Pros and cons between GIMP and Ink Scape blog.
GIMP
To begin with I treated GIMP as if it were Photoshop back when I was learning at college. I’d scan in and import my Griffin sketch and put a white layer over this which was 60 percent opacity (so the original can be seen see below new picture). After this a completely transparent layer would be added for digital ink.
Rather than painting over by hand I’d used the pen tool (Photoshop) paths tool (GIMP) to make a path then stroke it bit by bit on the transparent layer.
I also added a colour transparent layer and manually filled in the area.
A main drawback of doing this is the ending image would be timely to manually recreate in paths. The resulting image would initially only be the same size as the original. This could however be improved by increasing the canvas size, merging (unhide path, right click merge visible) and resizing the paths to the required dimensions once finished. The paths are vectors (stored as coordinates) and do not suffer pixilation like normal Rasta/bitmap images do. My Ink does suffer this and would need a re stroke and recolouring on resize. While time consuming a benefit is the artist has complete control. The lines and fill colours can be painted with either a fill tool or a brush.
Manually traced paths can be exported to SVG (Simple Vector Graphic) format. This is the same as what Inkscape uses.
Inkscape
In comparison Inkscape could not be treated like photoshop and its complexly vector based.
Looking though the menus a I saw an option under ‘Paths’ called ‘Trace Bitmap’. I wondered if my original sketch would work through this (similar to what I did in GIMP). Adding it as produced a vector graphic path. The lines were not as dark as they could be.
I found this YouTube guide which used GIMP first before importing into INKSCAPE.
How To Convert Your Sketches into Vector Art
It used the colour selection tool and then inverted and stoked the selection to create clear blacks and whites. See the different between image of the left (pre GIMP) and on the right (after with B/W) .
There is no paint brush tool only a fill paint bucket tool which creates a shape. The colour fill is also set after its added in a default Gray. I can edit existing nodes of the path to expand it out further.
To conclude both applications GIMP and INKSCAPE both have their uses. GIMP in great at preparing the image for importing to INKSCAPE. It’s also more artistic to custom fills actually painting the colour rather than it being a shape. INKSCAPE handles vector graphics a lot better than GIMP and is a great option for allowing images a various sizes to be created.
Exported png image from inkscape
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