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.
Twitter bird attacking a young boy – LeMasney Consulting
Hey all. This is a 365 request from my very good friend Janie. She sent me a funny and exciting picture of someone very dear to her going down a slide, and I decided to take it somewhere different in Inkscape. I was especially inspired for this image by the one below, one that I use to discuss sometimes non-ambiguous emotion in design.
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Hey, all. I decided that today I’d celebrate some of my favorite technologies. IconDock at http://icondock.com made this easy on me, as they distribute vector based icons for a whole boatload of social media and technology companies in a icon pack. However, that’s not what you see here. I took my own favorite icons from that set, sized them up, converted to bitmap (ctrl-m), bitmap traced them to get an outline, and then aligned the outlines into a 9 up grid. Then the fun began. Using the calligraphy tool in Inkscape, along with the eyedropper tool and the original icons, I would use the eyedropper to pick colors from the originals, then apply the colors in a painterly fashion on top of the outlines I had created. After I was satisfied with all of the color, I brought the outlines back to the front. Really loved this process!
Summer is coming. We just pushed the clocks forward. More light in the day, more warmth in the air. Summer is coming. One of the lovely things about summer for many is a nice ice cream cone in the evening. Or in the day. Anytime really. I highly recommend Dairy Delite or Gibby’s in the Bristol area of PA, but you likely have your favorite. Feel free to post it in the discussion.
Mine here is a double scoop in a cake cone: Chocolate with crystallized ginger and cherry chips, atop cappuccino with caramel and chocolate streaks, chocolate, peanut butter, and cinnamon chips. I made in in inkscape by creating the cone with the Bezier tool set to angled lines. The scoops are large ellipses with many smaller ellipses at the bottom. I duped the bottom one and flipped it horizontally to make the top one. I created a grid with the render grid tool, and clipped it to the shape of the cone. I created the various streaks and shapes in the flavored scoops with the ellipse, rectangle, calligraphy, and duplicate tools. In 0.48 I would have used the spraypaint tool, but I just got my hands on it, and am looking forward to playing with it. I added the text, and created a subtle background using the gradient and calligraphy tools, slightly blurred. Finally, I created the candy coating effect for the shine on the top cone. I hope you enjoyed it, and I thank you for stopping by.
If you’ve ever been to one of my workshops on open source graphics apps, you likely saw me use this technique there as a way to demonstrate the power of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). In the GIMP, this is a technique that involves layer masks, blurring, brushwork, image scaling, and guidelines as a way of believably merging one recognizable face onto another becognizable head. The GIMP based composite image is here. I decided that I’d try to do the same technique in Inkscape, and found this attempt to be fairly quick and fairly successful.
Hey, friends! So, today’s sketch is a flashback for me to just after I got my BFA from University of the Arts in 1998. I was lucky enough to land two jobs: Rider University’s Instructional Technology Specialist position, and also Bucks County Community College’s Sculpture Lab Assistant. I loved both jobs dearly, and learned a lot from both positions. They were both very service oriented positions, and they both came with new friends. In the Sculpture gig, I worked with another guy doing the same thing and he convinced me that my artistic contribution was going to be interpretations of the ubiquitous Approving Pizza Chef Guy, the one who graces what must be 50% of all pizza boxes. I started drawing him on warning signs around the shop, and he even got etched into a large metal sand pit using an Arc Welder. I’m sure he’s still there, forever scribed in molten metal, but he’s otherwise stopped showing up directly in my work until now. At any rate, with that experience I learned to keep a certain sense of fun and irony in my work, and so in that way the Approving Pizza Chef Guy (and the other Lab Tech) have been a part of my work ever since.
Approving Pizza Chef Guy
So I started with the Pizza guy image and I did lot of little tweaks to make him mine. I flipped him, and then bitmap traced him. I duplicated and reversed his hand so that he’d be giving a “2 thumbs up”. Using the calligraphy tool, I gave him bangs and a beard, extended (and made him stroke) his thin Daliesque mustache, and puffed up his hat. I made him stop winking. I then used the watercolor technique of a wide stroke of color with the calligraphy tool under the lines to color the piece. I created the pizza and placed it, moonlike, behind him. Finally, I added the text. I missed him, and I’m glad I had this opportunity to revive him.
This is the kind of thing that makes me scream at the television. When someone is describing a URL verbally, I have found that more often than not they will call the slash used in URLs a backslash, when it is in fact a forward slash, or just a slash. I’m not sure why it makes me so crazy, but more than anything I think it’s the number of times I’ve seen it done incorrectly lately. So, to try to do what I can in my communities to campaign against it, you’re getting this sketch today. Thanks for the platform!
The image uses a lot of my regular go-to effects. I use blurred dupes for shadows and glows, pencil based triangles for attention, and in this particular piece, I used the bend Live Path Effect to create the curvature on the word forwardslash. The background rectangle has a center gradient to create the shadowy corners effect.
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