Space Postcard – a daily create

I really enjoyed this one. My inspiration came from those old Florida (I probably blatantly ripped this one off to be honest: http://www.inspiredgoodness.com/storage/ct_greetings_florida.jpg)

For this one I got to do two of my favorite things. Scour dafont.com for new fonts and look at pictures of space. I used Italic Bricks http://www.dafont.com/italic-bricks.font and Chocolate Dealer http://www.dafont.com/chocolate-dealer.font for this project. I also used photos from the hubble space telescope http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/.

The process began like so – I picked a variety of pictures that had lots of different colors for the inside of the font. I cut out the inside of the letters and pasted the image inside of the cut out part. Then I rotated everything around to my liking and used a lot of the Distort tools in Gimp (including iWarp to slightly warp the edges and I believe the Curve Bend tool to slightly bend the letters. The quote at the bottom is an actual quote from astronaut Michael Collins, and I thought it sounded catchy. After all my fonts and colors and warping was in place, I applied the RGB noise filter as well as the Canvas filter to create a sort of papery effect.

Definitely enjoyed doing this one, hope to get more tdc’s like it!

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A visual compendium of storytelling, IMO

My Grandfather, on the far right, who I only know through stories.

GIMP Tutorial – Coloring Vintage Photos!

Vintage photos are pretty cool things to play with, and they are all in the public domain so you can use them!

I got my photo from here – go here to see the before as well 🙂
http://mementomori-stock.deviantart.com/art/Vintage-lady-and-flowers-004-348279962

So I said this was a tutorial but the only tools I used were the free select and the Hue/Saturation tool. It really depends on the photo for what levels you use inside the Hue tool. Lets just say this one takes a lot of patience.

Basically, use the free select to grab the parts you’d like to color. I found it was easiest to grab them then put them in a new layer. That way if you want to go back later and tweak the colors you dont need to reselect everything all over again (my god, can you imagine?)

Once you’ve selected your piece, go to Colors > Hue/Saturation. From there just try and play with the slider until you get something you like. I wrote down the numbers for a specific color (skin, dress, hair, etc.) in Notepad so that I had consistency across the photo.

There are probably less time consuming ways of doing this, but I definitely improved my free select skills. I plan on making a zombie portrait out of one of these photos for my next tutorial 😉

Kicking off headless – A simple engraving tutorial

Hello headless! I am starting off the year with a tutorial on faking a wood engraving! Please try and contain your excitement.

This is a very simple tutorial. I got the wood from Deviantart here: http://blank77.deviantart.com/art/Wood-Grain-24243045

Deviantart has excellent stock images, just make sure you check the creative commons license (or the creator’s comments on the image)

I am presenting at a conference next month and wanted a background for my Prezi. I thought a simple woodgrain with a touch of UMW would work nicely, so here’s how to do it yourself with any image or text. This would also work on any background 🙂

1. Begin with your background, then create a new layer.
2. Paste the content you would like engraved into the new layer.
3. Right click on the new layer, then select Transparency > Alpha to Selection
4. Make sure your background layer is the active layer, then go to Filters > Map > Bump Map
5. Your settings should look like the following:

Deselect, and then you’re done! Hopefully this tutorial will inspire you to play with some of the filters in GIMP

The toys are alive – #AAG15

I’m all about subtlety in gifs lately. This one I call “Exercise in the clone tool” because that’s 99% of what I used here. I really wanted to try and make a static image be animated as “real” as possible, which is easier said than done. I probably could have done more little animations, maybe I will in the future.

See if you can find all the animations 🙂

Riff-a-Gif – Spiderweb AAG #13

I don’t know if these posters technically count as ds106 assignments, but it was way too cool for me to pass up.

The spider was made by me in gimp (I know, it looks so real). The awesome poster is by Michael Branson Smith – hopefully he doesn’t mind the riff!

The “digital” of digital storytelling – rant

 

With the start of the headless approaching, I’m gearing up to get involved as much as I can while working full time.

What got me thinking about writing this blog post was the unfortunate Tweet-delete incident where all of my tweets after 2011 magically disappeared.  1,000 posts gone, lost in a blink of an eye without my control.

from http://reactiongifs.com

I wont deny that I almost shed a tear – I looked forward to the day that I could go back and look at my tweets and laugh about my early 20’s.  Now I wont be able to.  Is such the nature of a digital medium?

 

If I had written down my tweets in a physical diary, it’s not as if the words could get up and walk off the page.  Sure there’s the concern of it getting lost or destroyed, but unless my home was broken into or caught on fire, I am pretty much the master of my diary’s fate.

There is a certain trust that we put into technology; we trust the websites to stay up, we trust that our content will be there, we trust that it will be easy to interact with, and we trust it to keep us safe from harm.  But why do we have so much faith when really we don’t know anything about it?

I have argued before that in order to effectively use technology you should be able to read (or at least understand) the code behind it.  I liken this to reading the terms and conditions – nobody actually does it, but if they needed to, they could.  I don’t mean that everyone should become computer programmers.  That would be like saying you need to be a pilot to fly in a plane or a mechanic to drive a car – no, but you should at least know how to buckle your seatbelt.

The act of learning how to read and write code not only makes you a better participant of technology, it makes you less of a consumer.  Which leads me into my next point – in a course that emphasizes creation, how much consumption is okay?  It’s wonderful that we are able to use fancy tools to create art, but how much of that art is really ours?  I don’t have answers for these questions and I know there are plenty of counter arguments (painters need paintbrushes, I get it), but for this upcoming semester of ds106, I challenge you to think critically about the technology you are using along the way.  I hope you take the time to learn a little more behind the scenes.

Light Fight – AAG #12

Once I saw that it was vader we’d be animating, I had to give it a shot.

I used the clone tool to hide the lights and make them look like they were flashing. I also used the hue/saturation tool on the little yellow light to make it look like it was glowing – I did the same for the reflection on vader’s outfit.

I really wanted to make his cape wave but there are only so many hours in a day

Lollipop wiggle – #AAG11

Took a little break to make a Dum-Dum wiggle 🙂

Thanks to Tina for the 3D app reccomendation
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/3d-camera/id316966270?mt=8

Under Construction – #AAG 6

Okay so I’m doing them out of order. This one was really easy, I just filmed myself writing on a whiteboard, opened the video up in MPEG Streamclip, exported as an image sequence and ta-da! I did delete a LOT of the frames though (there were 1,000!) so that may be why it’s a little jumpy. The file size is still crazy large though