This past summer my band, Universal Royalty, was on tour in the UK for about 6 weeks. While touring, VQ, my brothers and I have gotten to play along side some very cool groups. TRANSITION, who hail from Bristol, England are one of the coolest. Todays “quick-fire questionnaire” is with Niall, the bands bassist. Let’s get into it.
CPM: How long has Transition been a band?
11 years
CPM: Hometown?
Bristol, England
CPM: Years playing your instrument?
Good question! I started when I was 8, so around 16 years. Man that’s scary!
A couple days ago I posted a tutorial on making a Nuclear Warning Symbol in Illustrator using a simple brush. As a follow up this week I’m posting two variations of the result of that tutorial. The first is the normal Nuclear symbol, and the second is a grungified version. Have fun.
A few friends have asked how to sketch graffiti. I started sketching graffiti in Junior High School to keep occupied (I usually sat in the back of the class). So here is a quick overview on how I sketch graffiti when wanting to pass some time; the reason I mention that is to let you know that this is a more time consuming approach. Also, this type of sketching is for when you don’t have anything but a pen and a “whatever type” of paper (printer paper, napkin, math assignment, etc.) handy. I’ll only be using a ball point pen and and my sketch book(Sometimes I feel that using color in a sketch is a waste of time; markers, pastels and colored pencils never look as good as paint…this is just my opinion).
Now as a point, you should know this is how I do it. This is NOT the way I would sketch if you’re looking to develop a “line by line” lettering structure for your graffiti. I used to just draw any word that came to mind, in the past few years I’ve been sketching books of the Bible and reference verses. This one will be a quick sketch of Hosea 10:v12.
“And he set the gatekeepers at the gates of the house of the Lord, so that no one who was in any way unclean should enter.”
2 Chronicles 23:19
The word “gatekeeper”, translated from the Hebrew word “show’er”, speaks of a porter or doorkeeper, one who guards the opening to the temple. The gatekeeper, a title spoken of here in 2 Chronicles, was a position installed by King David. They were Men from the tribe of Levi, set apart by God to maintain holiness throughout the temple. Armed with swords and passionately focused these men were the last line of defense from the outside world to the holy place where the Lord dwelt among man. Their role was to keep out anything unclean from the holy temple of the Lord, from ill intentions of plunderers to unclean animals; these guys guarded the temple night and day with a steadfast rigor.
I wanted to try something fun with Flash this week, so I did a quick search for “Flash Physics Engine.” Lo and behold, I struck gold. Box2DFlashAS3 is an open source ActionScript 3.0 conversion of the C++ Physics Engine Box2D. I’m very impressed with its well coded structure and easily implemented nature. I learned a few new things that will change how I code forever just by reading through their example files.
Still, they have limited resources right now as far as help documentation goes (”Please refer to the source code from the examples provided to get an idea of how to use Box2DFlash in your projects.” — that’s the ReadMe.txt that comes with it… not very helpful,huh). I thought I might give you an example of my own and walk through it step by step. Read the rest of this entry »
