Tag Archive: “art”

The hobo’s guide to exporting vector graphics from Adobe Shape Creative Cloud

Adobe Shape CC is a free mobile app for vectorizing high contrast images. It’s good for generating crisp graphics from sketches. (See my prior post on a similar process using old school tools.) You can export the results as an image directly from the app or retrieve images as free assets from Adobe Creative Cloud. However, to access editable vector versions of your designs, you need a paid Creative Cloud subscription and/or Adobe’s desktop software.

Sort of.

Using a modern desktop browser, right click an asset thumbnail and select Inspect Element to poke around the associated code in the browser’s developer view. Locate and copy the associated background-image URL:

This URL requests a PNG image based on the underlying shape. However, you can edit the URL to retrieve the raw SVG of your artwork. Initially, the URL will look something like this:

https://cc-api-storage.adobe.io/assets/adobe-libraries/[ASSET_ID]/:rendition;size=200;version=0?accept=image/png&api_key=CreativeCloudWeb1&user_token=[USER_ID]

Delete the underlined portions to locate the vector version. You may need to use your browser’s Save As feature if the SVG is displayed instead of downloaded. Be careful to retain the long ID strings and the question mark delimiter (?). Now you can revise the vector artwork you created on the go using a free program like Inkscape.

Here’s a hint to roll your own browser bookmarklet to do this with one click:

Posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2015. Tags: art.

Portrait Sketches

Some random portrait sketches from this summer:

A fun development this fall was discovering Fear of Art, a group founded by some high school acquaintances. They organize monthly “Drink and Draw” events that are a great way to get a little experience life drawing. I’ve attended two so far. Here are some of the pictures I drew at the September and November meetups, respectively:

Posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2014. Tags: art, drawing.

Grease Pencil Portraits

Posted on Friday, February 21st, 2014. Tags: art.

Making Faces Videos

I’ve been recording some time lapse videos of sketch sessions. Recorded at 5 seconds per frame; played at 5 frames per second. (25×?)

That last one is not of portrait drawing, of course, but of painting a 3D-printed landscape model.

I’m using the lamp clip I designed and fabricated with my Printrbot to hold my phone for these recordings. I’m using Frameographer by the folks at Studio Neat to record the videos (and, sometimes, iMovie for iOS to combine and/or spruce up clips before uploading).

Posted on Monday, February 10th, 2014. Tags: art, drawing.