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.
Here is a close up image of a little girl. More than anything I was looking to create a screencast to explain how I do these text based portraits in Inkscape. It’s a fun technique with some easy key steps that you’ll see in the video below. Enjoy!
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One of my best and longest standing friends has tqaken to critiquing my blog. I welcome this. Especially because he has started giving me ideas for the blog. He said that he really wanted to see an eye that could see in all directions. I decided to interpret his request figuratively, and just render a human eye, as I believe with knowledge, insight, and experience that we can foretell a lot of what is going to happen. Though I’m surprised constantly. In inkscape, I created the iris with a circle and some overlapping blue and green stars using the shape tool, with a large white circle in back of it for the eyeball. I added a black ellipse for the pupil. I used two rectangles-to-paths to shape the upper and lower face by using the node tool. For the space between the eyeball and the upper and lower face, I added a pink rectangle behind the eyeball. I added simple pencil lines with shape: ellipse for the upper and lower lids and lash line, and switched to pencil with shape: triangle out for the lashes.Thanks for the suggestion, Roch, I hope you like it, and I hope you suggest more ideas.
In honor of my official transcript showing that I graduated from Rider University in December of 2009 with a Master of Arts degree in Organizational Leadership, I wanted to make a tree, a common symbol of knowledge and education. It also is one of the key elements of Rider’s brand. I used the pencil tool mostly, set to 50% smoothing, and shape: Triangle in to create the roots and trunk. I then used the ellipse tool in order to create many overlapping green circles, and path: unioned them for the foliage. To amplify the beauty of the branches, I set the foliage transparency down a bit. I made a background plane with a gradient with about 5 stops to create a natural, but muted, background.
This post was about playing with Inkscape‘s configurable Axonometric (isometric in this case) Grid tool. I set the grid to be shown, and then started to build out a toaster on a counter. After creating the top, side, and front, I added the handle and slots. I then created some toast, introducing some curvature to the design. Then, I added some wisps of steam and a face. I enjoyed the layering so much, I decided to take the opacity down a bit to show the innards of the device. I duplicated the top wall of the device, made it dark grey, applied a blur, and placed it below the toaster to make a shadow, Finally, I placed a few shapes in the background to create a counter surface.
This is an imitation in Inkscape of bokeh, or the effect of light when a lens is out of focus. Following is a link to a video demonstrating how I did it, with what I think is a nice overview of the Inkscape Tiled Clones Tool.
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Okay, so this is a situation where I wanted to play with some of Inkscape‘s built in filters, but in reality I only used one. I created a rectangle and simply used the selection tool’s skew handle to shift the top to the right parallel to the bottom. I converted it to a path and applied the filters/bevels/button filter to the shape. I created the tongue out of a simple square with a curved top, then duplicated, rotated and duplicated again to make the eye shapes. I gave a slight curve to the bottom of the eyes, and used the node tool to create a division in the tongue. I used a rectangle converted to path to create the mouth by blowing out the edges to rounds. I took that shape and applied an LPE curve. I added circles for pupils, and a gradient for the tongue. It seems so simple to look at it now, but lots of little tweaks were used for the effects.
