Notes from the Artist

After talking about the "olden days", I got all nostalgic. I am working on completely redoing my ArtistJoyful site, and I was reminded that there are pieces of old work that would add a lot to my treasure chest today. So, I went mining. It wasn't a major excavation, only half a drawer into my file cabinet. Still, I gathered some nuggets I had not thought about using before, since I switched to computer graphic building so many years ago.

I am reminded how rich I am. I've got whole "veins" of analog art yet to mine. The beauty of it is I can use a snippet of an original art piece here, and another section there. With very little effort, one original painting can be tapped to enrich many different graphic design pieces, each with totally unique outcome. And I still have my original intact. I am grateful.

Labels: analog, original art

I started doing graphic design before computers. I'd pull out my rapidograph and carefully, tediously draw a fine line border for a certificate. I would then letter it with my calligraphy pen. I loved doing commercial art that way. I loved pin-striping a car, or hand-lettering a sign, too. It was tactile and challenging and satisfying.

I was working at a newspaper when the first OCRM (optical character recognition machine) was brought online. You had to use a certain kind of typewriter for the machine to recognize what was typed. I was thrilled when I could reproduce the type with my pen, and fool the machine into thinking I was one of those typewriters.

The computer room was this cold, sealed off room where the huge computers were housed. I would scan the type, the OCRM would translate the type and the strips of programmed copy would come out to be waxed and pasted up. The graphics were taken from cutbooks and pasted up too.

Fast forward to 2009. I love taking an image I have penned, scan it into Photoshop, work it, save it, pull it into Illustrator, vector it, clean it up, save it, pick it back up in Photoshop, add layers of color and perhaps photo texture etc., maybe pop it over into Painter, add some texture, and eventually end up with a clean custom graphic. Other days, I just sit out in the yard with my watercolors and joyfully paint. There's something about the "old world" style of hand work that just feeds my soul.