Saturday, January 26, 2013

Practicing the Alphabet

Part of being an artist is that I tend to draw a lot. Much of the fun of making art is in the making. And sometimes I want to make things, but I don't want to wait around for great inspiration. In those cases, I know I can use an old stand-by excuse to draw or paint, like the alphabet. (I've heard of some artists returning to themes like rural Pennsylvania with brown paint, or sad European clowns with blue paint.)

As a graphic designer, I also need to practice designing things. And as a web designer, I need to practice making web things too.

As an excuse to draw something, I did ink illustrations of each of the letters of the alphabet. To design something, I made a web page to display them. And for a web design project, I made it with one html page that uses jquery to change the images when a letter is clicked. Plus, the layout will change if it is viewed on a small screen.

Go ahead and have a look!


Saturday, January 12, 2013

Trash or Treasure?

Sometimes things break. And sometimes when things break, it isn't immediately apparent what should done with the broken item. (I now have two broken sump pumps, should I just put them in the trash?)

I imagine the owner of the old lawn mower in this painting may have intended to fix it at some point. Maybe it was kept for spare parts. Maybe the owner just hasn't gotten around to properly disposing of it yet.

And what about those tires?

It's funny how some of the most interesting things to paint are things that really shouldn't be there in the first place. The grass needs to be cut, but the lawn mower is broken. The walls haven't been painted in years. The roof looks rusty and leaky. But it looks interesting!

If it was all cleaned up, I wouldn't have noticed it, or painted it.

Broken things have stories to tell. Brand new things, cleaned up things don't have stories yet.

Friday, January 11, 2013

Manhole Covers

I recently put up a page to showcase some photos I've taken through the years of manhole covers. I combined the photos with some special effects in Photoshop to give them a bit of a posterized look. I built the page with some html, css and jquery.

Take a look and tell me what you think.