Penelope Poppleby(tm) cracks me up. She’s one of the first characters of Evedom® and symbolizes a whole raft of memories and impressions for me. She’s back by popular demand, in composition called “Penny and the Poo,” although not in the right setting for the request.

Years ago, she appeared with a French sign, photographed by Jill Meyer’s husband. The sign was typically French-explicit, a pile on a bathroom floor with the butt end of a dog hanging over it and the message that if you wouldn’t allow this in your home, you shouldn’t allow it on the street – Paris is your home. In my composite, Penny had just stepped in something. The original is not to be found, though, I found more of Penny from the same series. I also tried a different background for the gist of the message to see if it might please Jill, as a substitute. It didn’t. It’s now titled “Lovely But Useless.”

Not bad photos! Taken with my phone cam on a very cold day at Irondequoit Bay boat launch. I was surprised to see so many swans.

There was a wonderful shot of four of them flying in, but they had landed by the time I got the phone out of my purse.

For Christmas card design warm-up, I made an angel and two infographics, both about privacy and coal.

Poster size renderings are on my mkcolling.com website. Ideally, a infographic displays true and researched information (for people who can’t understand bar graphs?) – as if that extra effort matters in a time when superstition and rumor become true when repeated often enough.

I wondered what the limits were on eight gigs of RAM. These monsters (originals at 12×42, 300 dpi) came close to finding out. It’s still not certain how much of the noticeable slowdown (time out while PS renders type?) was was intensity of the work flow and how much was the result of a deep virus that was “treated” but still residing on the hard drive.

At this point, the nuisance of getting everything up and running on a new computer – new system, too – is unattractive.

There are two infographics because one is initial plot development and one is initial character development. I started working with every intention of figuring out what to talk about in a 100 page book, after attending a seminar on how to get a best seller written in a weekend. If only I had the words . . . there are new (to me) software and systems involved. Continue reading →

Lindsay Adler gave a dynamite three-day seminar teaching her favorite photo editing techniques at creativelive.com. A fashion and portrait photographer, she does some, if not all, of her own retouching. She uses Photoshop a little differently than I would for similar problems, but offered no great revelations for a PS expert.

Her objective is jazz up already perfect photos. Mine is always to make lousy or damaged photos look good.
I perked up when she started using liquify to make quick, precise adjustments.

She uses it to reshape teeth, slim noses, enlarge eyes, enhance hair, lower shoulders, and hollow cheeks.

I did eye and nose adjustments, and have to admit there is more control in CS6. Instead of getting a marbling sample, I came out with an image that can still be identified as a human face. Yay.

Maybe Mac is the secret to perfection with liquify.

Regarding the liquify filter in CS6, if you use it on Windows7 with an ATI Radeon graphics processor, and it opens to a teal screen with no photo showing, your 8G memory is insuffucient. Lower or disable the processor preferences, and you’ll get a nice slow redraw.

Whenever I catch a mapping demo, I work along with it and hope the technique stays with me. There isn’t enough reason in my business to remember how to do it.

“Poppy” (her condition, not her name!) is one of several versions of the painting. The character is from the original late-1990′s Evedom® line art collection, created with Adobe Illustrator, in 24×39″ format.

I’m still reusing my early Evedom® line art and it’s still as good as new in CS6, nearly twenty years later. After all this time, the efficiency of drawing it once with digital tools and having it available to reconfigure and reuse forever still amazes and delights me.

This version was printed on heavy handmade watercolor paper, 8×10,” and painted with acrylics. It was the reference sample for the Evedom® downloads collection that I published for the paper craft market about five years ago. This is probably its first appearance online.