Posts Tagged ‘rough’
Chewed pen photographs
Dear readers, we recently moved office, I’m talking about my day job here. I had to get my desk ready for transportation, so I got the parcel tape and started taping up all the drawers. I’ve been at this job for two months but, while taping up, I found a very thin upper drawer, a little stationery drawer. As you can see below I had uncovered the melancholic stressed-out remains of my predecessor.
chewed pens
What does this picture make you think about? Is it a little wabi sabi?
chewed pens, alternative angle
Please leave a note in the comments! If anyone wants I can upload the 3MPx original images.
Wabi Sabi part 2 – the beauty spot
A week ago I looked at Wabi-sabi, the beauty in imperfection. That was all about objects, things created by manufacturers, craftsmen and artists. This time I’m looking at people, more specifically; some of the most beautiful faces of the 20th century!
It really is a case of letting the pictures do the talking. But before I insert all the pictures into the post I’d better explain to the less observant and well practiced in ‘spot the difference’ that each pair of photos has one difference. Some obviously asymmetric element, an ‘imperfection’ perhaps, of course it’s a beauty spot. You can actually get one for yourself here in the UK, with prices starting at £75!!!
In chronological order let’s look at the beauty spot lineup.
Marlene Dietrich in 'Destry Rides Again'
Anne Francis as 'Honey West'
Lynsey De Paul
Now you might be confused looking at these beautiful women whether the beauty spot makes any difference at all, so I’ve thrown in a wild card. This might help you decide whether beauty is enhanced by the mark or not.
Beastly is in the eye of the beholder
Now I really want to encourage readers to make imperfections within their design work, whatever that may be. But never go the easy way of making imperfect things straight off the bat, first you have to achieve something you believe to be perfect and THEN give it some Wabi Sabi Sauce! It’s a sacrifice isn’t it?
Finally, in corporate work where you might need to use a © or a ® you might be able to use it as a beauty spot, but probably not… The next blog post won’t be about wabi-sabi principles, but I am going to re-visit this subject and it’s application in day to day logo and illustration work soon.
Pop Art coffee cups
I’ve always liked pop art. And you can see some Roy Lichtenstein influenced enjoyment of halftone patterns used in illustrator in one of the previous posts here at Design Reviews. This post about pop art though is a bit of an accident. I wanted to create a logo originally, for a cafe. As everyone knows a logo should only contain very simple, minimal art or graphic symbols. It’s also best to make it work in single color or posterised. Pop art is often low in colour and detail so it can be a good inspiration for shapes in creating logotypes with the illustrator pen tool.
I wanted a great cup symbol or shape within my logo so I thought I’d take a look around the web for some simple graphical representations of cups. Looking at these I thought I would spot some shapes to complement the letter forms in the logo. But I didn’t really. I did come across a great resource site though.
Pop Art Machine is the place, I’d never been to this site before. To quote the site’s description “…collects, curates and creates pop art. Our focus is painting and printmaking using public image sources as inspiration. Here you will find over one million free source images and finished pop art posters & prints.”
Sounds good and it is good. The image on the left below is my interpretation of one of the cup images on the site. Using a not too far removed technique I drew the image on the right from an actual photograph. The technique I’m talking about it that once you’ve drawn a clear crisp precise vector shape to your liking you then use the pencil tool to ‘lasso’ the shape roughly. Then you make it the same color as the surface, changed with the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) sliders in lightness/darkness only. Also on the cup on the right I sliced up the saucer with Beziers and the ‘divide objects below’ command. Of course anyone who’s used illustrator knows I’ve finished it off by using one of the ink brushes for the strokes around the shapes. It’s quite pleasing to the eye but would only work as a simple icon sized graphic I think.
two cups yesterday
Above is the result of this work and inspiration. The illustrator source file is here for anyone to download and use as they wish. The logo didn’t really work though…
Serif DrawPlus – vector illustrate for free
Do you use Adobe Illustrator for all your vector artwork? I must say that I do, but I don’t always start by using Adobe Illustrator, nor Adobe anything at all.
Have you ever heard of or tried Serif Drawplus? Don’t worry, you can get a couple of earlier than current versions for FREE. But why would you look at it if you Adobe Illustrator on your machine? There are a number of reasons but the biggest reason for me is in roughing out an idea, putting your first ideas onto the screen. DrawPlus can do this very very quickly because of the number of basic shapes in it’s fly-out menu, and then also because these basic ‘primitives’ are intuitively customisable using the ‘node’ editing method. These aren’t like regular vector nodes at all (though you can edit in that way too). Just check out the screen cam video below to see how shapes are created and modified. Many of these shapes would take many many stages to make in Illustrator using the transform and pathfinder tools…
Now you can get these versions of Drawplus for FREE v4. and v6. v4 is free on the website and v6 is very frequently included on Magazine cover CDs here in the UK.
Other advantages of Serif DrawPlus; font selection/preview, colour schemes, gradient types & presets, interactive fill, transparency & perspective tools.
Then why choose Illustrator at all? For me, compared to these free versions of DrawPlus, Illustrator has;
- Dependable/predictable output files. I’ve worked in the printing industry for years and no-glitch postscript output is a must, Illustrator has always proved to be most compliant/reliable.
- Pantone colours. And correctly producing one or two colour and spot colour artwork.
- Accuracy. (and the smart guides)
- I like the pen tool better (long-term experience).
- Other tools not available in DrawPlus; scatter brushes, symbol sprayer, plugin filters
Looking at things another way; For me Illustrator is the best but that doesn’t mean other tools are not useful. A new art program can provide a little bit of inspiration in itself. In music it’s the same: So I have a selection of guitars! Specifically I have two electrics and two acoustics. All of them are great in their own way. (Les Paul, Strat, Acoustic & Spanish style). Picking up one or another gets your fingers working in a different way and, with the electric, using the amplifier in a different way.
If I can get my hands on a newer or the newest version I will be updating this blog with a review. The newest version at the time of writing is Serif DrawPlus X2. DrawPlus X2 from Serif, the vector-drawing and graphics software that puts the power of a professional design studio on your PC
Have you tried DrawPlus, what do you think? Leave a comment or two.