Winter Bear, Q. Cassetti, 2011, digital, vectorLittle messing around with simple shapes working with my new favorite tools (shift W: which monkeys with line widths and shift M which can join shapes —additive and subractive). I love messing around in the land of vectors so I can make little ditties like the bear to the left. Key learning from this rush job is that believe it or not, if I draw my designs, scan them in and then have them as guidelines underneath the vector work, the images are better, happen faster and are more designed than just randomly drawing on the tablet without a plan. No duh. But hey, that’s why I had to go to graduate school was to have my mentor, Murray, surface these things because the basic stuff is something we forget. Sketch first, finish last. So my desktop is littered with thick trace with tons of line drawings waiting to turn into vector shapes.
Another thrill is that I am building a wonderful library (in the symbols library in Illustrator) of all these critters and shapes. I need to draw some racoons, squirrels, bears, deer…woodland animals as they have a place far beyond the zoo/tropical animals. I have also made some way cool brushes (thanks to the prodding of Jean Tuttle) of vegetation, leaves, holly….So the toolbox expands and I am building my own version of Design Elements.
Love the Ultimate Symbol and its CDs. Check em out. They are such a wonderful tool to help get the jobs done. Check em out. New to the collection is a rights free disk set of Seymour Chwast illustrations. Interesting that Chwast has gone into business with Ultimate Symbol (which I think is a remarkable and very design forward organization) to get a library of his illustration back into circulation. For me, this moves the needle significantly in the world of rights free illustration. What is your thinking?
I am beginning to get that frisson of excitement around just doing illustration and graphics. I feel a wave is coming. A sunami. Yea! Its about time.
We had a great chat en famille last night with Kitty—a virtual valentine for all of us. She was in good spirits mixing it up with a new group of friends referred to as “Skull Cave”. These are interesting folks who are not as crazed as others with World of Warcraft and other consuming electronic games. There is a high zombie factor with students studying and then spending a lot of their spare time playing these games.She was in great shape, centered, happy….laughing. I miss her so much.