Jono's life sans Xara

[wizard509]

They look good Jono I may not like all of t but all in all in all good work.

[Jonopen]

just be creative in every thing you do jono [well unless you are explaining yourself to Mr Plod ]

way to go...

When I was a kid, after a bit of a night out, I was walking home carrying a big gnarly old log, and you guessed it, Mr Plod apprehended me! I can't remember the exact details (obviously), but think I got away with it by saying I was an art student!

[Jonopen]

Hello all, it's been a while but here's my latest roundup of bits and pieces (aka 'stuff').

Except for these doodles and experiments, things have been fairly quiet digitally. I have however recently discovered a local print studio that can do A2 giclée prints, which has really got my cogs going again.

As usual a few of the images originated from the Scribble challenge or were inspired from topics on the TG forum. For example the magazine, where I tried out Affinity Designer's new warp tool to layout the text (image below).

[gwpriester]

Nice. Keep on being creative.

[Jonopen]

Hello all, It's funny how things come together. I've been wanting to produce a set of 12 or so stamps for a (top secret at the moment) project that's been on the back burner for years. A third party content producer (Artifex Forge) has just released a collection of graphics, styles and brushes (for Affinity Designer/Illustrator) for creating vintage postage stamps. So anyway, I thought I kick start the project and give them a go.

Although the graphics pack contains a load of ready made stamp templates, to understand how it all works, I recreated a stamp from scratch after deconstructing one of the template files. In actual fact I don't think there's anything in the pack that can't be done with Xara, it would just take a different approach.

Anyhow, after lots of head scratching here's my first shot. For fun I've also included July's 2023's scribble line in the 'J' of Jono!

Hopefully I'll get another 'graphics roundup' together to post here soon.

[gray]

I always found stamps fascinating when I was a kid. The designs and styles always caught my eye. Sounds like an interesting project to design your own.

[Jonopen]

I always found stamps fascinating when I was a kid. The designs and styles always caught my eye. Sounds like an interesting project to design your own.

Thanks gray. I'm also fascinated with stamps. Some of them are like miniature artworks. With my project I’m aiming to roughly complete one drawing a month including any research and accompanying text. So see you next year! (only joking, I'm sure I'll be around here before too long).

[Jonopen]

Here’s the latest round-up of imagery that's been loitering on my SSD for the last few months. As usual they've mostly originated from the TG monthly scribble challenge, so they're an eclectic mix of doodles, experiments and ideas.

I’m mainly now using Affinity Designer but dabble with VectorStyler and occasionally with Inkscape. Even after several years, I still have a love/hate relationship with the Mac OS. Probably due to my deeply ingrained past life using Windows.

Cheers, Jono

[Egg Bramhill]

Great compilation Jono.

In actual fact I don't think there's anything in the pack that can't be done with Xara

Just for fun I thought I'd give it a try in Xara. I used the example construction on this page: Page image below.

Here's the result.

The face was created in MidJourney AI using

Imagine : Copperplate illustration of 19th century mans full face, bearded --s 750 --v 5.1 --style raw

and converted to vector using TraceJourney AI and cleaned up in Xara.

The remainder was all Xara creation and the whole drawing is vector. Used Spray.exe to create the noise effect.

Fun to do

[Jonopen]

That's brilliant Egg. Nice use of Spray.exe. I'd forgotten about those little utility programs.

I must check out MidJourney AI and TraceJourney AI. Looks like they could be useful and save a bit of time for my 'stamp project'.