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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18 of 365 is a Spirograph inspired piggy.

Spirograph Pig
Spirograph Pig

This was the result of me playing with the Render: Spirograph extension in Inkscape. When I first made the Spirograph, I saw the central opening as a mouth, and created a tongue, and some very simple eyes to make some sort of monster. Not really satisfied, I thought it looked a bit like a pig. I decided to push the idea by applying piggish colors, adding tweaked triangles for ears, defining the eyes a bit more, and shaping the snout with ellipses. I added the fade in the muddy background to create a bit of depth and story. I’m really enjoying learning about all of the deeper features in Inkscape — I usually would stick to the tools on the side, but I’m getting a lot out of the LPE tools, the extensions, and path tweaking.

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17 of 365 is a bar code, or maybe a forest.

20100107
John LeMasney

This one is not about faces, stitched paths, or much else — it’s just about a cool feature. One of the extensions in Inkscape aloows you to create barcodes in 6 or 7 popular formats. QR codes are absent from the list, but this one (128) scans with my Android phone too. I’d like to combine this with one of the other recent techniques, like the liner volumetric faces, and see where that goes.

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brand consulting design principles Illustration Inkscape portfolio technology

A tribute to Steve Jobs, a portrait in lines.

A portriat of Steve Jobs in line by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
A portriat of Steve Jobs in line by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
A tribute to Steve Jobs, a portrait in lines.
A tribute to Steve Jobs, a portrait in lines.

Playing again with the stitch sub paths live path effect in Inkscape. I took an image of Steve Jobs and did a two part stitch to render his face and hair, then added facial details and turtleneck to finish it out and make it recognizable. Fun stuff.

‘Steven Paul Jobs (/dʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American business magnate, industrial designer, investor, and media proprietor. He was the chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), and co-founder of Apple Inc., the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar, a member of The Walt Disney Company’s board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar, and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, and put up for adoption. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping out that same year, and traveled through India in 1974 seeking enlightenment and studying Zen Buddhism. His declassified FBI report states that he used marijuana and LSD while he was in college, and once told a reporter that taking LSD was “one of the two or three most important things” he had done in his life.’

from “Steve Jobs – Wikipedia” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs curated by lemasney creative. Feel free to share.
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portfolio

15 of 365 is a lion, king of the beasts by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

15 of 365 is a lion, king of the beasts by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
15 of 365 is a lion, king of the beasts by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

15 of 365 is a lion, king of the beasts by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
15 of 365 is a lion, king of the beasts by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

This is another experiment with Inkscape‘s Von Koch Live Path Effect. I made a simple shape, which ended up being the jaw and face of the lion, then applied the Van Koch LPE, which does that very specific kind of repetition. After tweaking and playing with the Van Koch copies, I had the ‘pyramid’ of shapes that make the bottom of the lion’s face. I duplicated it, converted it to a path, then duplicated the path twice more to form the mouth and cheeks by rotating them into place. The LPE effect can get in the way of finished shape placement and dupes, so I suggest that you keep a copy to the side with the LPE applied, and work with dupes converted to paths. When I started out, I had no idea that it would be a lion, and in fact I made it first into a huge wig, then a beard, which led to the lion. After adding shapes for the eyes and nose, I made the crown out of a square converted into a path, then cut the holes out of the crown using the boolean difference operation. I created the spikes for the crown using the Bezier tool with the triangle out shape applied. I conjured up some ears and teeth, and tweaked the color until I was happy. Then I created the background and starburst to make it pop a bit.

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Illustration Inkscape portfolio

A face made out of lines

A face made out of lines by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
A face made out of lines by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
A face made out of lines by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
A face made out of lines by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

This image is based in creative play with the stitch sub paths tool in Inkscape. I discovered that you can create a really fun dimensional effect if you approximate the edges of an object in space as paths and then connect them using the stitch sub paths live path effect. I tried at first to make a profile without a real model to work from, which was okay, but not really believable. I decided to go and find an image of somebody’s facial profile online, the solution to which turned out to be one of the first images I came to, an image of a guy named David Zuckerman. I liked the clean-cut profile and used it, and after I was all done, I went back to get the information to credit the photo and found out that he’s “a computer scientist on Adobe Flash Builder team leading the work on language intelligence, refactoring and other IDE goodness” ( ). That’s well… awkward. I wonder if I can talk him into using Open Source software?

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portfolio

Number 13 is two Death Stars and a stormtrooper.

Death Star Stormtrooper mash-up by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Death Star Stormtrooper mash-up by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Death Star Stormtrooper mash-up by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Death Star Stormtrooper mash-up by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

This one was a lot of fun. So I was looking for inspiration, as I often do, in my RSS feeds in Feedly, and lo and behold someone or other was making reference to the Death Star, and how much it looked like some cellular structure or whathaveyou. I saw a face. I did some research and found some great larger sized photos of the Death Star, took the best one and imported it into Inkscape, bitmap traced it (threshold), halved it using the node tool, duplicated it, flipped the duplicate,  and I had my ‘eyes’. Then, I tried a simple “have a happy day” smiley smile, but it wasn’t working. I went out and looked up some higher res images of Darth Vader, Stormtrooper types, and the Fetts and clones. The stormtrooper worked best. I brought in the image, traced the bitmap (outline) and removed the top half of the mask using the node tool, then applied a white fill to the outline. There you have it!

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