Well that’s it. We came home the other day to see the young ones sitting in the yard under a tree. Not good with the dogs. We’re thinking, great, how long will this go on, we can’t have them stuck in the back yard on the ground, that won’t work. Luckily, a little while later, the mom came down for a feeding, then flew up to top of the fence. They paced a little bit and then finally followed her up like pros. What a relief, they can fly! This was the last time we saw them all together.
I am putting this here so I don’t forget, part of my new Memory Overflow category.
Iaroslav Lazunov over at designmodo.com put this nice list together describing what is new in Adobe Illustrator CS6 (this link here covers the whole CS6 Suite). He even shows some examples of how to use the new or changed tools. While he does talk about gradients on strokes and pattern creation, the two biggies everyone keeps writing about. He also goes into some of the little things that make the program better.
I for one am hoping it is more stable and with the 64bit support and ability to use more ram, maybe it will be.
Sadly, you still can’t scrub values, select colors outside the color picker or rotate the canvas (view) in Illustrator CS6 like you have been able to do in Photoshop for a while now.
A few more shots over the last week growing like weeds. The parents can’t keep up with the feedings at this point and need to leave them to get more grub.
Today we had to do a title for our favorite movie. I can’t say for sure what my “favorite” movie is, but The Jacket is certainly on the short list. While it is not for everyone, I think it is fantastic.
Taken back in November, these night shots of the valley were made by moonlight.
The mourning doves are at it again. Here they are during what we refer to as “the changing of the guard” and dinnertime for the young ones!
To get these shots I set the camera up on a tripod using an SMDV RFNe (low price remote trigger, check amazon). 1/5 of a second with an f6.3 and auto iso. I used auto iso in case it started getting dark while I waited, I figured I would rather have noise then darkness. It might have been nice to go with a bigger aperture to get an even shallower depth of field but I did not want to end up with a bunch of just out of focus shots since I would not get to make adjustments once the action started.
This week we used the 3D Effects and had to do a logo. I was working on a tire but every time Illustrator 5.1 rendered the logo on the tire it would crash. I finally gave up and made this bottle of Crash Cola.
I don’t know how I ended up on a nursery rhyme theme this time, really. It just sort of happened and I went with it.
The lesson this week was about type and included a number of different ways to make type more interesting.
Star Light uses three techniques, it uses a Text Style for the letters, a Graphic Style for the star and the letters follow the path of the star.
Row uses Area type, Reflect and Gradient.
Humptey uses Text on a path, although other elements include the Graphic Styles, Gradients, Clipping Mask and Feathering.
Jack and Jill use Type on a Circle
Can you remember the second part of Jack and Jill. I had never heard it before but found it while researching this project:
Jack and Jill went up the hill,
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.
Up Jack got and home he ran,
As fast as he could caper.
There his mother bound his head,
With vinegar and brown paper.
Head on over to Michael Frye’s site and check out his video on Lightroom 4 : the new tone controls. If you are not reading Michael’s blog on a regular basis you are missing out on some great landscape photography imagery and tips, so add him to your RSS feed and stay tuned.
Back in 2005, long before the iphone and ipads, I built a CarPC that ran some front end software called RoadRunner. This software allowed anyone to make their own screens as jpegs and map the functions of the computer to those screens. After copying several of the available layouts and simply recoloring them to match the car lighting I decided they needed a usability upgrade. The key the usability was two fold:
So the common theme here is the flat, shiny cornered button. Certainly this is a pre-iphone look. It gets the job done and while it does not clash with the interior, it is not inspiring. This old example was made in Paint Shop Pro and there are over a hundred icons for the full interface that include navigation, application and music controls.
The Illustrator assignment for this week was to create iphone style icons. To come up with this set I started out with this tutorial on YouTube here that was part of the lesson set. This video is excellent, the instructor goes fast and I had to rewind numerous times but it was well worth it. His use of the Illustrator interface panels made more sense to me than what I have been doing and it led me to move things around and save my work space. At first I made a rounded play button like everybody has but then realized, I wanted sharper edges to match the sharp edges of the car they are going in. This small sample is from left to right: navigation, music, music folder, play and fast forward, a handful of the needed to transform the CarPC interface into a new look.
If you are interested in CarPCs, head on over to mp3car.com for more information but understand this is for the hobbyist, it takes work even when buying fully assembled kits and it will cost more than if you just buy something outright from a regular car audio manufacturer.
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