Archive for July, 2008
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Wall decals are awesome.
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 …
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More Fractal Wallpaper
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.
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Fresno Bee covers Making of a Law
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 …
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Shrinkery
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 …
