A hopeful wish from me to all the things that matter to me. I love design, my family, a lot of my projects, and many of you. Let’s keep going, okay?
Tag: Arts
On calligraphy
I started making these calligraphic lines many years ago as a way of making shorthand notes on movement while watching a video of ballet. As the dancers turned and spun in the air, being thrown and jumping, I’d record the motion with a pen on a page.
It turned into a primary form of my mark-making ever since that first moment. I have thoroughly enjoyed moving from analog mark-making on paper and canvas to the digital canvas. Inkscape has been a beautiful analogue for that process. The things that I learned in one have definitely influenced the other, and I feel privileged to be among those who had a foot in each pool (digital and analog mark-making).
Using a digital canvas
I never get tired of making things glow, shine, have depth, reflect, or stand out in Inkscape. In this case, I took my Wacom tablet, and with the calligraphy tool, I made the key 3 marks you see. Then I duplicated, applied a yellow, and applied a blur to the duplicate, sending it behind the first marks. I added a deep red background, and to create some depth I made a pill shape and used the spray paint tool set to single path to create the texture.
What about you?
Have you ever practiced making marks on a page? Do you doodle in corners? How would you like to see the ways in which you could turn those marks into art using tools like Inkscape and the GIMP? Contact me at 6095539498, or john@lemasney.com to see how you could get started!
On the importance of design
If you know me, really at any level, you know how important design is to me. You know that I feel like it surrounds us, a physio-visio-spatial fabric that helps to define a space, a culture or a community. I would also say that once you are past the idea that it requires magic or some gift of birth, you understand that you can do it too, given the right tools. Many of the designers I know who are asked to design each day are flummoxed not by the blank page, but because they are using Word or Publisher or PowerPoint to design, and for no other reason other than familiarity.
Using the right tool for the job of design
Let’s stop that where we see it, okay? Inkscape is one answer, but others exist. Oh, there’s one other requirement for design: You have to love it. You have to have a passion for having the right outcomes. You have to care about it. Otherwise, it will just be text and pictures on a page. You need to be able to be inspired by sites like and even if you feel like your work doesn’t belong there.
Passion is a big part of Design
The desire to help people learn is the key skill in being a great trainer. Legitimacy, transparency, and patience are definitely important too. My experience has been that getting past the fear of one’s own designs is really about getting your designs in front of the eyes of others, gaining feedback, improving, and growing. This project has really helped me to do that!
Hope you enjoyed today’s sketch!
So I am a bit of a night owl.
Especially on vacations, but most any night, I spend my most productive hours between 10pm-3am. I’m posting yesterday’s sketch, for instance, at 2:23 AM EDST. That’s just me. People scold me, tell me to go to sleep, and those who have meetings with me the next morning raise their eyebrows at me as if to say “late night, huh?” Yep. It was a late night, and I really enjoyed the quiet, and clear thoughts, and lack of interruptions of the day to day stuff. Very often I’ll have the TV going while I work on my laptop, but with TiVo my DVR, I no longer have to watch any of the ridiculous late night commercials. Whenever I’m elsewhere, without a TiVo DVR, I feel like it’s just easier not to watch TV.
The problem with commercial television sans DVR
Watching TV without one, especially late at night, is like a brainwashing session. BUY ME one commercial screams. YOU’RE FAT AND POOR another one bellows. BUY THIS CAR, YOU NEED HAIR, YOU HAVE ALLERGIES. I’d rather not have to pay attention to it, especially when I’m a little sleepy, and maybe a bit vulnerable to self-doubt. DVRs let me skip right past the stuff that asks me to obey. So this sketch is a little illustration of my feelings about late night TV, and I hope you like it!
So this is the fold design for a paper airplane that I learned when I was about 7 years old. It’s a great flier, a long-lasting glider, and you may even know how to make it, but if you don’t, I wanted to try to convey how to make one using Inkscape to illustrate. What I found was that the imprint of how to do it in my mind is no match for trying to illustrate that. Try to make it, and if you have trouble, let me know in your comments!
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Cupcake Illustration
So today’s post was just about using a few different tools in Inkscape to create some interesting effects. First and foremost, I saw the stitch sub paths live path effect as a great way to create ridges of a cake cup and so it was. I made a shadow with a blurred ellipse. I used the calligraphy tool to create the cake and the icing. I used the dot tool feature of the pencil for the confetti sprinkles. I created the cherry with the ellipse tool and the node editor, and the stem with the Bezier tool. I added some highlights for the frosting with the calligraphy tool, then blurred them a bit.
A lot of fun to make!