January Blog Post (New Year New Bloggin!)

It’s been quite awhile since I posted an update on here! December and the beginning of January I spent working on the final pieces for my illustration thesis, as well as the process book that captured my research and how they were all created. You can check out the finished book here at madelinepeck.adobe.com. Super happy with how it turned out and now I can turn to other cool projects!

I’ve been continuing my work for the coloring book. I’ve been experimenting using the bezier tool with the pen vector tool, as it really helps with the roundness and closed lines coloring books tend to have. The pages are always more detailed then I remembered having planned for but that’s alright, perhaps I’ll just need to make some compromises and remember that no one will have access to the secret super version that lives inside my brain.

On the side I’ve also been working on the thumbnails for the Element background wallpaper.

This is what I’ve come up so far for ideas, and I’m looking forward to taking them into the proper sized folder and seeing how I can clean these ideas up for the final version. I also am going to start some other design work for the rest of the app :D

Today I actually also attended the super low key design team video chat, which involved a brain storm session for Fedora 35 that was exciting!

Intern Day is Coming Up

I hope you are all having a good week! I have to say, writing these blog posts and reflecting on the week and what I’ve done has become a really therapeutic process. Also maybe I’m enjoying myself this week even more, because I’m testing out a Bluetooth keyboard that I got for school and for writing on the go without a laptop.

Let’s see what have I been up to. Over the weekend I decided to take the plunge and order some stickers with my own design. I had this great drawing in my sketchbook of a plant with a little face on it’s pot, so I redrew it with the right dimensions and higher quality on my iPad and ordered a small batch of die cut stickers, to see the quality and if I want to get more for the future. It was really cool and I’m looking forward to getting them in the mail in the next week or so.

The process for the Fedora 33 and Fedora 34 wallpapers has started, you can look at the tickets Mo’s created for them here and here. But over the weekend people voted on which scientist/mathematician/inventor/amazing human being for inspiring the wallpaper, and Walter Lincoln Hawkins was chosen for Fedora 33, and Ub Iwerks was chosen for Fedora 34. I compiled a document full of info for all of the options, which I hope was helpful to others, but at least it was helpful to me.

Walter Lincoln Hawkins was an African American chemist and engineer widely regarded as a pioneer of polymer chemistry. He was instrumental in designing long-lasting plastic to sheath telephone cables, enabling the introduction of telephone services to thousands of Americans, especially for rural communities.

Ub Iwerks was an American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician, who invented the multiplane camera for animation in 1933. The last movie to use this technique at Disney, I believe was The Little Mermaid.

These are some sketches that I did, working through some ideas on how to represent the inspiration for the wallpapers.

The intern team reached out to me from the Intern team last week and proposing a side project to me for National Intern Day which is on July 30th! Which was super exciting. A perfect example to remember why it’s important to show your process and document your work so its shareable for others. I’m making some illustrations for Red Hat’s different social media platforms. This illustration was my first idea, of a black and white photo of two current interns, with the Red Hat red on them somehow.

It would be cool to make gifs for Red Hat’s instagram.

As for the coloring book pages I’ve finally settled on a new schedule for myself. Bezier-ing continues to be a challenge but it’s getting easier and quicker. This was what I screenshotted after I first started using the tool. I’m glad the words are still round and loopy. It’s a shame because I spent a lot of Monday and Tuesday lining the cover with the pen tool and mixing the tools only to realize they weren’t compatible and scrapped it. Ah well. A learning experience.

Hope you’re all having a wonderful week!

-Madeline