Graphic Design and Illustration.

The Greenest Handshake

Last week it was that time again.

Time again to see if the creative world cares about little old me. 🙂

Well I showed up rather early to the meeting, so I took the time to enjoy the warm weather and soak up the downtown ambience.

I’m not normally downtown much. Sure I go to the WAG fairly often, but I’m usually in and out. Not too much time wandering around to see what’s going on.

So after much wandering around, mostly around Portage Place, I was off to the Lo Pub. And more vegetarian-style pub grub.

I tried the nachos this time around. They were quite good. Not the best nachos I’ve ever had though. That title belongs to some unnamed restaurant in the blue smoke filled haze that is Bally’s casino in Las Vegas. Now those were awesome nachos!

While I was there enjoying my nachos, I had three quick conversations. One with a budding First Nations artist who, when asked where his work was being shown, rather offhandedly said, “New York”. I was rather flabergasted (and somewhat jealous). And apparently too flabbergasted to get anything else like a name or any place locally where his work might be found. And then I spoke to two other programmerator types who could have been each others stunt doubles. Which lead to a rather embarrassing event that will go left unsaid. Suffice it to say I had a seniors moment, and I’m a bit too young at 37 for such nonsense. 😯

The rest of the evening was looking to be rather blah, when I ran into someone I had chatted to briefly before several meetings ago. Turns out, he’s an EV (electrical vehicle) enthusiast. And while I’m not exactly the worlds greatest environmentalist, I do own a hybrid Honda Insight and try to walk, bike or bus to work every day, so it was interesting to hear what he had to say regarding the state of EV ownership here in Manitoba. Seems to be a bit more of that going on around here than I thought.

And in keeping up with the environmental theme of the rest of the evening, I then spoke for quite a while with someone working in the carbon trading industry. He works for this company Emissions Recovery Solutions Inc., that is trying to get First Nations communities set up for carbon capture programs — mostly thru land management practices like tree planting and wetlands preservation — thereby generating a carbon credit that can be sold to corporations to offset any regulations these business may be facing. That’s a very basic explanation. More info can be found here on carbon trading. Anyways, he spoke to me for some time regarding lots of the aspects of his business and environmental policies here in Canada and the US. Especially regarding the Tar Sands in Alberta. And he wasn’t nearly as negative about it as you would think. Though he wasn’t exactly glowing with optimism either. Very down to earth approach. While I’m not totally sold on everything he said, he gave me quite a bit to consider.

So after a rather successful evening out, I headed off for home. Once again enjoying the nice warm evening. I even got off the bus early so I could walk a bit more of the way home.

I’m also rather looking forward to next month’s meeting. Seems there will be a demo of a game called Cogmation Robot Builder. As someone who once owned the Star Wars Droid Factory playset, I’m intrigued.

Classic Car

Summer has now officially started up, and it looks like we’re actually going to see some sun for the next few days. So in celebration, I’ve posted this image. Just a note – I do not actually own a car like this (nor does anyone as I based the details of the car on several different models of old cars), nor am I planning a road trip any time soon 😦

Anyways, mostly a Plain Jane vector illustration with a few effects thrown in just ’cause I can. Enjoy.

Image of the Month – June

So this month I finally got around to finishing off the WIP I had for the month of April.

I managed to get the wolf printed out on some very heavy linen textured paper, where I proceeded to first paint an underpainting in various shades of red. I chose a red as I knew I was going to finish off the piece in mostly cool grey tones. Choosing a warm tone for the underpainting of a primarily cool toned final painting is pretty much Underpainting 101. Once everything was dry, I went to town and finished off the painting.

Keep in mind when viewing this piece, that it is the same size as a business card, so detail can be a problem, AND I chose a style that would be very textured in appearance. All in all, I am pretty happy with the way it turned out.

Now all I need to do is track down a geocaching tag to make this a trackable item. It looks like for this to work, I’m going to have to hole punch this thing. Probably in the bottom left or right corner. Hopefully I know someone who is big into arts and crafts, and has a eyelet punch I can borrow, as I think I might want the extra durability if I want this item to last for any length of time.

After much work (and one or two accidental posts that the world wasn’t really supposed to get) my website and blog are up and running once again!

I changed the theme of my blog today to the Portfolio theme. As a designer, I feel bad that I went and used someone’s theme, but it was setup much the way I was thinking of running a portfolio style blog, so I figured it was worth the extra cash and spring for a pre-built theme than hosting a WordPress blog somewhere on my own. This change also meant I had to drastically alter the way I set up my site. I used pages instead of posts to originally layout my design and illustration portfolio. In order for this theme to work it’s magic, the site needs to be all posts instead. I had to take the site offline to ensure anyone out there following this blog doesn’t suddenly get flooded with a whole whack of posts from me. Especially since it was all old content.

So for anyone out there who had never actually checked out the site in it’s entirety, please feel free to check it out at stevendownie.wordpress.com.

June 14, 2012

Site Strangeness

Just a few housekeeping notes to take care of here.

Over the next few days, I’m setting up the site to be a bit more friendly to keeping on online portfolio up to date and running. It will take a couple of days to get the whole thing rolled out, so visitors to the site might find a few things amiss. Not to worry, the blog should function normally and I imagine everything should be back to our regularly scheduled programming by the end of the week.

Really Big Image Dump

This should be my next to last post in my ongoing theme of digging up old art to publish online. These last ones here are more of the same. Just old line drawings that have been scanned and coloured in Photoshop. Otherwise no real theme to any of these images, just a lot of ideas I was playing around with in the sci-fi/comics genres. Enjoy.

A Couple of Older Works (Again)

While it has been quite the trend the past few weeks, I am just about done going thru some of my older stuff and getting them digitized and published online. Eventually, I’ll just put up a page that will contain all these images. But for now, on with the show…

This first one was done quite some time ago. I was still in college (so over 17 years ago, if anyone is keeping score) and I’m pretty certain I was doing this image when I should have been working on a school project. Done in water colours with a bit of pencil crayon for some details. Pen and ink for the lines.

I think I was looking for something illustrative for some possible self-promo work once I finally graduated from school. Never used it for anything though it was in my portfolio for years and years. Believe it or not, the type I lifted (i.e. stole) from a car dealership ad. I rarely if ever hand draw type anymore, but it was still part of the curriculum when I was in school. Definitely not something I miss!

This next image needs less of an explanation. When I was a teenager I fell in love with both the stories written by Michael Moorcock and the book covers that were coming out at that time for his books. Here’s an example:

My image was an early attempt at trying to tap into that style of drawing. The “type” used in my piece is just a made up, fantasy alphabet I very quickly made up.

I’m not entirely certain I am done with that motif though. I may wind up doing something else with that image. Perhaps I can convince a certain someone to help me out and pose for some reference material… hmmmmmmmmmm.

Image of the Month – May

I was hoping to post a pic of the follow up to my last image of the month. That’s going to have to wait as I am just not quite happy with it yet. But I’m almost there.

Instead, I’m going to keep up with my latest theme and post a (much) older image with a bit of new digital life added to it.

There should be quite a few more posts like these in the next few days as I continue to travel down memory lane and get a few more older images scanned into the computer.

The Handshake gets Flashed

So after a brief absence, I once again attended a monthly meeting of the Secret Handshake, Winnipeg’s informal group of freelancers and other creative professionals and enthusiasts. It was once again held at the Lo Pub. And I finally figured out why it’s called that. It’s attached to a youth hostel from Hostel International. It has a rather large sign out front that sez “HI”. So, I guess “LO” is a rather clever and natural fit. And I cannot believe I didn’t make the connection earlier. Yes, I am a Graphic Designer, and no I’m not a very observant one.

As I’ve blogged before, the menu at the Lo Pub is vegetarian. I set out to try their vegetarian burger (even sprung for vegan cheese) and was very pleasantly surprised at just how good it was. And I’ve had some pretty mean veggie burgers in the past. I was alo very glad I did not order the nachos as it came in a rather ginormous serving. Might be something to consider if I can ever get Kimmy out there.

Shortly after my meal, I ran into someone I went to high school with and caught up a little bit. He hadn’t really been to many meetings before, and was wondering whether these meetings had any agendas or if they were just mixers. I said that while it seems some events have specific purposes, like launching an iPhone app, or showing off a hand-crafted camera rig, most the other evenings I’ve had with Secret Handshake were very informal. This got into a rather lengthy discussion regarding pecha-kucha that the DGC put together once in a while and how it would be nice to develop a forum that allows local creatives talking about their work to other creatives in a slightly more structured way than the slightly hap-hazzard what that Secret Handshake goes about doing things and the very curated and structured way pecha-kucha is handled by the GDC in Winnipeg. While I certainly do not mind the very informal, party friendly atmosphere Secret Handshake has right now, and would hate to see it disappear, it would be nice to get people to show off what they are working on or perhaps try getting people to do something creative while attending the event itself. An easy one could be found over yonder should anyone but me think it’s a cool idea. And no, that’s not a hint for me volunteering.

Later on, I ran into a web developer who just started working over at some little company called Automattic that make a little piece of software I think most people reading this blog might of heard of. Surprising that it’s now the second time I’ve run into someone located here that works for them. Must be something in the water.

Anyways, we wound up having a rather interesting discussion involving revolutions in publishing, Guttenberg, the hell that is making ePubs from InDesign and blogging when we were suddenly bamboozled by a couple of guys looking for beta testers for their software. They were from a company called Fannex and all this weekend (as I write this) they are running tests of their software and needed some brave volunteers. These guys came across pretty strong and the web developer fled quickly enough (or perhaps our conversation was only interesting from my end?) leaving me to hear the spiel.

It was actually pretty cool. The idea is pretty simple. You‘re at a game or concert somewhere and people in the audience turns on their smartphone and the phone becomes one pixel in a giant sized monitor. Thus allowing the audience to display an image or motion graphic. Pretty cool, as long as you have enough people in the audience to participate. Won’t work if only five people use the app. The simulation with 30% participation was interesting, though it would only allow for primitive graphics.

While they guys I was talking to from Fannex seemed to have their eyes set on a bigger market, they seem keen to launch here in Winnipeg. And I think that’s a good decision. The newly reformed NHL team , the Winnipeg Jets, have quite a history of getting everyone to wear white to create a “White Out” and that’s without fancy technology. So it might be an easy sell. And the fan base seems rabid enough to try anything right now.

When I went home and mentioned all this to my wife she thought the Fannex App was pretty cool, and remarked it was similar to a flash mob in some ways. Just a bit more “flash” than mob I think. And speaking of flash mobs, while I am pretty certain it’s not what the developers have in mind, this technology could certainly be used for culture jamming. Not to mention having the possibility of taking away the home team advantage at a game by creating a make-shift banner for the opposing team. I’m thinking Labour Day at Mosaic Stadium at Taylor Field in Regina. 😛 Though, while funny in theory, I could imagine that might get dicey in practice depending on how much of a sense of humour the home team fans have! There could also be some interesting (and far less dangerous!) possibilities for artistic expression by turning a whole bunch of cell phone into a virtual canvas.

Well that’s it for now. Got to rest up as I think I’m in for a busy weekend!