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Tom Lechner
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New Things
¡RSS!I really intend to put something new on my website every
Libre Graphics Meeting
I'll be giving a short talk on Laidout at the Libre Graphics Meeting Thursday May 3rd, and also a workshop on Weird Layout, to explore tools that can be used to create graphic art on strange surfaces like polyhedra, or with strange tools like Laidout's new alignment tool, or perhaps Inkscapes up and coming tiling interface! If you happen to be in Vienna next week, come on down and unwrap polyhedra of your very own!
The LGM has been bringing together a ton of developers and users of open source graphics software each year to collaborate and cross fertilize. You can watch previous talks (here for instance) to see what you might be missing. If you think the LGM is a useful thing, you might consider donating, as they try to help fund travel costs of many developers and presenters that go, who would not otherwise be able to go. See the LGM website for more!
3 March 2012
Libre Graphics Research Unit
 
 
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Recently I was in Brussels for the Libre Graphics Research Unit's
Co-Position meeting. These meetings are basically small, focused
hands-on meetings fleshing out various aspects of open source graphics tools.
This meeting in particular focused on layout tools. I gave a presentation discussing possible uses of emerging tools like touch tablets in graphics software. Major areas of discussion included visual versioning, lots of discussion about fonts, including introduction of some javascript from Manufactura Independente that allows multiple color fonts on web pages by overlaying chunks of fonts on top of each other. That and various other font related discussions pushes me a little more toward actually implementing text in Laidout. Pierre Marchand's Lazy Landscape, leverages open source development's natural tendency for collaboration by providing a kind of code wiki, where the "page" is actually runnable code. On the other end was a presentation from Nathalie Trussart about the limits of collaboration, in that sharing everything can easily result in too much information for the collaborators to process meaningfully. Lots of other workshops and talks over 3 days concluded with Alexandre Quessy showing off Toonloop with live animated legos. See a more thorough summary of the goings on at the LGRU site here! On another note, I also got some interesting comics, including 3", by Marc-Antoine Mathieu, a French cartoonist, a story basically following a ray of light as it flies around, bouncing off various reflective surfaces, and L'Enfant Penchée by Benoit Peeters and Francois Shuiten, whose expansive architectural comics derive a lot from Brussels buildings (thanks to Agnes for the recommendations, and helping me get to the Brüsel comics shop!) Now I just have to get over a cold I seem to have picked up on the airplane back! |
17 January 2012
Palace of Fine Arts Photos
A few shots of the Palace of Fine Arts rotunda in San Francisco. I had hoped to get there during a rare sunny winter day (on the 1st), but traffic held me up. It is pretty at night, though!
3 January 2012
New Laidout
Finally, after a little over a year, got a new version of Laidout released.
6 November 2011
Zombies Return
Here are some shots from this year's Zombie Walk in Portland. For the first time, it wasn't downtown, since the zombie organizers couldn't raise enough money for downtown permits. This was also the first year even trying to get permits, and the powers that be wouldn't accept a bloody smear as a valid signature on the paperwork. So, the gory onslaught fell upon NE Sandy Blvd.
14 August 2011
Nightlife 12:02
Nightlife 12:02 now online, for your amusement. Buy it now, or tip largely!! This continues where Nightlife 12:01 left off.
20 July 2011
Upcoming Nightlife
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Here's a preview of the first 4 pages from my upcoming Nightlife 12:02, which continues where Nightlife 12:01 left off. I should have 12:02 done in time for the Portland Zine Symposium August 6 and 7. |
30 May 2011
Libre Graphics Meeting
 
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I was recently in Montreal, where this year's Libre Graphics Meeting
was held. Once again there were a plethora of
interesting talks
on many aspects of open source graphics software, and even some
talk about open source hardware!
Many of the presentations were about color management, still a weak point in GNU/Linux systems, and lots about fonts. Other talks focused on broader issues of the usefulness of free/libre tools, not just for graphics, but also for social networking and hardware. As Jon Phillips points out, as proprietary smart phones, ebook readers, and other portable devices continue to sweep the world by storm, open source creators and other tool creators might want to be concerned about the accessibility of these gadgets. Another talk from Ana Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente of Manufactura Independente, was about a project of theirs to remap public governmental details like administrative minutes and politician backgrounds, from a form that's next to impossible to learn anything useful from, to something where you can actually look up useful political data in a much smaller amount of time. Legislative sessions are laid out in a format similar to online forums, and you can click on the picture of the person commenting to get their background. As someone who's done political cartoons for many years, such things are very useful indeed! Check out this magic at demo.cratica.org (it is in Portuguese, for Portugal). I presented a short talk on developments in Laidout during the last year. Also, I showed how I used a combination of Laidout, Inkscape, Gimp, Blender, Polyptych, fabric and 40 iron on transfers to project a panoramic image onto a t-shirt. I'm working on a kind of tutorial of the process. People laughed, I am assuming at my jokes. I've only just learned of techniques to send fabric right through ordinary inkjet printers that have certain kinds of inks. This method would be FAR better for clothing creation, as iron on transfers are quite stiff, especially if they totally cover a tshirt. For fashion design, be sure to check out Susan Spencer's www.sew-brilliant.org, where you can read about her work gathering forces to create open source fashion design software. Her approach one person described as TeX for clothes patterns. At the 2011 Libre Graphics Meeting, she discussed how you can input various body measurements, and have some clothes patterns automatically resize to fit different body types! How cool is that! I accidentally missed a talk I really wanted to see, on Lightwist, during which they demoed how to combine two or more projectors to blend together into a single super high resolution monitor! This is now usable as a plugin for the Compiz, opengl based compositing manager. I eagerly await the video of the talk to be released! |
10 April 2011
Eggbot
I just got in the mail a new Eggbot, one of the most amazing things I've seen in a while, a plotter that can print on spheres!!! Learn more about the Eggbot here. You can buy them through Evil Mad Science. Definitely one of the coolest devices in the history of the planet.
3 April 2011
Stuff...
2011 has not been a productive year for me so far in terms of art making, but that's beginning to turn around. I'm going to the Libre Graphics Meeting again this year, in Montreal. Before then, I hope to have a working 2.5 foot wide diy multitouch table functioning, and running Laidout. We'll see if that happens! I may or may not sell comics at the Stumptown Comics Fest, here in Portland this month. Despite very early registration, for some reason I am on the waitlist for tables, but it's looking like no table will be forthcoming.
In the meantime, here's a couple photos from a recent Portland Lightist photoshoot:
21 November 2010
New version of Laidout!
Nine months in the making, and I finally finished version 0.091 of my desktop publishing program called Laidout! I use Laidout to make my cartoon books. Now, there's a new feature to fold paper right on screen to create booklets, and Laidout keeps track of where page content goes. Makes booklet and calendar making really easy.
You can see a video tutorial of it in action here:
2010 Zombie Walk
Shots from this year's Zombie Walk! My second year going, I felt like a schmuck not dressing up last year, so I let my inner diseased rat loose this time! You can see my whole set here, and the Pdx Zombie Walk flickr group here.
18 July 2010
Nightlife 12:01
Nightlife 12:01 is the sequel to Nightlife, basically a dream comic.
9 June 2010
Libre Graphics Meeting
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The annual Libre Graphics Meeting for 2010 was held in Brussels, Belgium, and I was fortunate enough to be able to go and meet many of the makers of the software I use all the time. There were about 170 people from 47 different countries, each day was action packed with interesting talks about lots of different programs and subjects. When navigating the streets of Brussels early in the morning trying to find the conference, you simply have to throw out any preconceived ideas about urban planning, and this really puts you in a great, open frame of mind when you finally get there and listen to the talks! Now that I've mostly gotten over a really bad cold I picked up in Brussels, here's a short overview of the meeting. Other non-LGM photos from my trip will trickle in on my flickr page over the next month or two. I presented Laidout and my interactive polyhedron unwrapper on the second day of the conference. People seemed to enjoy it. You can watch my talk, and all the other talks online, thanks to River Valley TV. The LGM was certainly inspiration to get me to spend more time developing Laidout! Among some other interesting news was that the development version of Scribus now has new mesh gradient capabilities. Also exciting was some new code to do more intelligent image caching in Scribus, mostly eliminating the huge bottleneck that used to make Scribus impossible to use for documents with a ton of images in them! That was accomplished by Marcus Holland-Moritz, who used Scribus and various other things he coded himself to create a coffee table book with 200 or so color photos of New Zealand! His presentation covered many innovative and very interesting experiences using Linux and open source software to make image heavy books. This talk hit on many issues I've encountered using Linux, and particularly Scribus, to make books. Definitely one of my favorite talks. Susan Spencer gave a talk outlining the requirements for fashion design software, and soliciting help to create open source software to cover those requirements, as existing software all costs several thousands of dollars, and is a serious deterrent for new fashion designers wanting to adapt their designs easily to different body types. I can't help but think perhaps Laidout could fill some small part of that pipeline. Layout on strange surfaces is no end of fun. Martin Renold, one of the developers of Mypaint, gave a talk about extending python with c code. He detailed the strategy of using python for the gui, but when you need pixel pushing power, one may write extra python functions in c. Mypaint is quite an interesting new painting program, which has a lot to recommend it, including removing most gui clutter, to let you focus on the image you are constructing, and still has quick and easy access to a multitude of brush types and effects. There was a very interesting Nodebox 2 demo, where graphics results from various scripts that can be changed in real time. This strategy seems to be a theme in graphics software these days, and I'm thinking particularly of Portland's own Luz. Alexandre Prokoudine, who seems to know about every single graphics application imaginable, presented his Darktable photo management program. Darktable can work on all kinds of images, apparently unrestricted by bit depth, or color space. There seems to be adaptible batch processing. Looks promising! Ana Carvalho gave a short talk about using open source software to make and publish comic books! She is a part of Plana Press, which has published several books of comics, using open source software. See, it can be done! On the whole, the LGM was a complete information overload, and I hope to go again. You can see various other reviews of the goings on there here. |
19 April 2010
Stumptown Comics Fest
Yes, it's that time of year again, and I will have a table full of my comics at the Stumptown Comics Fest this coming weekend April 24-25, at the Doubletree Hotel, 1000 NE Multnomah, Portland, OR 97232. You'll be able to buy millions of copies of my 2 new books (and lots of other people's stuff too).
7 March 2010
Wii whiteboard
Inspired by Johnny Chung Lee's wii projects, this is my recent experiment with a wiimote used to make a really cheap electronic whiteboard. Total cost (excluding the projector) was about $40, and most of that was for the wiimote. Software used was wmgui, gtkwhiteboard, and my own polyhedral panorama projection software.
I think I need to make a better pen. I am assuming my infrared led is too narrow, and too weak, and is making the input quite jagged.
27 February 2010
Blue Monk photoshoot
Shots from the January Pdxstrobist photoshoot at the Blue Monk in Portland.
10 February 2010
Quicktime blues
Evidently, recent versions of Quicktime no longer properly view my panoramas, so I converted the ones I have on my site to a flash based viewer. I still only have a limited subset here, but over 100 in my flickr panorama set.
23 January 2010
Some photos from Seacliff Beach
Just a couple of photos from my winter travels. These are from Seacliff Beach near Santa Cruz, California. The concrete boat at Seacliff was a favorite place of mine as a kid. Sadly, you can't legally go onto the boat anymore.
8 January 2010
First comic of 2010
Here's a quick comic that I made to be a contribution to the Stumptown Underground "Sleep" issue, but I missed the deadline, so it became my first comic of 2010. See it on flickr too.
12 December 2009
Dinosaurs continued
I got mentioned in the Portland Mercury for my dinosaur contribution to the Stumptown Underground monthly zine! They not only mentioned me, but they seemed to like my comic too..
26 November 2009
Bunkers and dinosaurs
Finished my Marin Headlands panoramas, taken just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Still have a few more panoramas to finish from my winter travels almost a year ago. Maybe I'm just getting old, but years just fly right by these days!! Also drew a dinosaur comic..
26 October 2009
Photos from the Portland Zombie Walk of 2009.
Shown here are a small sampling of my photos from the zombie walk. I still have a couple of panoramas to edit from it. See the whole set here. Also, you might check out a lot more of other folks' photos at the Pdx Zombie Walk flickr group.
10 October 2009
Photos from the corn field
Shots from the Pdxstrobist group meetup at Lake View Farms (and later Craig's place) on September 26, 2009.
Still have one or two to edit, but not sure when I'll get to them!
4 October 2009
My 3rd 24 hour comic
This year in Portland, 24 Hour Comics Day was held at Backspace. A LAN party came in and we had to move, and I was afraid the live music later in the day would be irritating. Overall, however, it didn't turn out so bad, and I enjoyed most of the music. I could have done without the Twin Peaks theme song. I finished my comic several hours early, which is just as surprising as the fact that the story didn't involve aliens!
Read the whole thing here!
12 September 2009
New parkour photos from Gas Works Park in Seattle
6 of us from Portland drove up, and joined 50 or so other people for the national parkour jam in Seattle, August 29-30, 2009. This was a great training and jam session, a ton of people showed up from all over the country.
Here are some photos of mine (or view the set on flickr), still have a few more to edit.. You might see some other peoples photos and video here, here, or here.
22 August 2009
Old parkour photos
Here's a bunch of old parkour photos that I've had sitting around for a year or so, having forgotten to process them..
11 August 2009
Lake Cunningham Panorama
Here's a panorama taken from the middle of Lake Cunningham in San Jose, California. The movie version is basically an experiment to see how easily I can produce a short video on Linux with various hardware and software I've aquired in the last year or two.
4 August 2009
Nightlife
This comic combines several dreams I've had, and strings them all together so that they might make some kind of sense to people outside of my head. I finished just in time to sell at the Portland Zine Symposium July 24th.
4 July 2009
A couple more photos
So I've finally finished a couple photos that have been just sitting around unfinished for a while now. With these two done, I'm down to about 100 other unfinished works!
21 June 2009
Color Comics
I realize I keep apologizing about not posting enough artwork. I have no excuse, other than I've been practicing the piano a lot and playing video games.
Anyway, here's a 10 page story, experimenting with color:
3 May 2009
More goofy photos
Here's a photo from the Stumptown Comics Fest, plus some other recent goofy photos:
12 April 2009
The stuff of laziness, oh and Stumptown
Ok, so I've lapsed into old bad habits of not updating my site for long periods of time again. I have no excuse. By the way, I will once again have a table full of my various artwork the Stumptown Comics Fest this coming Saturday and Sunday April 18 and 19 at the Lloyd Center Doubletree hotel, between the Lloyd Center and the Lloyd Center MAX stop. 10am-6pm, $6 at the door. See you there!
Anyway, here are some recent photos..
17 January 2009
Winter Travels
My excuse for infrequent posting now is that I was in California for a couple weeks, and when I came back I had several hundred photos to sort through and process. Terrible excuse, I agree, but you can see some of the results below. More to come!
Read old news.....
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