A barrel of...a nanner of...um...monkeys

I get this distinct feeling of joy when I get to assemble the final composition of a sticker. Regardless of how I feel about the end product - it's interesting to go from avoiding the work, to doing the work, to finishing the work.

I hated this piece in the beginning. I traced around an actual image of a plastic monkey from that classic children's game using the Bezier tool - a task that I can do reasonably quickly and without much trouble. I made an admittedly sloppy vector shape and duplicated it four times. It wasn't until I moved, flipped, and rotated, each shape that I realized this wasn't so bad.

I think my favorite bit is there at the top where, rather than clip-masking the monkey's arm like usual, I "hooked it" onto the border.

Down, not out

Life happens. That's something I see and hear all the time amongst the creative community. The problems of our day-to-day lives interfere with our ability to produce work - and the block sets in.

I feel worthless sometimes. I feel like everything I do is awful. I feel like picking up the pen/brush/stylus would just be a waste of time. None of these things is entirely true, of course. Still, that's a difficult feeling to shake off.

I don't want to stop making things. I know that art will always be there for me. I have to keep moving. I have to keep looking forward.

The first sticker was pretty difficult to make. Luckily, I just learned about converting a stroke to a path. This allowed me to create a hidden shape to create the illusion of overlapping lines. That last statement made sense to me, at least.

The second sticker is a quote from Paul Ritchey over at ContinueShow. There are a lot of things I'm starting to notice and dislike about this one in terms of kerning, spacing, and leading. On the other hand, this is the first time I ever used Inkscape to produce Roman-style type. I'm really happy with my 'S' and 'G'. Creating those letters (using step-by-step instructions from the Logo Font and Lettering Bible) forced me to learn an alternative method for adding nodes to existing paths. Just hold 'ctrl' and 'alt' with node tool selected and click to add a new node. Yeah!