Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Look at Me, I Made and Art Book

It has tinsel, so this is totally a legit Christmas post. East 17 and Frankie Goes to Hollowood will both back me up on this.

So yeah, this is a weird thing I've been sitting on for a while. :D To cut a boring story short (it's like, 1 AM on Christmas Eve here), I ended up with this voucher to make a book on Blurb, for free back in late 2011. Immediately I knew that I wanted to make a dumb art book with it, just for myself. So, the following summer I got to work, pulling together just the oddest collection of stuff, from cartoons I'd drawn in primary school to desktop wallpapers to college projects and weird digital art from more recent times. Midway through making it though, happy with how it was turning out and with the eclectic selection of work I had going, I started thinking 'hey, maybe other people would buy this'. Well, maybe as one dollar ebook, anyway.

Unfortunately those hopes were quickly dashed when I looked over the ebook Blurb spat out. It's wasn't that bad, it was just that the level of compression on the images was more than I'd be happy with charging money for. It was very noticeable on a few images especially; kind of a killer blow for a digital art book. I had been thinking, for a while, about modifying the Blurb-created PDF file, swapping the compressed images with my own non-compressed versions and selling that. It seems doable, but I was worried that that would land me into hot water with Blurb (at least in a hypothetical world where anyone bought it in the first place :D). No, instead I decided that, screw it, I'm going to give it away for free. It's a Festivus miracle!

Download from MediaFire | 11.4 MB, PDF

The actual, psychical book though, I think turned out really well.



Some Junior Cert art business. I'm surprised a border didn't end up around this page somehow, but no, this is freaking cool.



In case you were wondering: Yes, I have always been the best at naming things. :D



Had to get a little creative here. With only the two images of it I captured for DeviantArt back in the day, I filled up the rest of the (left) page with the source code for this (very bad) penalty shoot-out game I made back in college. It did have a cool look though (I should really get that up here someday).

And hey, if anyone's interested in picking up that physical version, it's still available to order on Blurb. Just saying. :D


As advertised, a fifteen year spanning collection of arty odds and ends, taking in everything from subversive primary school posters to striking desktop wallpapers; from lo-fi computer doodling to Flash animations and even a batik.

Arty Stuff by John Keane | Make Your Own Book

But wait! There's more. So, when I decided that I might want to sell this book, I cut some stuff out that might have been problematic copyright-wise, but it can't do any harm to put that up here. Right?

View post on imgur.com


Yep, whenever you're ready, imgur. This is all I'm seeing at the moment. :D

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