I took this picture in church a couple of week ago, when my cousin, Mariah, was eating a pop tart and not sharing. Every time someone someone asked her for a piece she would give them this look. When I seen the option of making a captioned picture I knew this would be the one.
I again used a photo editor called “PicsArt” and started with a blank project. I uploaded the picture and clicked the option of “Add Text.” Then a white box popped up that allowed me to add the text I wanted. (I had to do this twice, once for the word up top and then for the words down bottom). I dragged and dropped the words to where I wanted them and that was it. Her face and the caption work perfectly.
After struggling, for hours, to create a venn diagram in Word, Excel, and GIMP. I went and found http://www.gliffy.com/, an online diagram making software. It was simple and easy to use. You drag out the shapes, shift them into position and then add the text.
At first, I had no idea what to put into a Venn Diagram. I looked at others to find my inspiration but nothing was coming. Then I started thinking, what do I want to put in the middle? Who deserves to be in the middle? Who beats out everyone else? Batman! Duh. It took me a while to come up with attributes that would put him in the middle, while having other heroes in the diagram as well.
I subscribe to the DC Universe. DC has all of the big boys and girls, including my favorite hero of all, Batman. A human who fights psychotic villains, bosses around heroes with superpowers, and manages to run a successful business. You can’t do much better than that!
Below is a 10 minute screencast outlining how to create an animated magazine cover using Photoshop. Thanks go to Ben Rimes for the inspiration as well as to Melanie for the perceived need. I’ll be doing another one for GIMP shortly, but the same general logic applies for both applications, it’s just easier in Photoshop. Keep in mind I don’t talk about how to create an animated GIF in this tutorial. I recommend creating your animated GIF first, and you can do that using Tom Woodward’s tutorial for Photoshop here or mine for GIMP here. Also, the following video is best watched in fullscreen to catch any and all detail.
This is such a great design! It is based on famous sitcoms with a twist. The design is in balance created by the squares. No matter which way you look at it, 3×3 all the way around. The design is centered around the title of the show, which is where most of your attention is focused. Yet, the design is symmetrical and in proportion. The pattern of girl on one side and boys on the other with the parents creating the connection supplies the rhythm of the design as well as the unity. The bold blue creates a solid background for the characters to stand out against. Normally, people scan over the faces and recall names, yet here you find surprise. Gilligan has replaced a Brady. This replacement creates a connection between the two sitcoms. The alteration blends so well with the design that someone actually has to look to find what is different.
Part two of my Design Assignments requirement, I chose to do the Creative Commons Poster.
Being an animal enthusiast, I chose an adorable hound in the middle of a field of daisies. I chose the caption “Share the joy” for my photo because without the ability to share photographs and information, we wouldn’t be able to see the joy in photographs like this.
I love the idea of sharing the world, experiences, and joy and I think that this photograph that I chose tells a greater story than just an adorable hound in a field. It says something about the place the dog lives, the freedom it experiences regularly playing in a field. The absence of a leash, the rolling hills in the background, it all adds to the sense of freedom.
I bring you this so I can share the tutorial for creating an animated magazine (or movie poster) that is to soon follow. This is a brand new ds106 design assignment, and you can find it here. Now back to polishing off the tutorial—it’s actually a lot easier than you would think. The original magazine cover is here if you would like to do a little comparison.
Update: Video tutorial for this assignment posted here.
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 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:
The one that got under my skin was the Yoda Ven diagram, which outlines the possible intersections of “Green”, “Small”, and “Poor Grammar”, and when you run intersections of these you get:
I knew I wanted to make this a new design assignment, so I did- Venn Pop Culture:
In the vein of Stephen WIldish’s “Yoda Venn” (see http://stephenwildish.co.uk/ for all of of his designs), design a Venn diagram of three circles, each representing an attribute, where each overlap defines a figure from popular culture.
I had a harder time coming up with three that worked, and gave my all the combinations. I then aimed to define the intersection of all three characteristics to get them all to describe Gandalf, and that broke down into “Old” “Long Hair”, and “Powerful”. Here is what I got:
I tossed out about 10 other starts that failed. This is not easy! Making the graphic was simple in GIMP, a gradient background, and three overlapping circle selections with fill and “multiply” for layer effect.
And what does this mean? Well everyone likes Gandalf, they want an old powerful wizard on their side. The hair? Works for me. The more fun relationships are the 2 sided cross overs.
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.....
