Friday, October 09, 2009

Get Your Freak On...

UPDATE: Rained out and rescheduled! Details here. (Thanks to riderx for the scoop.)
Rob of Leesburg Baker's Dozen and Plum Grove Cylery fame has delivered a new brainchild, the t-shirt (and possibly patch) design for which appears above, courtesy of yours truly (proof pic appears below). If you're looking for something different, check out Speed Freaks, a two-day stage race that promises an excellent blend of everything you can imagine, including time trial, short track, and marathon/enduro stages over mixed terrain. Register before October 14th and save $15 off the price of admission. Plus, I have it on good authority that this guy will show up, camera in hand, to immortalize lucky participants in a panoptic pool of permanent pixels. Be there!

Back to the artwork. I rushed this piece—mea culpa—and it shows, but I still think it's a good product. Had a little trouble with Illustrator though, no surprise there. Seems it doesn't like tracing colored jpegs, and it registers its distaste by applying random distortion (note the wavering lines of the downtube in the image) to the drawing. Then again, I'm sure my utter lack of skills with that most versatile of software programs is most likely to blame. I like to think that I'm just retro, that pen and ink, like steel, are real. But really, I need to make the time to learn more. Especially given that Rob has asked me to do the artwork for future races, now that he's started up a little business called "Go Time Racing."

All right, back to the grind. Single Speed World Championship '09 report on the horizon. Thanks for sticking with me (odd...disappear for a while and you pick up 7 new followers...what's the message there?). Until then.

4 comments:

Rob said...

Think of illustrator as the devil. Sure sometimes it allows you to do some really cool stuff, but mostly it burns you. And puts you thru hell. :P I hate it and avoid it at all costs. Though I do need to update to CS3 at some point in the future, I have like Ill v10 or 11.

Blue-eyed Devil said...

I hear ya. I took it to Illustrator because I needed a vector image; this is going on shirts and maybe other merch, so it has to be scalable. I think mine is CS2.

b1umb0y said...

Your artwork looks great! You have some serious creative energy. I think you probably know more about Illustrator than you are letting onto based on this piece.

If you are ever in the neighborhood, I can show you a few additional tricks in Ill over a beer or three. Just say the word.

Blue-eyed Devil said...

Yeah, Dave, I need to get in your neighborhood and grab some beers with you...been too long.

Thanks for the kind words. Bliss on the 14th, man...be there.