Tag Archives: Art

Everybody wants one of these guys to wrap a piece of string around…

Now all we need are some miniature marshmallows, a box of Honey Graham’s cereal and some chocolate chips…

Hey, it’s another mini photo! This little bugger is an air elemental, to go with yesterday’s water elemental. It’s a slightly more exciting model, with a really fun face…

My wife is learning how to sew! My sister is teaching her, and I’m helping her document her progress. I know she’s going to be posting a couple pictures and sewing stories, but this is one that I took that I decided to appropriate for my own site… It’s a fairly low light shot, maybe a 3/4 second exposure and I really like how the moving needle left blurs of light in the air.
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First of the elemental mini pictures! And, sadly, the least interesting. Unless you were a 28mm tall surfer or something.

Just a quick image for today. Caught sight of this guy out of the corner of my eye as he was creeping around, trying hard to stay in the shade of the few trees around the parking lot outside of work.

Sometimes following a different path home after work is it’s own reward. Other times, you stumble on cool photo opportunities like this one. I call it “Reason #572 that I’d make a lousy soldier.”

If I was the guy on the rope, I’d be frozen just about there, trying to decide if it was a better idea to claw and scrabble my way back up the wall or if I should spend the next several weeks continuing to inch my way down.

If I was the guy on the roof, I’d be throwing up all over the guy on the rope.
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The in-laws have a new puppy! Just a quick entry for the evening with a photo and movie of little Lucy playing tug-of-war with the camera strap.

It’s tutorial time! I’d kind of promised to do this a while ago, so here goes. This was all done with Adobe Illustrator, but I’m sure there’s similar functionality in other programs.

1. Draw a square. Or a circle, or an irregular polygon. Whatever the shape is that you want to have torn out of the paper, draw one of those. I’m using a square here because it’s easy. Once you’ve drawn it, duplicate it and line it up exactly over top of the original. You’ll need the duplicate later.
2. Put a line texture on the frontmost square. I’m using the ‘Pencil Brush’ with a stroke weight of 2.
3. Make the textured line the same color as the background paper. White is easiest… In this step, I also expanded the line from a texture into a shape by going up to the the ‘Object’ menu and selecting ‘Expand Appearance.’ This is important for the next step.
4. Grab all of the white-filled line fragments and give them a drop shadow. Just the line fragments. If you grab the whole square, you’ll just get a square drop shadow and that’s kind of boring. You may need to futz with the settings a bit until you get something that you like.
5. Remember that duplicate shape from step 1? Bring it to the front. It should block all the stuff you spent so much time creating.
6. Select everything, then go to the ‘Object’ menu and select ‘Clipping Mask > Make.’ This clips out the drop shadow from the outside of the box, leaving just the stuff from the inside. Ta-dah!

Spotted this guy on the way to the car from work. Actually, to be more accurate he spotted me. It was kind of a surprise to be walking past a tree and suddenly realize that part of the trunk is watching…

He eventually decided that I wasn’t a threat, climbed down, and started advancing on me slowly, probably thinking that the camera was some novel method of dispensing food.

Then he was overcome by a bout of itching…