Things ahead

Late last night, while I was waiting for my rhubarb cobbler to bake, I was browsing Pinterest and came across this quote from C.S. Lewis, so I paired it with a photo in my files from almost two years ago.

This is the North Portal Road in north/northeast Fremont County. You wouldn't think it to look at the photo, but just as you top that far hill you can see spread out beneath you a lush, green irrigated valley, full of crops that include alfalfa, dry beans and corn. At the moment the name of the valley escapes me, but it's a neat area you'd never know was there unless you took the time to drive through this empty sagebrush country.

For more photography, visit C} Images on Facebook.

The best free digital download:

I really am getting ready to go to bed after an evening spent working on some editorial things for the paper... but I made a quick visit to some of my favorite blogs, and found this:

Just Something I Made

This pdf and another are available over at Just Something I Made, and I can see nursery inspiration coming on. I knew I didn't want to decorate the nursery with the normal baby animal themes, I guess they're too cartoonish and unrealistic for me, and now I'm thinking I could maybe somehow use these vintage images as a jumping off point of inspiration for our baby room's decor.... I'm envisioning trying to blow one of these up and transferring to the wall. Too ambitious? Maybe. :-)

InDesign: Learning a new skill

Sometimes it's hard for me to believe, but there are some slow times here in the Roundup office. It's just the nature of the business that sometimes all the deadlines loom at once, and other times we're all caught up, like on Friday afternoons in January.

So one Friday afternoon a couple weeks ago I was in the office by myself and  I started to design this invitation in my InDesign program, and killed two birds with one stone as I also figured out how to type on a path, which is pretty tricky to pull off, and I'm still not a master at getting the text to do what I want.

Click for zoom image

Something else I haven't mastered is screen shots in programs, otherwise I might have attempted to put together a tutorial on type on a path. As it is, I found several helpful tutorials through search engines, and that's how I was able to figure it out.

The inspiration for the invitation was vintage advertisements like this one for Northland SnowShoes. That's where I stole the 'Vigorous health and a million thrills' from. 'The greatest sport of the season' also came from a vintage advertisement.

I find my images and inspiration on Google image search, most times, including the snowshoe, dogsled and pine bough graphics I put in my layout. Finding images is a lot of trial and error for me - there are at least five others in the file that I started using and then discarded because I didn't like them well enough.

This ad for hot cocoa was the inspiration for my text layout, and why I wanted to learn to make curved words.





So even though there's some down time in the office, I was able to put together an invitation for our snowshoeing party on Sunday, and learn a new InDesign skill to use in building the paper and designing ads in the future. There are endless things to figure out and experiment with in the Photoshop and InDesign programs, if only one has the time (and patience) to tackle them. Online tutorials are wonderful things.

precision

"What Eugene humbly suggested might make colorful place mats are works of art with remarkable complexity that continue to amaze viewers." - American Primitive Gallery, on Eugene Andolsek

take a look at a few of the pieces this guy drew over 50 years, and read the biography at the link above. i'm not usually one for abstract art, but maybe i like these because they're not abstract, but very precise and meticulous. they're all just ink on graph paper that this guy put together at his kitchen table, then put away in trunks because he didn't think anyone would be interested.

click on the image to see them in a larger view.