Icelandian Startrails

This little badge design is based on something i saw on one of Björk's 'Debut' era (ca. 1993) releases.
I guess it was supposed to be Björk's logo: the letter B in a cool foreign looking alphabet/techno design, with the repeating gradient background in earthy browntones and a startrail on top.

Especially the startrail seemed like a nice idea for another brush dynamics tutorial, so i began exploring.

It went all well until i tried to add a stroke to the stars, which just didnt look good because small selections converted by Gimp into a path, do not result in very accurate paths. Especially the smaller stars looked more like little blobs with all sharp points gone.

So i switched to Inkscape and tried to recreate the startrail effect only to discover that its a lot harder than expected and gave up after banging my head against a wall for hours.

Last week i gave it another try and this time i got it working.

Not only was i able to delve deeper into designs with gradients, i also figured out how to make a vector startrail.

So after the jump i present to you, two techniques of making a startrail.
First in Gimp and then in Inkscape.