Tom Lechner's Art

Busy busy busy

4 May 2008

The last few weeks have pulled me in all kinds of different directions, so I've been a little lazy with updating this page. I did take lots of photos, so you can click below to see some shots from a Pdx Strobist meet-up, where I took my first ever glam shots (I just have mixed feelings about that), a parkour clinic in northern Washington, then the Stumptown Comics Fest. Then, of course, there's lots of various side projects in addition to my full time job. I took panoramic photos of all these events, but it'll take me a little while to catch up!

24 Hour Comics Drawpocalypse

8 April 2008

I've now basically recovered from the 24 Hour Comics Drawpocalypse at the Cosmic Monkey. Something like 25 or so people started at 10am Saturday, and about 15(?) were left alive the next day. Some had finished their 24 page comic many hours early and left!! Lots of great work was made. I finished with 2 hours to spare.

24 Hour Comics Drawpocalypse

29 March 2008

Yes, it's time again for a 24 hour comics masochism marathon!! The task is to create a (finished) 24 page comic in 24 hours. I did one in 2005, and it's time to see if I can still stay up 24 hours straight, and live to tell the tale. See a promo staring 24 hour superstar David Chelsea here. This will be at the Cosmic Monkey this Saturday, 10am to 10am Sunday. Be there or be asleep!!

At Lick Observatory

29 March 2008

Nestled atop Mt. Hamilton just east of San Jose, Lick Observatory, which has nothing to do with tongues, is home to several telescopes, including this gigantic refractor. This is one of the neatest interiors I've seen in a while. Visited last Decemeber, but hadn't been there since I was a kid, and it's still neat! There's a very windy road leading up to it, and I have childhood memories of trying to spot the wrecked cars that had driven off to their doom whenever we drove up. This photo is of the first telescope built on the site, which was constructed between 1876 and 1887. The body of James Lick lays entombed beneath. Beat that for ambiance!! The entire floor that you see raises and lowers so that the eyepiece of the telescope can be at eye level for the astronomers. You can see the counterweights along the walls. The telescope itself is balanced so that a single person can just grab hold of it and drag it around to point it at the right place. All in all, a neat place to visit.

Iraq Body Count Panorama

15 March 2008

You can just make out a thin strip of red flags in the distance. A sign nearby reads: "Each white flag represents at least 5 Iraqis, Each red flag represents 5 Americans killed as a result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq." As of March, 2008, iraqbodycount.org estimates about 85,000 civilians have died from violence in Iraq since 2003. This was an installation at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, March 2008. You can learn more about the exhibit here.

The Quiet Before the Storm

11 March 2008

My second go at an enfused panorama. Much more ghosting that my first attempt, but pretty easy to clean up.

Transparent previews now a part of the real Gimp!

7 March 2008

So I finally got a feature accepted in the mainline Gimp that allows you to temporarily see through sections of an image as you try to rotate, scale, shear or otherwise transform. This has long been one of my main irritations whenever I use an unmodified Gimp to edit images.

24 Hour Comics Jam Panorama

3 March 2008

This was one of many such events hosted at illustrator and graphic novelist David Chelsea's place, in July of 2006, in the spirit of of 24 Hour Comics day, where cartoonists have 24 consecutive hours to create a finished 24 page comic. I've managed to get one done on time, not this time around, but the previous year. At this jam, I opted to chicken out and just take photos. Surprisingly enough, some of these comics even turn out pretty good!

Added some more really old cartoons

2 March 2008

Lately, I've been screwing around with my new camera and fisheye lens instead of drawing cartoons, so I thought I'd post some more of my oldest cartoons to my old cartoon gallery.

Get Your Walnuts Here

2 March 2008

This is another of my older panoramas from 2006 made with 30 photos taken with this thing. The tree is a huge black walnut tree near Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon. This kind of tree is great to have near curbs, because the huge walnuts that drop off the branches will often make a memorable resonant thump on unsuspecting cars and passers by.

Near the Portland Rose Gardens

1 March 2008

This is the very first spherical panorama I ever made, stitched together from 30 photos in June of 2006. I finally managed to convert it to a computer viewable format. It shows neat stone steps leading up to the Rose Gardens in Washington Park, Portland, Oregon.

Flickr

27 February 2008

Now you can comment on some of my work (probably mostly photos) on Flickr...

Eagle Creek Panorama

27 February 2008

Here we see the shadow of the Creature of the Punch Bowl, shortly before it mauled my leg. With the assistance of Adam and Mike, I managed to escape, and you can see my empty shoes left as a reminder to others. In any case, this is one of my older panoramas that I converted to be computer viewable.

More First Thursday Panoramas

25 February 2008

Behold the Pony Club, one of the Everett Lofts in downtown Portland. That place shows strange comic art, and sells various odd comics, including some of my books sometimes. The shot on the right shows a large drawing by Theo Ellsworth protecting the crackers from Dylan.

Just another working day

24 February 2008

I was on my way to work the other day, and on the Hawthorne Bridge, the sunrise really struck me. So anyway, at the end of the day, even with my brain scrambled from the day's events, I happened to notice a really striking sunset! These photos really don't do the sky justice.

Bush Blows Up Moon, Protests Follow (view panorama)

20 February 2008

President Bush today decided to blow up a falling spy satellite, but missed by about 60,000 miles, and hit the moon instead! It turned completely red for a while, but suffered no permanent effects. He told reporters that, "Well dangit, the moon is just an easier target to aquire that some puny little space junk!" But seriously, owing to a freak atmospheric phenomenon, the moon in the photo appears to be much larger than it actually is. To the right and up a little from the Hawthorne Bridge, you can just barely make out the Orion constellation amidst all the jpeg compression clutter.

Foggy Morning on the Willamette

18 February 2008

This photo was taken one foggy morning just after the first big storm of winter, December 2007 in Portland. When I try to view this photo with Freepv on Linux, for some reason the top photo is 1/3 smaller than it should be, and tiled 3 times, leaving a huge black rectangle floating in the sky, and I have no idea why. Seems to work for real quicktime on other machines, though.

Parkour in the park

14 February 2008

Some of the first Portland parkour for 2008. Present were Julian, Tim 1, Tim 2, Monkeyjunta, Oni, Adam, and me, hiding behind the camera. This could have been a fairly good panorama, but I forgot to take enough photos of the reeeally long shadows that day, and of the people after they landed. The shadows I drew in are just silly, but I'm tired of working on it!! I do like the trees, though.

At the table with the Friends of the Nib

8 February 2008

For First Thursday at Floating World Comics in Portland, Oregon this month, Jim Woodring and the Friends of the Nib came down from Seattle to sit around and draw cartoons. I happened to be passing, and took this panorama hand-held..

Inside Lick Observatory's 120 inch Reflecting Telescope Dome

2 February 2008

Aside from the hideous moire pattern on part of the dome that I'm too lazy to process out, this panorama came together reasonably well. They also had a short video that visitors can view about how the telescope was brought up mountain on the very narrow winding roads and assembled in the dome.

Panorama of My Grandma's Backyard

26 January 2008

This panorama is my first attempt at building a panorama from multiple exposures. Each section is built from two photos: one light and one darker, which are blended together using a program called Enfuse. There are various other ways to combine exposures, but enfuse is fast, easy, and has adequate results (so far!). I also have to keep reminding myself to make sure I focus on the right area!! My final photos straight down focused on the tripod rather than on the ground. GRRrrr!

Portland MAX station in the depths of the night

20 January 2008

So this is what a MAX stop looked like at 4am just after the winter solstice of 2007, while I was waiting for the train to take me to the airport. Also new is that I totally reprogrammed my sphere photos page, so that it has a much slicker interface..

Another observatory on Mt. Hamilton

15 January 2008

Here's a qtvr of the dome containing the 120 inch reflecting telescope of Lick Observatory at sunset.

Presents and the World Wide Panorama

6 January 2008

I now have 2 panoramas in the World Wide Panorama, a great repository of thousands of total panoramas, from across the globe. One of mine is my parkour panorama and the other one is a room full of presents. (click to go to the presents one in the World Wide Panorama)

Panorama of Lick Observatory

3 January 2008

During my winter travels, I took this picture of Lick Observatory (unrelated to tongues) on top of Mt. Hamilton in California, overlooking the haze covered Silicon Valley. I made 4 panoramas up there, the rest of which I'll post some other day!

Continuous Parkour Animation

10 December 2007

Here's an animation of the so called droste effect with a parkour photo, made with the mathmap plugin for the Gimp. I realize it's a littel choppy. I'm working on it..

Parkour Sphere

1 December 2007

Here's another spherical panorama, this time of parkour at Keller Fountain in Portland, Oregon.

Marquam Bridge Spherical Panorama

24 November 2007

I recently bought a fisheye lens for my camera, which GREATLY simplifies creating sphere photos. Here's my first attempt with the lens and automatic stitching software called Hugin. Actually it's my second attempt, but my actual first attempt turned out really horrible.

Ho Hum..

15 November 2007

Ok, so I've been a bit slack with the updating again. I know it's a cop-out, but here are some links to other people's work that I've found pretty neat: Carel Struycken, who played Lurch in the modern Addams Family movies, happens to make very nice spherical panoramas: www.sphericalpanoramas.com Here's a site with over 3000 spherical panoramas that anyone can download and look at. If you are running linux, you might have extra problems, as they are all in Quicktime VR format, not particularly well supported in linux, but if you can get it to compile, you can use freepv. If you are using debian, you might have problems getting the web browser plugin to work, since it wants Firefox or Mozilla related dev files, and there don't seem to be equivalent Iceweasel dev files, unless I'm missing something... geoimages.berkeley.edu/worldwidepanorama/wwp/index.html Lastly, here's some info about an autistic man by the name of Stephen Wiltshire who, after flying over Rome in a helicopter ONCE, spent 3 days drawing an extremely accurate 10 meter panorama of Rome: www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk

Fame and Glory

22 September 2007

Holy crap, one of my Laidout tutorials has been viewed over 1000 times since I posted it last week!! The other ones are more like a couple views a week, but that one, OVER 1000!!!! What the hell? There can't possibly be that many people interested in a tutorial for software that probably only I use?! Instead of posting actual content to my site this week, I am simply going to sit back a bathe in the glory. Oh, and next weekend I will have a table at the Stumptown Comics Fest. It will be Saturday and Sunday, the 29th and 30th at the Lloyd Center Doubletree, 1000 NE Multnomah St. in Portland, Oregon. See you there!

Zine Symposium recap

17 Auguast 2007

In other news, the Portland Zine Symposium has come and gone, met lots of odd people, sold some books, and people actually showed up to my workshop on Open Source Software for Zine Making. Fewer people came to it as compared to last year, but fewer people left during the middle of it too, and I'll take that as an improvement overall. Having a projector to demonstrate things was very handy.

Finished Seaside Retreat

17 August 2007

At long last, I finished inking Seaside Retreat which ended up being a 16 page comic about the tranquility to be found through sea side living. I have aslo made it available in print form via Tales of Inertia, which also contains the first 11 pages of Weak Daze.