2 Ways to Create Realistic Depth of Field
July 27, 2009
Minervity has an excellent set of tutorials on creating realistic depth of field in photographs that don’t have any naturally. The steps are clearly explained and anyone with a basic knowledge of Photoshop can easily add this to their skill set.
For the article, go here.
500+ FREE Watercolor Brushes for Photoshop from Designm.ag
May 30, 2009
The good folks at Designm.ag have collected over 500 free high resolution water color brushes for some program called Photoshop.
Have you ever heard of it? You have? Well, then this link may be of some use to you.
Seriously, there are some outstanding brushes here. Definitely worth checking out and downloading a few sets to play around with (see samples below).
One thing I know is we’ve come a long way from Mac Paint 1.0 in January, 1984. . .
Yellow Mug software’s SnapNDrag – A better, free screen grab utility for OS X
May 29, 2009
The good folks at Yellow Mug software have a great little shareware screen-grab utility called SnapNDrag for Mac OS X. It improves on Grab with a better interface, more options and improverd functions (you can more easily capture timed screens).
Sometimes it’s the little things that add productivity to your day. Highly recommended!
“The New Yorker” cover finger-painted with iPhone App Brushes
May 29, 2009
Apple’s super-duper iPhone and an app called Brushes were used to create the June 1, 2009 cover for The New Yorker magazine by artist Jorge Colombo, who stood for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square drawing it with his fingers.
For more on this story, and a amazing short video that shows the cover being crafted stroke- by-stroke (the undo’s are eliminated from the animation), go here.
Miggs Burroughs Lenticular Art: Fairfield Public Library, April 16—June 14, 2009
May 14, 2009
Please mouse over the image if it is not animating automatically.
Migg Burroughs is a well-known CT-based artist and graphic designer who has recently been working with lenticular images. While this show does not feature 3D lenticulars, Burroughs certainly proves that this imaging technique can produce fine art in the right hands.
The heart of this show (called Journeys) is a series of nine 18 X 18 inch lenticular portraits that use a period photo combined with a contemporary one taken in the same style to achieve their effect. The image reproduced above is of Burrough’s mother. He used a photograph from her high school days along with an image he shot making a two image lenticular that fades from the young woman to the senior citizen. While this idea may not sound revolutionary, seeing these portraits in person was surprisingly moving.
Burroughs offers a bit of history in his text explaining that it was a French painter Bois-Clair that invented the lenticular concept by taking narrow vertical strips of two paintings, reassembling them and folding them like an accordian. Burrough’s process begins with two digital images and the software necessary to divide them 30 stripes to an inch. He then laminates the digital output with optical lenticualr plastic that has a corresponding 30 grooves to the inch.
One of the highlights of the show is a piece called Political Ties (18 X 18 X 36 inches). Burroughs uses 7 square images joined together to form a simple chair. In the images we alternately see a young man sitting in a chair with a white shirt and red tie, looking much like the fellow working away in the cubicle next to yours. The alternate image has the same young man in a black T-shirt, roped to the chair with his red tie used as a blind fold. You can walk completely around this piece and watch the transformation from every angle.
This show is well worth the trip to Fairfield, CT. All the work is for sale and Burroughs does commissions, too. It was all I could do not to break the bank and buy one of his smaller works on the spot.
There’s one of a local movie house, The Community Theater, (20 X 16 inches) that presents the same view from day to night with an old-fashioned neon movie marque as its focus. Simply beautiful. And for $450 it could hang in your home.
For Miggs Burroughs’ website, go here.
For gallery information on Journeys, go here.
Moving Murals on public walls by Rufus B. Seder
April 23, 2009
Rufus B. Seder has made books (Gallop and Swing) and greeting cards move, but he should be best known for his large scale moving wall murals.
- For a short CNN video, go here.
- For a detailed explanation of the Lifetiles process, go here to the Eye Think, Inc. website.
- For a great collection of short videos on individual public installations, here.
TypeDNA’s Fontshaker: A Must-See Online Font App
April 20, 2009
Oh-my-freaking-God if you have any interest in typefaces at all, you’ve simply got to check out the TypeDNA web site and their Fontshaker online app, accessible through your browser. Just as the Chocolate Math email I recently received described itself: “this is not one of those time-wasting things, this is fun!”
You can visually browse and discover all the fonts installed on your local machine (and open them in Photoshop) along with other neat tricks. You really have to experience their interface to see how much much fun it can be to play with your fonts. Click on the image for a larger size.
50 Free Fabric Textures
April 20, 2009
Designm.ag offers a nice collection of 50 Free fabric textures here and in these recessionary times, free is just the price we all want to be paying for our fabric textures, isn’t it?
Below are small sections of two I grabbed:
The Art of the Zombie Walk
April 18, 2009
Scroll down below for some thoughts and information about Zombie Walks. Here, a collection of posters announcing Zombie Walks held across the nation and abroad.
Pretty impressive for a recent ‘underground’ phenomenon.
I especially like the range of approaches shown here. You can see how this act of street theater can be pitched to all slices of the target audience: Shaun of the Dead fans, the Romero Purists, the Resident Evil T-virus bio-plague Umbrella Company conspiracy franchise, the Robert Kirkman Walking Dead comic book zombie apocalypse, the not-dead-so-technically-not-zombies-rage-virus unfortunates in the 28 Days and Weeks mythos.
Zombies—and the people who love them and wanna be just like them— seem to be everywhere these days. One of the reasons may be that the contemporary zombie fan has more and better zombie-related entertainment — in more formats — than ever before.
Comic books: The Walking Dead, just past its 5 year mark and issue number 60, by creator & writer Robert Kirkman, art by Charlie Adlard.
Video Games & Films: Resident Evil, three films starring the luscious Milla Jovovich; the video game has just released its 5th edition. Plus, a mention must be made of Aspyr’s Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse (2005) and its kick-ass soundtrack album. The soundtrack to this video game is one you won’t be a shamed to own, I swear!
It features an eclectic range of 50s and 60s covers like Oranger’s eerie electronica version of Mr. Sandman, Ben Kweller’s Lollipop, Death Cab for Cutie’s Earth Angel, Clem Snide’s Tears on My Pillow, an explosive take on Shaking All Over by Rose Hill Drive, the Ravonette’s My Boyfriend’s Back, a mechanical pop-clock work stroll through All I Have to Do is Dream (filled with discordant sound effects) by the Dandy Warhols and the one original cut by Phantom Planet, The Living Dead:
It’s no use
Go run and hide
You can’t escape this
Sea of sunken eyes
You know
We got the look
We got the push
We got the pull
Now
Who do you think
Is gonna rise when
Hell is full?
Films: Dawn of the Dead (re-make in 2004 by Zach Snyder); Shaun of the Dead (the classic rom-zom-com from 2004); Land of the Dead (2005) and Diary of the Dead (2007) both from George Romero, Fido (2006) a charming, little seen comedy with Billy Connelly as a domesticated zombie and Carrie-Ann Moss as the mom of the family who owns him.
Books: Until very recently this field was owned by Max Brook with his The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, coming to the big screen in 2010, directed by Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, Monster’s Ball) with a screenplay by J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, 2008).
There is surprising competition from Jane Austen and her new collaborator Seth Grahame-Smith with their best-selling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Grahame-Smith has signed a deal for two more period horror humor pieces in a deal that could be worth as much as $575,000. Next up: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
If you’re not familiar with the term, a Zombie Walk is an organized event where people gather to roam a section of a city dressed as and behaving like Zombies.
It’s a public celebration of the rising popularity of the Zombie amongst today’s thrill crazed youth.
I blame Television and Neglectful Parenting for this.
Constant text-messaging and also the Interwebs and Twitter have left today’s thrill crazed youth particularly susceptible to the Walking Sickness, it seems.
Some Zombie Walks are more like pub crawls in tattered costume; others are organized enough that they have ‘victims’ pretending to be ordinary citizens along their route. The taking of a ‘random’ passerby, mobbing them with a small horde of Zombie-enactors and having them emerge with clothes torn, bloodied and now staggering to join the Slackjaw side must provoke at least a few anxious looks.
Zombie Walks take place through out the year, though, of course, Fall is the most active season in America given the association with the coming of Winter and traditional Halloween celebrations.
A television program airing weekly in Pittsburg, PA called The It’s Alive Show has been organizing World Zombie Days, at which participants arrive in Zombie regalia with canned goods and non-perishable food items to donate to local food banks. World Zombie Day 2009 will take place on Sunday, October 11. World Zombie Day 2008, held on October 26, had close to 50 cities participating with more than 7,500 zombies shambling along with dead eyes and a hunger for. . .brains!
In Pittsburgh they hold their Zombie Fest at the Monroeville Mall, the site where George Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead (with its nun zombies, cheerleader zombies and football helmeted zombies) was filmed in 1977. 1,341 people participated in 2008 and they are awaiting Guinness certification as an official world record.
But later that month on October 30, Grand Rapids, Michigan experienced a record-breaking Zombie outbreak with an official tally of 3,370 participants. Over three thousand people in one place, getting their slack jaw zombie groove on. And friends, they might think it’s a movement. Source.
For info on the New York City Zombie Crawl, whose motto is “When there’s no more Booze in Hell, the Dead will walk the Earth,” go here.
Get your official NYC Zombie Crawl T-shirt, designed by E. J. Matos here. Click on image for larger size.
Just so long as no one starts discussing implementation of the Redeker Plan.
At some point in the coming zombie apocalypse it becomes clear that only a portion of the civilian population can be saved. What to do?
Pull back your armed forces and that portion of the population that posesses the vital skills society will need for rebuilding. Retreat to a location that can be fortified and has natural obstacles to recommend it; mountains, rivers, deep gorges and canyons, islands.
The remaining refugees, the bulk of the population, are to be herded into special isolated zones. They must be kept alive, well defended and even resupplied, if possible. You see, these survivors are deliberately left behind to slow and absorb the flow of zombie hordes trailing the armies’ withdrawal into ‘safe zones.’ Grim stuff, this zombie renaissance.
Ha, ha! How silly it all is—there’s no such thing as zombies. Still, the Redeker Plan gives me the creeps (from Brook’s World War Z).
A pattern is emerging.
First, a few small isolated incidents. Then larger and larger occurences, expanding geometrically.
Soon these will grow to form a chain of outbreaks until
no one,
anywhere,
is safe!
50 Things Every Mac Geek Should Know
March 4, 2009
From the editors at Mac|Life magazine (formerly the zanier MacADDICT). We can’t heartily endorse the entire 50. In fact, we honestly believe you can be a very respectable Mac geek and not know how to play Tetris in the Terminal.
Checking and repairing permissions (#7), yeah, that’s one for sure. But Dock tweaks (#20, #38) Firefox over Safari (#21) Walking Over Driving Directions (#34, beta) and Smart Playlists in iTunes (#39)? Maybe there just aren’t 50 world-altering Mac tips.
But there sure as hell are at least 17 Worst Mac Disasters along with coping advice from the same. Although disaster #7 Mac Scratch Fever, getting a scratch on your Titanium PowerBook? Perhaps we need to remind ourselves of a real disaster with consequences.