Victoria Nece

Wall decals are awesome.

Monday, 07. 28. 2008  –  Category: Graphics

I have a solid white wall in my bedroom that’s more than eighteen feet long, and I had the hardest time figuring out how to decorate it. (The fact that most of the walls in my apartment are solid concrete and won’t accept nails definitely doesn’t help.) But I put up some wall decals this weekend and am really pleased with the results:

Both the branch and the birds came from individual Etsy sellers. The dark woodgrain portion is from http://www.shanickers.com/ and is repositionable; the red-orange birds are from sweeetnothing.etsy.com and, while not movable, are removable and won’t damage my walls — super important since I’m not allowed to paint.

They’re very easy to apply — not much to it beyond peel and stick!

Oh, and here’s the geeky bit: I actually plotted out where I wanted to put the decals in Photoshop before I applied them. I set up a really simple scale (something like one inch = one foot) and turned on the grid, which made it quite easy to get a fairly accurate rendering:

Now, if I could just get my curtains up…

More Fractal Wallpaper

Monday, 07. 21. 2008  –  Category: Downloads

Five more wallpaper images for your downloading pleasure, all 1680×1050 and created with AEFlame.

These are a little subtler than the last batch, but I think that makes them a good bit more usable as well.

Fresno Bee covers Making of a Law

Wednesday, 07. 16. 2008  –  Category: News

Hey the Fresno Bee wrote a story about our Making of a Law film! They even mentioned my poor little bill character! (No relation to Bill of “I’m Just a Bill” fame — but I have to admit, it’s amazingly hard to talk about the legislative process without personifying the bill somehow.)

The film is part of what’s called The Constitution Project, funded by the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. The nonprofit group says it wants to improve civics education and public understanding of democratic institutions. In a related film, for instance, Imbriano examines a crucial Supreme Court case from the 1960s.

The films target a high school audience, or younger. A cartoon embodiment of the Wawona school bill walks through Capitol Hill corridors, slumping in despair when doors shut in its face. A scene from a cheesy old horror movie illustrates the dire fate of most of the 9,000-plus bills introduced in Congress each year: Most die.

“The documentary really shows how hard the process is,” Stauffer said.

You can read the rest here:

http://radanovich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=89920

Shrinkery

Sunday, 07. 13. 2008  –  Category: Graphics

I’ve spent much of today playing with a fun technique called “tilt shift” — you can do it with lenses or Photoshop, but either way you get the same effect: normal size objects appear to be miniature models of themselves.

It’s not remotely difficult to do — just select everything but a thin feathery strip of the image and run the lens blur filter. Everything in that one visual plane should be sharp, but nothing else should be. (Paint back in some of the lost detail with the history brush if necessary.) Add a bit of grain to the blurred areas, crank the saturation to a 1950’s Technicolor level and you’re pretty much good to go.

This technique works best with photos shot from a high-ish angle, and will give particularly good results with fairly regular subject matter such as buildings and careful landscaping. Also, England. I think it’s the combination of UK architecture and the very green grass there, but the country just seems to lend itself to being converted into tiny model villages.

Berwick-Upon-Tweed, shot from the train from York to Edinburgh:

York, sans scaffold-covered Minster:

A very mini Mini:

And, last but not least, something from the other side of the pond: the lovely Jersey City parking lot.