Tag Archives: clip art

Ubuntu Wallpaper

Good Riddance April – May is here!

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I, for one, am glad to see the back of April 2012. Not only did we see the wettest month for some considerable time in many parts of the country, but those of you who know me personally, will know that I also had a major family tragedy with which to contend. I am therefore looking to May to help make amends for a truly miserable month.

There were a few things, however, that came out of April that are worthy of note. The first being the launch of Ubuntu 12.04 which, I believe, has managed to convince one of my friends of 50 years to admit that Linux might be a good thing! I have also learned how to make (albeit somewhat dodgy) tutorials for Gimp and Inkscape, which I have posted earlier on this blog. For this reason, I took a bit of time off tonight to produce an Ubuntu wallpaper in celebration. I hope that this will inspire some of our readers to give Inkscape a go so that we can start a small gallery of our work. I offer this as my ‘opener’ for, I hope, many more contributions of this type:-

Ubuntu Wallpaper

Ubuntu Wallpaper

All the techniques used to produce this 1600 x 900 pixel wallpaper have been covered by my tutorials on this blog so, theoretically, you can all produce something similar (or, hopefully better) by giving my tutorials a go.

We have a lot lined up for our readers in May, including:-

  • Rock Challenge stuff from Cockermouth School ( and others),
  • More information on the Glasgow Kettlebells event,
  • Results from our ‘sponsored’ team at the Crimond Stock Car races,
  • Information on the Aberdeen Ice Hockey scene,
  • More competitions in conjunction with Waves Radio,
  • More of ‘Billy’s Bargains’ (hopefully as good as the pen drives from last month),
  • Tutorials from yours truly on Gimp use,
  • Postcards from around the world (I am going on holiday),
  • Much more of our usual features.

If anyone else would like to help with contributions, please make yourself known to us, as we would like to keep this blog lively and relevant to our readers’ interests.

I am also waiting for contributions coming in for inclusion in our ‘user clip art galleries’. All contributions, no matter what their quality, would be gratefully received and would help to contribute to the community nature of this blog.

A last appeal to all of our readers in North East Scotland to help support our radio show on Fridays by entering our prize competitions. We intend to be offering some ‘Ping’ polo shirts for our “Where’s Waves?’ contest this week, so be sure to tune in to 101.2 FM at 6 o’clock on Friday!!

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Celebrate your ‘Games’ with us.

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If any of you are celebrating your own ‘Games’ this summer of 2012 and you, like us, are afraid of infringing copyright laws, you will be pleased to know that I have discovered a large set of sporting iconography, along with a generic ‘Games’ logo that is in the public domain (CC0 license) and is therefore available to use freely as you wish. If your own event is small, large, or even of Olympic proportions, and whether it is being held in Edinburgh, Cardiff, London, Belfast or any other location in Britain, you are legally able to use these symbols incorporated in your artwork. This has to be good news! Continue reading →

Steve Allen

April 6, 2012

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Starting on 13th April, the company will be joining up with our friends at Waves Radio in Peterhead to help you start your weekend in style by bringing you ‘Into the Weekend’ from 6 until 9 pm every Friday.

Waves Radio

Waves 101.2 FM - Peterhead's commercial radio station.

PomPrint has a long tradition of working with the radio station, having advertised with them since 2003, sponsoring both Kenny King’s “60′s on a Sunday” and Gordon Bathgate’s “Seventies Slammer” as well as working with them on charity events in the Peterhead area.

Owing to the previous levels of success by advertising with Waves, we have decided to use this medium to help advertise this blog and to try to attract more readers from the Mintlaw, Perterhead and Fraserburgh areas. We hope too, that we might get some of our followers from further afield tuning in to Waves in return.

You can stream the station by adding the following URL to your media player:

http://stream1.radiomonitor.com/WavesRadio.m3u

or you can visit the station’s website by clicking here.

Each week we will be focusing on advertising a variety of different topics within this blog, commencing with our special Golf Promotions on next week’s show. Make sure that you tune in next Friday and get a feel of ‘things to come‘.

More news on this to follow shortly.

Tutorial – Creating your own Photo Clip Art – Part 2 (Starting out)

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This article is part two in a tutorial. It is recommended that you read Part 1 first.

Selecting your Photograph

In order to produce a good quality piece of clip art, you must always start with a good photograph. The old adage about not being able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear holds very true in all matters graphic. You would be amazed at the amount of customers that give me ‘Black cat in coal cellar’ and want me to turn it into something akin to a David Bailey original! This is not possible. Continue reading →

Tutorial – Creating your own Photo Clip Art – Part 1 (Introduction)

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As promised over the last few weeks, I have put together this small tutorial, designed to help our customers to produce quality photo clip art using their own photographs and Free Open Source Software (known as FOSS). My aim is to get as many people as possible contributing to this blog and as a consequence, helping us to produce a helpful resource library of images and clip art that can be used by our customers, artists, children, and anyone at all who enjoys producing digital images for pleasure. In order to make it as palatable as possible, I have split it into ‘bite-sized’ chunks, as I intend to go in depth on most of the topics covered. This first part is designed to serve as a ‘Prologue’ in the hope that it will gather a bit of interest amongst our readers. Continue reading →

Introducing a new contributor.

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One thing that I really enjoy about being involved with artists and, more to the point, artists that are involved with FOSS (Free Open Source Software), is that you meet up with some very talented and very generous people.

One of these is an Italian friend of mine, Cristian Pozzessere, who goes by the pseudonym ‘ilnanny’. Cristian has very kindly allowed me to add his vector graphics to our collection here on this blog and App and, as always, these will be free for anyone to use (they carry a CC0 – Public Domain license).

Clock by ilnanny
Battery by ilnanny
Padlock by ilnanny
Mobile Phone by ilnanny

I do hope that you like Cristian’s work and, if so, why not visit him on OpenClipArt and download the original vector files, or see more from ilnanny on deviantArt?
CC0
To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

These images are also available in our Clip Art Galleries.

Introducing – Open Clip Art (dot Org)

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Hardly a week goes by where we do not have a customer walk through our doors asking us to put a picture of a celebrity or a cartoon character on an item of clothing, a bag or a mug. When we explain that we are unwilling to fulfill their request because of copyright, I often feel that this is the very first time that anyone has ever mentioned the word to them. I even get requests where the customer presents me with an image that they have downloaded complete with Shutterstock watermark, and ask me to use that!

Not only are these images protected by copyright and are therefore not available for use, but they are invariably low resolution images deliberately optimized and compressed for quick download for people with slow connection speeds.

Given the amount of hen nights, stag nights, holidays, sports events, concerts etc. for which we are required to provide both legal and good quality designs, how is this achieved? Continue reading →