….Heading says it all. Click the image to check out some robotic destroyers!

A Collection Blog of Robots

I really like drawing random stuff and just letting my mind go. Ive was looking for more inspiration for such an activity and I re-stumbled on to David Lanham. So over the past week i’ve been doodling  weird and crazy stuff everywhere…i think its getting out of hand. My wife has been giving me the look and I think shes about to do something she might regret. Enjoy!

Need a a topic to sketch, a little motivation, and want some feedback? Come join us in the forums. We’ve been reviving and revising the sketch competition and its killer. The past few weeks we covered boomboxes, external hard drives, flash lights, and an interesting convergence of coffee makers and gardens. Theres been some great work submitted and some great feedback given. Check out the submissions here.

Drawing effective and simple figures for designs has always been a problem for me. So in a search for some help and inspiration, I found this guy. Update: His name is Joseph R Tomlinson (Thanks peeps) and this is his blog.  His work sometimes creeps me out a bit but his style is cool and full of simple pen and marker drawings.

Copyright Joseph's Art Blog

Anyone doing a design project centered around the homeless?

So…I’ve bet you’ve noticed things have been a bit…slow. We’ll thats going to change. Starting today we are going to have at least a weekly post. We are still going to post videos and things of the like but we will have some “other stuff” mixed in. So, to prime the design pump check out this amazing work done by Beau Daniels. A bit of the old school mixed with the new.

Here’s an interesting concept from MIT’s media lab called “Beyond”. The sketches are pretty low fi, but the concept it downright interesting.The system uses a collapsible pen to essentially extrude or punch into the third dimension on the two dimensional surface. It’d be cool to see this with more resolution, refinement, pressure sensitivity, and all the bells and whistles. In any case, it’s worth a gander.

Beyond – Collapsible Input Device for Direct 3D Manipulation beyond the Screen from Jinha Lee on Vimeo.

Designboom via Gizmodo

I’m on vacation and writing from the beach on my iPad but in read about this and just had to post about it! Ten One design, makers of the pogo sketch stylus many people use to sketch on their ipads, has just come up with a way to enable ores sure sensitivity on the iPad. It uses the amount of contact of the soft tip of the sketch pen as an indicator of the amount of pressure being applied.

It may be somewhat if a long shot having it implemented and working on the iPad since it does seem to use private API’s or programming snippets. Apple has policies in place that disallow the use of such APIs so I’d be a little surprised if they do allow this schema into the app store any time soon. But if they do, could this really be the death of the smaller cintiq and intuos? Time will tell, but i’m sold!

Check out the link for more info – http://www.macrumors.com/2010/07/01/pressure-sensitive-sketching-on-ipad-demoed/

If you’re like me and love to sketch with pencil on occasion, it can be very hard to do while in an impromptu setting with traditional prismacolor or other pencils. You’d need a sharpener and a bevy of pencils if you want to keep sketching with a reasonably sharp pencil point.

Here’s the tip: If you’re wanting to sketch with pencil on the road, try using a mechanical pencil like the Pentel Mechanical Pencil. Regular mechanical pencil lead smudges for me, so I swap it out with waxy colored pencil lead refills that don’t smudge and are reminiscient of sketching with red or blue prismacolor pencils.

You’ll need to pick up a mechanical pencil that takes colored refills that are .7mm or .9mm so that the point won’t snap every time you put some pressure to it. Using mechanical pencils, I can get the benefits of sketching with a pencil without having to lug around a sharpener and several pencils! So give it a try some time.

Check out two samples I did below with a .7mm point in blue and .9mm point in red -

I worked on this project SEVERAL years ago as a Sophomore in college, but it still was nice to see the project featured on Core77. Check out more about it in my Coroflot Portfolio if you’re curious.

I’ve recently had quite a few requests for a quick overview of contour line sketching and how it works. In this video, I go over a few tips and tidbits on how to quickly show form using simple contour lines while sketching. As always, feel free to share the video and leave comments below. If you’re having trouble viewing all the videos, check out vimeo.com/idsketching for all our archive of videos. Spencer out.

P.S. my apologies for the shaky camera – I’m using a new camera rig that I am trying to perfect.