The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.” (Robert Persig) by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Tag: GIMP
So, I decided to break with the design principles and do something kind of fun today. My friend Justin Hoenke, a fabulous librarian and one of my favorite humans ever, posted the selfie you see in the first quadrant. I recently saw a meme using Carlton Banks (of Fresh Prince fame), and decided to use Justin’s fun pic to do my own Carlton meme. I missed my post yesterday, so another will be coming soon today.
In the GIMP, I opened Justin’s picture, and sized it down to a quarter of the original image size. I brought it in again as a layer, sized it down less, moved it into place, and added a layer mask by selection for the second quadrant so that the rest of the picture was not overlapping any of the other quadrants. The same for the third and fourth, except that I started to munge his iris together to prepare you for the appearance of Carlton in the last quadrant. For Carlton, I added an elliptical selection the size of Justin’s iris, and made it into a layer mask, then played with layer styles and transparency until it looked like Carlton was inside Justin’s eye. Without the stamp tool to munge the iris, Justin’s pupil would have obfuscated parts of Carlton’s face.
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This is an example of my love for double exposures. Back in 1994, I was in a photography class, and perhaps my best image was one of my friend Geoff Kremer double exposed with a scene in an abandoned warehouse that I was exploring with my friend Roch Pisarek. They were interesting images on their own, but together, there was a kind of spark. In the GIMP, I achieved this by importing both images, resizing them to be the same size, then placing the selfie layer on top of the newspaper layer, then setting the layer mode to Darken Only which gave the effect I was looking for. I also duplicated the selfie layer and lowered the opacity of the newspaper layer to enhance the effect.
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Ray Park as Darth Maul
I was inspired by a recent clip I saw of Ray Park practicing martial arts to do a split screen of him with perhaps his most famous role as Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode 1. The clip shows exactly how integral Park’s physical appearance and performance were in the creation of the character. I tend to do a lot of this kind of facial alignment work in the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) because it offers all the right tools for photo manipulation in the perfect price of free.
How I made the image in GIMP
I started by gathering the two images, one of Ray in makeup/character and out. They were of a similar size, and of a reasonable size for my piece. The glossy of Ray was angled, where the image of Darth Maul was horizontally aligned, and so my first task was to drop horizontal and vertical gridlines at Darth Maul’s eyes, nose, and mouth. Then I dropped the opacity of Ray’s face and used the rotation, scaling, and move tools to align his face with the gridlines. I returned opacity to 100%. I added a layer mask to Maul in full opacity, then added a selection that took up exactly half of the face and filled it with the opposite color. In the GIMP, Black and White are the degrees of opacity in layer masks. Finally, I needed to repair the angled edges of Ray’s picture that were created in rotation, so I painted with the color of his shirt and the color of the background to fix those, and used the Stamp tool to repair his hair, which had highlights and texture that would have been difficult to recreate from scratch. It’s not perfect, as the angle of the head in the two shots is slightly out of alignment, but I think the illusion works. Apologies to Ray Park and Lucasfilm (Disney, now) for the unauthorized use of their images for the purpose of education and commentary here.
Last week, I was fortunate to meet for four hours with a company that wanted to learn how to use PowerPoint 2010 more effectively, make better, more engaging presentations, learn a bit about design tools like Inkscape and the GIMP, and develop a base of design skills. We all learned a lot about color, look, feel, design success, and more. Thanks so much to the company in question, and I love Hoboken‘s view of NYC. I can’t wait to go back.
Here are the presentations I used to walk the group through the issues.
New features in Powerpoint 2010
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iC0N-C2xRgH6xlvB6Gt0RXb6HcefgoGh0JrmtaEMrLk/edit?usp=sharing
Best Practices in Graphic Design
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/121kHFLhNGrP85vKdR5ti1tRFVzMbwRmboBRuzRLFg7A/edit?usp=sharing
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It may interest you to know that I have worked in the field of Instructional Technology and Design for 14 years, but that I have an undergraduate degree in Sculpture. This is the point at which people usually crinkle up their face and say “How did that happen?” I sometimes mention that I followed it up with a MA in organizational leadership, and I can see their hand twitch, ready to scratch their head.
The answer is that I love technology, especially in organizational use. I am passionate about it. I adore the ways in which technology is an extension, a tool set, a solution to problems. My undergrad sculpture degree taught me about creative problem solving, visual structure and communication, and things like space, color, texture, planning, and their intersection between the arts, including graphic design. I started off studying drafting and architecture in high school, and through a series of events that will be its own post later, I went into the fine arts, but continued to use electives and other channels to learn about computers, design, printmaking, food, business, and networking. Those skills have made it possible to go in lots of different directions in my career, including graphic design, as much of a passion for me as technology itself.
I thought it would be interesting to look at the ways in which my workflow, choices, methods and outcomes change when I’m either working in the fine arts or graphic design. Others may have their own differences, and may even disagree with my divisions, but these are mine.
- Graphic design is typically digital, the fine arts is typically analog.
I do most of my work in Inkscape and GIMP for graphic design. I create most of my fine arts work on paper. This fact informs the rest of these points pretty directly. - Graphic design is precise by nature, the fine arts are typically more chaotic.
I have always colored outside the lines. My sister used to tease me about it. My painting and drawing teachers encouraged it. My graphic design work allowed me to make choices about precision in my work.
Ampersand by John LeMasney via lemasney.com - Graphic design is typically more direct and less ambiguous, the fine arts may create more questions than it answers.
Usually if I am working on a graphic design project there is a clear deliverable point that I am trying to get across, such as “Our name is Spacely Sprockets, and we make great gadgets”. When I work in the fine arts, I am typically looking to answer more fundamental questions about humanity, the act of living, or the experience of a moment. There is sometimes an overlap of these kinds of ideas between the two disciplines, but even then, the design work has less ambiguity.
Glasses off by John LeMasney via lemasney.com - Graphic design work is highly portable, the fine arts typically create a storage issue.
All of my graphic design work is sitting in its original state on various hard drives, cloud storage services, and other portable media. Except for a show or two of my graphic work in which pieces were printed, framed, and sold, and a paper portfolio of some of my best graphic work, and excluding the prints, fliers, signs and other versions of client work, the work exists online. Most of my original fine arts work sits hidden in portfolios, discarded in moves, or only in photos where the work does not exist anymore. The photo is typically a sad facsimile of the work itself, and hardly ever captures anything of the experience.
A fiery line by John LeMasney via lemasney.com - Graphic design work is easily shared in its original form, and represented well in copies. Fine art is best taken in with all the senses.
My design portfolio shows you the work in both its original and final forms. There is no need, in my opinion, to see it printed to see the work. My fine arts work, as well as most art, really should be felt in the way that a sculpture affects the air, tasted and smelled in the way that oil paint can activate the back of your tongue, heard in the sense of the way the sound of the space changes with the work in it, and seen in such a way that you can sense the texture of brushstrokes, the bend of a piece of metal in space, the thousand points of view in a site specific piece.
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