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.
Leaf illustration by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Leaf illustration by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I saw a beautiful illustration on Pinterest that made use of clipping, and decided to play with the idea for myself. In Inkscape, if you import an image, like the palette in the illustration above, and make or import a shape, such as the leaf here, you can place the leaf shape on top of the palette image and apply object/clipping/set clip which results in the clipped image above. I added a rectangle in white, set transparency to 50%, and added the word leaf in one of my favorite fonts, Bebas Neue, and applied a skew.
It’s an interesting way to visually share two ideas in a single image. Both the palette and the leaf have their own visual message, and together they send an interesting combination of the two. I could have used a photograph instead to possibly make a statement about love or business or nature, or all three. Open up Inkscape and try this technique for yourself.
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It is becoming more important to know how to create original images, videos, and other visual content. You need transliteracy skills.
20060410 (2) (Photo credit: nikontino)
In the same way that it has traditionally been important to know how to read, write and perform arithmetic as a basic skill set of communication, it has become increasingly important for people to create their own images, video, and other graphics to communicate their particular message effectively. It’s almost as though people only recently realized their visual preferences, maybe as a reaction to the emergence of visually motivated social networks like Pinterest, a place for people to curate, share, and collect images with verbal content becoming secondary.
A more visual web of content requires new skills.
A screenshot of the GIMP 2.2.8 raster graphic software. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As we move towards more digital interactions, and enjoy more visual web content from producers as a first introduction to their messages, we can see that they are creating a digital trail for themselves. Other people then find and interpret what they are about through quick visual assessments. If you look at my Pinterest boards, you will quickly get a sense of what I am about, because the cursory glance at a series of images does not carry the threshold of understanding that reading text does. We must slow down and engage our verbal brain to interpret the letterforms, then the words, then the combination of words to make meaning. With images, we need only recognize the items in the image to begin interpretation. We want to be able to leave our own visual trail, one with interesting, insightful, and communicative images, videos, and graphics that tell our story. If you do not know how to edit a photograph, make cuts, titles, and transitions in video and audio, or create a reasonable graphic, you will become more reliant on others to produce, edit, or change content for you. In the same way that you would not have to rely on someone else to create your word processed documents for you, you do not want to rely on someone else for mediating your visual content.
You can learn how to make great images and videos.
There are fantastic free tools and resources to begin to learn how to use these toolkits in the same way that you learned how to use browsers, word processors, spreadsheets, and operating systems. If you learned by spending time in the applications, the same will likely be true for visual applications. If you learned by reading a book, you may want to try the same for these applications. In order to learn Inkscape, an open source illustration application like Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator, by book, I strongly suggest The Book of Inkscape, by Dimitry Kosonov. You likely learned word processing and other applications because a need arose for you to become familiar with them to do schoolwork, business, or to communicate with others. A new need has emerged in digital transliteracy: for people to communicate in person, on paper, on-screen, in images, in video, in voice, and in graphics.
You can be your own graphic designer, video producer, or photographer with the skills to support you.
English: An infographic illustrating and comparing the popularity of different geosocial networking services (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
With newly acquired video editing, image manipulation, and other visual media skills, you can begin to tell new stories that move people differently than a page or a voice can, take part in the remixed web, leave your creations waiting to be found and enjoyed, and have a kind of digital presence that engages, sticks with visual learners, and promotes you differently than text can because of the very nature of the media.
I’d like to help you to gain these skills!
Contact me at lemasney@gmail.com or 609-553-9498 to talk about how we can begin to acquire these skills for your organization, service, or product. Let’s do something great together!
English: A full adaptative indexed palette (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In this episode, I decided to focus on color as topic. I explain how you can use a dollar bill in order to create a palette that subtly reminds the viewer of prosperity and wealth, how you can use photos as a source of palette, and sites that you can use to see lots of palettes that people are sharing to convey emotion and message without one lick of text.
I have realized that there’s something that drives me to do the things that I do, and let go of the things that I don’t.
For example, I am an advocate for open source software, like the gimp and Inkscape, when the rest of my creative friends bemoan my choice over adobe products, saying that they could not get their work done without them. The reason is clearer to me now why I can.
I am an advocate for calorie counting and whole foods and vegetarianism and light exercise, like walking. Many of my friends think that calorie counting is too much work for them, that whole foods are bland and tasteless and that they could not possibly adopt the lifestyle, or that they could never live without meat. They feel that you can’t get proper exercise outside of a gym. I have evidence to the contrary.
I use a Chromebook, and feel that I am working towards a chromebook- and mobile-only computing style. I still have some needs, such as archival storage, video editing, and DVR that will keep me tethered at some times to a traditional desktop or server, for now, but that is changing. My friends say that they couldn’t get by without their tower.
I gave up drinking in April of 2012. I believe that I will never drink again. I was not able to stop until I believed it was possible. Until I envisioned living without it successfully, I didn’t, and so I couldn’t. I have friends that are deep in the grip of alcoholism. They believe that there is no other way. This is obviously not true, and yet, they persist.
In the face of oppositional ideas, harder paths, and seemingly unobtainable goals, I believe that I can achieve, which makes it possible. When I don’t, I can’t. If you can’t bring yourself to believe that something is possible, that you will never gain the benefits from it, or that it’s not worth the effort or time, then you are assuredly right: you can’t in your mind, so you won’t in reality.
It is impossible to surprise yourself in your beliefs when you are both the non-believer and the non-actor. Though not guaranteed, it is possible if you believe that it can be. Until you can say out loud that you believe that you can, and believe it, you may want to hold off trying. Without belief, doing may be impossible.
One response I’ve gotten to this idea is that it is so hard to believe that which you do not. I would say that this perceived effort is a sign that belief is not likely at this time, and that when you are ready to believe, it will be easy. You will have some key evidence that the seemingly impossible is possible. The evidence may be the result of things going to far down the opposite path. You’ll have some break in the clouds to hold on to long enough to believe. Seize it — it’s the difference for me in acting and doing, or not.
20121231: thank you for everything by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #creativecommons #design #thanks
Thanks so much for all you do and say and are. It was a pleasure to have you here; To be with you a short while cc-by lemasney
Thanks so much for all you do and say and are. It was a pleasure to have you here; To be with you a short while cc-by lemasney
While I intend to continue to post here from time to time, this is the official last post of the second set of 365 sketches. I wanted to take this moment, at the end of 2012, to thank everyone who contributed to the project with ideas and support, patience and kindness. In many ways, this project changed, maybe saved, my life. Thanks to all of you.
Click on the post title to visit the post, then click the image to see it full size.
If you like it, please share it, and thanks!
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Thanks so much for all you do and say and are. It was a pleasure to have you here; To be with you a short while cc-by lemasney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
The Essential Cheat Sheet for Social Media Cover Photo Dimensions [+ Pre-Sized Templates]
A Crash Course in Inkscape
