Fedora 36 Beta Update

The final F36 day and night beta wallpapers are here! Take a look below and let us know what your thoughts are!

Day version of the wallpaper download here

Night version of the wallpaper download here.

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We last left off with the beta versions of the wallpaper that were created in Krita, which can be found here with their design process explained.

We received a lot of great feedback including suggestions for a strictly night version with the moon glowing instead of a sunset, adding butterflies to the day version, as well as shifting some of the clouds around so they didn’t stack and make the right side of the wallpaper too heavy. The previous version is below in Day, Sunset, and Night mode.

After the first beta wallpapers were completed we were able to start to play around in Blender. Máirín Duffy created the image below demonstrating the idea of the glass planes layered in front of each other with a light source.

Máirín then moved on to approximating something that resembled the previous versions.

Here are some of the tutorials she followed:

Creating the grass (just green hair particles. Couldn't use the texture they cite because the scale is off, blades of grass are the size of the trees, and couldn't figure out how to scale the texture) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOS9k6kqBsc

Creating the glass materials - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtfNtpJa3hU

Creating the clouds - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPAYX8z9i8M

She noted there were some issues,

”The grass looks horrible like green hair on a bald person! I had the material as a base green color and that stopped working.
I have a pretty nice, blue cloud off on the side. That could be duplicated to make the real clouds white. I colored it blue thinking I'd put it inside the front light blue water to make it look cloudy.
The middle blue glass does not shine through the front blue glass... it's as if it's not there. But the green mountain layer does shine through. I can't figure out why.
The lighting is a train wreck.” - Máirín

Our blender expert Micah Dunn was able to start playing around and pulled the textures from the first beta versions in a simpler manner.

Experimenting with how thick the panes of glass should be.

The Fedora Design Team meets once a week and if you want you can watch the recording from March 9th’s recording here at the 16:30 minute mark.

Until this final version of the day wallpaper was produced!

The F36 default wallpaper in Fedora 36 uses a new feature called light/dark mode, where you can put your entire desktop into a light or dark mode and the wallpaper lightens or darkens to match the desktop UI.

You will need a build of Fedora 36 to test the wallpapers alongside this new functionality, but you can also just download and set the wallpapers from this blog post on any version of Fedora or any desktop to test them out as wallpapers.

If you are a beta tester for Fedora 36 or would like to test this wallpaper's light/dark functionality, the update with the new artwork is here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2022-30419fe922

If you have the testing updates repository enabled on your system, you should be able to grab it by simply running 'sudo dnf update f36-backgrounds -y'

You can grab the latest Workstation ISO for F36 here: https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/36/latest-Fedora-36/compose/Workstation/x86_64/iso/Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-36_Beta-1.4.iso

You can run this in a VM tool such as GNOME Boxes on Fedora, and once it is booted, open a terminal and run 'sudo dnf update f36-backgrounds -y'

Simply, you'll be able to install the update with the following command:

sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --advisory=FEDORA-2022-30419fe922

Leave your feedback here on fedoraproject.org.

Mid February Update

Well! The biggest update is the day and night versions have been finalized for the beta release of Fedora 36. Obviously we chose Deepika Kurup to inspire the wallpaper and had a mind map session as well as some thumbnails that steered us in the right direction.

We kept in mind the concepts we’d talked about at our first mind mapping session, Nature/Water Cycle, Transparency/Reflection, and Filter/Purification. Eventually we discussed an artist called Nobuhiro Nakanishi, who’s layered artwork uses rectangular glass plates to create immersive landscapes that form a wide landscape.

Mo proposed, “layered shaped glass textured landscape, maybe vertically taller than Cathedral Dusk to show layers of ocean or layers of soil beneath.”

I could draw the landscape’s textures to hand over to Micah who could take them into blender. Like an artist creating a fabric’s design, and handing over the finished fabric to someone who can drape it on the mannequin into an outfit.

I came up with the abstract landscape below based off the surrounding inspiring imagery. Each part of the landscape would be partially transparent pane and because it was digital, we could have clouds and parts that wouldn’t logistically make sense in the real world.

So where were we last week? I had the general landscape figured out, some of the trees blocked in with leaves texture, but the three blocks of land and water still needed attention and I was having a tough time rendering the clouds.

So I decided to just turn that layer off so I could hopefully come up with a better cloud rendering.

To create this landscape in Krita, I used a bunch of clipping layers. For example with the grass. I used the selection tool to draw a shape, used the bucket tool to fill it, and then you do ctrl shift g to create a clipping group folder. Once the clipping layer is on you can only draw on that shape. If you try to draw outside of the shape it won’t show up. And the beauty of it is you can have multiple clipping layers on an object.

Which is great because if you want to change an aspect of it later on, like the base color to be darker or a different color it won’t erase all your hard work painting the texture.

Instead of making cloud shapes with the bucket tool and painting within that shape- I decided to use a transparent brush to softly bring them to life and keep them lighter and loose.

The background clouds were the first ones I was happy with and once I added the fake light source in the back it started to pull a lot of the elements together. Having that common theme of a little yellow light was helpful.

Then Mo reminded me that it needed a different dimension so the canvas size had to be changed.

Lots of little changes went on in between these two images. Added the front clouds, the little fish, the rest of the trees, the leaves texture, and more detail in the grass.

For the night version, I thought about taking it into gimp but because I already had all the elements in individual folders I started off by just duplicating the file. And since most of them had masking layers I could either change the base color, like with the sky, or I could just add a blue tint over the whole part.

Each pane got different levels of blue to try and keep the levels of contrast. I moved the fish to imply they were swimming somewhere different now, as well as the clouds.

I’ve already gotten a great amount of feedback on both of these! Taking this night version, which is honestly more like a dusk version, and making the sun into the moon to take it full nighttime mode has been suggested. Moving the clouds on the right so it’s not such a heavy stack of clouds is going to happen.

And for the day version playing around with the blue sky, potentially adding butterflies or birds, and looking at the trees on the right to see if they work better as islands over the blue water instead of being enveloped by the wave.

I worked on a few other things but this was the majority of my past week so wanted to lay it all out :)

Fedora 36 Wallpaper!

Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

That’s right!!! We are officially ready to start brainstorming for Fedora 36 Wallpaper ideas because our candidate with a K last name has been chosen (drum roll please) and it’s Deepika Kurup!!!

Ideas and progress are going to be documented on pagure, issue 789.

To recap, Deepika Kurup is an inventor, scientist, and clean water advocate.

Kurup's initial idea that won her the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist in 2012 is based on using a photocatalytic compound for water purification. In 2015 she developed a pervious photocatalytic composite using sand, TiO2, Portland cement, and silver nitrate. This photocatalytic pervious composite showed 98% reduction in total coliform bacteria immediately after filtration. Exposure of the filtered water to sunlight with a photocatalytic composite disc resulted in 100% inactivation of total coliform bacteria.

This has a lot of different paths we could go in! Playing around with whether we wanted a landscape that emphasized the sun and water like Fedora 34, or if we wanted to symbolize bacteria in a way with the water in a gradient effect going from dirty to clean. A few of our voters commented that this is globally meaningful, and exploring the element of water and the inventor presents a new generation.

Thank you to everyone who voted and gave comments on the candidates! It’s greatly appreciated!

The next step was a brainstorming session for figuring out different paths we could go down together. So we met on Wednesday, November 3rd at the design team meeting which was 1:30-2 PM EST?*

*This is our usual time slot which we will continue to use for most of the future sessions. But if you can’t make this time of the week, feel free to call and host another brainstorm session if there is a more compatible different time slot! Or if the majority of people who want to attend can’t meet then we can move the time slot.

1. Nature/Water Cycle

Some ideas were a physical landscape where land and water meet. It was brought up that we could leave an easter egg of trees from previous wallpapers. Marie also brought up the idea of dew droplets. Especially since Kurup’s invention involves hollow glass microspheres, so the droplets could represent both water and the shape of the microspheres.

2. Transparency/Reflection

Water’s transparency was brought up as a visual element to play around with. Transparency is also key in Fedora’s OpenSource process.

Either one or more reflective orbs being the end result of the filtered process reflecting the world around us and the clean ending.

3. Filter/Purification

Mo brought up how water gets filtered so it’s easy to digest, the same way Fedora is which results in it being the better “purified” desktop. We discussed particles and elements being filtered out potentially in a gradient abstractly or concrete representation.

We talked about how this invention and the ability to filter particles out of the water, mirrors our necessity to filter air when it comes to covid, and how it offers hope.

Next steps:

Going forward anyone who wants to be involved is encouraged to pursue whichever avenue they’re the most interested in and work on some thumbnail sketches (they are supposed to get the creative juices flowing with ideas not overly detailed) to figure out some potential compositions.

:D Please have fun with this and don’t feel restricted by any of the topics discussed above! Any other ideas are welcomed.

And one last reminder that the ticket issue is #789 on pagure!!

Week 3 & 4

June 16, 2021 - Wed

Decided to combine two weeks into one blog post because unfortunately my grandmother passed away on the 4th and I took some time off to help and be with my family.

Last week I was able to talk to Gabbie about the details for the Research Podcast thumbnails! Super exciting but I’m just awaiting the reference photos of the first few guests and then I can draw up a proper schedule.

I’ve been chugging along on the Kubernetes coloring book.

I’ve been coming up with some designs for the Open Studio Swag t shirt contest! I got feedback from Mo about which ones were stronger and these two were part of the sketch phase. I just need to make a vector file of both of them for Friday. But some other interns said the sketchiness of the tree one is charming so I might try and see if I can keep that when I convert it.

I’ve also been doing a lot of small housekeeping things, like adding a signature to my Gmail finally, going into Workday, and adding a personal statement as well as skills. I talked with Joe from the talent acquisition team this week about a permanent job at Red Hat in September!

I worked on the new pride fedora logo and I came up with these below but honestly, they were relatively simple. Going over the previous ticket there was some debate about how much could be done with the logo, and my skills with Inkscape are still slowwwww and simple since I use it for drawing the majority of the time. Honestly, the worst thing is when you know it’s possible to do something in a program but not sure how, and Google is your best friend. But the ticket is here and Mo has come up with some really great variations!

Have a great rest of your work this week!

-Madeline

January Blog Post (New Year New Bloggin!)

It’s been quite awhile since I posted an update on here! December and the beginning of January I spent working on the final pieces for my illustration thesis, as well as the process book that captured my research and how they were all created. You can check out the finished book here at madelinepeck.adobe.com. Super happy with how it turned out and now I can turn to other cool projects!

I’ve been continuing my work for the coloring book. I’ve been experimenting using the bezier tool with the pen vector tool, as it really helps with the roundness and closed lines coloring books tend to have. The pages are always more detailed then I remembered having planned for but that’s alright, perhaps I’ll just need to make some compromises and remember that no one will have access to the secret super version that lives inside my brain.

On the side I’ve also been working on the thumbnails for the Element background wallpaper.

This is what I’ve come up so far for ideas, and I’m looking forward to taking them into the proper sized folder and seeing how I can clean these ideas up for the final version. I also am going to start some other design work for the rest of the app :D

Today I actually also attended the super low key design team video chat, which involved a brain storm session for Fedora 35 that was exciting!

Work Update

My last post was a dip into talking about my work that I’ve been doing, and as I type this I’m listening to a Red Hat meeting on how to support your Black Associates. In the past two weeks the Black Lives Matter movement has extended even more across the globe, sparked this time by the unjust murder of George Floyd. The movement was initially created in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. I suggest if you haven’t looked around their website that you take advantage of the resources provided, as well as the lists of important texts and books by black authors being shared around the internet. There are no shortage of podcasts as well (I’m currently listening to Fanti). Black lives have always mattered, they are beloved, and needed. Every time I as a white person feel the need to speak on the current situation, I need to take a step back and ask, “Is this going to drain black people emotionally? Am I going to unintentionally add to the trauma that they are going through? Am I in my lane?” Don’t talk about the racist conversations you try to shut down to your black friends, just so that they can give you a medal, because no ones giving them a medal for all the racist encounters they experience. Sit in your discomfort but don’t stop learning, continue to sign petitions, donate, and if you can go to protests then do so safely.

Black lives matter.

And now I provide a sneaky peak of one of the pages I’ve been working on this week, which I hope that you will enjoy as you take time to take care of yourself.

I save all my files and jpegs of the coloring book here on github, so if you’re curious about what else is getting wrapped up it’s all out in the open before I even create my blog post.

Right now I have a few several pages created and formatted that I’ve been jumping back and forth from, so I guess you’ll just have to wait until they’re done, or download my saved files for krita on github haha.

Stay safe out there!