I’ve sent my family a postcard from Camp Magic MacGuffin this evening as part of the Postcards from Magical Places assignment as designated by our esteemed directors.
I had a rough time with this using GIMP. I can’t seem to get my bearings straight while using it. I’ve looked up tutorials and such, but I’m getting very disoriented and frustrated. I think I”ll have to steal my dad’s computer so I can keep using his Photoshop…
I thought this was a classic postcard-esque photo, showing the beautiful sunset and the height allowed me to get a greater panoramic shot. I think this postcard appropriately illustrates all of my past camping experiences. With years of camping experience with 4-H under my belt, I rarely wrote postcards home, but when I did, they were half-hearted and I typically showed more concern for the pets than I did for my own blood relatives. I chose a tie-dye stamp because I knew my hippie family would love it.
Up next I think I’ll be combining my Creative Commons research with the design assignment poster. After that, only three stars left and it’s only Tuesday. #winning
This week I found another block of time through which to sprint after a number of ds106 design assignments. I had some trouble narrowing down which assignments to tackle until I began them; clearly, I do not yet have the patience or chops for some of the work, so it’s great that the ds106 community has shared so many different ideas for assignments. I hope to contribute some ideas this summer and fall as I try to implement a more ds106/MOOC feel in my middle school classroom.
Here are my basic hardware and software specs for the week: MacBook, OSX 10.6.8, 2.26 GHz Intel Core Duo 2, 2 GB of memory, Chrome, Wacom Bamboo tablet, SketchBook Pro (for drawing), Acorn (for fills and copy).
This week the work is not in any particular order. I made an animated comic book cover that looks pretty crummy next to all the awesome examples out there. I don’t yet have the animator’s patience to pull off a decent attempt, so I’ll pass on sharing for now. It was a simple snikt effect.
I’m becoming interested in how the community categorizes tasks. At times today, I definitely felt like a designer; at other times, I felt more like I was tweaking a pre-existing design for my own education (which seems more like a visual task to me), or mashing-up a number of designs. Some of the visual assignments feel like design tasks, too – like the album cover. I’d love to hear more about how contributors and organizers think of course- and task-design.
I take a ton of screenshots in Minecraft. I love discovering new sights in Minecraft, as well as new perspectives on familiar places. I ask students to take a ton of screenshots, too, so I can share their work easily through blogging. (Teaching in a multi-age classroom in a middle school, I haven’t yet solved the riddle of whole-class social media use, so I try to collect and share as many digital photos and artifacts as possible.)
For this assignment, I looked through my ds106-server screenshots, found a picture I liked, cropped it some, and then appended a snappy postcard/bumper-sticker-ready punchline in Acorn. Lastly, I mocked up a simple back for the card and let it be.
Since I wrote about how much The Road terrified me when I posted my Liminal States story-shape, and since The Road showed up as the exemplar for this assignment, I went back to Liminal States and riffed on my fake album cover assignment; with Liminal States you really can’t go wrong with a boy and his dog.
However, I wanted to use a different image this time around, so I found
“>a picture of a boy dressed as a cowboy riding a dog in The Commons on Flickr.
I brought the photo into Acorn and composed the rest of the cover there, darkening the bottom band to offer better contrast for the tagline.
The boy dressed up as a cowboy reminds me of my [privileged, white male] love for archetypes, even though many of those archetypes make horrible, horrifying decisions, like the genre-riffing characters of Liminal States. Moreover, in the book, youth – the eternal kind – is not all its cracked up to be. Considering the source material, it’s also significant that the boy and the dog clearly have different ideas about what’s going on and are, in fact, headed – or at least looking – in separate directions. The presence of grass is germane to the novel, as well.
I picked Trajan Pro for the font because it has that somber, elegiac, official feel like the title of a Tom Brokaw book.
The tag line is neither entirely true nor entirely false in its description of the book.
I’ve cartooned myself many times – some examples can be found here, here, and here. There’s even a short comic I drew about the first year of our school out there in a filing cabinet somewhere.
I find using a cartoon alter ego to be very helpful in breaking up the monopoly that text holds over my blogging, and I like to use drawings in class materials, as well. Cartooning is a good way to and bring some humor to the engrimmening proceedings of American public education.
For this assignment I wanted to draw myself differently than I normally do, so I went online and searched after
“>an image of Savoy from the comic Chew as drawn by series-artist Rob Guillory. (I have no idea why I’ve never cosplayed Phillip Seymour Hoffman playing Chris Farley playing Savoy, but I know I could rock it.) I like Guillory’s style – it’s cartoony, dynamic, busy; as with Jeffery Brown’s completely different work, it makes me think I could draw a comic. It gives me hope.
I tried to capture Guillory’s sense of Savoy’s form, but left much of the interior clean, as I tend to do in larger work; paradoxically (maybe)I detail little doodles like crazy. I also colored myself for a change since I usually work in black and white.
I drew myself in SketchBook Pro using a 2.5-sized brush rather than a 4.0-sized one so that I my line would look more like Guillory’s and less like mine. I began with a blue-line drawing and then added a layer for a black-line drawing to bring into Acorn. Then I deleted the blue-line layer, switched to Acorn, and colored myself.
To make my own, I went for a popular, yet nerdy, property – The Lord of the Rings. In looking at spacesick’s use of patterns, I decided to use a ring motif to build Mount Doom and to perch Suaron’s eye atop it. I used a different color/material for each level of rings: silver for the Elves, bronze for the Dwarves, and iron for the humans. While that progression isn’t canonical, I used it to bring more color to the page and to communicate of how Middle Earth rank-orders its species. I could have made the other rings all white and left the one ring golden, but I am not at all unhappy with this design. I wonder also about linking the rings to show their interconnectedness in a chain-mail kind of way.
I used Acorn to compose the cover. I read up on spacesick’s fonts
“>here. The projector is the only element I lifted directly from any of spacesick’s covers.
Finally, I opened the image in SketchBook Pro for some final touches with textured brushes to worry the cover.
I’m really eager to see more of these designs from the ds106 community.
I’m not sure why this assignment is worth zero stars; I think it should get two.
For this task, I decided to make a children’s book cover for a hard science fiction novel – House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. I love that book. It gives me hope.
My cover, however, gives me the giggles. It’s so profanely incongruous – and yet so weirdly apt – that it delights me.
House Of Suns for kids
I drew the cover in SketchBook Pro and then colored and lettered it in Acorn.
As I hunted down stray pixels in Acorn, I discovered that it’s much easier to draw and paint in that program while zoomed in a level or two (this is both an a-ha and a duh moment). I still prefer SketchBook Pro for drawing, but it was satisfying to find a way to draw and color productively in Acorn, as well. At the default zoom, even a medium-sized brush can disappear on-screen in Acorn because its reticle isn’t persistent. That means if you’re trying to paint stray pixels in Acorn without zooming in, you lose the tip of your brush if your brush color is the same color as your background. That frustrated me greatly, but now I know that it’s easier to keep track of your brush tip while zoomed.
I hope others will jam on the idea of making children’s book covers for novels meant for adults.
Aude aliquid dignum: dare something worthy. I try to approach teaching and learning as if they were the most worthy things I could do and help others do. I think it’s important to ask kids to do worthy work. I think it’s important that teachers dare to resist the standardization of education. I think it’s important and worthy that we talk about how to subvert the status quo in our primary and secondary schools so that learning matters to kids, their families, and their communities. So here it is:
Aude aliquid dignum
I made the image in Acorn. I tried to minimalize the sans-serif text’s presence on the page without making it illegible (I probably cut too much of the “g”). Then, while trying to stay away from the Dr. Manhattan symbol, I made a little hydrogen atom to frame the words, with the “e” inside the electron. Hydrogen is a pretty minimalist element, but the proton and electron are also the building blocks of everything else. Hydrogen can exist by itself, but atoms do great and terrible things together. We humans can do the same, inside and outside Minecraft, a game about building – and/or destroying – alone and/or in a community!
I put another atomic particle in the upper right-hand corner so that the eye would be drawn there in an attempt to connect the two white spaces with one another over distance, which made me think that maybe the electron (which wants to create a bond) is also little person or organism looking to the stars and wondering how to connect with another being over a vast distance. I think connecting is worth daring.
I found a CC-licensed picture of a glorious, insanely detailed, embroidered Moss, brought it into SketchBook Pro, and traced over Moss’s hair and glasses. I used green in homage to the show’s pixelated, primitive CGI credit sequence. Then I went into Acorn to fill it in and clean-up white speckles left over in Moss’s hair and glasses.
For this piece, I searched The Commons on Flickr for propaganda. I went into my search looking for an ad or poster about building a shelter. I wanted to make a visual pun on our Minecraft work. However, when I found this picture, I switched gears. I hate Creepers. I’m playing the ds106 server on survival mode right now, and the Creepers have not been kind. If you look at my stretch of the beach on the server (behind camp), you can see how much Creeper damage I’ve had to patch. Finding a way to rally against the Creepers was just what I needed to lift my spirits.
I grabbed a CC-licensed picture of some Creeper cosplay. I took a screen shot of the head and cut out the background in Acorn. Then I brought in the propaganda poster. I used the scale and perspective transformations to size, angle, and position the Creeper heads. Then I made the heads monochromatic and color-matched them to their bodies.
Beat the Creeper
Now I’m ready to go back on the sever. I hope someone will put this poster into a ds106 texture pack for Minecraft!
#DontBlogNow starring Martha Burtis and Alan Levine. Somehow featuring the Bava, Timmmyboy, and Slaughterhouse 4. I did a lot of cutting, filling, and smudging in Acorn. I grabbed the movie poster here. I found Martha here and I found Alan here. I sepia-toned their faces, shrunk their heads, and then altered their saturation and brightness to help their faces better fit the gestalt of the photo in the poster.
#DontBlogNow
I love how different their expressions are, as if Martha has caught on to something that Alan is asking about again. “A serial killer in a red raincoat? Really? Was that a deliberate design decision? Where?” “Over-ay ere-thay, Alan-ay! Et’s-lay o-gay!”. Why someone snapped a photo of them at this moment I will never know.
I picked Don’t Look Now to avoid making a quick and easy visual pun about a movie I loved. I despise Don’t Look Now. I loathe that movie. I will never go to Venice. I refuse to look at myself passing on a boat. Forget it.
I will, however, spend hours remixing the film’s poster.
I just wish I was better at digital production – I really like the way the poster turned out, but I wanted it to be perfect, like my utter, unutterable, intangible, illogical contempt for this Don’t Look Now.
That’s it for today’s products. As I go further into the ds106 experience, I’m trying to stick with at least a few assignments per week that push me out of my comfort zone. I also want to balance the camp nature of camp with the profundity of the learning experience available to me here. I need to socialize more with my fellow campers, too.
I try to teach to what kids are doing in my classroom; in the same way, I’m learning to design what I discover instead of trying to design what I plan. It feels good.
I chose a blurry, badly accidentally taken photo of the ground and added the antique effect in iPhoto. Adding enough of the effect to make the photo look old, but not so much as to make it look like a sepia effect. I added text in photoshop as the finishing step.
I chose a quote from Leo Tolstoy about change. Currently, change is the overall theme of my life at this point. My family is moving, changing addresses, states, and sides of the Mason-Dixon line. I am personally changing myself and how I live my life and interact with others. The world is changing, politically, economically, and socially. This quote spoke to me in way other quotes about change didn’t. Many people want to change external things but not many people stop and actually change themselves. They might think about it, but thinking and wishing for change is not the same as doing and changing.
To create this photo, I used the picture of our foster dog as the background. Using the lasso tool, I selected my mom’s face and used the free transform function to make the selected space smaller. I then pasted the image of Mom’s face into the dog’s eye.
I decided to use Bridget, our foster dog, as the subject of this assignment. She is one of many dogs that has been rescued through The Pixel Fund. The Pixel Fund is a non-profit animal rescue that my mother created. Bridget has had many names. She has been called Mary, Dora, and currently Bridget. As it is hard to keep track, she is often referred to as Sister Mary Dora Bridget. Yet, she responds to each name individually.
The fact of the matter is, Bridget completely adores my mother, which is why I chose my mother as the image that means the most to Bridget. Anywhere Mom goes, Bridget follows, clinging like velcro. If Mom leaves and Bridget has to stay behind, she stays by the door and waits, watching intently for mom to come back.
I searched for a movie scene that everyone would know and was from a movie that I enjoy. I used Photoshop to insert myself in this famous movie. I used the scene as the background and used the lasso tool to copy myself out of another photo. I then pasted my image and moved my picture around to the right spot. Yet, it still was not quite right. I used the same technique that I used to cut myself out on the suitcase in the background and pasted that onto of my image. So it looked like I was actually in the scene rather than pasted on top.
I love Forrest Gump. It makes me laugh and it always moves me to tears. You watch as Forrest goes through his life, making friends, overcoming obstacles, and wandering through history without a clue. So just for a moment, I will be someone that sits and listens to the story that Forrest has to tell. As Forrest would say, “And that’s all I have to say about that.”
I took this photo with Photobooth on my computer and added the pop art effect. Quick, easy, and simple! Finding the subject worthy of being Warhol-ed though was a different matter. There were so many things I could choose from, including myself.
This is my mother’s grandfather clock that has been in my life forever. I grew up with the sound of it chiming. Too the point, where I know the the rhythm of the chime anywhere. It seemed worthy of becoming pop art. It stands at an angle in a corner and with every step or shift of weight on the floor it will let you know it happens to be there.
This photo combines classic and funky. And any photo of a clock makes the viewer think about time. We think about the amount of time we have, in a day or in a lifetime. I normally think about the speed of time and how fickle it can be. Why must it crawl in a boring situation? Why does it speed through when I am having fun? And why, oh why, must it stop when I have to give a presentation in front of people?
I got this thing for information graphics. It’s a Zazzy thing — can’t explain it. At any rate, Alan’s assignment was just what I was looking for to express my lifelong fascination with old movies, aging TV series, and the inscrutable weirdness of the bible. Dig it:
Today I decided to make leather pouches at the crafts table. Yet, I came across this piece of leather with a huge brand in the center. I was very deeply affected. This scar is still left years after everything else is gone. I understand back in the Wild West when cattle was free range and cowboys still existed, branding was used as a way to catalog and keep track of livestock. Back when people thought that animals don’t feel pain. But this is the 21st century, we have the technology. We microchip cats and dogs. We have the internet, satellites, radar, and instant information. Surely, we could find a better and more humane way to keep track of our livestock. Frankly, most cattle isn’t even free range anymore so there really isn’t a need to permanently mark an animal just so you don’t lose it. People worry about growth hormones and what goes into an animal before we decide to eat it. The whole point behind the organic movement. Yet, only certain groups of people worry about the emotional well being and life of the animal, instead of making tasty and healthy to eat. And there are still people in this world that think that animal don’t feel pain. That animals are some how inferior to humans. I just can’t see it. I have a dog and a cat that mean the world to me. Lucas, the dog, wants to make sure that I am safe at all times and Max, the cat, makes sure that I am happy. Always ready to comfort me when I have had a bad day. Animals give unconditional love and forgive easily. Appearances and disabilities mean nothing to them. How can something so compassionate be inferior?
Day one of week four and I’m getting my grips on the Design Assignments.
I tried the Lyric Typography Poster assignment, which can be found here.
Waddya think? I chose the lyrics “Ain’t it just like the present to be showing up like this” from Bon Iver’s Blood Bank. A beautiful song by Grammy award winning artist Justin Vernon, if you haven’t heard it yet, listen to it!
If you haven’t heard of Bon Iver, clearly you were living in a hole in February when it angered many pop culture fanatics when the band won Best New Artist. While I love Bon Iver, it angered me too because as I like to remind people just because it is new to you does not make it new.
Anyway, I used Photoshop on my father’s design computer for this project. I started with a blank canvas, typed the lyrics separately into Text Boxes, then moved them, resized them, etc., until I came up with a design that I liked. The clocks I got from openclipart.org… Check it out!
Camp is now over (see the final story. If you are craving an experience like this, head over to ds106 and see how to participate. For more on the Summer of Magic Macguffin, see.....
