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.
There are lots of ways to interpret freedom. Many of us in the US see freedom as a given, a birthright. In other parts of the world, it’s something far away, only wished for, or in some cases, openly rejected or feared because of the relative chaos it might bring in some minds or situations. However, in my mind, given my societal and experiential biases, freedom means riding at a high rate of speed in an open topped car, close to or after midnight. Happy independence day, Americans.
So this is a layout for a box of stuff, made easily in Inkscape due to an extension called extensions/render/foldable box, with which you can make simple folding box of any dimensions you wish. i decided to use it to bring light to the fact that I myself have way too much stuff. I’ve never been happy about it, but I think I’d really like to do something drastic about it now. The voice in the block there on the right is the disgusting guilt-driven voice that we all often hear from advertisers and marketers when they rely on the simplest forms of pursuasion: fear uncertainty, and doubt in one’s self. Marketing and advertising are out of control in this country, and require more responsibility than is often mandated in the work.
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Slides without audio:
This is a video of my introduction to the 365 Sketches project that I gave at the opening to the show at Princeton Public Library in June of 2010. In a nutshell, this project is one on which I do one daily digital drawing using free software called Inkscape. I believe the video works to explain the processes, people, and issues that were encountered, and I highly recommend giving it a watch. Thanks!
So if you’re a librarian, you may have already seen this a few times. Back in mid June, I got a message from Janie Hermann that she was looking for a sketch for an upcoming American Libraries Association conference session using Battledecks, a presentation contest in which participants are asked to present on a topic using slides they’ve not seen yet. She asked only that I use a tiara in the design, as the tiara was the top prize. It’s hilarious fun, and lets presenters really bring their best adaptive skills, wit, and self control to the stage. I was thrilled for the opportunity to help, and thanks, Janie, as usual, for asking! Peter Bromberg created a youtube playlist with all of the festivities captured at this youtube playlist link.
This is another case of using the free three dimensional application from Google named Sketchup in my workflow to introduce 3d letterforms into my Inkscape sketch. I went a bit further than the last time in using color, mood, and background in order to push the forms forward a bit. Hope you liked it!
Clearly, we have a serious issue. Well, maybe not clearly. So this is really to just explore the beautiful per letter orientation capabilities when you do a conversion from text to path. You have lots of capabilities even as text to do fine kerning, letter spacing, and even rotation, but I find it a lot easier to do something like this by making the text, converting to path (ctrl-shift-c), ungrouping (ctrl-u), which makes all of the text into individual path shapes. You could select a string and make them into a group or single path to manipulate in that way, but lots of options, regardless. Hope you liked it!