I’m having a lot of fun with my new venture, Stay Vigilant. It’s really gratifying making things by hand.
I just added 2 new 11″ x 14″ posters: Cards and Camera.

TLDR Summary:
After 13 years of designing websites and mobile applications, I’ve decided to return to my roots and create (and sell) things by hand at my new site, Stay Vigilant. It’s going to feature posters, t-shirts and other design artifacts. I’m starting slow, but in the coming year I’ll be adding new creations, day-by-day, month-by-month.
One of the first projects I’m featuring on my storefront is the poster series I was able to successfully fund through Kickstarter earlier this year, Bicycles For Our Minds.
If you don’t see something you like, sign up for the SV newsletter (it’s in the righthand column) and I’ll let you know when I post new pieces.
Extended Chunk:
Long ago, in an analogue galaxy far, far away I was a fine art major with a concentration in graphic design. Figure Drawing. Photography. Painting. Print Making. Book Binding. The trunk of my car and the floor of my bedroom included: sketchbooks, x-acto knives, linoleum blocks, gouache, cardboard, stretcher bars, conté crayons, Canvas, card stock, tracing paper, charcoal, oil paint, acrylic paint. Almost every piece of clothing I owned had an ink or paint stain on it.
Back in these days, I stretched (and gessoed) my own canvases to paint on. I developed my own film from the Pentax K-1000 I shot photos with. I cut my own mat board and mounted my design work onto it with spray mount. I wasn’t always happy with my work, but there was a great satisfaction in creating things by hand.
When I brought my wife (then girlfriend) to my parents house for the first time 12 years ago, she saw painting and drawing hung on the walls. She asked me who made them. I told her I did. She was surprised, because even back then, she knew me as a guy who designed websites. Who did things on an RGB screen.
I don’t think she’s surprised by my new venture. She’s caught me sniffing the bindings of hardcover books at bookstores on numerous occasions. The first time, she didn’t know what to think. She probably thought I was doing some weird drug. I had to explain to her I loved the smell of paper and ink. Maybe it transports me back to happy time in college. A time when I decided what I wanted to make and for whom.
Well, there’s no reason I can’t start doing it again.

While we’re on the topic of theft from my last post, below are the words of T.S. Elliot on the measure of a poet:

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

This can be just as easily applied to any act of creation–be it gadget, painting, poem, building, vehicle or song.
The quote above is also the one everyone mis-attributes to Picasso.

Yesterday was Willem De Kooning‘s birthday. He was one of the most famous of the Abstract Expressionists of New York City and one of my favorite artists.
People like to think of artists as glamorous, jetting around Manhattan to various parties and lofts and galleries. While De Kooning had good friends and great times, his life was far from glamorous. His paintings went on to sell for tens of millions of dollars but they didn’t just appear spontaneously from inspiration.
It took a lot of struggle and effort to get to where he got.
I recommend reading de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens to really understand the life he led.

Artist Berndnaut Smilde makes indoor clouds with a thermostat, a humidifier, and a fog machine. Incredible.

via Technabob

I had a friend once upon a time who was a comic book artist and writer. He told me around 20 years ago that there were only about ten truly great artists in the business. One of them was Moebius.

Ars Technica: Legendary Star Wars concept artist Ralph McQuarrie passes away at 82
What makes McQuarrie’s artwork resonate so much isn’t just that it’s beautifully executed, but that the art direction of actually Star Wars movies is so consistent with it.

image via concept ships (via Daring Fireball)

What a remarkable photo (actually, remarkable series) of Lucien Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud.
This photo reminds me of the fact that when you’re lucky enough to be making a living doing what you love, you never really retire. Look at the wall behind him next to his canvas. Awesome.
This photo was taken in 2005. Lucien died in July of 2011.
*I also love this photo of him shaving with a (clean) paintbrush. Seems reasonable to me. Seriously, it does.