On 4/29/07, John R. Culleton <john@...1668...> wrote:
For the cover of a book of detective fiction I want to create an irregular figure like a blood stain or spatter. Can I do this in Inkscape? (Using real blood and a camera was considered but rejected because of lack of a donor :)
There are several fonts of blood splatter - check DaFont or another good quality free font site. These have the advantage of already being vector format, and very easy to convert to pure SVG.
There's two on DaFont: http://www.dafont.com/search.php?psize=m&q=rhesus
You can get interesting stain/droplet effects with Inkscape's "Star" tool - turn the number of points up very high and play with the other Star tool settings. If you can get the SVG of the Inkscape 0.43 "About" screen, that's got great 'stains' on it, made with the Star tool.
0.43's About screen answered a nagging question for me: "Why the heck is this 'Star' tool one of the default tools? Is a star really useful as a basic shape?" (the answer is yes, obviously!)
There are also a number of 'splatter' GIMP brushsets, but of course they're not vector based.
If you do come up with a good set of SVG "splatters", donate them to the Open Clipart Library, so the rest of us can use them too! "Grunge" or splatter brushsets are incredibly popular for Photoshop & the GIMP - a set of splattery/grungy SVG cliparts would be a popular download, I'm sure.
Brian wirelizard.ca