High Resolution Chalkboard Backgrounds

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High-Res Chalkboard Background

Who knew that a Saturday afternoon inspiration would translate into over 100K Pinterest repins?

A little back story

Last September I joined a group board on Pinterest called Hand Lettering Practice. It was just the excuse I needed to do more hand lettering, a passion of mine since childhood. Along with a good part of the lettering community, I also became quickly addicted to the chalkboard technique, and after some experimenting in Photoshop, came up with a pretty easy way to “fake” the effect without actually using “chalk” and a “board”. Yeehaw!!

So I created some Free Photoshop Background Files, a tutorial on how to do the layering, scanning, etc. and another Tutorial called A Beginners Guide to Spiffing Up Your Hand Lettering.

These three posts have been surprisingly popular and I’ve received lots of comments and questions, especially on the topic of how they can be used for specific projects and whether it’s okay to use them for commercial uses.

My response to both questions has been:

”Of course, you can use them commercially. Have a ball! They’re my gift to the world. But, know that if you want to use them for a print application, like an invitation, printed menu, etc., they may get a little “crunchy” since the original files were created for screen display only, in other words low resolution.”

In other words, if you stay under 8.5×11, they’ll look “okay”, but they’ll print out pretty much like something downloaded from the internet, which can be disappointing. So it occurred to me that maybe folks might appreciate being able to use these same backgrounds at a higher quality/resolution for use in print applications, scrapbooking, signs, invitations, etc. and so here they are. Three high-quality .jpg files in black, blue and green at 300 dpi.
1.99-buttonI am asking $1.99 for the download, however. Only because similar chalkboard background files on stock photo sites can cost as much as $20.00 (and since Foolish Fire is not my day job, all this stuff does take some time away). So, if you can make the lo-res versions work for your project, have at it. But if you need better quality, I invite you to purchase these 300 dpi, 8.5×11 versions.

The same techniques apply when using the hi-res backgrounds with scanned artwork or chalkboard fonts or your own machine set text. You’ll just be working with bigger files, thus anything you scan or layer over these base files should also be at least 300 dpi to get a 1:1 ratio.

You may also note the color is a little less saturated on the higher res versions. Since these are intended for print eventually, I’ve created them in CMYK color space, instead of the RGB for the lo-res versions, which are intended for screen use. RGB color is a bit brighter on the screen.

As always, I hope you enjoy these files and they become a helpful addition to your artistic tool box. Please contact me if you have any trouble with the download process.

Best,
James :: Foolish Fire

I could really go for some chocolate covered feelings right now

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I could really go for some chocolate covered feelings right now :: Foolish Fire

My new friend Camille Harper routinely says stuff that can keep a hand letterer busy for days. So when I read this Facebook post she made a while back I immediately asked permission to commit it to paper, then pixels.

My wife told me it’s now her “PMS poster.” I am hereby smiling and nodding.

The process: thanks Norma Talmadge

I immediately found inspiration in my vintage photo collection in the form of a beautiful old portrait of the silent film star Norma Talmadge. The huge throne-like chair she was posing in became a perfect backdrop for the quote, which I did last. First though, I created and 8.5×11, 300 dpi RGB file as the base file for the piece.

choc-text

As with most of the quotes I’m doing these days, I like the free-form, bold styles of the classic serif fonts—in this case Clarendon Bold. Obviously I take liberties with almost every rule of typography but then that’s what makes hand-lettering so appealing, to me anyway.

Once the text was inked in it was scanned at 300 dpi and then placed into the same sized Illustrator file. I then did a Live Trace at a high level of detail and expanded the trace to create vectors. After releasing the compound paths and expanding and ungrouping until I could select each letter individually, I copied and pasted the entire text into a layer in the base Photoshop file.

*Alternatively, you could just cut and paste your scan directly into the Photoshop file and bypass Illustrator, but I’ve come to like the way the Illustrator live trace includes the “counters”, or spaces inside letters like “o” and “e” and “p”, so it’s easy to make those a different color if I want to. It also tends to pick up all the little flaws and lack of precision in the inking process I intentionally include, which give it a more organic look and feel.

The main background art also started out in Illustrator with a placed file. I drew the vector shapes needed to convey the form and pasted them by group into individual layers in the Photoshop file. So skin tones as one layer, the dress as one layer, etc. Each shape layer was then selected (Option-Click the layer preview), and then did a “Edit > Paste Into” of the various textures, some with blending modes added allowing the original solid color beneath to influence the final look.

So to review, here are the steps (and these are pretty much consistent for all pieces like this):

  • Find a great quote or write one
  • Do preliminary sketching to establish a layout
  • Locate any source material to reference for shapes and textures
  • Pencil and then ink the letter forms
  • Create the base file artwork in Photoshop by creating layers and filling with textures or colors
  • Scan and place the lettering file in Illustrator
  • Make a “live trace” and expand
  • Delete bounding box background
  • Play with releasing compound paths and ungrouping until individual letterforms can be selected and filled
  • Cut and paste vectorized letterforms into the base PSD file
  • Tweak the final layers to achieve the right look, color palette, etc.

The final product is always a hit and miss thing, especially arriving at a final color palette. Doing most of the artwork digitally almost gives you too many choices, so editing is important and having a solid idea of what you want. It can take a few minutes or a few days. This one came together in a few hours, thanks to a little art direction to get the colors right.

DIY Postcard Hack #1

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hacked-postcard-1

You know that phenomenon whereby you’re looking through the greeting card aisle and you break out with a spontaneous explosion of, for lack of better word, “guffaw”? That’s me. I got that gene from my mom. Cutest thing ever when she did it. I just get stares. But, my preferred venue is not Rite-Aid but the antique /vintage shop and instead of pouring over Hallmark cards I prefer pawing through piles of dusty, vintage postcards. They’re cheap, often have some wonderful stuff written on the back, and the artwork is mostly cheesy, thus ripe for what I’m calling a Postcard Hack.

Download the PSD and Hack Away

So I give you Postcard Hack #1. I’ve added my own captions and now you can too! Below is a link to a free downloadable layered .psd version of this postcard with the caption bubbles included. If you have a copy of Photoshop, or Photoshop Elements, you can:

  • Open the file and add your own captions. My fonts probably won’t open on your computer so just use whatever font you like. Move the bubbles around wherever you want, flip ‘em to have them point to whomever, birds, kids, sailboat…go nuts.
  • Just add the file to your ephemera collection. I’ve scanned it for you. You’re welcome.
  • So here it is: Download Hacked Postcard #1

By the way, this postcard was sent from Crow Lake in Ontario, Canada to someone in Cleveland, OH in what I’d guess was the 1950′s or 60′s. The slightly creepy text on the back says:

“Hi.
Beautiful Day. What a place to just loaf away your time. Saw a red fox eating the remains of a deer that had been washed up on shore—big, long bushy tail.

Love,
(name unreadable)
XXX”

Is it just me or might the image of a bloated, half eaten ruminant clash a bit with the idyllic narrative the Crow Lake Tourist Board would probably like to put out there instead?

“Visit Crow Lake…you never know what’ll wash up on shore.”

“Come to Beautiful Ontario…stay for the waterlogged venison.”

“Just watched a predator devour a big, putrid lump of soggy carrion…wish you were here.”

Ah, aren’t postcards just the Twitter of a bygone era?

Americana :: Waiting for the Parade

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Americana :: Waiting for the Parade

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S. and a good day to reflect on the sacrifices and service of men and women down through the decades who put themselves in harm’s way. I purposely avoid politics on Foolish Fire but occasionally I’m struck by images that may be construed that way, although what I like about this particular image is not only its equal measure of amusing and poignant qualities, politics not withstanding, but its quintessential optimism.

I did this gouache painting a few days ago from a photograph I made some years ago while photographing a neighborhood 4th of July celebration in Dublin, California, for the daily newspaper I worked for at the time. Dublin was featured in a popular book of photographs called “Suburbia”, published in 1973 by Bill Owens and was one of my early inspirations. So to Mr. Owens, a fellow photojournalist, and my fellow Americans of all political stripes, I dedicate this snap shot.

“I Want to be Bob G.” now available on Amazon

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"I Want to Be Bob G." :: Short Story by Archer Adams

Boy Meets Bob

It’s the late 70′s. A six-year old boy finds some Penthouse magazines in his neighbors trash and after reading a story about the infamous Penthouse photographer and publisher Bob Guccione, decides his mission in life is to be “Bob G.”, in spite of his parents’ attempts to point him down a more respectable career path.

This hilarious, touching short story is from the pen of Archer Adams, a writer from Montgomery, Alabama and is available on Amazon. If you like David Sedaris, Jean Shepherd, you’ll love Adams.

Pixels passing in the night

But this is also a story about how collaboration happens in the digital world. Adams was all set to design his own book cover and contacted Foolish Fire via email after finding downloadable chalkboard backgrounds on the FF site. Not being a designer, he offered to hire me to do some hand-lettering as one option for his cover but quickly realized that Sedaris had used the chalkboard motif for his highly recognizable book Me Talk Pretty One Day and nixed that idea.

So step one…I asked Archer to send me his story to mine for inspiration and he basically had me hooked like a fish farm trout from the first paragraph. By the end I’d laughed so hard I nearly had to re-upholster my Herman Miller. The story stirred up a riot of imagery and after some brainstorming and a quick negotiation, we arrived at the solution you see here, sorta chalkboard-y but not literally, leveraging the hand-lettering to retain the innocent quality of the narrative and incorporating this freakishly bang-on image of the kid with the camera (which ironically could have been me at that age). The whole process took a few days.

Girl 1 for Bob G.

The first run at a typical Penthouse model from the 70′s.

As it turned out the girl on the left was the hardest element to get right, requiring several iterations and copious “research” on vintage Penthouse models on my part, which also turned out to be a very interesting exercise in explaining stuff to my wife. Deftly handled by yours truly I might add, except for “the forgetting to take down the reference print outs I had taped to the walls” in a timely enough fashion.

Call me “old school” but doing random projects like this still brings me back to that first, naive, emotional experience of sitting up in my bedroom with my new, beige Power-Mac G-Series I’d just bought at Sears. I recall the exact moment like it was yesterday…signing onto the “World Wide Web” for the first time with a non-graphical user interface and within seconds chatting with someone in Australia about sailing, in real-time on a fledgling online community called “The Well”. I knew nothing about sailing but it didn’t matter. Almost 20 years later, I still experience a rush when these kinds of serendipitous connections happen and better yet when ones and zeroes beget pixels beget book covers.

Stay tuned for much more from Archer Adams.

An ode to the joy of self propulsion

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an Ode to the Joy of Self Propulsion

I am reminded that Bike to Work Day is coming up in early May. Since my commute consists of a ten-foot walk from my bedroom to my office, biking to work would not be practical (or safe) but I thought the quote above and essay below seemed appropriate. Tolstoy said this after he was publicly criticized for learning to ride a bicycle at age 67.

I’m a little wistful tonight. As I sit in my living room recovering from a short, hilly ride on a quiet Monday morning in late April, I’m thinking of past rides out to Tilden, and missing the cycling from years past, especially with my two nephews and my brother-in-law. It was a period when our lives and schedules miraculously converged and 50+ miles was considered an average distance for most any Saturday from March to October.

When the world closes in, as it does occasionally, and all I see are dark clouds on the horizon I think of those rides, pedaling through the redwoods on Pinehurst Road, my nephew Zachary pulling up along me side just to say “it doesn’t get much better than this.” And while I would tend to notice the potholes and discarded fast food containers on the side of the road, he could somehow stay immersed in the place, the redwoods, the smell of something blooming. His incessant positive outlook shook me out of my half-emptiness.

We laughed a lot on those rides. There was merciless ribbing and we talked about bikes ad nauseum and told the same stories about the same past rides as if repeating them at different mile markers on different days gave them new life. But in a way, every ride, even on familiar terrain, is a new narrative, or a new chapter in a continuing one.

There are many things that can make a road ride special; the weather, the traffic, the close calls, the near spills, the encounters with bees, snakes, squirrels, deer, angry motorists and the small but noteworthy differences in the way each of us feels on this day, today, compared with last time we rode this route. It’s what we monitor and track and share in that space between climbs and descents. Heart rate, leg and butt soreness or lack of, flat tires or the miraculous lack of—we write our cycling histories on each venture out to McEwen Road, Carquinez Shoreline and the Crockett Bridge, Mt. Diablo to the Junction, Mt. Diablo to the Summit, lower Pinehurst, upper Pinehurst, Tilden by way of The Three Bears, the notorious Pig Farm Hill. And these days it’s the Two Bridges Loop, Pinole Loop, the Modified Jelly Belly Ride and on busy weekday afternoons during daylight savings time Short McEwen Frontwards, McEwen Backwards, Cummings Skyway Loop, The Figure Eight of Death (McEwen Backwards Twice), and the Briones Hill.

And there’s the dreaming of better bikes, upgraded components, lighter wheels, the latest training gadget. We talk about bikes like they’re our girlfriends and wives, with familiarity and fondness, and a constant, humbling realization that no matter how much we think we understand how they work, they occasionally leave us stranded by the roadside.

I’ve been trying to find words to describe a particular sensation that I experience while cycling—that of the pushing of the pedal—that basic constituent part of making a bicycle go. It happens most often while standing up out of the saddle and pedaling up a slight incline. I only know it’s a kind of sweet spot where muscle and metal are almost indistinguishable. Where thought becomes effort becomes force becomes a kind of compressed, complex, simple, explosive event.

Maybe it’s a sublime facet of space and time where physics and metaphysics merge. Where the act and actor swap places and the spaces between bike frame molecules absorb a little bit of the rider. It happens many thousands of times on any ride and yet only happens once, on that one low hill, with that slight tailwind, on that cool Saturday morning in April or May, on that quiet, satin ribbon road, when legs and arms and pedals and sweat and heart give one push and then another, and something gives way, and we reach up and fly past our darkest days. I can’t describe it well but I know it doesn’t get much better than that.

So I missed Hairball Awareness Day…but really…isn’t…every day…?

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Hairball Awareness Day :: Foolish Fire
There I was minding my own business reading Mary Roach’s new book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, when during a chapter about digestive disorders she just casually mentions in a footnote that Hairball Awareness Day is rapidly approaching. In fact it’s every year on the last Friday of April. Who knew? By the way, (and you might want your kids to leave the room for this), did you know that humans can get hairballs, too? It’s called “Rapunsel Syndrome”, I kid you not. The rest is too disgusting for prime time interweb publication. Read Mary’s book.

So we have two cats, one of which, Eddy, gets a hairball about twice a week and although he’s dumb as a bag of hammers, he has refined his “delivery” with an uncanny, Cy Young award-winning, GPS guided accuracy so as to “deposit” his 6-inch mucous bombs exactly where I will inevitably walk. Love him dearly but seriously…I’m pretty “aware” of hairballs already, thank you. As are most cat owners.

But, being a fan of both obscure holidays and “awareness” in general, I just had to make a little poster in honor of this unfortunate (and sometimes serious) consequence of being both fur-bearing and a neurotic groomer, in other words, being a feline and/or George Michael. I know dogs get them, too, and again…some people, and again…eeewww, but cats got the evolutionary shaft on this one. So let’s cough up a little compassion for our feline buddies, even if it is a few days late.

Think you know how to buy eggs? Get ova yourself.

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The Ova Easy Egg Guide

This piece has a two-fold purpose:

  1. A humble attempt to “eggucate” those, who like me, are often confounded by the act of food shopping, and more specifically the buying of eggs.
  2. To introduce my new food blog, Munch Ado About Something: Advocating the Peaceful Overthrow of the American Diet. In this most recent post, you’ll learn how the idea for this infographic was hatched (sorry) and a maybe a few fun facts about eggs, among other articles about food, some serious, most not, but hopefully always delicious.

So for you hand-letterers, here’s a quickie synopsis of the process:

Step 1: Research. Did some looking around on the USDA site, the American Egg Board site, etc. to get the bulk of the info for this piece. My goal was to make it fun, easy to use but to also express my point of view. I try to answer one, simple, overarching question in an infographic — this time it was “How can the average consumer buy the healthiest, most sustainably produced eggs?”

Step 2: Serving Up the Chicken. I knew I wanted to do a painting of a chicken for a lead image, because I find chickens to be quite beautiful visually. So I found an image of a Barred Rock Hen in my stock photo library (who knew?) and did a gouache painting from it.

The lead chicken art

Step 3: The Background. I wanted a somewhat grungy, barnyard-y, rough-hewn look but that didn’t obscure the hand lettering, some of which would be fairly small. So I found a high-res background file of an old, faded, blank book page, which had some natural vignetting and layered a lo-res piece of ephemera of a beat up old landscape painting over the top, and masked all but the outer edges.

Free blank book texture

Old piece of ephemera

Step 4: The Title Text. Using a decorated, vintage font as a basis for the “Egg Guide”, first did a pencil sketch, then inked in the lettering, scanned the text and placed it a layer in the base, hi-res Photoshop file.

Here’s a Photoshop Phactoid: the 300 dpi Photoshop file at one time contained over 200 layers and weighted in at over 600 MB! But, worth it if I ever want to use it for print applications. The final piece shrank down to 120 layers and 187 MB.

Main Title Lettering

Step 5: The Innards and Giblets. Most of the other text bits were done in pieces and scanned separately for easier handling, which explains all the layers.

Hand-lettered text

Step 6: The Dozen Eggs. Those other (12) little eggs were actually painted digitally in Corel Painter, but only once. Eggs are way too identical to warrant 12 separate paintings.

Step 7: Free Range Chickens All Over the Studio. I knew I wanted augment the Rating Guide at the bottom with at least one more chicken so I did a few gesture studies to give me some choices. Holy crap was it hard to get those chickens to pose!

Chicken studies

Step 8: Edit, Clean Up, Get My Wife’s Feedback. Wait, Reverse That.