Learning to Draw with Screencasts

I’ve been having so much fun with Inkscape lately that I thought I should share. I basically got started with it when my wife and I ended up with no other option for our Christmas cards but to decorate our photos ourselves. Apparently most photo places don’t do Christmas templates in a 4x6 format. So I downloaded Inkscape, bought a set of Christmas-styled stencils from iStockPhoto.com and we went to town.

Then she wanted sparkles. Sparkles… Our stencil set was sadly lacking sparkles. So I did what I always do when I need to learn something: I googled it. And found this lovely tutorial which showed me how to make a sparkle. It worked out great and the Christmas cards looked awesome. I enjoyed the process so much that I subscribed to heathenx’s RSS feed of Inkscape screencasts.

If you’re a coder interested in learning how to create some basic visual elements, I highly recommend checking out screencasters.heathenx.org. It’s basically RailsCasts for vector drawing. So far I’ve only watched the two screencasts, but I feel like I’ve learned a lot already. It also has a similar relaxation appeal to painting happy little trees.

Who knows maybe one day I can even make the jump from engineering to design

or not.