Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Make your blog mobile device friendly

(note - the type here is all wonky, sorry - can't get it to play nice for some reason)
I wanted to share a thing I discovered. You can set your blog to 'crop itself' (for lack of a better description) to display on mobile devices. On Blogger, go to the Settings tab and click on Email & Mobile. Click 'yes' on the mobile thing.


Here is a preview of what mine looks like formatted for a mobile device ~


(click to see it bigger)



Why is it pink? Well, the template I chose for my blog is the pink Watermark one. Then I made changes to it in the advanced design thing (taking out the pink), but they obviously don't apply to the mobile thing. So that's kind of a bummer. There's a probably a way around that, but I'm not sharp enough to know what it is. Its not that important. If someone really really wants to read my blog on their phone, they'll just have to bear with the pink background.


I also tried the special 'email to a blog' thing that's on the same page, but couldn't get it to work. Maybe its only for sending from a mobile device? and not a regular email account? I don't know. Over my head. 

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Fish Tacos, anyone?

My Wendelito ~

(click to see him bigger)




I took a little too long on this, but I worked out some things I wanted to try. Next time I'll be able to do the same thing, faster. Its all Prismacolors and Polychromos, and a wee bit of graphite. Graphite makes a nice "grey", and sharpens up to a needle point, so can get into nooks and crannies of the paper really well. Sometimes I run a sharpened colored pencil over a sandpaper block to get it super sharp like that. 

This kitty is an homage to my Wendell who I lost a while back. I'm working on a book dummy using this idea, so this will be a sample piece for that as well as a children's book promo piece. I'm posting him everywhere, so apologies in advance if you get sick to death of seeing him every time you turn around for the next few days.

And now I'm off to Taco Bell (seriously).
Adios!

Thursday, June 23, 2011

More WIP

Still working on this, in between other things.

I'm having a lot of fun. I added more to the turquoise wall, and am playing with using some graphite in addition to the colored pencil.


Here's a close up of the little guy on a break in the background. He's about 3 inches high.


And a senorita passing through.



The piece is about 9 x 12 inches.
Digital is fine, but this is my first love. I liked learning how to do a colored pencil "look" digitally, but have realized that nothing compares to actually handling real pencils, and doing it the real way.

Hope you're all staying cool. We've just had a couple "over 100" days and I was very cranky. I should be drawing a snow scene!

Saturday, June 18, 2011

WIP

This is what I'm working on.

Its just the top half. Yes, its very turquoise.
I can't believe how long it took just to do this much. Well, actually I can. Its just that every time I do something like this I question my sanity. You colored pencil people know what I mean.



I'm not satisfied with just putting down a flat layer of an aqua or turquoise color, then a plain stripe of yellow and orange. I have to add all sorts of blues and greens, and change the temperature of the colors in the zig zag stripes as well.



This is how many colors have gone into this so far. Prismacolors and Polychromos.





This has a long way to go, so I will be tucked in beneath the A/C vent, squirreling away on it for the foreseeable future. Actually, now that the heat has officially arrived, I would like to stay squirreled away until about September!

Adios ~

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Getting clean

No, no, not like that. I mean cleaning up art. So you can put it on backgrounds, make repeats etc. for licensing. I don't think most people have any idea how art actually gets "fiddled with on the computer" to make it ready to go on products. Its an interesting process. I'll show what I'm doing at the moment with my pajama kitties from a couple of posts back.
(*I did have a whole post showing them in a repeat, but took it down because I do want to license them, and got all paranoid about showing them around too much. I do appreciate everyone's positive comments about them, both here and on Facebook!)

So here's how it starts.
I have the kitty in red longjohns, who I've called "cat 1". He was done with colored pencils on Stonehenge paper. When I scanned him, the paper texture showed up. So I took the eraser tool in Photoshop and carefully went alllllll around, erasing up (what I thought was) close to the edge of the image to make a nice clean background.

(click images to see them bigger)




What I should have done FIRST, which I did in this next step, was use the lasso tool to cut him out of the background, then plunk him down onto a new page with an "empty" (or transparent) background. THEN, all I had to do was clean up the small space just around the edges of the figure, not the whole page. Which I then did. I enlarged the image to 300% so I could see it up close, and got in there with a pretty small brush (9 pt or less) and cleaned it all up. So now the little guy is very clean, and resting on a totally empty background. Or is he?





I made a new file and put a solid color over the whole thing, then dragged the new 'clean' kitty over on top to see how he'd look on a background. ACK! Look at all that white around him!  This is what happens with colored pencil work, where the "edge" of an image isn't well defined. What makes colored pencil work so nice and soft looking is often a sort of gradated-out edge. But it makes it much harder to gauge where to erase, exactly, and keep the soft edge while still making it clean enough to put on a background.





This is what it looks like when you look up close. Look at all the little 'white bits' that I thought I'd cleaned up. YUK.





So now I have to tediously go around every single edge with a 3 or 5 pt eraser brush and pick at it until its clean, but still looks like colored pencil. That means I can't just do a hard swipe all around, up close, like I would if it were a different medium. Oh no - I have to do a waaaaay more fiddly "in and out" kind of erasing thing to it.

But when I'm done, I will have a perfect image with no background at all, which can be placed in a repeat on any kind of background and look great.

See? People have no idea.

If you want to learn how to clean up art like this and do repeats, check out Tara Reed's ebooks. She rocks.
~~~~~~~

Also, yes, the blog looks different. Sometimes you just need to change things.

Also, I took down my art from Fine Art America. They didn't do anything wrong- but it seemed too redundant with Imagekind, since they both do basically the same thing.

Also, CafePress has changed their policies a bit, allowing for 3rd party sales which you have no control  over (if you're in the Marketplace), and they also can remove images if they haven't been used for a long time. There's a lot of discussion in the forums about it all. I took my stuff out of the Marketplace (which means people will only find it by going to my shop directly) which cuts out a lot of potential traffic and sales, but also lets me keep more control. If you have a shop and somehow didn't get the email about this, I suggest you read the new terms to decide for yourself what you want to do.











Tuesday, June 07, 2011

I'll have the chicken case-a-deeya please



What's on the board at the moment. Its early bird special hour at the local Mexican restaurant. That is not a cinnamon roll on her head - hopefully it will look more like a tacky flower in the finish.

Lets see, what else. Working on lots of stuff, actually. All children's book and licensing things. Some I can't show,  you know how it is.

The weather has finally turned to sun after a weird spell of more wintery rain. Its a welcome sight. I've been sad because I lost one of my kitties a couple of weeks ago - a little wild one, one of those you can't get tamed up, then they get sick, and ... its too sad. I'll miss the little guy coming to eat every day.

So I'm just hunkered down, drawing away. Its nice. I'll post more when I have something worth showing.