Category: portfolio

This is a portfolio of my work in many forms. It should give you some insight as to the products I might help you to create.

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portfolio

Webmonkey – LeMasney Consulting

Webmonkey - LeMasney Consulting
Webmonkey - LeMasney Consulting
Webmonkey - LeMasney Consulting
Webmonkey – LeMasney Consulting

Ask any of my esteemed colleagues on the TEDxNJLibraries team what my role is and, as likely as not, they’ll say that I’m the TEDxNJLibs WebMonkey. I do most of the updates on our site at and have been one of the champions for the solution and methods for our site. I’m proud of the work, and proud of the title, very much a term of endearment.

With this in mind, I wanted to do a painting in Inkscape to have a realistic rendering with harsh lines of a monkey. In the background you can see some code from our site, which is WordPress based. I guess if I was being true to that I’d have copied in the PHP rather than the rendered XHTML, but you get the picture. I started with a few photos of monkeys and used them as a base for building the face with the calligraphy tool, working with the eyedropper tool and using the original photo as a palette, but after I had the basic structure, I decided to remove the photo and build up the image from my mind. I especially love the way the sparkle and color come through in the eyes. It reminds me of the way I light up inside when I get a chance to add new content to the site. 😉

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Slick back my hair, you know the devil’s in there. – LeMasney Consulting

Slick back my hair, you know the devil's in there. - LeMasney Consulting
Slick back my hair, you know the devil's in there. - LeMasney Consulting
Slick back my hair, you know the devil's in there. - LeMasney Consulting
Slick back my hair, you know the devil’s in there. – LeMasney Consulting

Them Crooked Vultures is a supergroup comprised of Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age; Kyuss), Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters; Probot; Nirvana), and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin, etc.). They know how to make a killer track, and made quite a few on their debut album.

I was walking along listening to the album recently and had a flash that I would make a sketch based on the beautiful, quirky, and very visual lyrics. I began scanning the lyrics as I listened the next few times through the album, and came up with a couple of candidates. Another favorite lyric besides this one was from New Fang:  “sometimes you break a finger on the upper hand/I think you’ve got me confused for a better man”. This line however, is from Elephants, and has a great stompy, moshy rhythm. Good stuff if you like Josh, Dave, or John, and if you don’t like any of their respective music at all, I think you may just be broken, but I’m highly biased.

In Inkscape, I used the pencil tool set to 50% smoothing and shape: triangle in to create the slicked back hair and soul patch. I used the text tool and gradient tool to lay out and color the text. I rotated it a bit to give the ‘head’ a bit of attitude. If you’ve not heard any of the new vultures album, please take a listen to elephants and other songs here: https://www.youtube.com/user/Disco#q=them%20crooked%20vultures

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Orange bokeh – John LeMasney

Orange bokeh - John LeMasney
Orange bokeh - John LeMasney
Orange bokeh - John LeMasney
Orange bokeh – John LeMasney

This is another image that makes use of the spraypaint tool in 0.48 order to make a bokeh effect. The silhouetted tree was a photo from MorgueFile converted to vector with a bitmap trace. In the background is a gradient to convey that particular color from that time of the day. A quick one, but very enjoyable to do.

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portfolio

bandage illustration – LeMasney Consulting

bandage illustration - LeMasney Consulting
bandage illustration - LeMasney Consulting
bandage illustration - LeMasney Consulting
bandage illustration – LeMasney Consulting

I imagine everyone reading this has had the weird common experience of using disposable bandages, like the pain of removing them, the sort of icky fascination with the uncovered transformation, the rules and practices of how to prepare the cut and the strange way in which the color of the bandage is not really the color of anyone’s skin, but is closer to some people’s skin color than others (excluding character band aids, clear bandages and other movements forward in this respect). At any rate, the whole thing is kind of weird, culturally speaking, and I like to focus on weird stuff here.

This is one of the more complex scenes I’ve done in Inkscape. The bandage was made using a few overlapping and tweaked rectangles. I made the circular perforated breathing layer by making one ellipse, duplicating it, then duplicating those until I had a row, then duplicating those into an offset row, and so on. I built the thumb and finger with rectangles. The drop of blood has the candy coating effect applied. The most fun weird part is the armhair, which I created with Inkscape 0.48’s new spraypaint tool. I made a thin line of multidirectional hairs, then randomly duplicated them with the spraypaint tool. One of my favorite new tools, for sure. I moved the hair that was in the path of the bandage to the adhesive parts of the bandage. Finally, I created some abstract blurry, overlapping low opacity shapes for the dried blood on the bandage.

Weird, I know, but it was a lot of fun to make for you. Thanks for checking it out!

John.

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Oliver Giller – LeMasney Consulting

Oliver Giller - LeMasney Consulting
Oliver Giller - LeMasney Consulting
Oliver Giller - LeMasney Consulting
Oliver Giller – LeMasney Consulting

With just a few minutes to spare to get in today’s sketch (Easter) I’m thrilled to share this portrait of Oliver Giller. Oliver is the person to first introduced me to the concept of Open Source. He is easily the largest philosophical influence on my life, and helped to form what I list amongst the most important beliefs that I have. I lost touch with him after he graduated from Rider University about 9 years ago, but always remembered the things that he introduced me to, including the GNU Image Manipulation Program, Linux, and the GNU General Public License.

Withing the last 2 years or so, though, we’ve reconnected, and I’m happy to say that we are even doing a project together, which I’m doing this sketch for. I’m less happy to report that Oliver had to undergo brain surgery recently which left him with a scar, and in Oliver’s work to recover he donated a picture of his new stitches and asked that I do something creative with it for our project, essentially a journal of his recent health issues.

In Inkscape, I did a bitmap trace of Oliver’s face, in which you could clearly see the scar and stitches, but without explanation, it looked only as though he had a bad haircut on one side. I decided in the interest of clarity and also of not offending anyone with the graphic nature of the subject to take a highly stylized approach to the scar and stitches. It was fun to stitch a pattern using the Bezier tool, and I think I may use this technique again.

I’m of the firm belief that Oliver has all the best chances to make a full recovery, including a beautiful wife and family, parents who have supported him forever, and a strong network of friends. Thanks, Oliver, for all you’ve given me in life, now go kick this thing’s ass, so you can get back to the important stuff.

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Blue bokeh – John LeMasney

Blue bokeh - John LeMasney
Blue bokeh - John LeMasney
Blue bokeh - John LeMasney
Blue bokeh – John LeMasney

So, in an earlier sketch (dark green bokeh), I used Inkscape’s Tiled Clones feature to create a Bokeh effect, though at the time, I myself was less than impressed with what I came up with, and knew that I’d be coming back to it to make an improvement, which i feel like I’ve achieved here. I love Bokeh images, and in a camera, they’re generally created by having distinct backlight sources that are far out of focus while having a foreground subject or space that is in focus. In this particular case, I was creating a scene that focused on just the out of focus back light sources. Here, we might be looking at a building with lots of bright reflections in the distance, or water on a large lake on a sunny day, but in general, I think Bokeh are magical, mystical, and beautifully abstract.

With the beta of Inkscape 0.48, many people have been hard at work bringing new features to Inkscape. One of the most exciting differences for me between 0.47 and 0.48 is the brand new spraypaint tool, which allows you to take a single object or group of objects and quickly recreate them as a stream of overlapping clones, as though you had a spray can filled with a shape. You can affect the size, rotation, and other aspects of the copies or clones that you create with the tool, and it does a great job of injecting random placement into your design.

This tool was made (amongst many other uses) for just this kind of sketch. In Inkscape, I created a blue background rectangle, then I placed a single white ellipse and set it to 50% opacity. Then, using the spraypaint tool, I clicked and dragged the ellipse, which created a series of randomly placed clones at different sizes as I moved the tool about the canvas. It quickly created a randomness for the bokeh that worked nicely. I also used Inkscape’s tweak tool to affect the hue, brightness, and opacity of the shapes. Finally, I selected a few of the shapes at a time and increased blur at varying levels.

A very fun, very quick way to create this effect in Inkscape. Thanks to @JonCruz, @Scislac, and the rest of the Inkscape developers for a great upcoming release.

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