Playing With Clay

I just became aware of an awesome (and free!) 3D program called Sculptris. It’s seems to be pretty powerful, considering the price you pay. And with just a few hours of fiddling with it, starting with the default ball of clay, this is what I was able to create. Loads of fun.

Quilted

Posts have been a bit sparse around these parts lately, thanks to a bug that’s been hanging on with a vengeance and some other less serious life issues.

This is the second time one of my cartoons has been turned into a quilt. Ms. Freely sent this photo of the finished quilt as thanks for my permission, although I’m more humbled than anything else that anyone would find my work worthy of the effort.

iPad sketch

Armed with a new iPad and Sketchbook Pro, I present to you my first quick still life using those tools. A sippy cup sitting on a cloth. This thing will force me into a more painterly style while using it, although probably not for my finished cartoons done with ink and paper.

Jeep

I can’t believe I never noticed this. Not that I’m a car buff, but I’ve seen a few Jeep ads in my time.

Satan’s Spittle

Labels are still popping into my brain, so they have to come out. This time it’s a devil with a little drool on his lip for a hot sauce label.

South Pacific Pina Colada

Yep, another silly drink label. But at least this time I’ve given you a bit of a twist and plastered it on a virtual bottle to give you an idea of what it might look like in use, in real life. The 3D mapping feature of Illustrator is a pretty cool thing to play with, even though my rather poor efforts only hint that the bottle might be made of glass.

Corn Squeezins

And the hits just keep on comin’. Another label, this one a bit on the fringe of sanity, but I like the way the color came out here. A bit of a feathery background, and the corny triple nibblet accent at the top add to the fun farm/fowl theme. ‘Double Rectified’ is a nod to John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn character and his white lightning description. I’m not quite sure what it means, if anything, but it sounded good, so I used it.

BBQ Sauce

It’s been awhile since I’ve created any labels, and this one has been stuck in my head for a bit, so I decided that it was finally time to purge my brain. Although I think I’m about out of alcoholic drinks to create, as this one shows, there’s certainly no shortage of other products that can be tooned and labeled.

Walking in the Shadow of Ghosts

Boing Boing linked to this site recently and I was intrigued because long ago, in another lifetime, I spent a few years in Berlin. Some of the pictures presented on the website are haunting, literally, from the juxtaposition of today and yesterday.

Sergey Larenkov has artfully fused the past and present to give history a new perspective. Contemporary pedestrians walk through the venerable spaces where fallen combatants from history lay, with little idea of the ghosts that inhabit that dimension.

Graphic Design

I came across this website and immediately bookmarked it. Producing a “perfect book” caught my eye, but the love this guy has for graphic design oozes out of every page and dribbles from each word. I’ve only just begun to sift through all of the articles and I look forward to poring over them all.