This quote came to me via one of my comedic heroes, Louis C.K., who cites as a source of inspiration in his own early life.

It’s apparently a snippet of dialog from an old Spencer Tracy movie in which Tracy was admonishing a young, beautiful socialite who was down on her luck and feeling sorry for herself.

I offer it here because it’s a reminder that an effective antidote for depression can often be a shift of focus away from our own interior struggles and toward others. Or to just be of use in the world, in some way, big or small, every day.

We have a lemon tree in our front yard that produces all year around, which is great and we encourage our neighbors to partake of said fruit, but occasionally, we’ve noticed some said neighbors get a little too enthusiastic in their harvesting practices. Thus, this sign, made from an unused cedar grilling plank.

Stuff you’ll need if you want to try the techniques in this tutorial: 

• A smartphone or tablet running the Adobe Shape app
• A copy of Adobe Photoshop CC and/or Illustrator CC
• A Creative Cloud subscription (in order to make use of CC Libraries) . Here’s an FAQ page.

(Sorry to any legacy Adobe application users. This tutorial relies on features only found of the Creative Cloud Libraries.)

Hey kids, there’s a fun new toy in the sandbox!

It’s now possible to go from sketchbook to finished artwork in a few clicks.

Graphic designers have been turning raster images into vectors using Illustrator and the Trace Image feature for a long time but Adobe Shape, albeit a less precise way to accomplish this, gives us a much more spontaneous way to vectorize 2D and 3D stuff in real time, so for those of us who are way into instant gratification, this couldn’t be more up our alley(s). Case in point…I was watching some Swedish murder mystery on Netflix the other night and had my iPad open to Shape and decided to try vectorizing a few scenes that had relatively little movement. This is what I got:

The top image is of a guy swimming in a lake. The other just two guys talking. I spent literally no time on these but as an example of how to capture abstract shapes from literally anything you can photograph. If you can see it, you can path it!

This next image is a Shape rendering of a still life photo that already existed in my Photos library.

How the title graphic at the top of this post was created using a simple vector shape, plus hand lettering and a background scene photographed with Adobe Shape. 

First, I created a pen shape above to contain the title lettering. I started in Illustrator by manually creating a vector shape, then brought that shape into Photoshop, then cut and pasted the layer into Corel Painter. I know all that sounds complicated but I wanted the pen shape to have a textured background and by selecting the black shape in Painter with Auto Select, I could then hide the layer and paint within the selection on a new layer with a pastel brush. I then saved the Painter file as a .psd and opened it back up in Photoshop.

Then some serious fun…

I printed out the pen shape and used it behind a piece of tracing vellum so I knew where to execute my pencil lettering then used a #2 Ticonderoga to draw the letters and didn’t worry too much about the minute details. Once I had it the way I wanted it compositionally, I used my iPad Mini and Adobe Shape to capture the vectorized version of the lettering.

It’s hard to see in the photo but Shape is zeroing in on the dark areas of the design and displaying those areas in green in the iPad display. You can adjust the level of sensitivity to refine the detail and it also allows you to capture a reversed image. Press the camera-style “shutter release” button and it auto-magically creates a vector file which is then saved to a designated Creative Cloud Library.

Creative Cloud Libraries could be the coolest thing Adobe has come up with in years—if you routinely use more than one application for a project (which I do lots of), you can access artwork you’ve saved from various projects, text, color swatches, images, stock photos and just drag and drop them into most CC applications. So to create the title illustration above, I opened a new Illustrator file, dragged my lettering vector artwork onto the art board to do a little vector path clean up, although I could have just as easily dragged the same file into Photoshop (the same CC Libraries appear in almost every Adobe app) and used masks and brushes to get rid of unwanted bits and pieces. It all depends on what kind of edits you want to make.

Starting with the same .psd file I opened up from Painter, I added a color layer for a background and dropped my lettering right on top of the pen layer I created in Illustrator.

I intentionally used a setting in Shape that would pick up a lot of the artifacts created by the wrinkly tracing paper and side lighting, which added some “schmutz” around the letters. I edited out 80% of it but left a little in for character.

The background needed some interest so I used Shape again, set up a “scene” and photographed it in order to create some background interest.

I used this layer right over the background color layer, filled it with color and reduced the opacity to help it recede into the background.

Shape also works on pencil/ink line work illustrations. Left is the pencil sketch nearly all inked in, right is the Adobe Shape vector version.

I played with multiple, layered copies and blending modes in Illustrator to give it a slightly offset color separation look and feel. Here’s one option:

 The Takeaway

Some extremely famous and talented calligraphers and letterers use a version of this technique for getting their work from sketch to digital canvas. Since my work is usually much less precise and more sketchy and imprecise, this technique suits my style perfectly, and workflow-wise is much more efficient than scanning and using image trace tools. Photographing 2D line work won’t pick up the fine detail that a 600 dpi scan will, but that’s okay for some projects.

So no, I’m not on the Adobe payroll but I do like to call out a good product when I run across it.

While my first reaction to this tool was definitely “kid in a candy store”, I probably won’t use it for every project. But used in conjunction with CC Libraries, it’s definitely now a permanent resident of my go-to tool box.

I read this quote in a recent article by scientist/philosopher Nancy Ellen Abrams on the NPR website and let out a “bwaaa-hah” that sent my cat into the next room. Love the pull-no-punches ideas from this author and this quote from her is both inspiring and a little sobering.

And because I can’t help from spilling my guts about new hand-lettering techniques, here’s the deal with this one:

I sketched this in pencil first, then inked it in with a .5mm Micron drawing pen, then erased the pencil. Then came the magic part. I opened an app called Adobe Shape on my iPad Mini and without even so much as moving from my desk, created a vector image of the sketch, which then was automagically uploaded to my Adobe Creative Cloud library, which then I accessed from the Photoshop CC Library panel. So cool. You can also store color swatches, graphic assets, styles and all sorts of other stuff in the Library and access them from Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. And the experimentation with Shape has only begun. The other night I was watching TV and tried photographing a few images of the screen with Shape. Suffice to say if you pick your moments…

The vector image from Shape created some odd interpretations in certain places so I created a layer mask over the whole text layer after sliding the artwork from the Library to an 8.5×11, 300 dpi background file I created in Photoshop. The mask allowed me to edit the layer without making permanent changes.

Then, to get some of the pastel effects, I placed the layered .psd into a Corel Painter file and with the text artwork layer selected, chose Select > Auto Select, which gave me a selection of the artwork. I hid the text layer, created a new one and started working on the text with a pastel brush. The backgrounds, counter fills, were also done with a pastel brush on separate layers. I saved the Painter file as .psd and opened it in Photoshop to generate the web images, etc.

The Shape of things to come

All this took about an hour. Of course to replicate this workflow exactly requires having a Creative Cloud account with Adobe, which I do for my day job anyway. But even without the instant gratification which the Adobe CC Library makes possible, scanning your inked artwork and “vectorizing” it makes for some intriguing results. There are services like Vector Magic that will do an online scan on a per piece basis, if you’re curious. They also sell a desktop version of their app but it’s crazy expensive. Anyway, these tools (Shape + Photoshop + Painter) really work nicely together with my particular lettering style which is more free form and primitive. But I know serious big time letterers like Jessica Hische work in a similar style—sketch, ink, photograph, vectorize, refine. In her case, refine refine refine refine. Not so much with me.

I’ve been a serious Kombucha drinker for some years now and started making my own in 2013, partly to save money as store bought Kombucha runs about $3-4$ per 12 oz. bottle, as opposed to around $.50/gallon to make it yourself, but also because it’s just big nerdy fun to make a bunch of tea, stick a gelatinous frisbee thing in it and end up with some weird, fizzy lifting drink that Genghis Khan drank and that might have alien origins.

So because I love translating stuff I’m excited about into fun and practical infographics for my Foolish Fire readers, I began executing the one below so anyone interested in how to make this wonderful elixir of life would not just have another cute piece of hand-executed artwork but an honest to goodness at-a-glance reference, kinda like the Egg Guide and Fruit Sticker infographic. But then…

…the project got away from me. I really thought “6 steps” would end up being a manageable size for an infographic, after all infographics are typically long, but I’m afraid this one, when all was said and hand-lettered, weighs in at 73 inches deep x 8 inches wide!! Taller than me, truth be told. When the high-res version was finally finished, I went to generate the web version and checked the Image Size in Photoshop and almost fell out of my Herman Miller onto the floor laughing.

So I apologize to anyone who now has to figure out how to actually use this thing. In a web browser, I should provide complimentary bandaids to protect index fingers from scroll wheel overuse, cuz damn, it really takes five minutes to get to the bottom. I tried reducing the width but legibility quickly went south.

In print form, it requires 8 sheets of letter-sized paper that will have to be stitched together (maybe I should have included a ruler grid along the sidebar so it can double as growth chart for your kids.)

If this thing doesn’t break Pinterest I’ll be curious to see if anyone re-pins it. The Egg and Fruit sticker graphic have done quite well but a) I’m not enough people really know or care about Kombucha to bother reading it, and b) it’ll look like a piece of moldy fettuccine in the feed. Muolto estupido.

To any aspiring DIY Kombucha makers…there are some vastly more practical ebook format, PDF guides on www.kombuchakamp.com and www.culturesforhealth.com.

To any aspiring graphic designers, consider the usability of your projects before executing.

To any aspiring illustrators with a bug up your butt idea you just have to share with the world, a few pens and a lot of paper, what the hell…onward and downward!

I like inclement weather. The closer I physically get to the fog-shrouded coast the more chipper becomes my demeanor. But this is nuts. It’s frickin’ May, it’s flippin’ California and it hasn’t gotten above 68 for weeks. My cats are velcroed to the bed. I’m wearing a sweater as we speak. I know this qualifies as a heat wave in god-forsaken zip codes like Minnesota but we Cali types prefer we stow our sweatshirts sometime around tax day and retrieve them around Halloween.

So just in the nick, a client needed an illustration for a concert extolling the virtues of Summer. Might be over the top. But I’m cold dammit.

I don’t believe in astrology because I try to be a rational, reasonable person. That said, I swear I can predict when Mercury has gone retrograde.

For you uninitiated who may not be familiar, the term “Mercury going retrograde” refers to a celestial phenomenon wherein 3 or 4 times a year the planet Mercury appears to “catch-up” to the Earth’s orbit and appears to be moving in an opposite, or retrograde orbital direction in relation to Earth. It’s really just an optical illusion. That’s the science part. The rest of it, like the disasters that inevitable follow,  is just astrological clap trap. Suffice to say Mercury went “retro” on January 21 and will probably be a pain in my ass until around February 11.

As mentioned, I don’t believe in astrology, or past lives, tarot cards, or most of the other crap theories you’ll find in the New Age/Occult aisle of Barnes and Noble. I am however on the fence about the Mercury thing. And here’s just one more example why…

I woke up last Saturday morning to a broken dishwasher—admittedly a first-world problem and I feel slightly embarrassed about even calling it a problem. But, as I do a lot of cooking and it’s an appliance I rely on every day,  let’s call it a ‘serious inconvenience’. Less of a thing maybe than a tree falling through your roof but more of a thing than say, a crack in your car windshield.

Like any responsible DIY homeowner on a Saturday faced with a broken appliance, Plan A is always to try to fix it myself. In other words I started pushing the same combination of buttons over and over hoping for a different result. No joy. I deep-Google the problem. No joy. So like most DIY homeowners I give up on Plan A within a few minutes and proceed straight to Plan B—call an appliance repairman/woman on Monday•.

*I’m careful to say “repairman/woman because I recently called a plumbing company to send someone out to unclog a sewer line and they sent a female plumber, which was both a reminder that I lived in the SF Bay Area and, made me wish my grandfather were alive just to see how long it would take him to ask her, “so when is the plumber coming?” What can I say? it was a different era. For the record, honestly, given a choice, I prefer female plumbers. But I digress…

Having accepted that I would be manually washing dishes for a while, I set about to attack the pile I assumed had been cleaned by my otherwise reliable German-made dishwasher 24-hours prior but in fact had just been sitting there in a steamy metal cabinet culturing strains of god-knows-what kind of lethal pathogen.

So fearing for my family’s health and safety, I grabbed the stopper device from under the sink and started to fill it up with hot water. At that moment the sink stopper contraption came apart in three pieces in my hand. At this point I would normally just chuckle benignly and chalk this up to coincidence but whenever something breaks—then something else breaks right afterward, I get a little nervous. A little back story may explain why…

Me and Merc go way back

A few years ago during a Mercury retrograde cycle, within a period of two days—and this is not just true but all too typical—my watch bezel broke, then my office phone, then my internet connection went down while uploading a clients’ website files, then I went completly blank on my ATM PIN number while at the Trader Joe’s checkout stand with 10 people in line behind me. These are not disasters—clearly—just a little chaos in a short amount of time. But wait there’s more…

Mi cepillo con muerte (my brush with death)

During a retrograde cycle that same year..and again, true story…while on an up-and-back hike with my sister in a local state park—on the “up” leg , minding my own business, just walking side by side along a hot dusty fire road, talking away, I stepped on a rattlesnake as it was crossing the trail in front of us. Never even saw it until my sister let out a screech that dislodged pine cones from the trees as I simultaneously stepped on the snake and executed a Cirque du Soleil-quality-never-before-seen bit of spastic maneuvering to avoid being bitten, as it slithered away, annoyed but unharmed. I, on the other hand, was traumatized, embarrassed, and already wondering what legal remedies I might seek to enjoin my sister from ever describing the dance I’d just done to any other living human. But it gets better…

On the way “back” up the trail, just when my adrenaline had reached close to normal levels, I was again, minding my own business, albeit more conscious of “moving sticks” ahead on the trail, discussing my previous near-brush with death, when I stepped squarely, precisely and pretty fucking perfectly, on another rattlesnake in the middle of the trail. Again…screech, bizarre dance moves like Jagger grabbing a downed power line, heart rate reaching hummingbird-on-espresso levels. But, we both live to tell about it (me and Snake #2, not my sister, who may choose to “tell about it” but not live long after that).

And just when you think that was all the deadly reptile one person deserves in one day….when I got home, and even before I could tell my wife the tale of my twin brushes with death…the gardner I had hired to clear some brush from the backyard called me over. He was clearly agitated and as his English was limited, employed dramatic hand gestures to aid the following story; apparently while weeding the back yard he had spooked “un grande serpiente” ,(at this he spread his arms and leaned back a little like he was about to hug a side-by-side refrigerator) and then he grabbed his pinky with his thumb and forefinger and wiggled it back and forth while making a “chickachickachicka” sound. I knew exactly what he was describing. It was Mercury in retrograde.

The bottom line is, since then my Merc radar is pretty much al