My ribs are feeling better after a week of low-impact activity. I’ve learned to pull my knees up to my chest and pivot my entire body when I’m rolling over in bed as opposed to using my core to do the work for me. Stupid stuff like pulling the handbrake on the OG-V , pulling on my socks, and taking stairs two at a time are still out of the question, but I’m not as stiff as I was last Friday. Sneezing still sucks, though.
Friday morning I drove up to the Towson library, loaded a file onto their 3D control computer, hit START and reviewed hundreds of applicants for a graphic design position based in Africa as two new dealer badges printed in a slightly larger size. After the fiasco with my first silicone mold attempt destroyed the first badge and the second printed too small, I needed a couple of examples to work with. Luckily I was able to reserve a block of time long enough to print one decent example, abort a second misfire, and print a third excellent example slightly larger than the original. After work I sanded down the rough edges, built a proper mold box out of foam core and hot glue, and mixed up a new batch of silicone after I’d let it warm to room temperature. After pouring it, I set it on a seed starter mat to keep warm overnight. Saturday morning, the silicone at the top is hard to the touch—unlike my first attempt, which took five days and a heat lamp to finally set.
The next step is to go and find a cheap used pan at the thrift store and melt a lump of lead-free tin I bought from Amazon. This will get poured into the mold and, hopefully, provide me with a metal version of the dealer badge that will stand up to heat better than the plastic will.
The under-cabinet lighting in our kitchen has been dimming and dying for several years now, especially after I switched the annoying halogen bulbs out with LEDs. They are small round unmarked pucks connected by wire snaked in and behind the cabinets and connected with a bespoke two-prong plastic coupling, making their removal or replacement impossible—there is no manufacturer information to trace back to to match the couplings. So I’m resigned to swapping the 20-year-old pucks out with new LED units and splicing the old connectors onto the new units. This does not thrill me, but LED carries very low voltage (the original lights go through a big brick of a transformer, while the LEDs plug right into the wall) and I’m confident in my soldering and splicing abilities. It’s just going to take a lot of time and crouching under cabinets, which is going to be murder on my ribs.
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Happy to have this completed. My team was awesome; I couldn’t be prouder of all of them.
In the Yale Review, Chris Ware looks back on the author/illustrator Richard Scarry:
The Busytown books, as they came to be known—with their dictionary-like visual presentation paired with lightly slapstick situations and the presence of recurring, memorable characters like Huckle Cat, the Pig family, and my favorite, Lowly Worm—grew into a real-feeling big world that Scarry seemed to be letting little ones into.
As a kid, I spent countless hours poring over our collection of Busytown books: There was a welcoming simplicity to them, and they described people and places in a way I could understand easily.
I also picked up on something Ware mentions in his essay: a markedly European feeling to each book. There were cars and buildings and words that weren’t like the ones around me in Massachusetts or New Jersey and I was smart enough to notice the differences. So it made sense when he mentioned that Scarry lived in Switzerland after 1967, and during the period when his most popular books were published. There’s also an approachable quality to his artwork I always appreciated. His early work is technically excellent, but the loose style of pen and guauche artwork in the later Busytown series influenced my drawing style in ways I hadn’t really realized until thinking about it.
An article on a completely different website brought me to this one, and I could not have been happier last night. This is a reconstruction of the history of the Millennium Falcon, from the earliest days of Lucas’ scripts through Ralph McQuarrie’s original sketches, a pivot in the “Space Pirate” design after Space: 1999 hit TV in 1975, and the birth of the now iconic shape. The author sources multiple books, articles, websites, and photos to piece together how it evolved. I remember seeing some of these paintings over the years in different books and magazines, and now I know why they were different than what we saw on screen.
Oh, this is definitely bookmarked for weekly visits: Penguin Series Design is a review of classic Penguin book cover design from its origins to the modern day. The author has a collection of about 1400 Penguin books and teaches art and design in Melbourne, Australia.
About five years ago I went to our local library and checked out a thick graphic novel that spun a hallucinogenic tale of a guy called a “cat master” navigating the underworld of a futuristic city with a ninja cat powered by syringes of super-powered juice. Part noir mystery, part samurai B-movie, part graffiti showcase, it defied all description and I burned through it in one sitting. I returned it and promptly forgot the name. Doing a search for another graphic novel (Tokyo Ghost, another futuristic dystopian romance story I enjoyed immensely) I found this one again: King City. Highly recommended.
At work today, while I was setting up a camera shoot, I overheard a discussion one of the subjects was having about 3D printing, and he mentioned that his local library had 3D printers to rent. Astonished, I filed this away for future reference. While inhaling my lunch at 2:30 (it was a long shoot, and there were surprises) I checked the Baltimore County Library website, and behold! they have 3D printing services. Unfortunately they’re not taking orders right now, but if and when our local branch opens back up—they’ve been remodeling for a year and a half—I’m going to pop in and see if I can get my design printed.
3D printing is nothing new; it’s been around for decades at this point, and people have been making cool shit for a long time. I’ve always been interested in seeing what can be achieved with different materials, and I’ve seen people design incredible things in 3D modeling software that then gets printed into solid objects. I thought I’d dip my toe in the water with a pretty simple first project: a fake car dealer badge like they used to make Back In The Day. My inspiration came from something I got off the Flintstone Scout, which still had the original IH dealer badge from Cumberland, MD stuck to the rear of the tailgate.
I started looking for the proper typeface and settled on a classic House Industries font from the archives, modifying the S and making minor tweaks to the other letterforms to fit the era I was going for. The lower typeface was another old favorite, Bitstream Geometric 212, that I’ve had for probably 25 years. I set them up on a rectangle like some of the others I’ve seen in reference, put two beveled screw holes in place, rounded off the edges, and looked into how to build a 3D file with the tools I’ve got here.
Adobe makes a 3D program but it’s only available as a standalone package (not part of Creative Cloud) so that was out. I read up on how to build a 3D-readable file from within Illustrator, played around with the settings, and tried to bring it into SketchUp, but found that they’ve put a lot of their file import features behind a paid plan as well. So I messed with my file some more, found a free converter that switched an .OBJ file to an .STL (which most print-on-demand services prefer) and sent out for a couple of quotes. I was, frankly, quite shocked to see what they were charging: the first shop I contacted quoted me $50.02 for a piece of ABS plastic 4.5″ wide.
So clearly, it’s cheaper just to buy a fucking 3D printer than it is to ask someone to do a one-off project. Shit, I had metal laser-cut, bent, and powder coated for less than half that price. I don’t know what that plastic is made from, but it must be more expensive by the ounce than printer ink or something.
Back in the 80s as a highschooler and aspiring comic book artist, I was at our local mall and picked up a copy of Heavy Metal magazine from the newstand rack. A story called Rebel was the feature in that month’s issue, and I was enthralled. It was a well-drawn post apocalyptic Road-Warrior-esque story set in New York City and I stood there for an hour absorbing as much as I could. I guess I didn’t have enough money to buy the issue, because I don’t have a copy. But I immediately went home and started drawing my own version of what I had seen, which went on for about 30 pages before I ran out of story ideas. Fast forward to yesterday, where two comic artists who run a channel reviewing comic books featured the trade paperback version of the strip I seen 30 years ago. I’m glad to see it holds up as well as it does in my memory; it’s an incredible work of art.
In a strange and bitter happenstance, one of the reviewers on this YouTube channel was accused of soliciting and grooming high school aged girls, and committed suicide a few days ago after she went public.
I was surprised to see a medium-sized USPS envelope arrive in the mail yesterday, addressed to your humble correspondent; inside was a shiny new US passport featuring the new, terrifyingly bad portrait we shot here at the house where my hair looks like it’s falling off the back of my skull. I was fully expecting either a letter beginning with the words, “We’re sorry, but your application could not be processed…”, or just radio silence until the night before we’re scheduled to board the plane. It’s always great to be pleasantly surprised by bureaucracy!
I finished up a bunch of Scout II designs and posted them to my Instagram channel and to a couple of Marketplace groups, but so far there have been no bites in the storefront despite the Insta post getting a ton of likes. I would really like it if this made back some money; it was a fun exercise but I’m going to pump the brakes if I don’t make a lot of sales. Jen and I have been cranking out on a freelance project for an old friend where we’re both spending a ton of time in Illustrator—it’s time-consuming but can be done easily while playing a movie on Netflix on the second monitor—and I’d rather be doing that for guaranteed money as much as I like illustrating trucks.