Minimalism!

So, I decided that until I have a real way to set up my blog the way I want it, I would go with this nifty template from the blogspot gallery and tweak it just the tiniest bit. I also think I'm going to start blogging more regularly, but if that doesn't happen don't be surprised.

And the Blogging Starts Now!

So, coming up in my life, the term here at Drexel is ending and that means, work, finals, and then BREAK! Finally. And with break comes BLIP FESTIVAL 09! That's something I'm really excited for.

Don't really know what to say right now, but here comes my blog!

Enjoy!

I think I wanna redo this

So, I think I want to redesign my blog but, honestly, I don't know nearly any CSS, and I know very little HTML. What ever am I to do? I should learn that stuff, I am in design after all. I'll work on that. but for now this stays untouched, because I don't feel like dealing with it, maybe a new banner/border soon, and this green is started to make me sad.

Hullo Again

Alright folks, (yeah, "folks") I've got a few things seeing as I haven't posted anything in a good while. Mind you none of it's new, not really. OK! The first is about that design I had posted before. The scoring ended with pretty crappy number of comments, but, but... the score was a 2.75! now out of 5 that might sound rather shitty, but on threadless that's pretty damn good. Anyway, oh oh, right new thing. New-ish thing, actually. the picture you see above! That's a new self-portrait I just finished. I kinda don't like calling them that because really, it's just me tracing. So let's try that again. Above! You see a new vectorization of me, myself. You will notice that I am all alone, however, in the source photo (below) I have my lovely tickey beside me. So technically the picture is not finished, at some point tickey will join me in vector form, but for now it works pretty well for updating icons and avatars and such.

On to the NEXT order of business. What you see even more below is a demonstration of a little template that I made for PowerPoint. This is because I really am a geek. It happens. Anyway, I made the little frame you see there in Illustrator, and then popped that into PowerPoint just as a plain old .png. Everything else was just arranged in PowerPoint. The video is a bit slower than what it is in real life, but hey, that's what you get from online streaming, even vimeo...

Oh oh! I'd like to real quick thank Apple! Just for letting us FINALLY do quick, easy screen capping with quicktime, it made this MUCH easier! heart snow leopard!

And that's that for now, Enjoy!

PowerPoint Template Demo from Jake Beadenkopf on Vimeo.

Hello Again

So, I've been absent a long time, but for a good reason. I've been working almost non-stop on the above design. It's right now pending approval, but I'm betting it'll be good. I'm gonna need all your support and stuff. Bigger picture down below. Enjoy!

Tweet, the faithful

May he rest in peace.

We barely knew the bird, he with his sometimes assured stare, but oft confused look. He knew not of telephones nor twitter tweets, but we loved him dearly. Alas on the morn of July th' 16th his time for voting came to an abrupt end. He with a small score, albeit respectable, the 2.05 was not enough to save him. At just over two months of age he had grown very much, but was still so young. We will miss him dearly. However, in our grief, we must not forget to look forward, for although our dear bird friend has gone, we must continue on and look to the future towards "Clowning Around" and other such designs, even those yet unannounced!

That is all for today. Enjoy!

Tweet!

So! My latest design has been accepted for scoring! Now I need your vote! Go check it out! Enjoy!

Holy crap.

So, I did it, after 52 days as a critique on Threadless my beloved design "Tweet Tweet" has finally been submitted! Here's the standard full size promotional bit they gave me, it's not up for scoring yet, it's still pending approval, but you can be damn sure I'll tell everyone as soon as it is approved. Enjoy!

Edit: Weird, because of the CSS stuff in the page template it actually cuts off the flash thingy, better than running into the side bar though, I guess.

Score this design: "Tweet," to help it get printed on Threadless!

"What a strange time to be opening" thought the garage door as the poorly lubricated gears screeched into life in unison with the chains wound around them. The car residing therein was of the same general opinion as the door, and sorely hoped that she wouldn't be the reason for the early morning racket. To her delight, it was the bike who was taken by the young man. The bike too was excited for it had been a long time since the old wheels had done any real spinning. In a minute they had set off into the unknown mists of dawn. [To be continued? It's up to you guys]

Hello Again

So, I haven't posted anything on here in a long long time. Don't really know why, so I'm not gonna try to explain, rather I'm just gonna give you guys all an update on what I've been doing. Most of all, I've been making this design (above) for Threadless. It's coming along really well and I think, just about ready to be submitted. You can check it out here if you like, and by "if you like" I really mean "you better." So get looking!

Next up, I've just been having a summer, going out, doing things, getting my iPod broken. Oh yeah that's one of those things I'd blog about. So here we go, if you missed all those tweets with me freaking out about my iPod not working, and no matter what I do et cetera here's that story. So basically I had jailbroken my iPod touch and it was all going well, and great and everything, but then when OS 3.0 came out, I decided I would upgrade. But rather than resetting the iPod then doing the upgrade, silly me went along and tried to use the "Upgrade" button in iTunes on my jailbroken iPod. Needless to say it didn't work. So I thought to myself, "oh this isn't a big problem, I'll just restore, and then it'll work! So I clicked restore, and it tried restoring, and it was all good, but then, when it had finished it just showed that horrible connect to iTunes screen. So no matter what I did, it wouldn't work. I tried downgrading, I searched forums, used really hacky solutions, and even tried the troubleshooting tips on the Apple support page. nothing worked. So finally, after making sure it had been restored several times to be sure there was nothing jailbroken to be found there, I headed over to the Apple Store in Suburban Square. What I hadn't realized was that the iPhone 3GS had just come out, and the SS Apple Store didn't have any tech support on hand on launch day. Great going there. So the place was packed, whatever, they were very friendly and helped me schedule an appointment for that Saturday because they were actually booked completely the rest of the day and the next day. Anyway, that Saturday, after a little freaking out on Friday, I show up at the Apple Store, explain my problem (of course saying nothing about jailbreaking), and tell them I tried everything and it just won't work! So the iPod "genius" tried restoring it on his computer. Of course that didn't work, when it was done he checked the contacts, and of course everything was fine. So he asked the other guy there what to do. They came to the conclusion that they would replace it. Wonderful! Exactly what I knew they would do! So off he went to that (glorious, I imagine) back room to get my replacement. To my dismay they were all out of the 32GB iPt2g replacement models. So they had to order it, I didn't really care too much, I was shaking a little from having my little jailbroken secret stay under cover. So yesterday I got a call, and they had my iPod in stock! I went to get it and everything went great! I have my new iPod, it has the 3.0 software, and I am not jailbreaking it again.

Alright, i'm trying this mobile blogging thing, and i hope this doesn't get split up into multiple entries. Anyway, so now i'm at virginia beach, yesterday was fun. I got so burned, it's ridiculous, right now i'm lying down wishing my burnt pain away. I'm sad though, because i can't attach a picture to this... Jason is over there yelling on the phone at t-man, about kayaking.. Apparently that's what they're up to, it's pretty chill out here, but everyone is so dead today after two days of beaching. Nothing really to enjoy in this post, oh well. Enjoy!

Why, Thank You

This is a very big thank you to MOnk (@monkmusic) for mentioning my blog, and me (@pixls), in a tweet. Now if you know MOnk and how many friends and followers he has, you may be wondering why he would go out of his way to mention me and my humble blog. Well the bulk of it has to do with the fact that I'm straight up awesome, but more specifically it has to do with the picture that you see above that I recently drew for him. If you know MOnk and all of his awesome then you'll recognize his face. Being that he calls himself "Monk" I thought it would be cool to see MOnk as a monk. So I did. There's a version without the logo down below. Enjoy!

P.S. shoutout of congrats to two lovely California sisters Danielle & Jeanette (@daniellefab & @jeanetteix)
P.P.S. sorry if that "lovely California sisters" bit sounded creepy...

Wow, a lot of things

So, it's been a long time since I updated around here and, I suppose, a lot has happened. For one, that design in the last post was declined again, sad I know, but whatever. Now I'm working on a new one that's coming along rather nicely (see above). I made the original design with far more colours as you can see here. It's up for critiquing on Threadless (see previous link).

In other news I finished my community service project! And since the play is all done I can totally show you the complete thing! Hooray!
[for those of you who noticed (all of you) for the final production there was a "t" in "beast"]

Beauty and the Beast Prologue from Jake Beadenkopf on Vimeo.

And now before I forget, time to make this picture I just thought of for Monk. Enjoy!

Oy

So, I've been absent from my posting for a little while, but there's a good reason for it. However, the grace and articulate-ness with which I convey said reason may be a bit off due to the late, or early hour of the day that I find it to be. Basically, it's two thirty in the morning, Eastern Daylight Time; though there is certainly no visible daylight at this present hour. On to my long winded excuses as to why I haven't been posting with such regularity that I had been, the kind only found after having consumed copious amounts of bran flakes. As you all know, or at least soon you all will, I have been working on various bits and pieces for the school musical. I've finally finished cutting out all of those wretched pink foam wolves, yet the binding is yet to be completed. What's worse is that I've recently found that all those wolves are needed by Monday at the latest, but of course, I had to tell the director that they would be ready by Sunday! So, Sunday it is. I need to find a way to keep the two pieces together under stress without wearing them out (I'll post pictures of the horrible things, when I get a chance).


So, during the oh so scant hours (psh yeah right) when I'm not slaving away over the animation (see below), and the hard labour required of me I've made a Threadless design! The first revision was utter utter crrrraaaap (see way above). Oh I'd been typing this in "Edit HTML" mode, and totally didn't realize it 'til I tried to make something bold... Anyway... So I wasn't real surprised when it got declined because I totally whipped it up in a fifteen minute flurry of design driven adrenaline, wuick before I had to leave for school, to make use of the saws and such things kept in that wretched building (run-on?). So it had already been declined after the three hours or so spent at school, when I got home the "we're sorry" email was sitting all tight and comfy in my inbox. I wasn't really hurt, or even felt anything because of it (as opposed to when "Clowning Around" got declined), so I plucked that little mother fucker and dropped that shit straight in the trash where it belongs ('scuse). Immediately, if I recall correctly, I set to work fixin it up, you can go see the critique... I think, here? Yeah. So after a while I got it up to that last bit, (the one directly above) and submitted it! Like, I actually pressed submit like two minutes ago.

In other news, actually relating much more significantly to the first paragraph, I recently found out that that animation that I'm working on (see previous post) is due this coming wednesday. I've got a shitload of work ahead of me I think... How am I gonna get this guy's head to look right on this completely faked body??? Oy. Well, updates on that will come when they do, I might go silent for a little while more, like, 'til wednesday... Enjoy!

Intro so Far...

Beauty and the Beast Prologue (rough draft) from Jake Beadenkopf on Vimeo.

[Where it cuts off is all that's there so far.]

I've started animating, and sequencing the video for the intro to the musical. It's coming along well. The audio is from the soundtrack of the musical. All the pictures and animations are mine. The only thing is the video with this... compression, the frame rate went all wonky, so it's choppier and slower than it's supposed to. I'll probably figure out a better way to do it. I'll upload that when I get a chance. Enjoy!

It's Been a While

So I realized that I haven't posted anything in a couple days. What should I start with? I have a little bit of the next slide, but that's basically the last one, just zoomed in. I have a start on the third one, would you like to see that? I think it'll be more interesting...

Oh that's right I also started working on the placement of this nifty little design for threadless. It's been up on the critique section for a while, but i haven't done anything with it for a while. I thought it was time to start doing the placement. I knew where I wanted it to go, but getting it there just right is rather difficult. But I did it, and is now up for crit on threadless. Go check it out: http://www.threadless.com/critique/37538/Skull_and_Crossphones#v4
Forgot what else to say. Enjoy!

In a Faraway Land

I've finished coloring and filtering the overview of the little city where this all takes place. I think it looks very nice. Today I've cut out templates for shadow puppets, and later I'm going to make the actual shadow puppets, or at least, the main portion of them.


The process that went into making this picture was obnoxiously difficult, but the slides following this one should be much simpler. There are so many vector points in this thing it takes a while just to move things or even just zoom in. I think the final product is well worth it though, and it has a very nice look to it. I made the pure color picture in Illustrator using different brushes and such things, then exported as a .png with a transparent background and pulled the whole thing into Photoshop. I used a #E0E8BE background, solid, then on top of that, under the .png I placed an #888888 layer with a strength 4 fiber render (that layer is set to overlay). Again over that layer, but still under the .png there's a layer of black on white cloud render, set to screen, and with some of the opacity and fill taken down. Then finally on top of the whole thing I used another layer of cloud render set to color burn. then adjust opacity/fill of each layer to taste. Enjoy!

Once upon a time, in a faraway land...

A young prince lived in a shining castle.

OK, so it doesn't shine yet, or have color, but I've finished the hard part... of this slide... luckily the next one is basically the same thing.. just bigger. But I think it's looking pretty good so far. i'll look even better with the coloring! It has a nice medieval-y feel I think, the kind of drawing you would expect from back then, no? Yeah maybe there are some points where it could be a bit "better" but who really cares? It's only going to be up on the screen for a few seconds anyway, people aren't going to be examining it. Enjoy!

End of an Era

OK, so maybe it can't really be called an era, being that it started... nine days ago, but even so! Our dear friend pixlated has come to an early end (it's been done already), but fear not, for a loyal friend pixls of Ink (done far less times, once by me) has come to the rescue! If you read the last post, which I certainly hope you have, you'll understand where this came from, and why it's so awesome. So now we have a nice new banner for you which I think looks very nice (I brought back some taggy goodness just for you @daniellefab, better like it). Now we can all get back to our regularly scheduled blogging, though I suppose there is no regular schedule. Scratch that, this is my blog for the day. Enjoy!

New Look

So the other day, as I was drawing some animals for a certain short story I thought to myself "I need a refreshed look for my graphic identity." I didn't really think it like that but, basically I started doodling out a more... complex/professional looking logo type thing for myself. After some tweaking I was really pleased with the whole bit. So today, when I got home from my meeting, and by home I mean my sister's house, I started to design it in greater detail. The "pixls of Ink" moniker came about in two different stages. First was the pixls bit which many if not all of you have grown to know and love. pixls is simply "pixels" without the "e," nothing really special but I'm like "so cool!" And I totally had it way before Super Paper Mario! Then the Ink part is all a bit more convoluted than you might think.

[The next paragraph is recommended only for lovers of linguistics and Greek, otherwise there'll be a summary afterwards, but read it anyway.]

This past year some friends and I started to learn Greek, and while that all didn't go very far we did learn the Alphbet very well (α β γ δ ε ζ η...) and so instead of actually speaking Greek (Ελληνικἀ :Ρ) we would just write things in Greek lettering and make things out of it (like Γριφον @griff48). So, much to my disappointment there is no "j" sound in Greek, that meant that there is quite no way to actually write Jake, or Jacob. Then from my one year taking Latin I remembered about consonental 'i's (McMichael would be proud). So I decided that combining the principle of consonental 'i's with the Greek usage of aspiration marks, I decided that an iota with a non-aspirated mark, or something like that, would henceforth be a "j" sound. From there I could spell Jacob iota-eta-kappa-omacron-beta (Ιηκοβ), or Jake iota-eta-kappa (Ιηκ). Then upon seeing that I thought "funky, that looks a lot like 'ink' dunnit?" (No I didn't actually think "dunnit"

Basically writing "Jake" in greek letters yields something that looks like the word "ink."

After that realization I thought it would be cool to combine the two pseudonyms into one. Thus, "pixls of Ink" was born.

In the new banner for the site I wanted to stick with the largely green-ish theme that I had going before but, when I ran out of nice-looking green colors I thought, "let's mix things up a bit." I'm not all that interesting a person so my idea of "mixing things up" is making the dot of the "i" a horribly different color. Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't! The point in making the dot a different color rather than other such bits was that I thought it would be kind of clever. "How?" you all ask confused and slightly ashamed. "Well..." I begin my reply. I thought that it looked quite a bit like a dead pixel on an LCD screen. The whole thing then comes together and joins geekity with design. Enjoy! Goodnight!

untitled...

So, I couldn't really think of a clever title for this one so I didn't try. I could've done Domineering Dentists of Doom, but that wouldn't make sense because this post isn't really about me going to the dentist's office, it's really about a little fix i made to the twitter background so that the lighting makes more sense. (Do I smell barbecue?) Basically, before the bird had exactly the same lighting/shadowing that it had in the original source picture. Then I realized, wait, look at where the light's coming from! There should be some kind of shadow on the bird from the mouthpiece there! Originally I was just gonna be like, eh whatever, who cares? Then today I was messing around with the picture because I just got CS4 (awesome, right?) so I decided, what the heck, I'll do it. So I did this really nifty bit using a copy of the path from the actual mouthpiece, then used a copy of the path for the bird's body as a clipping mask. This way it cuts the fill to the shape of the bird's body without me having to go in and move. each. vector. point. down. to. the. border. It's much nicer this way.

In other news I did go to the dentist today. Wasn't too bad, "not much plaque buildup," but apparently I've got three teeth on cavity watch :( oh well. I don't like the dentist's, always pokin' and proddin', gross stuff. (No I don't smell barbecue...) I am hungry though, it is time for lunch I suppose, bye now.

PS sorry for my terrible computer handwriting (it's not much better in real life)

Update! After much fails, and one final success the updated picture is now my really real, actual factual, sincerely... sincere...(?)... twitter background! yaaayyyy! I think it looks cool, validation?

Hooray! Joy! Finally!

So, after two days of disappointment, my aspirations have been actualized, twitter has finally allowed me to doctor my design, and I have finally, actually, factually, changed my background picture!

This joy of joys, victory of victories over the machine overlords of the internet is one that ought be celebrated with song and dance, and praise towards the heavens, but that's for tomorrow I'm afraid, as now it is time for bed.

If the picture here isn't proof enough for you go check it out for yourself. I'm not hard to find, I'm @pixls!

@twitter grrr

So, today I made this really cool picture, that I want to use as the background image for my twitter page, but twitter is being stupid and so when I click upload a picture, it bring up the little browse thing, and I find the picture, and click open. It seems ok, so I click save changes and then, ready? Nothing happens. It says your changes have been saved! Yet, my background is still blank...

So I thought, huh, maybe it's just dumb right now, so I'll wait. Whatever. I waited like an hour and it still isn't doing anything. Oh well.

Oh, and it now appears that blogger is being dumb as well and has screwed with my colors... maybe it's because it's in CMYK? Who knows...

(update: fix'd here, not yet on twitter)

I've Done It!

I was finally able to make a camera in silhouette that's still identifiable as a camera! At least I think so, and I say it'd better be, it is going along with words, but I still want people to get it, and being that most people are kind of dumb i'm worried that most of them won't.

However, I'm still not sure as to whether I ought to include the flash powder stand. I'm really not sure whether that would make it clearer, or less clear, as to what the picture is trying to depict.

camera's on it's way

So I made some minor fixes, by some I mean one. I hope it's more recognizable but I really don't know :( Then I decided "hey, let's make a whole new one," so I did, but I'm still not sure which i like better.

Help!

I Need Your Help!

Alright, so I'm not really desperate, but I'm really kind of stuck, because I know what this picture is supposed to be but I'm not sure that people will get it, and the point really is for people to get it. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to look at the above picture and tell me what you think it is. Then if you're pretty sure about your answer, you need to tell me what you think I need to do to it to make it more recognizable, if anything.

Thank you all! (please?)

Finished Product

So I've finished the two different versions of the No telephony picture, and as per usual I am entirely open to suggestions.

As you can probably see [sorry if you're blind... somehow...] there are three designs above. Well one (hopefully rather obviously) isn't a sincere design. There's the full color, the monochrome and one that's just a wire frame of the vectors that went into the full color one (the monochrome wire frame is really rather boring), so gimme suggestions and I'll listen! I swear!

No Telephony in the Dramatorium

So part of my project if I didn't say it already is to make basically a kind of sign for the opening of the musical to go along with the bit that says no cell phones, no cameras. So what I've done is I started on this beautifully (I guess) done full color rendering of an old styley telephone. Then I thought that a simple monochrome telephone might actually look better. I'm not entirely sure, I think if we go with the monochrome it'll have to be quite a bit simpler. Maybe have a little plug with notches around it to make it perfectly clear that it is off. Well I'm not entirely sure, leave comments, please, what need to be done to them? Something needs to make the monochrome pop more, and I know that the full color isn't finished yet, so don't tell me that.

spam

No new pictures right now.
I need to rant (capitalization per @griff48's request). So, form the hours of about 12 am, to 1 am EST, I gained approximately 28 followers on twitter. My followdom suddenly shot straight up from 48 followers to 76. Do you know whence all these followers came? TheSmartEcard.com. I have no idea why they all started following me, or what purpose said website serves. Ordinarily I don't care so much about spambots following me on twitter, they follow, and I just don't follow them, but these all started following en masse. What's worse is that their spamming is so unabashedly straighforward. These weren't John Smith twitter accounts that when visited it turns out all they're tweeting about is insurance or V14GR4; these bots go right forward with twitter accounts that comeone might want, but their name, their freaking name(!) set to "TheSmartEcard.com" they weren't even pretending not to be spam! I think it's plainly obvious that the silly little image verification simply isn't enough to keep spambots out. Either that, or there's a whole bunch of really pathetic people out there. The thing is, that website, which I won't give the honor of typing out three whole times, I visited it, just to see why it's being so deperately spread, and the fact of the matter is, there's absolutely nothing of worth there. It pretends that a friend sent you an ecard with that link but it says that you have to fill out some dumb survey before you can get to it. It's not a real survey, it's a little fake five question IQ test. Then it asks for your cell phone number! I mean really, that's insulting! Do they actually get real people's cell phone numbers? If they do I'm quite sure whoever gives them totally deserves the extra spam they get.

On a less hate/rage filled note, would I be a hypocrit if this page had ads (not big flashy obnoxious ones), just like Google AdSense ads, what do you think? tweet @pixls or comment

PS. they're still going, and they've gotten cleverer, watch out for hordes of Jim Stevens'.

blogging and a warning

so since i've opened this little blog here it's been nothing but trouble, totally wasted my whole evening

but i really don't care, honestly i rather enjoyed it, i got the look how i wanted it, i made a nice banner (looks better in reverse, but you can't have everything you want), oh! there, it looks nice with the brown. good. so now it looks like i want it to, and i think i'll start blogging, i'll start by uploading, oh there, the image you see above is the work in progress on a phone that i'm making for the opening of a play. the point is basically to say no cell phones, etc. then there'll be one for photography. i'll upload things as they come, i believe in sharing so take what you like, just say that it's mine please!

oh yes and the warning, my blog is likely going to end up ranting a lot about politics, stupid people, friendly people, or whatever i damn well please. there may be foul language, there may be lewd sorts of humor, or even just general foul mouthiness. and i can almost guarantee daily offenses against the english language.

Hello World

So.
this is my first blog, technically i've blogged before, but that was horrid trash. this is me. the point is to post whatever i want whenever i want. the grammar might not be great, the capitalization and punctuation will be horrible. just a warning. i also twitter @pixls. but that's way too short for me sometimes. not that i'm a writer, not by a longshot, i just feel like a blog might be useful
i can post pictures, i can write (obviously), video if i have it, whatever.

generally it'll probably be a pretty fun place, post pics that i've made, or what have you, i'll talk about whatever i want, you'll see, you may even like it

well that's that, enjoy!