My Favorite New Tool
My favorite new tool is an automatic pencil sharpener. Yup that’s right, a pencil sharpener. It’s really not even new, as an invention or in terms of model, but it’s new to me. It’s vintage with a faux wood grain around the barrel that holds the mechanisms and batteries with a beautiful guilloches pattern on the top. The top is clear plastic and holds the shavings and houses the blade. Around the top part that spins and sharpens your pencil are the words,”Press Gently.” Words of wisdom both for the act of sharpening and for sketching.
Wishing for that Analog Feeling on a Graphics Tablet
First let me just say that I absolutely love using my graphics tablet for work and play. Using the digital pen instead of a mouse is absolutely ideal for the type of work that I do and because of my background in art it’s a "natural" fit. I have it mapped so that there is a one-to-one relationship between where I point the pen on the graphics tablet and where my cursor is on the screen. It is superior to the frustrating scrubbing that is so common with using a mouse.
One Burger Heads to the Boneyard
I‘m sure that I’m not the only one that has a whole digital box full of illustrations, graphics, mock-ups, ideas, etc. that just didn’t reach their full potential. Whether the idea itself was left to die in a cruel game of the majority rules or the shift of a project changed focus, we as design people go through a lot of iterations and create a lot of digital assets. I’ve had various versions of a blog and my intent was to allow those things to live on and/or be memorialized in the digital universe. So it is my intent here to let this burger live. It may not have the meltiest cheese or the correct arrangement or shaped sesame seeds, but it’s my rendition of a double quarter pounder with cheese.
God speed my tasty, vectorized burger.
Drawing and How it Relates to (My) Life
I experienced a good liberal arts education in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State. Up until recently my grades were good enough to be president and even though my GPA doesn’t reflect it, I did learn quite a bit. I have benefited greatly from the mixture of social and earth sciences, math…cough…math, english, art, and other courses. In my pursuit from film/graphic design to ceramics to multimedia specialist, one thing stands out as an absolute fundamental skill – drawing.