These are design or consulting jobs that rose out of a request from the audience. I am always looking for prompts for new content, so if you have a need, please reach out.
This is my friend Craig Smith’s dog Stanley combined with an airliner, bringing down delicious doggy goodness in the form of bones. Thanks to Craig for sharing his photos and giving me the inspiration. Inkscape makes it easy — I took Stanley and did a bitmap trace and then took the airliner and did a bitmap trace. I removed all of Stanley but his face, and I removed the body of the jet. I overlapped them, and created some goggles with ellipses, complete with lenses (low opacity fill). I created a single bone using the rectangle tool and ellipse tool, and then duplicated resized and rotated the bones to appear to be the payload. I used the calligraphy tool set to “splotchy” and low opacity to create the cloud shapes. The land and sky are a single gradient on the background rectangle. I recreated Stanley’s ears with the calligraphy tool set to a thick brush.
This is another answer to @angelbrady and her request for a creation of my 4 favorite Winter Olympic sports. I appreciate her suggestion, like all of the friends who have given them. Ski jumping is an amazing sport of focus, determination, and like the rest, courage. I decided to express my feelings for it here. I also wanted to congratulate the world on their participation in the games, and thank Canada for such a gracious hosting job. Go world! This was an image of a jumper that I manipulated in the GIMP thoroughly, then bitmap traced in Inkscape a few different ways, and overlapped the traces. A simple effort, but I like it a lot. Thanks again to Angel for her suggestion! Keep them coming, friends.
This one is a response to Angel Bee’s 365 Request to depict my four favorite winter Olympic sports. This is my first response, as I’m a big fan of the speed and courage of these athletes. The technique is mostly just calligraphic pen and lots of strokes, using Inkscape as a pure sketching tool, but of course with editing capabilities. Keep an eye out for the other three!
Google before you Tweet is the new Think before you speak - LeMasney Consulting
Google before you Tweet is the new Think before you speak – LeMasney Consulting
Okay. Where to begin? I got the saying from my good friend @gservo on his tumblog at https://gservo.tumblr.com/#_=_ where he pointed to the original (at least as far as I’m concerned) a repost by artpixie at http://artpixie.tumblr.com/post/395862226/design-is-mine-isnt-it-lovely which was likely found originally at in the glorious letterpress form by Joe Newton. I thought it was lovely, indeed, but I wanted to make my own take on it. I’m counting this as a 365 Request from @gservo even though I’m fairly sure he has no idea that he was involved yet.
So, I typed out each of the words as separate objects in Inkscape, only keeping the fragment “is the new” together, so that I’d have plenty of placement flexibility. I then began to do separate treatments for each piece, trying to evoke some emotion and connotations with color, feel, and size. So, for instance, I treated Google as though I were creating a refreshed logo, adding a web 2.0 candy coating. I gave Tweet a twitter blue glow. I lifted the words off the page with shadows (dark dupes with some blur and distance) and invoked age and a bit of sadness with 70’s colors in the words “think” and “speak”. “before you” in the second phrase got muted, contrary colors. To give the whole design a bit of drama, I added a yellow tinge at the corners with a center gradient.
If I was successful, you get a bit of irony, humor, and perhaps sadness. I wanted the first phrase to almost seem superficial and short lived. I wanted the second phrase to have some direness to it, to seem like an old idea that’s really not.
I also just fell in love with the idea that this statement evokes: that we are changing in the way that we process, store, and deliver intelligence. I heard a recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross on the idea that we are moving towards a time where intelligence is defined not so much by what we can hold in our heads and spit out when called upon to do so, but rather how quickly we can filter and manipulate the google-store of data, the invisible web, and the shallow web (which is how I refer to fleeting social media and data). How we use and interpret metadata, semantic supporting information, and tags will likely become more important than whether we can recall the capitals of all 50 states.
Google before you tweet (and think before you speak).
A wild jumping sailfish by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #inkscape #cc #drawing #design
A wild jumping sailfish by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #inkscape #cc #drawing #design
So, the origin of this was another 365 Request from my very good (and highly missed) friend Rob. He suggested:
“Sailfish jumping out of the water with the sun setting would be neat to see. Esp…ecially how you masterfully craft amazing images. Two to help get started, pictures: live: probably my favorite http://tinyurl.com/sailfishJump “
And so, I looked at the images, did some research of my own on Sailfish, and found some very interesting clinical creative commons licensed images. The one I settled on was at in which the sailfish is depicted in a removed, scientific style — the actual image (attributed to fishbase.com) is at and was a good place to start for the manipulation I had in mind.
So, I took the image and did a bitmap trace, which worked beautifully, and then I applied a “bend” live path effect to simulate the arc in the body that I saw in Rob’s picture and others. In order to give the fish body and depth, I used the watercolor technique of wide strokes of washy, transparent color with the calligraphy tool underneath the bitmap trace. I used a gradient to create the sea and sky, and then created some wild splashing with the same watercolor technique described above.
Thanks, Rob for the inspiration, and thanks to you for stopping by.
This is the latest entry into the 365 Requests sub project, where my friends, family and colleagues (hey, that’s you!) send me their ideas, photos, and suggestions about what to do next at https://lemasney.com/consulting/ . My good friend Amy sent me a picture of her kitty, and so I decided to use my newly discovered technique (thanks to Angel Bee) of doing a bitmap to vector conversion with the bitmap trace tool, then by grabbing the calligraphy tool with a wide setting and a low opacity to build up the color as if using washes or watercolors. Fun technique, and great, simple results. That’s Inkscape.
Vector and Illustration Advice From a Shutterstock Reviewer