the page of
Tom Lechner
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New Things
¡RSS!I really intend to put something new on my website every
You can also see my pages at Google+, Flickr, Youtube, and Deviantart.
Libre Graphics Meeting
 
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This year, the Libre Graphics Meeting was held in Madrid, hosted at
Medialab Prado. Tons of talks about all kinds of graphics software,
such as Gimp, Inkscape, Krita, Mypaint, and many more. In addition to these standards, also lots of discussion of
different methods of creating or processing work, such as node based graphics processing, scripting solutions, and the growing
capability and influence of html5. It is always good to see
artwork made from the software discussed, such as with processing.js, used to drive pictures on a giant wall on the side of
Medialab Prado.
A big highlight for me was Nina Paley's talk about the seeming lack of adequate open source animation software. There followed some discussion of the various merits (or perhaps not) of Synfig, Tupi, Blender, and more, as well as the trials and pitfalls of switching from a non-free art workflow to an open source workflow. She also screened This Land is Mine, a hilarious illustration of turf war through the ages. Part of this was explaining her approach to copyright, which is to explicitly not approach it, and concentrate on the artwork instead. I was quite interested in libmypaint, which potentially allows sharing paint brushes from Mypaint in other graphics programs. This is a fabulous capability. I've been working on a related concept of tool sharing, but for sharing the basic interfaces for manipulating vector objects. No working code yet, but hopefully sometime soon! See some photos here... |
19 February 2013
Nightlife 12:03
It has been way too long since my last cartoon book, but at last it is done.
The fourth in my dream comic series Nightlife is now available for review.
Buy a printed copy here, tipping largely, or you can read from the beginning...
1 November 2012
Portland Zombie Walk!
This year's zombie walk was less a walk, and more a gathering of zombies, then standing around a while, and walking mostly in a straight line between OMSI and Guardian Games. Seemed like less people this year.. It's a lot more fun when it was downtown, where there is a much higher density of non-zombies. I did a one-zomebie-stormtrooper walk home through downtown, and got plenty of wacky comments to make up for it!
I didn't dress up last year, so this year I made sure to go as the undead, as a zombie stormtrooper. Alas this meant I didn't take photos of the others! My favorites: zombie Mitt Romney with "Big Bird was here" written in blood on his back, a troop of Disney characters like Snow White, Peter Pan (with captain Hook's hook in his chest), Cinderella, that broken hazmat suit guy I remember from last year, two Star Trek redshirts (after dying). Someone even had a dog named Luke, that they took a photo with (if you are reading this, send me a copy!)! My favorite might have been one of the survivors with a gas mask on, with giant chains connected to his three zombie children!! See more of the horde at the PDX Zombie Walk flickr pool.
My zombie-ewok accessory was so attractive that I even made it to the Willamette Week fashion page!
My costume (photo by Luke Olsen):
And some construction shots!
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Adventures in Vietnam This last summer, I spent a wonderful month in the south of Vietnam, and a couple days for a side trip to see the Angkor ruins in Cambodia. Met great people in Can Tho, Ho Chi Minh City, and elsewhere, who graciously showed me around. Ate lots of strange food, and only barely got sick. Went to Vung Tau and swam in warm ocean water for the first time.. A very different experience than the cold water found in Oregon and California! Now I just have to finish processing my giant stack of travel photos! I spent most of my time in Can Tho, staying at Hotel Xoai. Early in the morning, you can go see the famous river market near Can Tho. Lots of boats gather to exchange large amounts of fruit and other things. Ho Chi Minh City is large, sprawling, and very busy! Huge masses of motorbikes zoom around everywhere. I'm working on a panorama of that, but it'll take a while! Handheld panoramas taken from a moving motorbike (thanks to T.!) means a huge amount of touchup is required! Also saw a traditional water puppet play, where the puppets move around above water, controlled by people hidden away with mechanisms beneath the water, together with live music. Although I didn't understand anything they said, it was still fun! No trip to Vietnam would be complete without mention of the huge amount and variety of food there! For all the bizarre things I ate, I barely got sick. From little food carts on the street to sit down restaurants, it would take a long time to sample everything. You'll be sure to learn to count to four: mot, hai, ba, yo! Well, sort of. At one place there were not one, but 3 street performers doing tricks with fire, and one who put a live snake through his nose and out his mouth! Not something I've experienced while eating before! Right at the end of my trip, I set aside a day to see the Angkor ruins in Cambodia. I wish I had set aside several days instead. I major tourist hotspot these days. Even with the hordes of tourists, it was still amazing. Many more panoramas to come, if I can ever find the time to process them! All this in one month's time, plus a 3 hour play in Vietnamese, set in imperial Vietnam, that friends valiantly tried to translate for me on the fly. I hope to go back some day! My one wish while there was for a portable air conditioner. Until then, back to Portland, and back to work! Still haven't quite finished my next comic book Nightlife 12:03 yet. Soon! |
14 July 2012
Stuff
For the first time in 10 years, I can't attend the Portland Zine Symposium coming up August 11 and 12, because I'll be in Vietnam! Hopefully when I come back I will have a new cartoon book done.
As for not having a new book since last year about this time, I can only claim in my defense that I have been totally obsessed programming new tools in my layout program Laidout. Here are a couple new tutorials:
17 May 2012
Libre Graphics Meeting Recap
 
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The Libre Graphics Meeting was in Vienna this year. Once again lots of talks and workshops about all the graphics software
I use all the time, with people from 32 different countries!
This annual meeting is a great opportunity for users and developers to see directly what everyone
else is doing with open source graphics software, give immediate feedback for better or worse about each others
software and work habits, and strategize how to interoperate.
Although definitely more developers than non-developers, there were many others coming from the art side. Artists are great at using software
in ways they were really not intended, such as using Gimp as a music generator!
Johan Engelen gave a demo of Power Stroking in Inkscape, which lets you change line widths that vary along a path. This is implemented as a live path effect. Another great idea whose time has come is for extending a curve at corners in a path. Normally, corners render rather unnaturally at corners, and this method allows extending an approximation of the path's curvature through the corner, rather than traditional methods that just extend the edges straight out, or abruptly miter. As I begin to program various path related features into Laidout, I often think I should be using lib2geom. There was a 2geom workshop, showing the basics of this library. 2geom has spun off of Inkscape, and is emerging as a useful library for path (and mesh) operations. Some people balked at it being a C++ library (rather than C), which doesn't bother me, as Laidout is all C++. Timothy Giet and Lukas Tvrdy gave a talk and workshop using Krita, with Timothy using a console game controller to help change tool settings, an interesting use for such things! I haven't tried using Krita in a couple of years, and it looks like it may be a good idea to try it out again. Not to be outdone, some Gimp devs announced the release of Gimp 2.8, which sees a number of gui polishes, and the introduction of the cage warp feature, which is really neat, though works VERY slowly on my computer. They also demoed a functioning high bit depth Gimp, a feature often asked for over the last 10 years or so. Very welcome indeed! A couple of times we LGM folks visited Metalab, a Viennese hackerspace that had lots of neat tools like 3-d printers, several tables to work on, photo development area, (very tiny) wood/metal shop, weird warning lights, and to top it all off, it survives on membership dues of over 100 people!! If I lived in Vienna, I might spend a fair amount of time there. I didn't have very much new to present this year, but did I present the new experimental alignment tools in Laidout. Had a little trouble getting Laidout to actually boot properly during my talk. I tested a few times in my hotel, it worked with no problems, but then plug strange projector wires into my machine and all hell breaks loose! It finally worked, though, more or less. I have much debugging in my future! Here are some travel photos, more to come, including panoramas when I have the time to process them! |
28 April 2012
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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