Open Sourcing

am going to be skipping around a lot today, so bear with me! First off, I love my tablet! I have been playing around a little bit more with Inkscape and vector designs as it is a lot easier to do this with the Wacom. I hope to have a nice completed vector design up in a little while. Secondly, my fiancee and I tried our hands at making some t-shirts last weekend. We enjoy doing little projects together and as a Valentine's Day present I gathered up some supplies and we made our own "vintage" looking t-shirts.

The process was quite fun actually and is sort of a hand made screening process. Basically what you do is create a design (see the image to the right for my quick "on the plane" sketches) and transfer the design to a light fabric. I went with a skewy bike gear and she ended up going with a winged track foot for our designs. We used an old pair of spandex tights, but pantyhose or a very thin curtain material would work as well. Then you create a template of the design by painting with glue on the areas that you wish to not receive paint. After the glue dries you simply paint on the t-shirt, through the template and you are left with your design. Painting through the fabric gives the resulting t-shirt image a worn out or vintage look. You can also use the template more than once if you want to make shirts for a number of different people. Take a look, I think it came out pretty well! (please excuse the grainy cell phone picture)

My next bit of jumping around is playing with some photo editing. I wanted to do some really impressive editing, not just cleaning a photo up, so I set out to try my hand at manipulating a face. I took the original picture from this post and used some stock images of tribal graphics, architectural moldings, and clouds to come up with the following:

I really like the way this last one came out. There is plenty more cleaning up that could be done to it, but I think it looks fairly good. I found the iWarp tool in Gimp which really helped to make it look like the graphics were against the face and not floating above it like the previous image.

ast week was my birthday and I received a new Wacom Bamboo tablet as a gift! I've never used a tablet before and was quite excited to try it, so I quickly got it all set up and sketched a quick picture of my car. It's obviously not perfect and would need quite a bit more work in order to make it a finished piece, but it allowed me to test out the tablet, which works great! I'm not sure how I ever got by without it actually. It took me a while to get used to it, but the pressure sensitivity is fantastic for painting in Gimp. I can't wait to try some texture painting with it!

Also last week I did a quick render on my hand with some particle clouds I've been tinkering around with. The idea behind the render is that some sort of alien is behind some laboratory glass and something goes wrong in the room causing a ruckus and the only thing that the observers on the outside of the lab see is an alien hand coming up against the glass! Scary!

managed to finish modeling most of a hand last night which can be seen on the right. The original intention is for the hand on Cephy to be webbed, which I still intend on doing, but I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to do that yet, so for now here is the slightly alien looking hand. The fingers are nice and long and there is a really short palm area. This seems to be a theme in most alien hands, so I figured I'd go with it! If you want a bigger view please click on the picture.

To model this hand I really concentrated on good topology, so it should hopefully deform quite nicely. There is a wire frame picture of the hand on the left.

I also uploaded a video of the eye from my last post. Enjoy!