Power
of the
Pens

Tim has worked in commercial art and design since 1999 for companies big and small. In college, he studied painting and fine art but transitioned into the online realm after discovering its amazing community.

"It’s easier than ever to immediately know (and see) who’s doing what. I am often star struck whenever I am fortunate enough to meet contributors to design portals such as k10k.net and Newstoday."

The recent winner of the Portland Cut & Paste tournament, Tim is no small fish himself. He’s attracted to design because of its spontaneity and room for improvisation. His hope, he says, "is to make things that connect with people, arouse curiosity, and, if I’m lucky, inspire others to create." Seeing as that’s what The Power of the Pens is all about, he’s a great fit for our project.

Currently, Tim is working on a holiday ad campaign, a Herculean motion project, a collaborative piece for Born Magazine (www.bornmagazine.org) and is managing several projects involving content to download, print and craft. His day job is as a senior designer at Curiosity (www.curiositygroup.com), where he illustrates and designs for web and print, does some Flash work and apparently tells pretty stupid jokes.

Tim was introduced to Wacom via the Graphire back in 2000. In 2001, he opted for the Intuos 6X9. These days, he won’t be caught without a Wacom tablet by his side. We’ll let him explain:

"The Wacom pen is such a natural mapping of the way I think. I actually prefer the tablet to paper for sketching — I’ll often use the pen to draw in Photoshop… I suppose the best compliment I can pay is that I don’t think much about my tablet — it’s a good tool — something that reliably does its job and helps me create."

So, that’s Tim. Let’s see what the Cintiq helped him create.

I have always been an impatient artist. While attending art school I remember wondering why anyone in their right mind would enjoy lithography, printmaking, oil painting or any of the other process-intense media, although I have much respect for practitioners of those arts. I wanted the marks I made to be immediately visible and I didn’t want to sit for 7 hours for a coat of paint to dry before applying the next coat. At the time I was drawn to charcoal and watercolors because of their fluidity and immediacy - I didn’t have to wait to see what was going to emerge. My Wacom tablet gives me that kind of directness with my computer. I can think it, and instantaneously create it on the screen.

The connection between the month of August and the dog days is obvious – but I wanted to use that as an excuse to see just how tweaked-out I could make a shape and still have it read as a dog. Additionally the word August means venerable, noble, honored, revered or refined. That is the reason many of the dogs are dressed in such distinguished attire.

When making the composition, I did some initial sketches in Photoshop. Then I freehanded all of the dogs and shapes in Adobe Illustrator - then composited the image in Photoshop. I did have one major challenge putting this piece together – my computer crashed shortly before the deadline and had to be rushed to an emergency care facility. Fortunately none of the source files were lost. The Wacom tablet I used performed flawlessly – it’s nice to have a tool that I don’t have to think about - I can be as impatient as I want to be.