I have been playing ArtRage again. This time I finally got around to buying the non-pro version. I have a couple of in progress versions of a self-portrait that I will have to toss up eventually. Toying with some of the new features from the old version I had (mostly the stencils) lead to this theme, which I am calling 'blurb' (and 'blurb-minimal' if you click on the software link). I normally avoid warm colors, so this will probably look very different for me. Like my temp layout has been for the past couple of days, I left it wider (1000px instead of 900px) and the bar is still on the left so large vids and photos don't overflow on the bar like they used to. Even though everything but the menu got more room to play in, everything feels jammed in there, so I might be playing with margins and such over the next couple of days. Of course, I might decide I really, really hate warm colors again and completely change everything.
O! M! G! - Design - Computer
Posted on: 2010-03-24 22:12:30[ 6 comments ]I think I need a tissue after watching this.
Sol & O Book 3 Cover - Books - Design
Posted on: 2010-03-14 23:18:44[ 2 comments ]
The wife had me working on the cover for book 3, so she could finalize her proof copy. I figured I would share the images with you guys since you (unless you are Rook) probably won't be seeing it for some time. We kept the same basic layout, just changing the text, font color, and images. I am linking the front and back covers of the first book as well just for comparison. And lastly, there is the pic we did for NaNoWriMo '08.
We tried a couple of different things to get the arm right. I wanted to do kind of a 'green screen' technique, but that failed miserably. In the end, we took some shots of the wife's bare arm, and a few just of the shirt. Then about an hour of pen work, retouching, and hue/sat/lum playing and we had a dark elf arm. The stone arm took even less work: desaturate, apply texture, some blurring and messing with levels and it was done. The sleeve was actually the back of the shirt with some trimming and distorting. It could use a little more shadow work, but everything I did screamed fake.
Anyways, hope you enjoyed your little preview of sorts of book 3.
Generic Holiday Wishes - Design
Posted on: 2009-12-15 02:27:30[ More - 4 comments ]I always start these little holiday themes a day or two before the actual holiday, decide about an hour into the process that it isn't worth the time to only be up for a couple of days, and drop whatever idea I had. But I figured all the whining about the phrase Happy Holidays we get to listen to every year was just too amusing to pass up. So happy/merry whatever is important to you...except Festivus.
Line by Line, the Library - Images - Design
Posted on: 2009-10-21 13:23:35[ More - 3 comments ]
Sometimes, I think the wife likes having a househusband...especially one who likes to work at all hours of the night in Photoshop and Illustrator. This weeks task, turn the top photo here into some sort of sketch or line art for a genealogy flyer for the library. It wasn't even her flyer. Oh well, it gave me the opportunity to work at all hours in Photoshop and Illustrator, so who am I to complain. I got to make a spiffy little line art image, do some clean up on a couple of scanned images the wife drew, and messed with the flyer a little.
ArtRage Happiness - Computer - Design - Images
Posted on: 2009-05-15 12:49:47[ More - 2 comments ]
I recently fell in love with ArtRage again and decided that I needed to give it a shout out since I only ever mentioned it in passing. ArtRage is a ground up painting program. But by saying 'painting program', I don't want you confuse it with MS Paint, Paint.net, Photoshop or, really, anything else. Unlike everything else I have seen, ArtRage strives for realism in application: brushes have a finite amount of paint on them, painting one color over another will bleed the colors, and understands pressure (assuming you have a device that does) and acts accordingly.
A little more versatility - Twitter - Site News - Design
Posted on: 2009-04-09 07:59:33[ More - 5 comments ]I have spent another night going crazy coding. I have finished up my Twitter project, or at least all I want to do with the API until the next version is released. The wife and I now have all our tweets backed up, rantfest is polling twitter.com for all our new ones, and we can choose to display them like I am doing on the left. It trys to update every twenty minutes, and if the REST api is up, it succeeds in its attempt.
I don't know why. - Design
Posted on: 2008-09-03 02:12:59[ 4 comments ]I don't know why I can never remember that Internet Explorer has issues with .png files. It does not matter how many times I edit images for the web, I always forget...and then I have to go back and 'fix' everything.
Well... - Design
Posted on: 2007-07-24 22:44:21[ 7 comments ]Well, the croton colors almost lasted a week. I just did not realize how bad the yellow looked on my desktop computer, and well, I wanted the filesize to be smaller. Even optimized for the web, the images were around 50k, add another 8-10k for the text, and you get around 60k. I normally like to keep the page 20k and under for those hapless people still on dialup. So yeah, here is a much cleaner look, love it.
