Ode to the libre community
We, Pedro Silva and Veronika Horska, hereby show our appreciation to everyone in the libre-software community: developers, contributors and users. Moreover we would like to express our support to Inkscape and Scribus, both used in the design of Portucalio.
we have also donated the small amount to Inkscape (Scribus does not have currently a donate platform in place). Don't forget to help them out as you can by donating or contributing by any means and that includes testing and reporting back :)
Portucalio is calendar from Portugal with original designs by Pedro Silva (big thanks to Veronika Horská who has been extremely helpful). This page is intended to be the gallery of all its illustrations under [[creativecommons:by-sa/4.0/|CC BY-SA 4.0]]. This is suppose to help anyone who wants to:
- Start her own illustrations using Inkscape
- Educate on the matter of printing using Scribus
- Offer a way to anyone to make it's own calendar
I will be showing all the different phases and the obstacles we have faced so far. This intends to be a simple and concise article but, hopefully, packed with a lot of interesting and educational information.
I started by exchange a couple of ideas in person, written on paper and using a synced folder with notes and images. Since these early stages, we relay on mind-maps to organize our thoughts, to foster new iterations of initial concepts and even to decide the final name. And for that, we started out with Coogle a cross-platform mind-mapper.
Coggle proved to be a very good option but the requirement to be online was kind of a bummer since our barnstorming meetings were normally in a cottage house without any internet and very weak mobile signal network. Plus the fact that it’s a Freeware as a service and not (FOSS) was a concern, we really wanted to keep it as open as possible using likewise open tools. So we went ahead and moved our efforts to Freeplane, another mind-mapper with a lot of documentation, more features, open-source and for offline use. Freeplane’s UI might not be its forte but keep in mind that you can adjust or even create your own styling and saved as a theme. In practice, you can set a different theme for different types of mind-maps. We really recommend it! Here is one of the mind-maps:
This phase is quite simple to explain. We gather all our photos, and organize them by category and or priority. While Veronika was helping with these processes I was in parallel sketching ideas for the layout of the page as well as its illustrations. Please feel free to use this as you like. The important thing here is to noticed that at this stage, when doing your own calendar you don't need to be perfect in your drawings. In fact the opposite is true: be as fast as rough as you can so the concept stands out while losing unnecessary aesthetic details. This will help you in the next phases
Both on paper and on screen, I tried to avoid being obsessed with details and pay more attention to the big picture and the concept I wanted to convey. All motifs are based but not exclusively, on our trips to Portugal and the photos we took there. In this step I recommend you the same. Do not spend too much time on your photos they are meant to be an aid to your process (in conjunction with mindmap and sketches). We use Shotwell to import and organize all the photo material as it provides a straightforward way to tag and classify photos. Nevertheless and if you need to correct something I would recommend Darktable instead.
Here we start to draw our [[Help:SVG|SVG]] files with Inkscape and using our newly imported photos:
(WIP) [[File:Portucalio-calendar-fevereiro.svg|none|thumb|February without texts]] [[File:Portucalio-calendar-fevereiro-with-text.svg|none|thumb|February]]
[[File:Portucalio-calendar-Abril-with-text.svg|alt=|none|thumb|April]] [[File:Portucalio-calendar-Maio.svg|none|thumb|May]]
(WIP)
(WIP)
(TO DO)