With the addition of things like filters, the boundary between vector art and bitmap art is getting fuzzier and fuzzier all the time.
To put this to the test, I decided to have a go at recreating in Inkscape something that was done on card using an airbrush to see if I could create a piece of vector art entirely in SVG format that looked like a piece of bitmap art. The piece of artwork I decided to use was taken from the Central Independent Television styleguide (many thanks to Roddy Buxton for giving me a scan of his copy), and is their colour logo from 1982. The most useful thing about the style guide illustration is that it contains a grid, precisely so that other people (like me!) can reproduce the artwork from scratch at a future date if necessary.
The next job was to tackle the first colour. I started with the blueish red at the top of the sphere, and drew the rough shape of the red as a vector shape:
Then I applied a filter. I made my own filter, which I imaginatively called “central” to do this. The results are shown below.
As you can see below, my filter is actually nothing more than a Gaussian Blur.
The “air brush” effect I was after comes from the Standard Deviation, which makes the softness slightly random.
Next I added yellow, on a separate layer, and applied my “central” filter. However, it doesn’t quite look right.
The trick here is to use “Multiply”‘ to Blend Mode to blend the layers containing colours together. Then the yellow mixes with the red to make orange:
Then, if you carry on for light blue and purple (you only need four colours) then you get the familiar Central coloured sphere logo. So there you have it, an “air brushed” Central logo which is entirely described in an SVG file.