Friday 1 March 2019

Lost on the road


Its been six years since i started working with Gimp, with lots of ups and downs.

For the last few years i was so focused on tutorial writing that i stopped being creative and have become a bit of a copycat. Every time i fire up Gimp, its because i want to figure out how to do a certain effect, which as a result has prevented me from being an artist.

When i realized i got lost on my journey i tried to remember what i wanted to do before i mastered the program.
Strangely i couldnt figure it out until i found an image on the internet of a cool futuristic logo, which would have put a smile on my face back then.

The more i deal with all the technical details, the less my creativity flows.
Things that would have made me excited, seem banal today.

On the other hand, artists who really impress me are 100 times better than me.

I have a lot of sketches from 20 years ago, that i'd like to vectorize and expand but im too scared to spoil them.

So yesterday i drew a bit on paper, got an idea, quickly switched to Inkscape and began building....



Wasnt too pleased at first and struggled with another ridiculous Inkscape behaviour, but today it got better and i got something good going.


On the right you can see the sketch i made.
Theres a fontmaker on dafont i've been checking out, who bases all of his font on a shape and then applies certain rules to it. Like subtracting triangles.

So i started with a rectangle for a letter and later maintained a certain dimension for all of the negative space.
Unhappy with how the lightning shape of the letter S interfered with the P, i got the idea to shear it, which looked cool but gave me an uneven stroke, and i couldnt find a way to deal with this annoying behaviour (the solution was to set Transforms to Optimized in the Preferences and quickly re-trace the shape).
On the next day it evolved into the square shape on the left, which got more and more aztec looking.
Then i played around with a Tangram idea, which you can see in the middle with the black and green shape.
Finally this evolved into the more and more sleek looking logo at the top, which is what originally fascinated me about graphics design and looks like a logo for a 70/80ies rockband or a 90ies techno label.

2 comments:

Lazur said...

I feel your pain on being lost.
Way too many projects in development hell and affordable time getting shorter with the daily routine of "screwdriving" personally.

Hope you can get back on track and find your old spirit!

Espermaschine said...

Its not a lack of time problem for me. Its the lack of energy feedback.
When i came up with effects and you teached me how to do them properly, it was always fun and inspiring !
This "scene" is completely meta, run by people who dont care about art and occupied by an army of noobs who got access to powerful software they dont understand.