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

65 of 365 is a prevail whale made in #inkscape

Prevail Whale 2
Prevail Whale 2

For those of you who use Twitter, you have likely seen the Fail Whale, which shows up whenever the system is beyond capacity or encountering some other issue that ceases service. It’s a beautiful, fun design, and I think of it as being akin to a creative 404 error page, or a really peppy upbeat quirky hold music playlist.  At any rate,a long time ago, I made a play on this design called the prevail whale, one of the few times I had some serious kudos action on my Flickr account. I decided to update my design to move further away from the look and feel of the original Fail Whale, and display a bit more of Inkscape‘s capability. The Prevail Whale works against the things that try to hold it back, fighting against fail, and having fun while doing it. It’s my personal mascot for social media.

Lots of techniques were used here. The waves are a Bezier tool construction, duplicated and extended several times. I used a dotted line for the stroke, and various sea toned colors for the waves. The birdies were just a simple ellipse and rectangle construction, joined, then tweaked with the node tool. Once I liked one, I duplicated and positioned them, grouped them, and applied a gradient to all of them simultaneously. The cloud and sun are techniques I’ve done here before. In this case, there is a glow on the sun, and a dotted line for the sun’s stroke. The whale is constructed from an ellipse, a triangle, and some other curved shapes, all thoroughly tweaked, joined, and worked to be continuous. I applied a gradient, to create a whale like skin tone. The eye is a series of ellipses, made very much like I might make a human eye. The tongue was maybe the hardest piece in the whole piece, as I had to shape, reshape, and tweak to make it feel right. The eyebrow is a pencil set to shape: triangle out. The tiny tiny teeth took a while — about 200 clicks with the Bezier tool, meticulously placed to get that great tiny tooth effect. I applied a glow to the whale by duplicating, setting yellow, and blurring. The blowhole spray was a quick kidney bean shape with the Bezier tool, with translucency added, and some dots made with the pencil’s ctrl-click to dots technique . It was a great deal of fun to make, and as always, I thank you for taking a look!

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brand Illustration Inkscape portfolio

64 of 365 is a hot mix tape

Hot Mix Tape
Hot Mix Tape
Hot Mix Tape
Hot Mix Tape

I grew up with record albums as that medium was dying. My first ever record album I owned was Men At Work. Sigh. Cassettes were a deep part of my generation — they offered me my first taste of audio engineering, because a record button existed on every standard cassette player.  I had lots of mix tapes. I very much indeed would sit up late at night and listen on the FM band of my radio for the good stuff, trying desperately to hit record as the first beat hit the speakers (even though the DJ would be stepping all over it), more often than not stopping and rewinding (because I had mistakenly recorded the wrong song) in order to cue the successful recording of the correct song in the queue after the other 6 important songs that week. Wow, that was a lot of fun. A whole cassette of great music from different artists was a thing of aural beauty, but it was also a sort of achievement — a testimony of dedication to the music I loved. It probably would be outlawed if they tried it as a new concept today.

This cassette was created mostly with the rectangle tool and the node tool, some gradients, and the text tool. I don’t really have any around, and I decided like other drawings I’ve done here to do it from memory. Thanks for stopping by!

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portfolio

63 of 365 is a vast, quiet moonrise in #inkscape

Moonrise
Moonrise

I really enjoy Inkscape’s ability to take a single path and use it as a brush with the pencil tool. I do this all the time. I was walking along a path, looking at some very tall, old trees, and was thinking about how I might use a single thin tree in order to build up and flash out a larger tree. I tried it and it didn’t work very well. However, in the same experiment, I came up with this, where I used 2 or 3 different tree bitmaps, converted them to vector using the trace bitmap tool, then copied one to the clipboard, which allows it to be drawn out as a brushusing the pencil tool set to shape: clipboard. The moon is a white ellipse, the text has the candy coating technique, and the trees have a blurred white duplicate for a glow effect. Hope you enjoy it!

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portfolio

62 of 365 is an outright breech of Pixar’s copyright in #inkscape

Wall-E
Wall-E

So, anybody’s who has ever met my 5 year old son Jack probably knows about his affection for the main character in the Pixar film named Wall-E. He draws the robot in a very stylized way (his rendering reminds me of the style in the credits sequence at the end of the movie) over and over again, and has gone through reams of paper telling stories and working out scenarios in which Wall-E does this or that, and I absolutely love it. It reminds me of my childhood in which I spent a good part of every day drawing soldiers in battles, futuristic cities, helicopters, cars and even tiny pictograms.  I hope drawing becomes a lifelong friend for him as it has been for me.

With apologies to Pixar, the drawing is from memory (the movie has a permanent place in our Roku’s Netflix Watch Now queue) and I take great liberty with the specifics of the character, such as placement of lines, etc. He’s made mostly with the rectangle tool, with some ellipses and Beziers in some places. Gradients were applied to give some character to the surface. Some text was added.

In the interest of getting Jack familiar with other tools for drawing besides media on paper, I’ve begun to give him access to Inkscape and have taken a quiet supervisory approach, waiting for him to get stuck in his experimentation, showing him how to move on, sometimes giving little tips to help him get started. In general, I try to let him play and experiment as he wishes. At any rate, this drawing is for him. I love you, Jack!

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portfolio requests

61 of 365 is an olympic luge slider in #inkscape @angelbrady

Olympic luge slider
Olympic luge slider

This one is a response to Angel Bee’s 365 Request to depict my four favorite winter Olympic sports. This is my first response, as I’m a big fan of the speed and courage of these athletes. The technique is mostly just calligraphic pen and lots of strokes, using Inkscape as a pure sketching tool, but of course with editing capabilities. Keep an eye out for the other three!

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portfolio requests

Google before you Tweet is the new Think before you speak – LeMasney Consulting

Google before you Tweet is the new Think before you speak - LeMasney Consulting
Google before you Tweet is the new Think before you speak - LeMasney Consulting

Google before you Tweet is the new Think before you speak - LeMasney Consulting
Google before you Tweet is the new Think before you speak – LeMasney Consulting

 

Okay. Where to begin? I got the saying from my good friend @gservo on his tumblog at https://gservo.tumblr.com/#_=_ where he pointed to the original (at least as far as I’m concerned) a repost by artpixie at http://artpixie.tumblr.com/post/395862226/design-is-mine-isnt-it-lovely which was likely found originally at in the glorious  letterpress form by Joe Newton. I thought it was lovely, indeed, but I wanted to make my own take on it. I’m counting this as a 365 Request from @gservo even though I’m fairly sure he has no idea that he was involved yet.

So, I typed out each of the words as separate objects in Inkscape, only keeping the fragment “is the new” together, so that I’d have plenty of placement flexibility. I then began to do separate treatments for each piece, trying to evoke some emotion and connotations with color, feel, and size. So, for instance, I treated Google as though I were creating a refreshed logo, adding a web 2.0 candy coating. I gave Tweet a twitter blue glow. I lifted the words off the page with shadows (dark dupes with some blur and distance) and invoked age and a bit of sadness with 70’s colors in the words “think” and “speak”. “before you” in the second phrase got muted, contrary colors. To give the whole design a bit of drama, I added a yellow tinge at the corners with a center gradient.

If I was successful, you get a bit of irony, humor, and perhaps sadness. I wanted the first phrase to almost seem superficial and short lived. I wanted the second phrase to have some direness to it, to seem like an old idea that’s really not.

I also just fell in love with the idea that this statement evokes: that we are changing in the way that we process, store, and deliver intelligence. I heard a recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross on the idea that we are moving towards a time where intelligence is defined not so much by what we can hold in our heads and spit out when called upon to do so, but rather how quickly we can filter and manipulate the google-store of data, the invisible web, and the shallow web (which is how I refer to fleeting social media and data). How we use and interpret metadata, semantic supporting information, and tags will likely become more important than whether we can recall the capitals of all 50 states.

Google before you tweet (and think before you speak).

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