About a year and a half ago I started working with the team of people recording the mintCast podcast. At the time my computer wasn't powerful enough to run mumble, the software that they were using to talk while recording the podcast. Wanting to contribute in some manner I asked if I could provide artwork for the podcast, and subsequently provided three different pieces of cover art for the podcast.

The first of the artwork was made completely in Inkscape and the logo in the bottom right is a CC-BY-SA artwork by Archangel, another mintcast fan at the time. I learned a lot while making this one, including the fact that noisy backgrounds usually aren't good. My operating knowledge about Inkscape grew tremendously throughout this project, and my appreciation for vector artists also grew.

This artwork was also used for a limited edition (only the team members received one) tee shirt, which this artwork worked much better on. The main reason the artwork worked on a tee shirt better was the clean background.

The second piece was one that I wasn't satisfied with at the time I called it final, mostly because the main font was to hard to read. This piece was created solely in GIMP and features one of the features that GIMP includes that isn't available in PhotoShop. Namely rendering of flame fractals directly as part of the editing program.

I learned a lot while making this artwork also, like making an embossed effect that looks good is really hard. And you should be really careful what typeface you use.

The third and final piece that I finished was made completely in Blender and followed three attempts that turned out less well. This piece was the one of the three that turned out closest to my original concept for the piece. I wanted to work off of the radio idea, but still tie it strongly into the feel and culture of not only mintCast, but the whole Linux Mint community. This was rendered with the external renderer, Yafaray, which proved to be one of the better renderers for this project.

Surprisingly all of this artwork was done on a 12 inch netbook, powered by an AMD single core 1.66GHz processor. Needless to say this didn't make the creation process very likeable, or fast. The computer was also partly what killed the other blender projects.