Recently in Art High, Low, Digital and Otherwise Category

This morning on my way to work I found out that the Sirius Led Zeppelin channel had become quite definitely unLedded. BOO! The bland and distinctly non-Robert-Plant-ish alt-pop-boy voice that issued forth from my speakers was entirely unwelcome. I am bereft. Plantless. It was soooooo good while it lasted, but now it's back to channel 24, KTRU and CDs. Sigh.

Ft Lauderdale Collage, originally uploaded by TXMagpie.

Smashing Magazine had a roundup of photoshop tutorials and this one in particular caught my eye, so I thought I'd try it.

Mom and Dad -- recognize the location?

I used the Creative Commons search in flickr to find the sailboat and the compass rose (actually a backlit photo of an origami box!) and used a cardboard texture from cgtextures.com. I kind of like the results :-)

For the most part I'm pretty happy with Vista. I especially loooove the built-in Windows Photo Gallery and I use it exclusively to organize my pictures and all my digital scrapbooking elements. The programmer in me sometimes wishes I could do more complex queries, but really, it's good enough for most situations. The only trouble I've had is noticing that every now and then a thumbnail goes wonky. I didn't realize what was going on at first, because what happens is you get a tall skinny line instead of a real thumbnail, and I was just labeling them as ribbons, 'cause hey, that's what they looked like.

Then I saw it actually happen while I was looking--there is a brief flash of the "real" image and then the skinny line appears. I poked around on the net and found lots of "my jpgs are corrupted" and "how do I fix my thumbnail database" posts but nothing seemed to be exactly what I was seeing. In my case, the files themselves are fine. It's just that the thumbnail isn't right. I could use the file in FotoFusion or GIMP just fine, but of course I never did, because I couldn't see the darned previews in Photo Gallery. After a bit of investigation, I decided that the problem was probably the resolution settings in the file properties. In a typical messed-up thumbnail, a 3600x3600 background jpg would have a huge "horizontal resolution" and tiny "vertical resolution" value.

Okay, great, but how to fix it? I poked at the files every way I could think of and eventually gave it up. Recently I came back to this problem. This time I found this thread: http://forums.microsoft.com/technet/showpost.aspx?pageindex=9&siteid=17&postid=4018429&sb=0&d=1&at=7&ft=11&tf=0&pageid=6 (see the 18 Sep 2008 response from Philip Fortier (MSFT)) so I at least had verification that (a) I wasn't crazy and (b) I was on the right track. I tried again, and I've figured out how to fix the files using GIMP.

1. Open the file in GIMP
2. Open the Set Image Print Resolution dialog (Image >> Print resolution in the version I'm using)
3. If the X and Y resolutions are "right" (e.g., 72 or 300 dpi) then you can cancel this dialog
4. If the X and Y resolutions are screwy, then click the link icon to unlock the proportions from each other and fix the values so they are the same and "correct" (in my case all the messed up files are 3600x3600 backgrounds so I set them to 12x12 print size at 300 dpi)
5. Save the file right over itself from GIMP and smile as the thumbnail magically appears in Photo Gallery--you won't even lose your tags or ratings or anything (or at least I'm not losing them--ymmv)

Unfortunately this is not a quick process, but I figure I'll do it a bit at a time, just like I did in tagging the files in the first place. I'm just REALLY HAPPY to finally have a solution.

I just saw this Houston Press cover at Southland this afternoon where I was waiting while they made a couple of key for My New Front Door and here it is on Sugar Frosted Goodness....

I love teh intarwebs.

(The Texans may be hosed, however.... That was a pretty sad opening game.)

Mom's latest CATDIP is up on the CATDIP V page and on flickr (click through the pic below).

I love the mousies :-)

CATDIP V is finally underway.... This time around we're doing album covers for imaginary bands. The original picture for the first round was already manipulated--Mom put a tabby cat in her pantry. The theme was Religion, so I invented Pantry Cat and Teh Cookie Kitteh Choir. I found some wig images to cut out to give Teh Kittehs some style, a song for them to sing, and away we went.

I drew the text and scanned it into GIMP, and then used the bitmap tracing tool in Inkscape to make pngs. (That was new for me, and SO EASY! I am going to experiment so more with that on more complex line-art scans and see how it goes. I'm hoping it's a good solution, because I really hate doing the magic wand/eraser stuff just to try to get a good black-and-white image.) I used kuler to pick the background and text colors and then just fiddled with the layout til I got tired of messing with it ;-)

All in all, I'm very pleased.

Click through the image to flickr for credits and more details.

A few weeks ago while Mom and I were putting together a slide show for Dad's 70th birthday, I was poking around on Amazon for some appropriate tunes. On a whim, I searched for The Irish Rovers. I didn't expect to find anything, because this record has always been my first search on a new music service, so of course I'd looked for it back when Amazon first introduced MP3 downloads. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that they'd be adding to their offerings.... (Duh!)

Anyhow, yeah, I downloaded the whole album. And yeah, I've been tooling around town singing along (southern girl + no ear for languages + overdose of the Irish Rovers = "unicairns", apparently) unashamedly. Well, maybe a little ashamedly. But not enough to stop :-)

So, here's a link to the sound of my happy childhood! I had to pick one song (oh, the agony!) which really isn't fair, but this is one I find myself singing in the shower, so I figure it's a good representative choice. I'm not sure I know anybody besides my dad who will enjoy this as much as I do, but I still feel compelled to share....

I'm relaxing today, making scrapbook pages from some recent pictures. I read about Adobe's Kuler in the latest issue of Digital Scrapbooking, and decided to go check it out. One of things you can do is point it at a flickr picture, and it will generate a set of colors that go with that picture.

So I gave it this picture:

and it generated these colors:

Cool!!

I used the RGB values from that in FotoFusion to make this page:

I LOVE THE INTERNET!!!

More fun with flickr toys! This is the Warholizer, using one slightly out-of-focus red rose.

Talas has a batch of antique book presses online. Someday, when we build our garage, which will contain the MOs library and my studio, I want one of these....

I've been learning about flag books recently, since I'm going to be leading a session at HBAG about them in April. Since we're concentrating on using photographs in the flag book format, I thought it would be fun to have several different images available in the kits. That was all fine until I discovered how much time it takes to do a physical mockup.... I figured it should be pretty easy to do the mockup digitally, so I could get an idea about whether the image would be interesting or not when flagged.

I use GIMP, so these instructions are particular to that program. If anyone wants to adapt the instructions for some other program, be my guest. Just give me credit and a link if you use my images and text :-)

First Things First

I highly recommend the very thorough flag book article in the Fall 2005 issue of Bonefolder. Karen Hammer does a terrific job of explaining the structure, how to prepare and trim your printed pages, and assembly. Following her example, I'm creating a seven-page book.

This tutorial is just about creating a digital preview, in case you prefer to twiddle bits before cutting paper.

So Let's Start Mocking!

Open your image in GIMP and crop it to your liking. I think landscape ratios tend to work better than portrait ratios, but I don't think there is any technical reason to not use a portrait layout. I'm using a 1600 x 1200 pixel ratio.

Here's my original image:

I want each page to include a good amount of the image, and I want to end up using the whole width of the image. I need seven pages altogether, with each page including a subsequent section of the image.

I'm going to start with about 2/3 of the image on first page, and divide the remaining third amongst the rest of the pages. To do this, I'll add a grid to my image. Take the horizontal width of your image and divide it by 20, then set up a grid with this as the horizontal value and the full height of the image as the vertical value.

In GIMP, choose Image-->Configure Grid from the menu. Select a Line Style that isn't Crosshairs (I'm using Dashed in my example). Click the chain link under the Spacing values so that you can make a grid with different horizontal and vertical values. Enter the calculated width and height in pixels. Click OK.

If necessary, turn on Show Grid and Snap to Grid.

Each flag is going to be 14 divisions wide, and we'll travel across the image one division at a time, resulting in seven pages.

Now we need horizontal guidelines to set the height of the flags. I'm going to divide my picture into three sections, so I'll add two horizontal guides by dragging them down from the ruler. Place these wherever they seem to divide the picture nicely. Write down where the guidelines end up--you'll need to recreate them on another document later. The flags do not need to be all the same height--this is an artistic decision!

Now we need to create an empty document to drop our flags into. I'm going to make the folds of my spine equal to twice the horizontal increment of my image division (I'm going to call this "the creep"). So the width of my spine will be 32 x the creep (8 valleys in the accordion fold, with the side of each valley twice the creep). The flags will stick out on either side by 8 x the creep, so the total width is 48 x the creep, or 2.4 x the width of the original image.

My original image is 2592 pixels wide, so I'll create a blank document that is 6220 pixels wide and 1944 pixels high (same as the original).

Now we need to add a grid and guidelines to this document. The grid divisions will be twice as wide in the mockup document as they were on the original image. Either remember the width of those divisions and multiply by two, or take the width of the new document and divide by 24. Set the grid on this document the same way you did on the original image.

We also need to duplicate the horizontal guidelines onto the mockup document. If you don't remember exactly where you placed them, just grab one and move it around a little bit. The exact location of your cursor will show in the bottom left corner of the image window; the vertical value is the second one. Drop it where you want it to be, and remember this value. Create a guide in the same place on the other document.

Now it's time to make some flags!

Select your original image and choose the rectangular selection tool (R on the keyboard). Make sure the options are Replace Current Selection, no Feathering, and Free Select.

Select the left-most 14 sections from the top guide up to the top of the image. This will be the first top-section flag. (Make sure Snap to Guides and Snap to Grid are both turned on.)

Now copy this flag to a new layer on the mockup document.

1. Ctrl-C on the original document (copy to the clipboard)
2. Ctrl-V on the mockup document (paste from clipboard)
3. Choose Layers-->New Layer from the menu (create a new layer based on the selection)

Switch to the Move tool (M on keyboard) and drag this flag to the upper left corner. Rename the layer "t1" (double-click on the layer name in the Layers dialog to edit the name).

Now we just need to create, copy and position six more top-section flags.

Switch back to the original image. Put your cursor inside the selection and press and hold the Alt key. This will let you move the selection (as opposed to moving the piece of the image that is in the selection). Drag the selection one division to the right.

Repeat the copy/paste steps above to add this flag to a new layer on the mockup document. Position the left edge of this flag two divisions from the left edge of the first flag. Name this layer "t2".

Do this five more times (scoot the selection on the original image, copy to new layer on mockup, position on the mockup) to create seven top-section flags.

Now do the same procedure for the bottom section. Again, start from the left of the original image and on the mockup. Name these sections b1 - b7.

The middle section will go the other direction, so this time, start from the right of the original image and the right of the mockup.

Place all the middle-section flags on the mockup, and you'll have an idea of what this image will look like assembled as a flag book! (Hide the guides and grid for a cleaner visual.)

So now we've seen what the image will look like if you start with the top flag section flopping to the left. If you don't like the way this looks, you can switch the direction; have the top and bottom sections flop right and the middle section flop left.

To do this, you'll need to do two things for each section.

1. Switch the order of the layers
2. Move the layers to the opposite edge of the mockup document

When we created the original mockup, we created layer t1 before layer t2. This means layer t2 is "on top of" layer t1. Layer t2 partially obscures layer t2. If we're going to flop the top section in the opposite direction, we need later t2 to be on top of layer t1.

Here is the same image, flopped the other way. Note that the right-most middle flag is on top, and the left-most top and bottom flags are on top.

Okay, great! Now how do I make it real?

Whether you're going to assemble your flag book "flop left" or "flop right," the flags themselves are exactly the same. It's all in how you put it together. So basically, just scale your mockup to the print size that you want, and then copy the flags at that size into a print layout document. Print that document, cut out your flags, and away you go :-)

If you've used the same proportions as I have (20 small divisions on the original and 24 twice-as-wide divisions on the mockup) then the ratios are as follows:

• Width of the fully-extended flag book = 24 large divisions
• Width of spine = 16 large divisions
• Width of flag = 7 large divisions

So you can decide your print size based on any of those. Let's say you want the spine to be 8 inches wide. Then the fully extended book will be 12 inches wide (8 in x 1.5) and each flag will be 3.5 inches wide (8 in x .4375).

Using the Scale Image dialog (Image-->Scale Image from the menu) I'll set my image to a total width of 12 inches at 300 dpi.

Now I can create a new 8.5 x 11 document, also at 300 dpi, and copy the individual flags into it to create a print page (or however many you need to fit all your flags).

Note: Make sure to observe the grain direction of your paper. Karen Hammer's article in the Bonefolder suggests aligning the length of the flags with the grain of the paper.

The sunset was amazing this evening. The MO drove around for blocks looking for good vantage points and I lucked out with these shots.

(I particularly like the second one :-)

At the HBAG open workshop meeting this week, Ping showed me how to make this cool little origami book. As will be obvious momentarily, I'm not a professional origami instruction writer, but you might be able to figure it out ;-) [Note: If you can't see the pictures, forget it.... The words alone will absolutely not be sufficient!]

The finished book has eight pages, and two "secret" four-page spreads (the insides of the regular pages).

Start with a square piece of paper. Fold it in fourths, and then cut half of the paper in fourths, perpendicular to the folds. (These flaps will be the pages.) Make diagonal folds in the part you didn't cut. That gives you a page that looks something like this:

Now fold the bottom section up

and the top flaps down.

Fold the right and left sides in to the center.

Now you have to do what I think of as a typical origami move (sounds impossible and doesn't make a bit of sense til you've done it). There is a sort of pocket on each side of the bottom front section, and you have to tuck it in behind.

Here's the pocket

and where you're tucking to

and what it looks like when you're done.

Now you're going to fold the pages down into their correct orientation. Start with the left set of pages. Fold them down

and flip them back.

Then the same thing on the right side.

Now just fold on the spine, and you're done :-)

Finally, here are pics of a template that shows which pieces end up where, and sketches of the process which may or may not make more sense than the narrative above....

Good luck :-)

Billy Squier Waterloo Records 021299 03

Originally uploaded by nathan_malone.

OMG SQUEEEE!!!

The wonders you can find tag-hopping at flickr :-)

and Robert Plant is hot. This newsflash brought to you by Becker Vineyard's lovely Provencal grenache blush.

Tonight I finished up my submission for the Money Swap at the Carving Consortium.

The task was to create currency--pretty open-ended :-) I decided early on that I wanted to make coins instead of paper. It took a while and some messing around to decide just how I was going to accomplish this. After several false starts, I ended up embossing metal, adhering it to wooden nickels, and covering the edges with stained-glass copper tape. I wish they were heavier, but I like the size and especially The Shiny!

I bought some thin metal sheets and started playing. I stamped my pattern on one side and used an embossing stylus to trace the pattern, which makes it raised on the other side. I made all the "bird" sides on the pewter sheets, and then carved my LORAX - 2006 stamp and started on the brass.

Well, it didn't take long to realize that the habit of carving letters backwards so they print frontwards was a bad habit in this case! I'm not a very accomplished letter-carver in the first place, and I wasn't about to try to recarve the stamp "frontways" so I let the project sit for a day while I thought. I finally figured that I could stamp onto paper and emboss through the paper onto the metal. Crisis averted!

Around this time, it also occurred to me that it was not at all obvious that I had actually done any stamping, much less carving. Not only that, I didn't leave myself any space to put my name or the date or any other standard swap-type stuff. Sooooooo, I decided to make an accompanying card. On the front I put a message from Lorax Herself, and I put all that other business on the back, including an impression of the bird stamp.

Then I needed a way to keep the cards with the coins, so I made envelopes. (Like I need much of an excuse to make envelopes. They are so much fun!) And that was that. I think that explains everything in the picture :-)

Off to the PO tomorrow! And off to bed now....

The Generator Blog strikes again, with a link to one of Don Realya's art generators. I poked around and re-found the Real Time Contextual Art Generator, seeded it with "mad, oilman" and got this incredibly appropriate result.

Now off to play some more :-)

and I'll say it again: "That subwoofer kicks @$$." Okay, maybe that's not exactly what I said last time, but it's the same idea. Funny how it's Dieselboy again (and Ibiza--that's kind of weird) but let me just say, if the phrase "drum & bass" does anything at all for you and you don't own any Dieselboy, you're a total pansy.

Can you tell it's time for the Art Car Parade?

I saw this befanged Jeep in Memorial Park this morning, and I have to say that it was even more amusing from behind. Instead of a trailer hitch, it had two tennis balls. Swinging from the bumper. Tiger-striped, of course.

[Here's a better picture from last year's parade.]

Liz Lubowitz has made this little set of bits'n'bytes much prettier, don't you think?

The Style Contest (for all SixApart-powered blogs) has been lots of fun to watch. This one (Garden State) has been my favorite since the early days (in the style browser, the entries are in reverse order, so you see the newest ones first) and when I looked the designer's page, well, turns out I actually voted on all of her entries, and I only bothered to vote on the ones I really liked. At least I'm consistent :-)

(Separately, the comments are still b0rken. I've exhausted the forums and submitted a ticket. This really only affects LizBeast, my lone faithful commenter, but I will still try to fix it!)

So, here it is, my very own type cabinet:

(It has all the trays--I had already taken a couple out when I took the picture.) Here's a close-up of the incredible layer of dust:

I wish I'd thought to take a picture of it in situ at the warehouse. Anyhow, I took all the trays out and started cleaning. First I dusted with a swiffer duster, and then scrubbed with Murphy's Oil Soap and water.

In this picture, the top tray is dusted, while the bottom one has been washed.

And then I gave it all a good rubdown with some furniture polish with orange oil. Here the left tray is scrubbed and the right polished:

and here is the cabinet, looking much better:

The wood on the trays is particularly pretty. Nothing like decades of use to bring a nice smooth patina to a piece of wood....

I let it all soak in for a while, buffed it up some more, and then brought it all in and reassembled it in the office. It looks great!! I can't wait to load it up with paper :-)

Today started with flowers and cinnamon buns, so it was obviously going to be a good day.

We glued down our spines and cover boards, put on the bookcloth, turned the corners,

cased in the text blocks and all of a sudden -- real books!!!

Book #1 went into the presses and we charged headlong into Book #2. Although it was technically the same as the first, I found myself adding a lot to my notes, which I had thought were quite comprehensive....

Here is Don turning corners

and Ed making end tapes.

About six hours later, scant minutes before the end of "overtime" (the extra hour beyond the optional hour that Myssie agreed to stay with us) I had Book #2 ready for the press:

This photo really doesn't capture the colors at all. That marbled paper is just gorgeous.... I'll get it back tomorrow, but I did have Book #1 to bring home and show off :-)

We even remembered to take a class picture!

(Ed had already taken his books to his car, so he didn't have the fruits of his labor to display for the group picture. That's a shame because he used some really gorgeous papers and leathers; his books looked quite different from the rest.)

Now, are those HAPPY BOOKBINDERS or what??

Thank you, Myssie! Thank you MPH! This class rocked.

My bookbinding class at the Museum of Printing History is fantastic! Today (day 1) we folded, punched, sewed, glued, added a ribbon, made and glued endtapes and spine filler. Tomorrow is covers and book #2.

Here is Myssie admiring the results of a nice trim from the guillotine.

I have to admit, we did all get a bit giddy at that point. After seeing how nice Geri's text block looked after trimming, I had to send mine through:

Not a great picture, but believe me, that is one smooooooth foredge!!

And here is my little book-to-be after adding the ribbon and endtapes. (Dude. We made endtapes. Most books you see don't even have endtapes, and we made ours. Out of pared leather. I may faint.)

More tomorrow!!!!

I received an email the other day via flickr from schmap.com notifying me that one of my uploaded pictures had been "short-listed for inclusion in our Schmap Austin Guide, to be published mid-April 2006." A quick google turned up that I'm not the only one. I decided to let vanity get the better of me, and agreed to submit my picture (admittedly one that could use a quick 'shop job) for "final consideration."

Below the fold, the EULA from the Schmap Player install, which does mention that some content, including photographs, has been licensed via Creative Commons or otherwise, and such licenses should be observed. There's even a whole section just on Creative Commons, which ought to make some people very happy. I'm no lawyer (thank God--sorry Susan, Kirsten, Geoff and anyone else I know with that proclivity ;-) but it seems to me they're being quite upstanding about the whole thing. I downloaded the San Francisco guide, and sure enough, there are flickr photos in it, and the links go right through.

Update:
Hmmm. Schmap is generating some buzz ;-)

This picture popped up in the "latest from everybody" section on flickr this morning and at thumbnail size, I thought it looked like a painting. (Actually, at regular size it is still quite painterly.) Cool picture, but I think it would be really irritating to be in the upper sections behind all that smoke....

P1000646
Originally uploaded by shanghai_ultra.

I heard the unmistakable drums of "Big Beat" this morning on KTRU but of course it was a sample:

08:20 AM- dizzee rascal / fix up, look sharp [boy in da corner] on the matador label.

I get an automatic win on this song on Metal because nobody else (besides Liz!) even knows the sampled song much less the rapper's overlay.

(Hm. This is interesting.)

The MO is gathering up some music to share with a young co-worker who actually has a clue, and one of the offerings is Basehead's Play with Toys. This is one of my all-time favorite thank-you-for-telling-me-about-this records. (Aside from Morphine, to which I lay full and undisputed claim (thank you, Michelle), the MO has all the cool music. It pains me to admit that.)

Someday he should put together a list of Necessary Tunes. We would have some overlap, mostly stuff that he's introduced me to that I now consider essential listening, but then his would veer off to metal-land and mine would go more ... I dunno, singer-y? Plus Billy Squier, of course. Hm. Might be a fun comparison :-)

Anyhow, here's a link to the Basehead record, just in case your musical education is as lacking as mine was.

I finally finished stitching together the scans from Rob and Cindy's scrapbook (note to self: next scanner will handle 12x12 pages in ONE SCAN, not four) and uploaded them to flickr. The set is here: http://flickr.com/photos/txmagpie/sets/72057594086892949/

I test-drove the QOOP photo book service, and the results are nice. I ordered an 8 x 10 book of the scrapbook pages I made from our Washington DC/Pennsylvania Memorial Day trip a couple of years ago and I am pretty happy with the results. I wanted to do it on lulu.com, because they have a square book format, and it's saddle-stitched instead of perfect bound, which would mean I could take the cover off and rebind it myself, but I never could get the pdf conversion to work, so pfft. The QOOP images come out just over 6 1/2 inches square, so that's okay. And the image quality is good, so I'll live with the format. It's a tad expensive ($15 + $5 s/h for 24 pages) but it really does look nice.

Speaking of bookbinding, I've signed up to take a case binding class from Myssie Light at the Museum of Printing History early next month. It's a full two-day class and I can hardly wait.

We've been in this house for several years now, and we're still being surprised by the plants. This really ugly weedy tree thing next to the driveway up and sprouted these incredible flowers. Who knew?!

After a little research (thanks for the links, Mom :-) I found out the tree could get pretty big, so now we're trying to decide where to move it to. It certainly isn't going to get big where it is now....

http://www.emilycompost.com/angels_trumpet.htm
http://mgonline.com/datura.html

I loaded up Adobe Photoshop Elements, 'cause it came with my tablet (big thank yous one more time, Mom & Dad :-) and I wanted to play with some brushes that I couldn't convert to use in Jasc/Corel's PaintShop Pro. I think I begin to understand the fascination with brushes.

The photo is mine (we had a bumper crop of daffodils this year!) and the brushes are from designfruit.com (Jason Gaylor) and inobscuro.com (Nela Dunato). I didn't spend much time with it but it's kinda pretty anyhow--Mother Nature gave me a good head-start....

This was unexpected. Long after seeing this photo on the cover of an Orvis catalog I saw this:

Even though they're just silhouettes, they're obviously the same exact ducks. How cool!

(I took that photo from my car, sitting next to this truck at a stop light. Dang, my car is short. Just like me... I only notice it in pictures ;-)

Whew! Last night I finished the last content page and cut the folios for the mounting and binding. I still have a few little odds and ends to sprinkle around in blank-looking spots, and a couple of pages are going to want titles, but this phase is substantially done! Remaining tasks: scan the pages, make the covers, mount the pages on the folios, bind. I can't wait to see how it looks all put together--I must admit that I am exceedingly pleased with this book so far.

R&C -- No peeking!

The MO said he'd picked out stockings for us and he hoped I'd like them. They arrived today and they are soooo cool! (The saguaro for me and the flames for he....) They are hanging from the mantelpiece already, looking quite festive. This weekend we get a tree (yippeeeee!) and put up the lights and it's going to really start looking like Christmas around here.

We have a new favorite tv show in the MO household: The Private Life of a Masterpiece on Ovation. It's an hour-long show that focuses on one particular famous piece of art. The episodes are well-done and inevitably contain nifty little bits of trivia. Several of them have gone into forensic detail with x-rays and other analysis of these works, trying to determine original sizes, intentions, etc. The program about Degas' The Little Dancer was particularly interesting.

Of course, you have to suffer through some capital-a-art critics in the process, but part of the fun is yelling at them to just get over their bad selves already. Roger Kimball¹ is a suggested antidote to these folks ;-)

¹All credit to the MO for exposure to Mr. Kimball....

I've finished up the thank you cards for my Birmingham chickee--they're going to be double-sided 4x6 inserts for notecards she had already purchased. She had some pictures she wanted to use, so I incorporated those (in her words, she started out glam and ended up with Ben-Gay!) and I think they're great. I'm taking them to the printer tomorrow :-)

I still can't believe she walked 60 miles. That's just nuts.... She rocks!! (And is still the most gorgeous woman I know.)

Here is the front:

and the back:

Wheeee!! I have a patron! My girlfriend Randee walked a zillion miles (okay, sixty, but still--in three days?? holy cow) to raise money for breast cancer research, and she wants to send thank you cards to her friends that sponsored her, and she asked me to design them for her! How cool is that? I'm tickled pink and I hope I can come up with something she likes. The MO wasn't too thrilled with the samples I showed him this evening, but he's a notoriously difficult customer, and the designs were pretty girly....

We went to the Bayou City Art Festival yesterday, and as usual, came away with a bunch of great new art. This show occurs twice a year; in the spring it's in Memorial Park and in the fall it's downtown. We've been going for years, and this fall show was one of the very best. Many of our favorite artists participate in both shows, but this year we also found lots of new stuff to love. Of course we never can get everything that we like, but we gave it a pretty good shot this time!

Here are some of the artists (read: the ones that have web sites) whose work is now gracing our walls or shelves:

• Chip DuPont
• Angelo Fico
• Kelly R. Guidry
• Jay Long
• Laura Maclay
• William P. Thayer

I had no idea ducks could be so cute! The MO received an Orvis catalog yesterday, and the cover photo shows a bunch of ducks coming in for a landing, their feet sticking out at all angles, their bodies tilting crazily in the sky. They look like they've just got their learner's permits and haven't quite figured out how to steer yet.

The photo credit in the catalog is for Tom Vezo, and sure enough, here is the original photo (with even more ducky goodness, as it was cropped on the right for the catalog). Too cute for words, really.

My cds for the Dual Disc Debacle are ready to ship! I forgot to stop at the office supply store for disc mailers, so the actual packing and addressing will have to wait one more day. I have three international swappees, so I want to get them out soon since they'll take a while to arrive. As a teaser, here are the covers:

I'm pretty happy with the playlist. It took some doing to get the whole alphabet represented (had to take liberties with x), and it is certainly an ... eclectic ... mix of music, but they're all good songs and it was a fun challenge. I'm quite curious to see what I receive :-)

Earlier this week I noticed a single green stalk in the bare patch of yard next the driveway. I figured it was a little weedling tree but on closer inspection, it had a thick lily-like stalk, so I let it be. And sure enough, today it bloomed.

It only cost me four mosquito bites to get pictures of it this morning. I reaaaaally hate mosquitoes! In other surprise yard news, the MO noticed that the banana tree we've never quite got around to chopping down is sprouting bananas. They're pretty small yet, but they're there!

Pretty cool, huh? Happy botanical day :-)

Flickr: The_German_Dude
(Specifically some cool architectural shots and what looks like some kind of museum exhibit.)

Tonight there is (nearly) a full moon. It looked huge as we drove home from an evening with friends so I thought I'd try to get a picture of it. My little Elph is not exactly hot-shot camera equipment, but tonight I discovered that "bad" pix can be a lot of fun....

(The moon is the thick white line to the right of the highway sign.)

Central Market has had roses on sale for the last couple of weeks--two dozen for $9.99. How am I supposed to resist that? Roses don't last as long as some other kinds of flowers, but they are soooo pretty. The ones we bought last weekend were hot pink and yellow, and mostly gone by this weekend, but there was one flower that opened up just perfectly. It was pointing straight up, so its petals opened out around it without the whole thing flopping down off the top of the stem. I was able to keep a couple of these to mix in with the new batch so we have even more roses around the house this week. I love it....

flickr: davelorenzini's photos / Tags / italy
(gorgeous!)

We had a beautiful sky this evening. The blue was lighter and brighter, and the clouds more peachy, but you get the idea. It was enough to make people stop and stare.

I noticed this lily yesterday morning on my way out the door. My camera lens fogged up a bit but the haze almost looks intentional.... I have no idea what kind of flower this. It only lasted a single day and I haven't seen any more of them.

In other home-body news, I have about 1/3 of my WWII Memorial Day scrapbook pages put together. Only one year after the fact.... Anyhow, I found a great deal on big (28 x 30) paper at Texas Art, I finally finished writing up all my notes, and now I'm actually gluing things down. So far I think it looks pretty good.

This was my first experiment with creating "digital pages" and while I'll admit that I really enjoyed the process of creating the pages online (FotoFusion is lots of fun, despite a weird GUI), it's a major hassle and expense to get from there to a physical product. And of course you want a real book, or at least I do. Half the fun is making the book. I like books, and so does the MO. Heaven knows you can tell that the instant you step into our house. We have tons of books.... And making books is just, well, it's like suddenly finding yourself in the principal's office but for some reason the grownups don't realize you're not supposed to be there. It's like getting away with something.

So, yeah, I want a physical book. In this particular case, I made my online layouts 12 x 12, since that's a "standard scrapbook size" and heavens-to-betsy, we wouldn't wanna be non-standard, now would we? So that's great, and they look terrific on my monitor, but did you ever try to find somewhere to print an image that big? Open your wallet, my friend. I got lucky, in that this whole techno-junkie thing is in the blood, and my dad had a yen for a large-format ink-jet printer, so my mom & dad printed my pages for me as a Christmas present. (This plan pretty much limits me to one scrapbook per year, you understand....)

Being me, I am not satisfied with just slipping these printouts into sheet protectors in a binder. There's still that whole BOOK thing to contend with. So I needed even bigger paper to mount the 12 x 12 pages on, and ideally this big paper would be twice as wide in case I want to stitch the binding, thus the wait for the sale at Texas Art.... And I've decided on a boring old post binding after all, but that's okay, it's still fun to play with the big sheets of paper. I have nine folios, thus thirty-six pages. Subtract front and back for the flyleaf and that leaves thirty-four. Twenty-four pages of pictures, ten pages of text. I've physically completed twelve of those pages so far, but they're all laid out. Haven't a clue what the cover is going to look like as yet....

I guess it wouldn't be nearly as much fun if you could just click the "make it a book" button, after all. I really do like the trimming and planning and gluing as much as taking the pictures in the first place :-)

Keeping with the carblogging theme ;-) I saw this on the way home today. Now, this is not the ThunderChicken, but it definitely qualifies as a cool car.

This is a two-cd + dvd set including music and video footage from various Mark Sandman projects (not just Morphine). I haven't even listened to the cd part yet. The dvd is great. It's well-presented and a bit quirky, but it feels appropriate. Some of the interviews are wonderful, and there is lots of music on the dvd portion aside from the packaged videos. I was disappointed with the selection of footage of Morphine, but the songs chosen from the other bands make up for it, and the videos are superb.

My guess is that you either really love this music or you hate it. I love it. Morphine was one of the best live shows I've ever seen. I dragged a bunch of unsuspecting coworkers to see them in Indianapolis and I don't think any of them liked it but I was standing right in front of the stage and I really didn't care what they thought. That music, his voice.... On stage he was supersexy. To say the least.

Playing with pictures this evening while chewing on some intransigent code in the mental background.

I am from marigold seeds, from Volkswagen and granite jetties.

I am from the railroad tracks and the ditch, hot in the sun,
from the haze of the onion patch and the cool piney woods.

I am from the blackberry bramble, the dandelion, the round warm hen's egg.

I am from Boat Yard Saturday Night and Nonesuch Corner, from Ivan and Jeannette and Gay.

I am from the artistic temperament and the romantic tendency,
From may we please be excused now and deck us all with boston charlie.

I am from the blue book and the purple book, feeling Grace breathe life into the ranks of the pipes.

I'm from the-ship-after-the-mayflower, sweet cornbread, black-eyed peas and parfaits.
From when Rob cracked his head and I theoretically learned about tact, from croquet in the back yard, and never getting the joke behind pulling Grandfather's finger.

I am from carbon-copied onion-skin pages titled Research,
a box of black-and-white five-by-sevens,
war medals and newspaper clippings.

Slides projected on the refrigerator door taught me my own unremembered history and
decades later negatives projected in the darkroom showed what went before.

Continuing on my Fragments from Floyd roll, this is in response to a series of posts (here is one) suggesting a sort of memory exercise based on a template derived from a poem (written in the house that Jack built--oh wait, that's something else). I'm not suggesting that what I ended up with is anything approaching poetry, but it has led me down a lot of forgotten paths over the past week or so. And somewhere along the line Fred said he's trying to collect 100 WIF's by June 1, so I wanted to help out :-)

We've had some pretty weather this week,

the bluebells are already coming up in the park,

and Melvin can be hard to see in the dark.

Tonight I finally finished assembling my Sardi books for an artist's book swap. I'm quite pleased with the results, but this is the first time I've played with this group and I'm a bit intimidated after seeing pictures of some previous swaps. The theme was "Ancestry" so I decided to tell Nana's story about getting the sardines from the corner store when she was first married and living with her mother-in-law, who didn't speak English.

[Long, with lots of pictures!]

"Software Art." Okay, now make it react to the music from my digital music channels like an MP3 visualization, and maybe we'll talk....

This morning's surfing landed me at the Designologue. Officially,

A designologue is a conversation between two designers in the medium they understand best - design. Comparisons can be made to Coudal's Photoshop Tennis where two designers alternately modify the others image using Photoshop.

But instead of one designer versus another, the two converse. No winners. No losers. Just good conversation.

Select a DSNLG (yes, much shorter) to view (I liked this one), either by clicking a thumbnail (what is it about a slice of an image that is so appealing? it's a great shape for thumbnails in this case) or selecting from the drop-down on the front page. Now you can follow