Hello,

I've been playing around with Inkscape quite a bit, but the one thing I've always had a problem with is getting anything I make to look realistic. It all seems to come out looking cartoony.

One such case was when I was trying to make concept art for a piece of furniture on a certain online game.
This is the item I made:
---> --->

The first thing I made was just a very basic (and extremely unrealistic) tentacle. I then did tons of raster effects on it until I thought it looked somewhat better. I still wasn't at all happy with it, so I tried just scrapping the whole thing and starting over after looking at a bunch of pictures of octopus tentacles. I think you'll agree the 3rd picture looks the best, but honestly, it still is lacking the realism I would like it to have.

Does anyone have any ideas? Maybe a way to make the tentacles look textured in some way? Perhaps change the stroke?

If you'd like the .svg file for the tentacles, let me know.

Thanks very much,
Kyle

#1 Don't use outlines.

Do a realistic metallic octopus. Inkscape is more for shinny vector cars and chrome, glass and light rays... At least until inkscape gets an equivalent of a illustrator gradient mesh or what even it ends up using in place of gradient meshes. Nice tentacles.

aho wrote:#1 Don't use outlines.

Yeah, I've thought about doing that before, but I have a hard time making stuff without strokes... I guess it's something to work on haha

EarlyBlake wrote:Do a realistic metallic octopus. Inkscape is more for shinny vector cars and chrome, glass and light rays... At least until inkscape gets an equivalent of a illustrator gradient mesh or what even it ends up using in place of gradient meshes. Nice tentacles.

lol I have tried using Illustrator before, but it's not as easy to grasp as Inkscape (at least for me). Maybe I should look into finding some tutorials about gradient meshes. Honestly I haven't even heard of them before.

thanks for your help guys! I'll be working on it; seeing if I can make my tentacles any better.

Just wanted to pipe in and say that whilst the style may not be realistic, the style still looks fantastic.

If you really want realism, you go for a raster application which isn't confined by maths. But really, your vectors look great.