Inkscape v1.4 About Screen Contest

Voting is now open

It’s that time of the year again and a new version of Inkscape is right around the corner. Inkscape v1.4 is currently being finalized and should be available soon.

As usual, there is a competition among Inkscape artists to design the new About Screen and the look of the new version. Over 50 submissions entered and voting is now open until the 21st of April! Cast your vote now!

Here’s the contest page on Inkscape.org:
https://inkscape.org/gallery/=about-screen-contest/contest-for-14/

I tried to showcase what can be done in Inkscape with simple shapes and without fancy drawing skills while sticking to the theme. Using only a limited set of tools to create a consistent yet rich look. The pieces rely heavily on clip groups, gradients, tapered, and power stroke path effects on simple lines and basic shapes [circles and rectangles were the starting point for most elements].
Organizing a design of this complexity was key. The improved layers and objects panel [introduced in v1.2] is a huge help when managing the 13000+ elements for the ‘Creative Growth’ across 3 layouts [about screen, website, and welcome banner].
These are my two entries this year:

Expand your creative universe
The design is based on a cover illustration for the computer game ‘Risk of Rain 2’. I liked the style and played with it in Inkscape. Rather than digitally painting it, I constructed it with vector shapes, a lot of clip groups, path effects, and gradients.

Creative Growth 
Enabling creatives to grow their imagination, go wild, and be creative.

I played around with last year’s entry [as it matched the theme perfectly]. The design has a lot with layer blend modes, path effects [taper and powerstroke], blurs, the spiro effects on the pen tool, clones, and Boolean operations. A quick edit turned into a completely new design as I had fun working in Inkscape.