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.

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portfolio

Webmonkey – LeMasney Consulting

Webmonkey - LeMasney Consulting
Webmonkey - LeMasney Consulting
Webmonkey - LeMasney Consulting
Webmonkey – LeMasney Consulting

Ask any of my esteemed colleagues on the TEDxNJLibraries team what my role is and, as likely as not, they’ll say that I’m the TEDxNJLibs WebMonkey. I do most of the updates on our site at and have been one of the champions for the solution and methods for our site. I’m proud of the work, and proud of the title, very much a term of endearment.

With this in mind, I wanted to do a painting in Inkscape to have a realistic rendering with harsh lines of a monkey. In the background you can see some code from our site, which is WordPress based. I guess if I was being true to that I’d have copied in the PHP rather than the rendered XHTML, but you get the picture. I started with a few photos of monkeys and used them as a base for building the face with the calligraphy tool, working with the eyedropper tool and using the original photo as a palette, but after I had the basic structure, I decided to remove the photo and build up the image from my mind. I especially love the way the sparkle and color come through in the eyes. It reminds me of the way I light up inside when I get a chance to add new content to the site. 😉

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portfolio

Slick back my hair, you know the devil’s in there. – LeMasney Consulting

Slick back my hair, you know the devil's in there. - LeMasney Consulting
Slick back my hair, you know the devil's in there. - LeMasney Consulting
Slick back my hair, you know the devil's in there. - LeMasney Consulting
Slick back my hair, you know the devil’s in there. – LeMasney Consulting

Them Crooked Vultures is a supergroup comprised of Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age; Kyuss), Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters; Probot; Nirvana), and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin, etc.). They know how to make a killer track, and made quite a few on their debut album.

I was walking along listening to the album recently and had a flash that I would make a sketch based on the beautiful, quirky, and very visual lyrics. I began scanning the lyrics as I listened the next few times through the album, and came up with a couple of candidates. Another favorite lyric besides this one was from New Fang:  “sometimes you break a finger on the upper hand/I think you’ve got me confused for a better man”. This line however, is from Elephants, and has a great stompy, moshy rhythm. Good stuff if you like Josh, Dave, or John, and if you don’t like any of their respective music at all, I think you may just be broken, but I’m highly biased.

In Inkscape, I used the pencil tool set to 50% smoothing and shape: triangle in to create the slicked back hair and soul patch. I used the text tool and gradient tool to lay out and color the text. I rotated it a bit to give the ‘head’ a bit of attitude. If you’ve not heard any of the new vultures album, please take a listen to elephants and other songs here: https://www.youtube.com/user/Disco#q=them%20crooked%20vultures

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portfolio

Orange bokeh – John LeMasney

Orange bokeh - John LeMasney
Orange bokeh - John LeMasney
Orange bokeh - John LeMasney
Orange bokeh – John LeMasney

This is another image that makes use of the spraypaint tool in 0.48 order to make a bokeh effect. The silhouetted tree was a photo from MorgueFile converted to vector with a bitmap trace. In the background is a gradient to convey that particular color from that time of the day. A quick one, but very enjoyable to do.

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professional activities professional experience research interests teaching experience technology

Rider University presents: Smartboard overview

smartboard_eraser_2
Image by la riviere via Flickr

I was asked by faculty member at Rider University Susan Kadish to come to her class of education students in order to talk about how to use SmartBoards in the classroom. I had a lot of fun, and enjoyed sharing what I know about how to use interactive whiteboards.

Presentation: http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0Ad-YsRMv5bPqZGNrZm05ZndfMjc5ZDRzMmc1Zm0&hl=en

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consulting

Ewing SeniorNet presents ““My 10 Favorite Free Graphics Applications””

An important distinction
Image by lemasney via Flickr

A Special Reminder from The Computer Learning Center at Ewing

CLC Tips & Tricks Program April 6

“My 10 Favorite Free Graphics Applications”

Ewing, NJ:   Next Tuesday, April 6, John LeMasney, Manager of Technology Training at Rider University in  Lawrenceville, will present “My 10 Favorite Free Graphics Applications” at the Computer Learning Center’s latest “Computer Tips and Tricks” program. This free program will take place in the Ewing Senior and Community Center, 999 Lower Ferry Road.  It will be preceded by a question and answer session during which the audience can direct computer questions to the CLC’s all-volunteer faculty.  The CLC “Computer Tips and Tricks” programs are presented as a public service on the first Tuesday of each month.  No prior registration is required.

““You’ll never go back to paying hundreds of dollars for name brand software after you see what you can do with these 10 free applications,” says LeMasney. “While I was personally raised on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Corel DRAW!, they’ve got nothing on these free and open source tools. I plan to demonstrate how to find great, free tools to design advertisements, posters, layouts, images, and logos, and I’ll explore tools that allow you to work in photographic, three-dimensional, vector, bitmap modes.”  LeMasney will also discuss the rise in popularity of open source software and what he describes as “the free yet fantastic alternatives to commercial applications.”

For further information about the April 6 program, courses or directions, call 609-882-5086, 609-883-1776, Ext. 6205 or visit the SeniorNet web site at www.ewingsnet.com.

Presentation: http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0Ad-YsRMv5bPqZGNrZm05ZndfMjE0ZmNtNW01ZHA&hl=en

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portfolio

bandage illustration – LeMasney Consulting

bandage illustration - LeMasney Consulting
bandage illustration - LeMasney Consulting
bandage illustration - LeMasney Consulting
bandage illustration – LeMasney Consulting

I imagine everyone reading this has had the weird common experience of using disposable bandages, like the pain of removing them, the sort of icky fascination with the uncovered transformation, the rules and practices of how to prepare the cut and the strange way in which the color of the bandage is not really the color of anyone’s skin, but is closer to some people’s skin color than others (excluding character band aids, clear bandages and other movements forward in this respect). At any rate, the whole thing is kind of weird, culturally speaking, and I like to focus on weird stuff here.

This is one of the more complex scenes I’ve done in Inkscape. The bandage was made using a few overlapping and tweaked rectangles. I made the circular perforated breathing layer by making one ellipse, duplicating it, then duplicating those until I had a row, then duplicating those into an offset row, and so on. I built the thumb and finger with rectangles. The drop of blood has the candy coating effect applied. The most fun weird part is the armhair, which I created with Inkscape 0.48’s new spraypaint tool. I made a thin line of multidirectional hairs, then randomly duplicated them with the spraypaint tool. One of my favorite new tools, for sure. I moved the hair that was in the path of the bandage to the adhesive parts of the bandage. Finally, I created some abstract blurry, overlapping low opacity shapes for the dried blood on the bandage.

Weird, I know, but it was a lot of fun to make for you. Thanks for checking it out!

John.