The Oxygen project is an impressive example for the artist skills some people of the KDE project have. Now a newcomer came up to help the Kalzium project and showed his first drawings which are of a high quality.
David Vignoni and Nuno Pinheiro seldom need any further introduction: they are the theme art directors of the Oxygen icon project which creates the new iconset and general art for KDE 4. The other members of the team are also well known to the occasional commit-digest reader: Kenneth Wimer, Thomas Lübking, Riccardo Iaconelli, Casper Boemann, Johann Ollivier Lapeyre and Nuno Póvoa.
These guys concentrate on KDE in general: the Oxygen iconset, the future Windeco of KDE 4 (no, I haven’t seen any of that yet), the future KDE 4 sounds, and so on.
However, some projects have special graphics needs. Especially the KDE games and KDE edu sections have applications which need specific pieces of art. In such cases sometimes one of the Oxygen guys steps up and tries to help, but sometimes other people from “outside” step in. This happened recently with Kalzium which was searching for artists to create an entire iconset for the elements of the periodic table.
The call was answered by Jarle Richard Akselsen: judging from his self description he used FLOSS for several years but only have internet for a couple of months. He now wanted to start giving back something – and started painting icons for the kalzium set. Here is his first contribution:
The last contribution was this:
Impressive, isn’t it?
I’m not sure if Jarle had any previous experience in drawing, but he mentioned that he used Inkscape only for these experiments. Looks like KDE has a new talent – and Kalzium will get a full and nice drawn iconset.
I now hope that he will fully join the artist team and will stay with KDE for quite some time. It can only enrich the KDE project.
/home/liquidat 
I saw a sketch of the widget set for KDE 4, and I must say I was really impressed. It was very pretty, and not much like the competition. And it blended really well with the oxygen icons (the earlier, black ones at least).
Nice and original. What more can you ask for.
Sounds perfect 🙂
Nice work 😀
Apart from the fact that I don’t like photo-realistic icons, these ones are very nice!
I fail to see how this relates to PCs exclusively The initial story you cited didn’t even relate to PCs. It was user error. Several of the headlines referred to “data” or “computer” or “server”. The only one that sounded like a PC was the “laptop” story. Next time you want to use real life stories to support your argument, use stories that relate to it. We’re not so stupid that we get scared by a bunch of security breach headlines and assume they’re the fault of lacking PC security.
I have absolutely no idea what this guy is talking about – he must have written this stuff into the wrong comment window. But I think it is too funny for deleting 🙂
— liquidat
nice works, but these are poor a little bit 😉
@ I disagree…
Um, what?
About the critics: Feel free to comment the work done. However, you should make your statements clear. If you think the icons lack something, point it out. Do this while you have in mind the quite difficult requirements the icons have (ex. the size they are be used in usually, etc.) as well as the fact that Jarle is quite new in this field.
And yes, I saw the examples posted in the digg comments which were “so much better”. Most of them are crap. Not in a general sense – but in regard to the requirements Kalzium has. Shiny icons which only look shiny at 128×128 upwards are totally not usable in *this* case.
So, back up your statements with detailed critics. In other cases your comment might been flagged as dumb – and deleted. And even if it is not been deleted, a comment like “poor a little” is, well, just poor.
This is not the highest quality of work, unfortunately.
From my personal experience I can tell that the artist has problems with sensing color dynamics, and the icons lack that crispy look you can find in some of the icon sets on iconfactory.com
i think a full set of them would like quite cool
ehh
i dont understand
Those Icons are very nice
lol@I disagree!
Definitely nice work. They don’t really look finished yet, but they show promise.
Thank You