Recently in Art High, Low, Digital and Otherwise Category

Seems like it should be so obvious, but it took reading a book for me to really understand that it’s okay to scrap “out of order!” All of a sudden, I wasn’t three years behind—I was a hundred or so pages ahead. And I am VERY HAPPY about that :-)

My awesome parents sent me the Dover Pictura Butterflies book a while ago [OMG – I can get Dover books on Amazon? With Prime?! Watch out pocketbook…] and there are a few full page illustrations that I thought were particularly gorgeous. I wanted to add something to the illustrations, so I scanned a table of numbers from an old builders’ reference guide and faded that into the background. Then it occurred to me that a customized PostCrossing “cancellation stamp” would be a cool thing to have, so I poked around a bit and sure enough, found a tutorial. Translating the “warp text” instructions to gimp-speak was a bit of a challenge, but I eventually found the text along path option and was on my way. (You’ll need to click through to the original images on flickr to see my cool cancellation stamp :-)

1. moths and maths 05, 2. moths and maths 04, 3. moths and maths 02 Created with fd's Flickr Toys

The last two of these will go out today!

These urban silhouettes by PRaile were my inspiration for this series. I’m kind of surprised that I have so few downtown-type pictures, given that I can see it from my front porch, but I did find this picture that I took a while ago of some random bar.

Instead of completely silhouetting it, I played with the “photocopy” filter in GIMP and kept some of the wording. Then I masked out the background and tried a bunch of different scrapbook paper backgrounds.

I’m quite pleased with the results, and one of them even got a fave on postcrossing! How cool is that :-)

These were lots of fun! I sorta-kinda followed a tutorial on PSD Tuts, although I obviously changed the theme. (Unless you consider “medieval” really vintage, I suppose….) I had to do a lot of research to learn about layer overlays and some of the other techniques, and how to accomplish similar effects in GIMP, but that’s the whole purpose of these exercises, after all!

I ended up with three versions, two of which have reached their destinations. (Click through the pic above to see them all on flickr.) I only have two cards traveling right now, so I need to get on the ball and come up with my next batch! Maps seem to be a popular request, so I’m thinking maybe I’ll try something along the lines of this map collage that I did a while ago.

Hooray! My first postcrossing postcard was marked received yesterday, all the way from Germany :-)

I’m using postcrossing as an excuse to learn how to use GIMP. My plan is to work in batches, making a series of similar layouts so that I get to repeat the techniques I learn several times. Plus I like groups of things, and it sounds so capital-A Artsy to have a series.

Thus, the Colored Zentangle Series (plummy BBC accent, please!)

A while ago I scanned one of my conference call doodlings and have been thinking since then that it would be really cool to color it in.

• If I didn’t have a pen and paper around during conference calls I’d go nuts….

This turned out to be a bit more complicated than I had expected. I started just using the Fill tool, but that left little white artifacts along the boundaries between the color and the black lines. So I did some research and learned about the Color to Alpha tool. That got rid of the white, but using Fill on the result still was not satisfactory. Then it occurred to me to make the alpha-ized image its own layer, on top of the background, and color on the layer beneath. That way the color could come right up to the black lines, or even extend into them a little, and since the lines were on top, it would look nice and neat.

For most areas I could use the Fuzzy Select (magic wand) tool, grow the selection by a couple of pixels, switch to the background layer and fill with color. For areas that had open boundaries or where the scan was not as clean, I experimented with the Free Select tool, which I really liked once I got the hang of it. For very small areas it was easier to just color freehand on the background layer. I got a lot of practice with my pen and tablet!

Here is my first result:

(Note: The postcrossing links won’t show the postcard’s journey until it is marked received at the other end.)

• US-417767

I also made a simpler color-blocked version:

• US-417769 (first one received!)

From here it was just a matter of playing with the sliders in the Hue and Saturation dialog to come up with some other color combinations that I liked.

• US-417743

• US-417756

• US-417762

I love them! They look really nice printed on photo paper, and I’m using 4x6 adhesive labels for the address side. I hope they stand up to mailing well. (I suppose I could mail one to myself to find out….) Now that one has been received, I can get a new address to send to, so I’m off and running on my next batch, the Medieval Collage Series.

Now I may buy two copies, just because.

I got a form email from Amazon explaining that Patrick Rothfuss’ second book would not be shipping when predicted. Ensaddened, (I stole that word from the link I’m about to post—what a great word!) I did a quick google on “patrick rothfuss book 2” and very quickly came across his explanation.

I’ll be adding a new blog into my RSS feed, obv. And whenever the book does appear, I’ll finish it all too quickly, as usual, but I think I’ll actually appreciate it even more….

I got email from Wil Wheaton!!

I mean, yeah, it’s because I bought a book of his from lulu.com, but still! It’s pretty cool :-)

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.