Category: Inkscape

These are pieces done for the Illustrated Objects project at lemasney.com that were made in Inkscape.

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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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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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Illustration Inkscape portfolio

A girl’s face made out of lines

An illustration of a girl's face made with serial lines using Inkscape cc-by lemasney
An illustration of a girl's face made with serial lines using Inkscape cc-by lemasney
A girl's face made out of lines by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
A girl’s face made out of lines

This one was a revelation for me. Perhaps not the best application of this tool, but it was a lot of fun to play with. I just started reading about Inkscape‘s Stitch Sub Paths Live Path Effect in Kirsanov’s The Book of Inkscape and found that it was great for lining long planes with manipulable parallel paths.

In my painting classes, I learned that it’s important to sculpt your subject with your brush to help your viewer see the way that a plane is going through space. This is a simplified way of doing just that. Very fun too.

I hope you can excuse the primitivism of this experiment, but I plan to develop my skills with it in the new year. Speaking of which, I hope you all have a great 2010.

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brand consulting design principles Illustration Inkscape open source portfolio professional activities research interests teaching

An illustration of Roger Ebert using text cc-by lemasney

An illustration of Roger Ebert using text cc-by lemasney
An illustration of Roger Ebert using text cc-by lemasney

A portrait of Roger Ebert made out of text by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
A portrait of Roger Ebert made of text by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

When I saw Slashfilm‘s post on Roger Ebert‘s list of best 2009 films (20 of them, not one of them Avatar), I remembered watching him on his show for years, up until his cancer surgery that removed a great deal of his lower face and neck. The photo that is the basis for my drawing appears above the post at Despite this surgery, which took his ability to speak, he continued to write, and as a salute on NPR stated so nicely:

“When Roger Ebert lost his ability to speak following cancer surgery, it wasn’t clear exactly what his future would hold, but it turns out that he entered a phase of his career that’s been utterly fascinating. He does talk about politics a lot on his blog, but even if all you read is his coverage of movies and culture, it’s well worth the time.” from Getting Personal: We Salute 10 Of Our Favorite Pop-Culture Humans Of 2009 – Monkey See Blog : NPR at Tue Dec 29 2009 23:35:51 GMT-0500 (EST) on

So, in my quest for doing (hopefully) interesting, poignant, and helpful sketches over the next year, I wanted to share my text-based portrait of Roger, with apologies to the original photographer who is not credited on Slashfilm. Shame. Also, I just read a great essay by Ebert that the NPR piece led me to at

He may not be able to speak, but he has certainly not lost his voice.

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brand consulting design principles Illustration Inkscape portfolio professional activities professional experience technology

Nexus Negative One cc-by lemasney

Nexus Negative One cc-by lemasney
Nexus Negative One cc-by lemasney

Nexus Negative One by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Nexus Negative One by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

On Early Adoption and the Nexus

I am a technologist, but I’m not generally an early adopter. Part of being a technologist for me is letting other people kick the tires so that I personally can benefit from their costs, repairs, mistakes, and teachable moments. I’m not saying all techs do this, but I do. I like stability in my software and hardware and services. I have some exceptions, and Google‘s first foray into phone software, Android, is a key example, and one I’ve not regretted.

I pre-ordered the G1 in November of 2008, and while I’ve certainly not regretted my purchase (it’s better than any handheld device I knew of or owned previous to it, phone or otherwise), I’ve been somewhat jealous as new phones running the OS, such as Verizon‘s Droid, have come onto the scene. The G1, though, has not failed me — it gives me what I need in a phone, a set of applications, and functions, generally speaking. I could use an upgrade on the camera. At any rate, this sketch is a tribute to my trusty G1 from T-Mobile, who I’ll likely stay with when I upgrade to the Nexus One or two or three, which is the point of the text there.

I feel like the G1 was a great first step towards the Nexus One, a “Negative One” of sorts. I do not intend for this to be derogatory though I am really looking forward to the release of Google’s N1. Google is doing great things in lots of areas, but the Android operating system is a killer set of apps, and the Nexus One seems like a great home for it.