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!