Inkscape 1.0 has been released!

The open source communities of Blender and Inkscape have made huge progress recently in terms of improving the user interface of their programs. After Blender had 'normalized' its UI in version 2.8 Inkscape did something similar in version 1.0. These are huge efforts, since open source programs depend on a large community of individual developers whose input has to be coordinated meticulously. That in itself is a major achievement - improving functionality and the program's look and feel is an other. The Inkscape developers took the program towards the users instead of forcing users to adept to the program's peculiarities. Kudos to the devs! One of Inkscape (and GIMP) skilled users has explained the program's innovative updates in a coherent way in a Youtube video.

Inkscape logo

I think I will give Inkscape an other try in the near future. I have scarcely used it in the past years, because I had trouble getting used to its UI. What spiked my interest is that Inkscape is said to have improved its Gaussian blur function. This function is imperative when creating realistic vector portraits (which is what I love to do), especially for artists that dislike the mesh-fill tool and the hard edges typical for many of the 'realistic' vector portraits drawn in Adobe Illustrator. If from this last sentence you conclude that I am not a fan of Adobe Illustrator you may not be far off the mark. I have worked with the program professionally for decades, using it to create technical illustrations for instruction manuals and educational purposes and for that purpose it is adequately equipped, but it sucks when attempting to create realistic portraits with it. That said, I may do a portrait of the same person in both Inkscape and in Affinity Designer, just to compare the results. To my knowledge this hasn't been done before, so stay tuned. You do not want to miss this.

Hasta luego online virtual folks.