Monday, December 29, 2008

messing with website

Boy I am so relaxed between classes. I really do love doing college online, but the time crunch is so hard! I just can't keep everything up. Something has to be let go. I had forgotten what having a couple hours to myself feels like.

I've been fiddling around with my website to show off my class results (Media 111 and Media 204) and then somebody gave me the idea of Google Adsense... just for fun I submitted my site. They turned it down because they only accept finished websites. What was keeping it from being finished was mostly a state of mind and the "under construction" text on the front page. I removed the offending text, resubmitted it and they accepted it within an hour.

Then I messed with page layouts, changed all the graphics, etc... eventually just added a white content box, cleaned up the dust again and put ads beneath.


Mainly I just wanted to show you the banners I was working on. They're very pretty, so was the layout. But I went back to the Russian Flowers theme again because it's familiar and feels like home.







The biggest problem I was having with that was trying to think of what text to use!

If I get into web design my ideal client will be the type of person who knows pretty much what she wants her website to look like and I just have to accomplish it. I'm not all that creative / original designer type. I'm a problem solver! Tell me what you want, I make it happen.

Monday, December 15, 2008

To Have and To Hold


I was so impressed with this story!  Easily THE most romantic novel I've ever read, that appealed to me the most. It was the bestseller of 1900. You already knew I was out of date, right?

Just happened across this cover. I don't necessarily like it, it's not what I had imagined at all. The first time the two characters meet each other, she's an aristocrat disguised as a puritan maiden, and the hero, though also a nobleman, is wearing buckskins: after he meets her, he is impressed enough to stop and scrape the mud off his boots with his knife.

It's all dramatic gestures and reading between the lines, and pirates and Indians and thrilling escapes.  Did you know about the Indian uprising against Jamestown, in which a quarter of all the whites in America were slaughtered? 

Read about it here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacre_of_1622

And read the book for free here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2807

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Photoshop Class!


My next class is a Photoshop class. The only project to be posted on the board this week is "anything", that's right, just photoshop something and share it with the group. So I sat down yesterday and had way more fun than I usually do. Usually if I started just playing with Photoshop guilt would get to me and I'd have to go do laundry or do something with the kids. But wait, this IS what I'm supposed to be doing!

The palette made me crazy. This isn't exactly what I wanted to do; I wanted to blend the other colored images (all from the Adobe Samples folder of safe, non-offensive images-- after all, I'm sure the teacher didn't really mean anything...) with the original paint blobs to make it look like glossy blobs of these images, but I'm not good enough with Photoshop yet to make it happen, so I settled for this.

 





The boat and lake image is the one provided for an example in the assignment, so I couldn't resist doing something else with that.

A collage for spring!
 


Book Cover Using Layer Masks

Assignment:  combine images into a cover for a book or CD.  I picked Way of An Eagle by Ethel Dell, which I had just read, and been very impressed with.  Things were so different back then!  It's fun to read a story written when things we consider unusual now, like having servants, were common, and things we take for granted, like a car ride, were worth featuring in the story. 

About the novel: 

The Way of an Eagle was published in 1912 and by 1915 it had gone through thirty printings. The Way of an Eagle is very characteristic of Ethel M. Dell's novels. There is a very feminine woman, an alpha male, a setting in India, passion galore liberally mixed with some surprisingly shocking violence and religious sentiments sprinkled throughout. A modern day critic, Nicola Beauman, says: "Most modern readers will greatly enjoy The Way of an Eagle, for it remains the best kind of read for anyone wishing to curl up in an armchair...and wallow unashamedly in a book that is entirely timeless...I love to imagine my mother and grandmother sobbing over books like this."

It's an old-fashioned love story with some wonderful messages.  If you'd like to wallow too, you can read Way of an Eagle free here, at Gutenberg.






 The lady is Gladys Cooper, an actress in the 1910s. I bet she'd make a great Muriel.


 

Using Clone Brush to Remove an Object

I'm especially pleased with the slide picture. I used the pen tool to make a new shape of shadow to match the railing, and airbrushed some of the surface. 


This one was an assignment. Non-optional. Take this guy's beautiful skin and ruin it with a tattoo. Okay: let's at least make it a good one! 


 



Assignment: Create a print ad with layers, selections, and masks.  

Example of what we were supposed to produce. 

I picked pianos for my project because "it's easy to sell a product if it's something you really like".
I used the pen tool for all the outlines. Pen tool makes superior outlines!  It's a huge improvement over the way I was doing things before.
Please note there's no reflection of legs in the original, but I added them.  I had to do each leg separately.   



And another product, with another great reflection  :-) 

 




There are the elements, here's my finished result:


 

I'm in!




Flipping through the Chadwicks catalog that arrived this week I see a lot of dresses I'd actually wear. What do you know, "me" must be the style this year!
These are so cool I might order them, if I had money and if they were made in America.

Monday, March 17, 2008

No, Colemak!

Dvorak is yesterday's news. The future is here:

http://colemak.com/FAQ

This is great! It's a layout specially designed for computers. The most frequently used keys are on the home row and the shortcut keys are preserved! It is so, so, so much more comfortable than Qwerty.

My post in the forum (long and ongoing):

http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?pid=2406

Monday, February 25, 2008

Dvorak...

Not a Czech composer (apparently not pronounced the same either), something far more useful :-)

http://www.dvorak-keyboards.com/

I'm switching again.

I switched a couple years ago, absolutely loved the feeling of typing on Dvorak-- you can't believe how smooth, easy and non-strenuous it is compared to QWERTY until you try it-- but I gave it up because of the shortcut keys.

The only ONLY benefit of QWERTY is how many programs use Ctrl+Z undo, and X, C and V for cut, copy and paste, which are all on one hand and very convenient.

I've been suffering on QWERTY lately, and now I'm grown up enough to adapt to the loss of the shortcut keys. Some of them now use the left hand, is all-- the key shortcuts are the same, just not in the same locations any more. That can be gotten used to as well.

It's difficult for someone who typed 105 wpm to become a 20 wpm beginner again... but I've a feeling it won't take long :-)

LOL kittehz!!

http://icanhascheezburger.com/

Can't believe I spent that much time looking at the "kitteh" pictures and laughing... oh they're cute though!

...even the bad grammar's cute.