Bluewaves

Having spruced up my Windows 8 start screen a few weeks ago I've been unable to settle on a wallpaper that seems to fit the simple monochrome/white theme I'm aiming for.  After trawling through endless Google Image Search pages for "wallpaper" I had a cunning plan; why not just make one?  If it wasn't obvious from my last post, I really love Inkscape!  I'm often surprised at the minimal effort necessary to create something that looks pretty professional (or at least, not like it was cobbled together in MS Paint).

In this case, I decided to go with white waves on a slight gradient-fill background.  It's certainly nothing original in the world of wallpapers; In fact, it's not even that original as wallpapers I've made go, being a reboot of a design I did a few years ago in GIMP (here on DeviantArt).  However, it does stick quite nicely to the simplistic Metro style of Windows 8.  Whereas the wallpaper I made in bygone times took a good day to make, manually shaping each filament and aligning multiple image layers, with Inkscape I was able to assemble the finished item in a matter of minutes.  

The wallpaper is as simple to construct as it appears, being composed of a circular-gradient background with a 30px wide white Bezier curve spanning the image.  Copying and pasting this curve a few times (resizing these to 5px wide) and randomly scattering them around the original curve gave the filamentous look I was after.  Finally, I created a copy of the curves and aligned the original and copy on top of each other, then applied a blur of 0.5 to one set to give the curves a slight glow.

Of course, one of the real benefits of having used Inkscape is that it takes almost no effort to resize or recolour the image as needs arise.  For anyone who would like to have a play around with the file I've uploded it here.

1920 x 1080 (standard HD):

There's also a dual monitor (3840 x 1080) version on my DeviantArt page (here) since Google won't let me upload an image that big.