Added 1 new A* page:There was an interesting article on the BBC News site the other day about scientists discovering that the ice spewing out of gashes in the surface of Saturn's little moon Enceladus is squeezed out by Saturn's gravitational pull: they found that Enceladus' ice geysers are more active when the moon is furthest from Saturn, at the point where Saturn's gravity is heaving it back around. There are some nice (old) photos of the ice geysers in that article, and I have a whole forum thread with photos and info about Enceladus--from a while back--over here. It's a pretty neat moon, and pretty likely to have a liquid water ocean under that surface ice!
~~~~~~
I got a lot of feedback about the first crazy flat color page yesterday (well strictly speaking I suppose that one of Mar in red way back in episode 11 was the first, but that was always just a one-off)--most of it positive, besides a few popped retinas. : o Today's is a little rough but I was so excited about yesterday's that I didn't get myself much sleep, so I'll blame it on that. : p Playing with these colors is fun and I really never knew I loved orange so much. (I don't think the people will always be orange, though. My brother suggested I make Selenis blue.) It's also shown me that I didn't need to be worried about color cutting down on my freedom to put abstract elements into the drawing, because playing fast and loose with the shapes and hues of the color just lets me add yet another layer of abstraction, if I want to use it that way. It's also nice to be able to make the eye jump between patches of warm and cool, and to suggest relationships between different areas of an image that it wouldn't have been possible to point out otherwise.
Oh right I had a couple more technical points to make about this stuff that I forgot to say yesterday. The first is that although I like the dithered black and white look, and how, for instance, it lets you create gray tones that stay at their proper tone even when viewed at an angle on LCD monitors, one possible lump in those mashed potatoes is that when you look at a dot pattern like that on a screen that's scaling the image down, like say on a non-super-duper-high-def cell phone, the pattern can come out all wiggly and squirrely. So that's just something for me to keep in mind if I ever think about using it.
The other thing was that although I said I punch the colors up by putting a copy of the image on a new layer and setting it to the "Hard Light" blend mode, that isn't *actually* the exact steps I follow in the macros I have set up that spit out the pages at the correct size, sharpness, and color depth for the web site. It would have been, but it turns out that my ancient Photoshop 4, which was the first one to have macros ("Actions"), was a little spotty on their implementation, so some operations, for whatever reason, cannot be recorded in a macro--and setting a layer's blending mode is one of those that don't record (they do in any modern version of Photoshop, of course). So actually what I have the macro do is take a "Snapshot" of the image, then Fill it with the Snapshot in the "Hard Light" blending mode--Snapshot and Fill macro just fine in Photoshop 4, so voila. If they didn't, theoretically I could also achieve the same result by using "Define Pattern" instead of "Snapshot," or maybe even somewhat more complicatedly through "Apply Image" or "Calculations"--although come to think of it I think those last two didn't turn out to record in macros in Photoshop 4 either. Silly! And mind you, Photoshop 4's "Snapshot" is not the same as "Snapshot" in more recent Photoshops, where it's a different function, and in the "History" panel (which Photoshop 4 doesn't have)--and I guess they removed its original function, since it was pretty redundant.
~~~~~~
OOh and over the weekend I hope to get that big super-sized A* drawing I did a few weeks ago all nice and inked up, so I can put it up for auction next week. It's gonna take a lot of ink again...
|
