SVG Grid

An SVG illustration, with a grid overlaid on top of it to allow for the easier positioning of hand-drawn vectors

Ever since Aviary took their lovely online tools down, including my beloved Raven, I’ve been searching for a suitable replacement. Inkscape, the best of the open source options doesn’t support some of my transforms or use xlink, while Illustrator, the best of the paid options can’t always handle my tidy nested layers*. What to do?

Today, a really extreme notion occurred to me: I should draw in Notepad++. “That’s madness!” I hear you say, and maybe it is, but I’ve optimised many of my old Raven SVGs using just a text editor and a browser to view, and I think I can do it.

With this crazy announcement, I now present my first concession to convenience, the grid. This will help me to assess coordinates, and draw my characters onto their backgrounds. Isn’t it tidy? Pixel precision in action.

*Also I’m way too cheap to give them over seven hundred euro, just for one program. Feck off, Adobe.

Calla Lily in Pixels

A carefully pixelled calla lily

The Quilting Bee is running another garden based activity this spring, and this is my entry, a calla lily. Mum would grow these in the garden when I was growing up, and I always thought they were so elegant and beautiful…

Last summer she gave me a potted marigold to put on my windowsill, and it bloomed all autumn and then died away. I never bothered to move the pot with the dead marigold all winter, and in the spring I was surprised to see a little calla seedling popping it’s head up! It smuggled aboard in the marigold pot!

Hopefully, I can take good care of it, and one day grow some beautiful calla lilies of my own.