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NYLA Smart: Practically Designed

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Image via Wikipedia

Presentations and Training Sessions:

Event: NYLA SMART

Date: Monday, June 14th, 2010

Venue: RRRC, Fairport, NY

“Class Description:

During this workshop on the basics of visual design best practices, we’ll examine examples and counter-examples of great design, the basics of layout, simplified color theory, rules for fonts and legibility, images and photographs, designing stamps vs. pages vs. slideshows vs. billboards, copyright and creative commons, and free and open source design tools (photo manipulation, illustration, layout, catalogs, and quick editors).

By the end of the program, you will:

* Find and evaluate web-based resources for great design
* Choose the best colors, layouts, fonts, and graphics for other design projects
* Respect copyrighted work by finding imagery and other materials that are freely and legally available
* Become inspired about your design projects
* Move beyond Word and Publisher to more sophisticated design tools”

Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/121kHFLhNGrP85vKdR5ti1tRFVzMbwRmboBRuzRLFg7A/edit?usp=sharing

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portfolio

146 of 365 is David’s birthday in #Inkscape #design

David is 2
David is 2

Today is David’s birthday (and Michael LeMasney’s and Lynette Day Young’s) so I thought I’d make a sketch about birthdays today. I’m coming down off a cake high, so forgive the simpliity of the sketch.

In Inkscape, I imported David’s image, and I placed a large bold block form 2 on the page and resized it to fill the page. I made sure that the z order of the two items had the 2 up front and the picture in the back. I placed them in such an arrangement so that David’s eye was placed in the center of the stroke of the 2. I selected them both and did a object/clip/set which gave me David’s face in the shape of a number 2. A very simple operation with a very interesting outcome.

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curriculum vitae Illustration Inkscape open source portfolio professional activities professional experience requests

Brownstone by the beach

Brownstone by the beach - LeMasney Consulting
Brownstone by the beach – LeMasney Consulting

Okay, it’s April 1st, so I figured I’d play with a little visual foolery. With some inspiration from Shannon O’ Connor, who contributed a photo of a tower with a tree growing out of it (what kind of neglect does it take for a full sized tree to grow on top of a building, I ask you?) so I figured I’d mash up some architecture and nature. So here I have an urban apartment building/townhouse which I’m clearly mislabeling as a brownstone, painted on a brown stone. I haven’t decided yet whether it’s just a painted facade or whether you can actually enter it. I like to think that someone walks up to it, tries to enter, and grabs an image of a doorknob. April Fools!

So, in Inkscape, I imported two images from MorgueFile, one of the apartment building, and one of a massive rock in the middle of a desert. The boulder had a man standing in front of it for scale, and he was about one eighth of its height. I bitmap traced both images, placed them on top of one another, then painted them with the calligraphy tool, the eyedropper, and the palette. I added a gradient based background, built a happy faced sun out of stacked, blurred ellipses and text, and added some surf crashing with the calligraphy tool. So there you have it, a ‘brown stone’ by the beach. Thanks to Shannon for the inspiration, and to you for taking the time to look.

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portfolio requests

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
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.

Categories
portfolio

Jay-Z, on to the next one by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #cc #design #illustration

Jay-Z, on to the next one by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #cc #design #illustration
Jay-Z, on to the next one by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #cc #design #illustration

I decided that enough people are telling me that they are digging the gradient based bitmap to vector translations that I want to work more often on them. Plus, my most popular posts so far (by far) are those of famous people, icons, or objects. In this sketch, I used Inkscape to take an image of Jay Z and convert it to vector, apply gradients to it, and to a rectangle based background. I then took three rectangles, converted to paths, and brought the opacity down. I’ve seen this kind of triple overlay imagery in several images related to his new album, The Blueprint 3, which I’m enjoying quite a bit. I especially like On To The Next One (feat. Swizz Beatz). I decided to twist the rectangles in space using the node tool to add some depth. If you’re interested in Jay Z and his latest album, you might be interested in seeing another direction it could have gone with the help of a producer named Alex Goose who developed .

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