Artist, graphic designer, & tech consultant in Nelson County, VA
Author:lemsy
John LeMasney (lemsy) is an artist, graphic designer, and technology creative. He is located in beautiful Nelson County, VA, but works remotely with ease. Contact him at: lemasney@gmail.com to discuss your next creative project.
So just a few nights ago, I was giving a talk about 365 sketches and it’s origins to the Princeton PC Users Group, and a friend of mine from Linux Users Group in Princeton, Kim, was in the audience. There’s a sequence in my talk where I show a whale deep underwater, preceded by a sheet of web 2.0 logos collected as a way of showing the style of web 2.0 logos. At any rate, when Kim saw this progression, he said that he thought at first that I was going to show a Nascar whale, a whale covered in logos. Yhis struck me as funny, and it was exactly the sort of thing I might do. I decided to do it with a cheetah, in order to stay in the analogic idea of advertising and fast vehicles. So, here it is, and thanks very much to Kim for the spark!
253 of 365 is a giraffe made out of text by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #typography #design #inkscape #tutorial #cc
253 of 365 is a giraffe made out of text by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #typography #design #inkscape #tutorial #cc
So my libland friend Julie asked me to sketch her a giraffe, and I do just about anything Julie asks. In this case, I did the following to fulfill her request:
I found a silhouette of a giraffe and imported it into Inkscape.
I lowered the opacity on the giraffe so that I could see text as I placed it on top.
I added the letters in the word giraffe one at a time with the text tool
I selected (s) each of the letters and made them into paths (shift-ctrl-c)
Using the node tool (n) I stretched each of the letters into the shape of the silhouette until the letters were representative of the silhouette of the giraffe.
The silhouette was set aside, and I then created a background for the scene.
Try it out with your favorite animal, and let me know how it turns out! Hope you liked it Julie!
Bokeh by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #vector #tutorial #cc
Bokeh by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #vector #tutorial #cc
Given my recent reminder from Beth about the very cool, powerful, flexible tiled clones tool in Inkscape, I decided to make a little tutorial about how to create this bokeh effect.There are a lot of settings here, but along the way, try playing with my numbers to see what happens.
Make a black background created with the rectangle tool, the same size as your page.
Make a single circle, and “unset the fill” by right clicking on the fill color indicator in the lower left and choosing ‘unset’.
Make the circle about 1/50th of the black rectangle, sort of the proportion of a star on the American flag’s blue field.
The first circle should go to the upper left corner of the black field.
Select the circle and open the tiled clones dialog by going to edit/clones/tiled clones, and use the following settings to replicate the design.
The tiling scale is set to 8 columns by 6 rows (48 clones)
In Symmetry tab: Choose P4M Symmetry, Shift X and Shift Y in both row and column are set to 15% with 6% randomization in both X and Y
In Scale Tab: Scale X and Y in both row and column are set to 5% with 10% randomization in both X and Y.
The Rotation tab is ignored.
In Blur and Opacity tab: Blur is set to 1% per row and 2% per column with 5% randomization. Fade out is set to 10% in both row and column with 25% randomization, and alternate is checked for both row and column.
In Color Tab: An initial color of a slightly yellow off white is chosen. This is why the fill must be unset in the original circle. Each of the settings for Hue, Saturation and Luminance are set to 2% per row and column with 5% randomization, except that Luminance is set to 30% randomization.
The Tracing tab is ignored.
Click on the Create button at any time to see how your settings affect your clones. When you’re satisfied, close the dialog. As long as you have the original selected, you can go back into the dialog and continue experimenting.
Also, any changes you make to the original immediately affect your clones, as you might imagine. My imperfect circle shape for the bokeh was created by finding and selecting the original (shift-d), making it into a path (shift-ctrl-c), and altering its shape with the node tool (n)
Obviously, there are a lot of options with this flexible, powerful tool. However, once you begin to play with the options, as I did here, your experimentation will pay off. You start to see what the shift settings do, how the rotation setting works, how to bring about symmetry or randomization, and so on. First, have fun, then worry about getting the precise effect you want. You may find that your experiments lead to more interesting outcomes than your original idea.
When it comes to information, I like it to come in firehose form, because I have excellent filters. Here’s a note that you might find is true for yourself too. Meanwhile, information addiction is a real thing, and you may find the following useful:
‘Contemporary theories of reinforcement learning are rooted in the dopaminergic reward system. Dopamine neurons in parts of the midbrain, such as the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra pars compacta, play a vital role in the expectation of reward. Most of what is known about these neurons comes from electrode recording experiments with rhesus monkeys. Not surprisingly, these neurons respond to primitive rewards, such as food and water. They signal a monkey’s expectation of rewards, but what was not known until now is whether these same neurons might also signal expectation of information. To test for this preference for information, which is a cognitive reward, a new paradigm needed to be put in place. Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka, both at the National Eye Institute, developed a brilliant behavioral task that opened the door.’
from “The Chemistry of Information Addiction – Scientific American” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-addicted-to-inform/ curated by lemasney creative. Feel free to share.
This is Friday’s post, so please excuse that today is now Saturday. 🙂 So this is for my cousin Mike, who has an amazing family with his wife Michele. Their latest addition was Chloe, and she looks like a healthy happy sweetheart. Congrats, cousins! Here’s her stats, and I hope you enjoy them even a fraction of the amount that we do.
