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Smooth Road road sign illustration

Smooth Road road sign by LeMasney
Smooth Road road sign by LeMasney

When I was in poetry classes in college, I was always very interested in symbols of life, such as roads, rivers, paths and the like. It made an impact on the way that I self-examine — I’ll look at whether I feel like my road, surroundings, and speed are all just right, or if maybe I’m going a little too fast, I’m a bit too sleepy, or if I’m talking on the phone instead of paying attention to the road. So to speak. đŸ˜‰ At any rate, this is a quick sketch that is hopeful, wishful thinking about life’s path. Even with curves like these, which life always seems to throw at us, the ride can be fun, if it’s relatively smooth, not jarring, without potholes, and so on.

In Inkscape to make this sign,

  1. using the rectangle tool, create a square and make it yellowish orange.
  2. rotate it 45 degrees to a diamond position.
  3. Using the rectangle tool’s curved corner handle, adjust the corners to round like a road sign.
  4. Duplicate the sign, and convert it to a path using ctrl-shift-c
  5. use path/inset path to shrink the shape into the inside of the first shape.
  6. set the outer stroke to black, and set the fill to none.
  7. Using the ellipse tool, add bolts to your sign.
  8. Using the rectangle tool, create a pole for your sign, and decorate it as you wish.
  9. Add your message using the text tool.
  10. Make a background that reflects your message.

I hope you enjoyed it!

John.

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Gold Star – LeMasney Consulting

Gold Star - LeMasney Consulting
Gold Star – LeMasney Consulting

Daniel Veazey, who has lately become a vocal supporter of 365sketches, recently successfully attempted a technique that I call the ‘candy coating’ effect. On YouTube at and on his blog at he repeated the technique and with some feedback started doing it exactly as I do it, though I sort of like his intermediary technique. At any rate, he inspired me to do a simple execution of it on a pointed shape because I mentioned that the technique can effectively be done on any shape.

  1. So, in Inkscape, create some shape, like a star. If it is a shape, rather than a path, make it into a path using ctrl-shift-c
  2. Duplicate the path. I like to make it a dramatically different color, like bright green.
  3. Using the ellipse tool, create a circle and overlap the top part of the duplicate shape. Use ctrl-shift-c to make the circle a path. Make it a contrasting color, like red.
  4. Shift select the green duplicate, so that you have the circle as well as the duplicated original selected.
  5. In the path menu, select the intersect path operation. You will end up with a shape that is the overlap between the two shapes.
  6. Using the path menu, choose inset path, then repeat this. You will see the shape shrinking in small increments.
  7. Make the shape white.
  8. If the shape is not placed just inside the original shape, do that now. Note how the white reflection above is inside of the darker star by a small border. Do this.
  9. Using the gradient tool, and with the white path selected, click and drag from just above the white shape to just below the white shape.

This is the candy coating effect in Inkscape. You can do it with any shape, though I’ve found that simpler shapes work better. It’s especially fun the see the optical illusion of this effect on a circle.

In this particular piece, I also created a shadow, used a second inset, and a reversed gradient to create extra depth and physical believability. Try it, and have fun.

Thanks to Daniel for caring enough to try it, and for staying connected. I include his video below for your viewing pleasure, though it’s slightly different that the technique I describe above.

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What do Pi and Pie have in common: A delicious coincidence by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #poster #math #food

What do Pi and Pie have in common: A delicious coincidence by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #poster #math #food
What do Pi and Pie have in common: A delicious coincidence by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #poster #math #food

In case it’s not obvious, notice that the mirrored numbers under the piece of apple pie could be read as the letters P,I,E. I had never noticed that before, and I’m guessing you hadn’t either. Anyway, I thought it would be a fun way to show off a fun new interesting Inkscape feature.

I had a lot of fun painting the piece of pie, building it first with the Bezier tool, and then building it out with the pencil and calligraphy tools. In order to find and place the Pi symbol, I used the  brand spanking new glyphs palette feature in the upcoming version of Inkscape, 0.48. I want to personally thank Jon Cruz, one of the many amazing developers who work on Inkscape every day, for taking what was essentially a spontaneous wish for me and making it a reality in Inkscape literally overnight. I’m no longer surprised by the responsiveness and feedback by members of the Inkscape team because it’s amazingly consistent. Making connections in an open source community is a great way to influence and help to improve upon software. It requires open-minded, talented, and generous set of developers. Jon Cruz, Scislac, and ~suv are all part of a vocal great team of just those kinds of developers. Thanks, Inkscape devs!

pi, pie, inkscape, gimp, open source, design, lemasney, typography

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A circular calendar by John LeMasney

A circular calendar by John LeMasney
A circular calendar by John LeMasney

One evening I was thinking about how strange it was that 360 degrees in a circle is similar to 365 days in most years. I was then thinking that if you broke out the days of the calendar year along the clockwise path of a circle that it might be a very interesting way to mark time, especially for a project like mine. You might see, for instance, at a glance, how much of this project has passed so far. So I made it in Inkscape.

I used the amazing and flexible Render Polar Grid extension as a base. I gave it 365 angle divisions and 2 major circular divisions, and tweaked the other settings with preview enabled until I had what I wanted. After that I began counting angle divisions from the top center, which I labeled January 1, to the division line that was 31 gaps away, which I labeled February 1 and so on. I extended the lines of the polar grid where these first days appeared. This counting, for me, was easily the hardest part of the project. I had to count lines 2 and 3 times, and remember that the first day of the next month was 29 and not 30 days away or what have you. Finally, I added an ellipse with the division feature enabled to show part of the ellipse as filled. Look for the little circle handle on the ellipse you made and move it with the node tool to play with this feature.

So, Inkscape is also a fantastic tool for conceptual design and ideological illustration, but you knew that. đŸ˜‰

 

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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. đŸ˜‰

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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.