I’ve been doing some reading on basic graphic design principles lately, so I thought a re-vamp might be a good excuse to practice a them a bit in InDesign.

Here is my spectacularly unsuccessful flyer from two years ago.

In order to make the redo, I needed to make two short lists based on the original poster: one of the necessary elements, and one of what’s wrong with the original poster.

Requirements: Header/Teaser, three informational statements, tear-off contact info, and what is hopefully a good graphic.

Fixes: Too low contrast. Everything has approximately the same visual emphasis, which defeats the whole ‘eyecatching’ requirement. In an effort to show as many drawings as possible, I’ve pretty much eliminated true white space, which doesn’t help with the contrast issue. Also, alignment? What alignment?

Much better. Still, there are a few things I think I could improve if I wanted to spend more time on it. The graphic is not my best work, I’d prefer to replace it with something a little more recent. And I’m not sure how to resolve the header. The zapfino font ‘d’ makes horizontally centering the header problematic. Also I’m pretty sure the alignment between the header and the three statements should be consistent, but that leaves the header looking like I meant it to be properly centered and didn’t succeed. Foo.

The original flyer is old, but the special is current! Valentine’s day is approaching rapidly, and now would be a good time to begin to panic… that is if someone weren’t to hypothetically offer you a totally affordable and unique gift option. Just sayin’.

I am a lucky person. In addition to occasionally donating his computer skills when I need them, my webmonkey also brews beer.

Beer.  Which I get to drink for the low low price of occasionally helping him put proto-beer in bottles.

I felt like I needed to even the scales a bit, and my recent illustrator kick gave me a lovely excuse to do so. I knew I’d need some sort of iconic figure to be the visual focus, so I borrowed the goat I’d made for him previously.  Then I determined what words needed to be on the label, and built from there.

The label is perfectly passable as-is, but I am most pleased about how I made it: the right way. It will be very easy for me to go back and change the colors and the text in the banner to make new labels for each different kind of beer he makes, without having to re-invent anything.

Postscript: We are rapidly approaching my 200th post. I’d like to spend it answering questions about process, photoshoppery, chainmail, or anything else that’s on your mind! Leave me a quick comment, and I’ll respond in my anniversary post next week.

When I first decided to do a blog, I promised myself that I would write it for me: If people read it, great, but that wouldn’t be the point.

For the most part I’ve managed to keep that promise. Which means that when my blog brings me something awesome, it is awesomeness + the delightful surprise that someone actually reads this thing.

I received an email not too long ago. Lauren and Mark Goodman are opening a village pub in Hertford Heath (in England guys. That means they’re classy.) on December first, called The Goat. Lauren had been poking around the internet looking for logo ideas, had found my goat post, and was wondering if I would be willing to develop one of them into a logo for her.

Um, YES. (Lauren’s offer of an ale on the house should I ever get out to England wasn’t the primary factor in my decision to take the job, but… English ale. And home cooked pub grub. These are not things one dismisses lightly.)

It’d been a while since I’d done a proper logo design, so I had to dust off my Illustrator skills. Although it was more like a long neglected outdoor grill than a misplaced tchotchkie… steel wool and a respirator, not a feather duster.

I hadn’t used Illustrator since I got my tablet, and that makes for a very different user interface. Mostly a much less frustrating one. Since this turned out so well, (and with a minimum of pulling my own hair out) I am suddenly I am getting ideas for projects that should be done in Illustrator.

I feel an artistic tangent coming on.

I’ve redecorated! D’ya like it?

Well, actually it’s bit more than simple redecoration. Because it seems I actually update my blog (well, occasionally anyway) I’ve decided to fuse my poor neglected portfolio website to its more popular sibling.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to update that portfolio a bit, and to provide a more obvious link to my etsy store. If you haven’t visited the store, (or if you have) I’ve just posted quite a few pictures of new jewelry which you should totally check out. More will be coming as I finish processing the heap of photos I took this weekend!

We interrupt your irregularly scheduled program ‘The Other Guys’, to bring you…

Goats!

Once in a great while, my webmonkey affords me the opportunity to pay him back for all his, uh, monkeying. In this case, he wanted a logo. A goat logo. He gave me a few specifics (headshot, simple, black lines) but essentially left me free to see what I could come up with.

So I got some reference material together, and started riffing on the concept of ‘goat’. When I finished my first page of sketches (the first six designs here) I showed them to my client to get his opinion on how things were going. He sort of flapped his arms and said ‘More cartoon-y! Fewer lines! Also that one in the middle on the second row is super creepy!’

In order to reduce the creep factor, I started my second page drawing mainly goats with regular pupils (instead of the weird football pupils goats actually have) and I did my best to inject some cute. I’m not actually very good at cartoons, ‘cute’ is about as close as I get.

Luckily for me, the second page of sketches produced a winner. With a little adjusting and cleaning up, here he is:

So. 2011. That happened.

Things are afoot behind the scenes at Spiral-Bound/Inksplot. There are plans underway, oh yes. Crazyness like an updated website, pieces in actual physical stores, and a digitized inventory system.

I know, right? It’s like I’m an actual businessperson.

Unfortunately, I am a businessperson without a usable copy of Photoshop. (My computer…shall we say, asked to be relieved of duty. I have a new computer, but it doesn’t have all the essentials yet.) Regular posting will resume as soon as I get a new copy, quite possibly that same day: I’ve got an idea that’s burning a hole in my brain. You’ll like it.

Something a little different for you this week: A photo restoration.

This photo had a sad, sad life before it came to me. It was well loved however, as it must have been put in its frame fairly shortly after it was taken.  It was sandwiched into the frame with the frontpage of the newspaper Club Life, dated October 11th, 1890.

For those of you without a background in conservation, the operative word in the previous sentence is newspaper. Newspaper, particularly old newspaper, is full of all sorts of nasty reactive chemicals. By the time I got my hands on it, the newspaper had begun to dissolve under its own power.

As for the poor photo: At some point, the photo had become one with the glass. I’m not sure exactly what the chemical process was, but removing it was synonymous with destroying it. And that was the state of affairs when someone dropped it, and shattered the glass.

The owner brought it to me, and asked if there was anything I could do.  I blinked at her for a minute, and said I’d give it my best shot. The first order of business was to get it scanned, which was impossible in its current state. The photo had snapped along with the glass in some places, but was still intact in others.  The glass grated against itself every time I tried to move it, causing more damage to the glass and the photo. Flipping it over in order to scan it was out of the question. Also it was spitting glass slivers everywhere.

Painful as it was, I had to use a razor to finish the process of breaking the picture into pieces.  I scanned each piece separately, then I assembled them in Photoshop, which gave me this:

Thirty hours of work later, I gave this back to the client:

There are a few interesting things about this photo, beyond the reconstruction work.

First, it’s pretty clear that not everyone had the same idea about how to pose for a graduation photograph. The guys in the back are posed and proper, hats in hand, while others sit with either genuine or awkward informality. Most people look in the direction of the photographer, but others seem to deliberately stare somewhere else. Everybody agrees that smiling is bad, but that’s about the only consensus.

The Union College of Law later became the law school of Northwestern University.

Also, where the hell was this taken? A construction zone? An alley? Wherever it was, the guy lounging in the front felt obligated to put his handkerchief on the ground underneath him to protect his suit.

People knew how to put letters in their names in the 1890′s. Boy howdy. Here’s the best example, before and after.

Lastly, there are two women in the photo. One would have been unusual, and two is really something of a surprise.

The registry lists them as L. Blanche Fearing (to the left) and Mrs. Fearing.

That’s right. She has no first name, not for the likes of you, anyway. She is Mrs. Fearing. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

It’s debut time at Spiral-Bound Sketches. This purse will be up on my etsy page soon, but you guys get first peek.

This is my little rubber purse. There are many like it, but this one is… Actually no, I’m pretty sure this is the only one.

The flap over the top just flips back to open it, but will stay in place otherwise.  ( I did some sneakiness with the weave so that it wants to be either all the way open or all the way closed. This prevents it from falling open accidentally.)  The strap is long enough that you can get into the purse while you’re still wearing it. Because it’s half rubber, it is very forgiving and will stretch when you rooch around in it. It’s small, but can hold a regular wallet, smartphone, and keys.

One of the few times in my life that I wore a purse on a regular basis was when I was taking classes in Barcelona. I had a good ‘during the day’ purse/bag/thing, but all the ‘going out’ purses I had were an invitation to those that steal such things. The straps were too long and easy to grab in passing, (as happened to one girl on my trip, who lost her purse to a guy on a moped when she was crossing the street)  and the material was too easy to cut through (as happened to one of my professors while she was window shopping.)  So with this purse, I took the opportunity to address those problems. This purse  sits a bit higher than most, more at the elbow than at the waist, and I dare a cutpurse to get through chainmail.

Craft Shows are a big time-sink, and they aren’t always a monetary windfall. But they have other pluses, not the least of which is that often someone asks me for something I would have never considered making. Now to be fair, the majority of these ideas are either not up my alley, or are implausible. But sometimes they’re good enough to try a little experiment.

In this case, someone asked me for a purse. I don’t actually use purses, so my initial response was disinterest. Also the sheer density of chainmail that would be required to make a purse that wouldn’t drop hairpins through the sides was depressing. Then however, I remembered this:

A little leather necklace of mine. Cute, and a little punky.  The basic weave of it is a 4-in-1, with a little strip of leather hopscotched through. And if it were possible to make several of them, and link them side to side…

First step:  I needed lots of little ‘necklaces.’  I had a large leather rectangle on hand, and no particular plans for it, so I cut it into narrow strips of slightly less than the width of the links.

I made a nice swatch of 4-in-1, and wove the little strips through it. By this point, I knew this was gonna work, and I was pretty sure it as gonna be awesome.

I wove until I ran out of leather, and wound up with a sizable piece of… fabric? This side is the verso.

And this is the recto. That means ‘the front side of the piece of leather’, by the way. I swear.

From that point, I connected the sides, made a simple strap from the last strip of leather, attached that, and was done.

Well. That was a successful little experiment.

This purse is too tiny to be of much use, unfortunately.  It’s barely big enough to hold a credit card, which is a function of using leather I just had on hand. Next time I’ll actually buy some leather on purpose, and so the resulting purse will be big enough for at least a wallet.

Just to be clear – I’m not this calm, cool and collected. I also don’t glow.

Balancing work time with everything else time is something all artists have to hammer out for themselves. Well, other than perhaps the independently wealthy artists with no family obligations and a particular gift for benign self-absorption, but I digress.

My balance is a work in progress. I have two part time jobs that are not art related, and one that is. None of this includes ‘just for fun’ projects, i.e. stuff that is not directly related to making money. Like, say, this blog. There’s also life, of course: Car payments and Thanksgiving dinner with the inlaws and watching the Perseids.

I do alright at leaving the work I do at a remote location where it belongs, but I run into trouble with work I do at home. Chainmail and some drawings are ‘work’, but they are also fun, which complicates matters. Sometimes, I want to make chainmail, as it is genuinely relaxing. And sometimes I have a show coming up, so I feel like I have to make as much chainmail as possible before the deadline, then I work myself into a slightly tarnished and blistered bag of twitch.

My problem is saying no in a rational way that also allows me to get done what I need to get done. If chainmail is fun, I shouldn’t balk at doing it a lot, right? But then I’m ‘working’ in my relaxation time. And if I only ‘work’ when it’s fun, then I’m not treating it like a job, which is the level of dedication that it deserves, and that my taxes sort of imply I should devote.

…

Oh, I’m sorry, did you want a conclusion? As I said, it’s a work in progress.