Really just a text and color study here, but I have been reminded a few times lately that when someone says a generalizing statement without any sort of social research or other foundation, you sort of come off like an idiot. Happy Saturday, y’all.
Category: Illustration
These are posts featuring illustrations designed by John LeMasney. In general, unless otherwise noted, they are licensed CC-Attribution, cc-by lemasney, and should contain a citation and linkback.
Okay, it’s April 1st, so I figured I’d play with a little visual foolery. With some inspiration from Shannon O’ Connor, who contributed a photo of a tower with a tree growing out of it (what kind of neglect does it take for a full sized tree to grow on top of a building, I ask you?) so I figured I’d mash up some architecture and nature. So here I have an urban apartment building/townhouse which I’m clearly mislabeling as a brownstone, painted on a brown stone. I haven’t decided yet whether it’s just a painted facade or whether you can actually enter it. I like to think that someone walks up to it, tries to enter, and grabs an image of a doorknob. April Fools!
So, in Inkscape, I imported two images from MorgueFile, one of the apartment building, and one of a massive rock in the middle of a desert. The boulder had a man standing in front of it for scale, and he was about one eighth of its height. I bitmap traced both images, placed them on top of one another, then painted them with the calligraphy tool, the eyedropper, and the palette. I added a gradient based background, built a happy faced sun out of stacked, blurred ellipses and text, and added some surf crashing with the calligraphy tool. So there you have it, a ‘brown stone’ by the beach. Thanks to Shannon for the inspiration, and to you for taking the time to look.
Here’s a simple sphere that moves a bit away from my regular reflective treatment.
In Inkscape, I made a black sphere on a gradient background. I duplicated and intersected the sphere and made the intersection white to imitate reflectance of the ‘floor’ part of the background gradient. I made a white rectangle and converted to path, then bent the top and bottom paths to make the reflection of an overhead lampappear to bend upon the top surface of the sphere. I created center gradients for both the black and white parts of the sphere. I added a grey, blurred, flat gradient for a shadow beneath the sphere. Finally, I duplicated and lowered the opacity of the black sphere and moved it down to create a reflection of the sphere itself in the ground.
Hope you all enjoyed it!
For the love of Pac Man
So, like many of Gen X, I was highly influenced by the introduction of Pac Man, and feel like the colors, sounds, and excitement that came over me the first time I saw it changed me in ways that I didn’t know until I started to study design. I was never particularly good at the game, and still I have trouble getting past the first level before losing interest. The first time I saw the game, it was inside a Wendy’s Hamburgers in Northeast Philly. It was about the size of a dishwasher, doubled as a table, and had a short queue waiting to play it. The version I play now is free and exists on my phone. It really is the end times.
How I made the image.
In Inkscape, I started by making the simple ellipse, rectangle, and Bezier shapes for the ghost outline. I combined the rectangle and Bezier path, the duplicated and flipped that shape to create the back of the ghost “skirt” In fact, two more dupes were made in order to create the 3d effect of the skirt. I found a public domain skull and bitmap traced it and carved it down to just the eyes and nose, then added it to the ghost. Then I added the candy coating effect. I duplicated the ghost 3 times and affected the color to match the Pac Man colors. As a final touch, I added the final frame of the Pac Man sprite (when he is captured) to the background. I hope you enjoyed it!
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.