Happy birthday to Paul. Who isn’t actually a pizza chef, but if he wanted a change from his day job he’d look the part in the uniform I’ve designed for his cartoon alter ego.
Paul’s Pizzeria
Month: April 2022
Every Sofa will be Famous for Fifteen Minutes
I used the ‘Image Trace’ function in Adobe Illustrator on my iMac to convert my pen and ink drawing of a sofa into a vectorised image. On a layer below I used the pen tool and – my new favourite – the blob brush to add a few areas of solid colour.
You can then re-colour the image either by changing colours individually or selecting the whole image and going for an alternative scheme from a colour theme library. Here I’ve used ‘Pop Art’, ‘Prehistoric’ and ‘Ice Cream’ (the one in chocolate and pistachio).
A Shed in the Snow
I converted this sketch of our shed in the snow in Illustrator for iPad. Instead of ‘Image Trace’ there’s a very similar vectorise function, which can convert it into something nearer to a woodcut or lino-cut.
Ink Sketches
I’ve just read Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s tale of medieval mercenaries, ‘Trail of Steel’, so I’ve tried to put a bit of his swashbuckling mayhem into my drawings of a sofa, a cruet and various piles of books and CDs.
I’ve been doing so many birthday cards recently that I’ve run out of De Atramentis black so I’ve moved on to the brown.
Junction Box
I drew this trackside junction box from a photograph in Adobe Illustrator. There’s a lot more planning involved in the process and mapping out shapes with the pen tool seems more like cutting shapes for a collage than drawing.
So far manipulating anchor points on the outlines of shapes seems rather random to me. I find it easy to inadvertently delete an anchor point and lose a section of the shape. Converting between an anchor that results in a straight line and one that results in a curve seems equally obscure.
The only way that I’ll learn is to keep practising.
Survival Kit
Just those bare necessities. Happy birthday to Daniel who last autumn located a log cabin with attached Boc Beag real ale beer pump at the head of a Scottish sea loch.
The Rotunda
We walked across the deer park to the Rotunda at Wentworth Castle this morning before heading up beyond the house to Stainborough Castle, built as a folly by Thomas Wentworth in 1731.
The bird highlight of the morning was before we set off, as we were packing the car. A woodcock flew up the road, flying about 8 feet above the centre road, as it would along a woodland ride. A few doors up it diverted between the houses, still at the same height, heading towards Coxley Woods. I’m guessing that it might have been hunkered down somewhere in the lower end of the woods but had been disturbed.
The Veg Test
Happy birthday to veg tester Emma.
Brambly
I’m not familiar with Adobe Illustrator, so it’s been a bit of learning curve, creating this ‘Brambly’ font using the Fontself Illustrator extension but I’m gradually getting into the logic of it but once I’d done that the font was available to be used in any program, such as here on a newsletter template in Apple Pages.
I wouldn’t use it for text like this but I can see the possibilities. I’d like to try and create a typeface that resembled my regular sketchbook lettering but to get into the process it’s going to be more fun to try a series of more illustrative fonts, where readability isn’t the main concern.
Link
Butterbur
Butterbur and kingcups are in flower in a small stream or drainage ditch between the sewage works and the end Industrial Street at Horbury Junction. A fresh-looking peacock butterfly feeds on dandelions alongside the canal.
Fontself
The Fontself font creation program enables you to draw and scan a font or to draw each letter on the iPad as a vector image.
What I’d like to do is draw the font on paper and then convert it to a vector font, as bitmap fonts are rather limited compared to regular fonts.
So far, I either end up with a bitmap font or an error message informing me that my particular version of vector image isn’t acceptable to Fontself.
I’m sure that I’ll work it out and in the process I’m learning a bit about Adobe Illustrator, such as how to vectorise an image using ‘vectorize’ on the iPad version or ‘Image Trace’ on the Mac.