I get by with a little help from my friends.

Thanks to encouragement and suggestions from Melanie and Cogdog, I was able to rescale Slide Guy to precisely the size that seemed right for the Mean Machine.

Of course, then the machine was missing a thumb on its right/left hand so I attempted to draw it in. Shape is okay but now I’ve got to learn about shading, blurring, and highlighting. While I was at it, I also filled in a missing chunk of Slide Guy’s right shoe.

Here are the two versions. I’ll add a third at the end of the semester to assess my GIMP progress.

Thanks again, Friends!

Before . . .

After . . .

Assignment (Visual) 13: Take a concept, one word, and plug it into Flickr and take the first 50 images and average them using Photoshop or similar program.

I was inspired by a graceful, though fuzzy image of a jellyfish grabbed from a friend’s underwater footage. In my mind’s eye, I could see the jellyfish replicated so that it appeared to leave an effervescent trail as it floated toward the viewer.

That didn’t happen.

Everything went swimmingly until I discovered the environmental map and imagined how cool it would be to have a source of light in the image — one that cut through the darkness and illuminated the jellyfish. Two hours later, I was really in deep water. So deep that I started taking a protocol in hopes of learning from the ordeal. Here’s a sample:

6:56 Somehow can’t get back to light effects.
6:57 Realized how to turn off color tools. Select move tool.
6:58 Cannot add environmental map again. Better to abort. Deleted all.

Believe me. It was not easy to delete all that work but I felt confident that I had learned enough the I could redo what I’d done right and avoid the pitfalls that got me into my untenable situation.

The gamble paid off. I remembered the basic process and made some improvements along the way. But, it’s still not the jellyfish trailing efferevesence.

So I’ll just call it my “jamfish” that teaches me to deal with the frustration of not being able to realize my vision but keep the faith that someday I will.

Assignment (Visual) 560: Warhol Something.

It’s fun to think what Warhol may have done with digital and social networking tools. I can see a mash-up of Four Square and his famous Warhol effect with maybe each square placing the image in a different location.

Nothing so interesting with my first Warhol effect. I did use GIMP to create my first and then tried a “toy” on the BigHugeLabs site to generate the poster. I learned from the machine-generated Warholizer that a more abstract effect is more appealing — and takes 20 years off!