Posts published in “Shoppery”

[drawing every day 2024 post one oh seven]: more kickstarters

Published April 16, 2024 by centaur

SO! Our Kickstarter for the Neurodiversiverse is live at neurodiversiverse.com (which just links through to the Kickstarter page for the duration of the campaign). And I'm proud to say that we are number one of projects if you search for neurodivergence!

For this project I had to create about fifty images in Photoshop - mostly by remixing other imagery we had, admittedly, but sometimes it took a bit of cleverness to make everything work out, as in this physical picture of most of our books and flash fiction postcards - not all of which I had on hand for the picture, and some of which don't even physically exist yet, like the softback of The Neurodiversiverse:

Liza and I (with the help of Betsy and Keiko) put a lot of time into this and I'm proud of the result:

So, please check it out and back us ... we have reward tiers everything from $1 for token support, to early bird ebooks at a discount, to the book and the ebook themselves, all the way up to getting your name listed in the acknowledgements at the back of the book:

And, while I hope to get in some real drawing today, I am unabashedly using this as my Drawing Every Day post, because I spent hours and hours on art today and that should count, dang it.

Drawing every day.

-the Centaur

[drawing every day 2024 post one oh four]: all my berks cards

Published April 13, 2024 by centaur

Alright, one more not-drawing drawing while I am scrambling to get ready for Clockwork Alchemy. If you're not using the Internet in its most basic form, it resembles a countryside where roads to infrequently-visited towns frequently get torn up and you have to either reroute - or build your own.

Case in point, link shorteners. Google used to have one called "goo.gl" - used to have, before Larry Page took over at Google and led it through the Google Plus debacle, where Google really started to get the reputation for killing products that ultimately led to it being called the Google Graveyard.

But, before they killed it, I used it on the book cards that I hand out at conventions! I had been using that shortlink to point to my Amazon "Anthony Francis" author page, but I don't trust link shorteners anymore. So I created a new link, dresan.com/blog/books, which has all my books on it (now in the top menu):

But, that means my book cards needed to be updated. I of course updated the link, but also took the time when I was in there to enhance the contrast on the top title so it was more legible. Hopefully these cards will arrive in time for the Clockwork Alchemy convention next week, where I will be Author Guest of Honor.

Drawing (or graphic design) every day.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the back of the "book cards", and the "book page" which also shows the book card fronts.

[drawing every day 2024 post one oh three]: the neurodiversiverse kickstarter cards

Published April 12, 2024 by centaur

So, no drawing-drawing today, as we needed to complete the Kickstarter for The Neurodiversiverse, which goes live early next week - and we (and by we, I mean I) had to ALSO complete the graphics for the book cards we will be handing out at the Clockwork Alchemy and Con Carolinas conventions. Have a look!

While Photoshoppery isn't the artistic skill I wanted to refine when I started Drawing Every Day, it is a skill that also needs to be perfected. I had to generate a LOT of graphics by today so we could submit the Kickstarter, and then these two cards - by TONIGHT, to get the order into Moo in time.

But, we did it! Hopefully the cards will arrive in time. Cross your fingers!

Drawing (or Photoshopping) every day.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Front and back of the Kickstarter cards, based on a draft of our cover, itself based on art from Barbara Candiotti, one of the contributors to The Neurodiversiverse. More information on The Neurodiversiverse Kickstarter will come shortly before it goes live next week.

[drawing every day 2024 post one oh two]: jeremiah willstone logo sketches

Published April 11, 2024 by centaur

What a long fricking day. No real drawing for you ... just sketches of a proposed Jeremiah Willstone logo. I created these as feedback to a fellow artist I'm working with who will design the actual logo in a form suitable for putting on pins and stickers. We started with an old logo idea I had a few years back:

But that's kitbashed together from a number of different public domain images and my own quickly hacked logo designs in Photoshop and Illustrator. However, Kimchi Kreative did such a good job with the Neurodiversiverse logo I asked her to apply some of her magic to Jeremiah. We're iterating on it now, with super rough sketches to bounce ideas back and forth.

You know, it's great to learn to do things on your own - and I focus on doing most of the work that I can myself, especially for my own creative projects. But when you have access to an expert, it's foolish to forego that for things in their area of expertise - and learning how to work with others on creative projects is a skill all its own.

Drawing (and learning) every day.

-the Centaur

[drawing every day 2024 post forty]: stand your ground, redux

Published February 9, 2024 by centaur

This time, I'm using one of my own drawings as a reference, the old "Stand Your Ground" t-shirt image, for which I recently found a scan of the original art from WAY back in the day (the scan was a BMP, !):

This is from 1997 (!). In some ways it's cruder; in other ways it benefits from the larger aspect ratio (I suspect this was done on 8.5x11 paper, or even larger). But my little notebook has been helping me draw every day:

And so: drawing every day. Onwards.

-the Centaur (the author one)

[drawing every day 2024 post thirty-nine]: last of this set

Published February 8, 2024 by centaur

My rendering of the last pose from the DALL-E character sheet for Porsche:

Not entirely terrible, though I can see my proportions are a bit cartoonish. These systems can't take art direction yet - I had to clean the character sheet up in Photoshop to really make it suitable, and even then the middle pose should have had the legs more spread apart, which it tried to do erroneously on the right-hand pose with a fifth leg - but they sure can render the heck out of an image.

-the Centaur (the author one)

[twenty twenty-four day twenty-six]: make up your mind

Published January 26, 2024 by centaur

Cat, when it's raining: "Let me out! Let me out! But not this door, it's wet. Let's try another door. And another! Or another! I gotta get out! Just hold the door open until the rain stops!"

Also cat, when it is nice and sunny: "Who cares about going outside? Ima gonna havva nap."

-the Centaur

Pictured: the cat-shaped void, Loki, actually using his void-colored cat tree for once. Image taken in infrared bands and color enhanced by NASA to show surface detail.

[twenty twenty-four day twenty]: cat-shaped void

Published January 20, 2024 by centaur

We have a black cat, so we got a black cat condo (just barely visible to the left). But of course, our cat-shaped void is a cat, and so prefers the blue couch, where its voluminous shedded fur is easily visible. My wife caught him in the act, so, enjoy this picture of our cat-shaped void, doing cat-styled things.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki on our couch. Interestingly, this picture was taken at an angle, so I rotated it, then used Adobe Photoshop's generative fill to recover the outer edge of the picture. The very outer edge is ... mostly right. Some weirdness is visible in the carpet patterns on the lower left, the brick pattern on the upper left, and whatever it is on the table on the right isn't there in reality. Otherwise, not a terrible job.

[seventy-seven] minus eighty-three: mondrian cat

Published June 9, 2023 by centaur

Just Loki, on the back patio, looking at a leaf ... with a little added magic (full size).

Producing this relatively simple image actually involved a fair number of Photoshop tools, several of which are new "generative AI" tools, but many others of which are just plain old machine vision magic:

Layers (stacked images) used extensively to save original or alternate versions of things.
Perspective Warp (a pretty impressive tool in its own right) to distort the image into a rectilinear shape.
Content Aware Fill (a new Photoshop generative AI tool) to extend the warped stone tile to fill the frame.
The Clone Stamp tool to complete the grout lines which were only partially filled in by Content Aware Fill.
Quick Selection tool to isolate Loki and the leaf into their own layers for later.
Selection > Modify > Expand and Selection > Modify > Feather to get the fine hairs on Loki's boundary.
Generative Fill (another generative AI tool) to eliminate many of the leaves.
More Clone Stamp to eliminate more leaves and minor imperfections.
Layer duplication to create an original and to-be-colored tile backdrop.
Swatches, the Rectangular Marquee tool, the Polygonal Lasso, and the Fill tool to create the colored tile.
Color Burn layer blend mode (with 57% opacity) to create the primary Mondrian effect.
Another layer duplication to create a new version of the colored tile to enhance the grout.
Filter Gallery > Colored Pencil which fortuitously greyed out the colored tile and colorized the grout.
Magic Wand tool set to Contiguous and 0% Tolerance to cut out the greyed tiles from the grout layer.
Darker Color layer blend mode to enhance the grout.
Drop Shadow on the leaf to make it stand out.
Duplicating Loki into a layer with Darken to make him stand out against the colored grout.
Adding Inner Glow modified to Darken as well (with a Choke of 14 and Size of 87) to eliminate some of the white halo around Loki.
Adding a second Loki layer, Normal blend with 50% opacity, to get his sheen.

I like how it came out, especially given how it started:

I looked at that and thought, "You know, that's almost a Mondrian backdrop" and I was right!

-the Centaur

[twenty-five] minus twenty-two

Published February 17, 2023 by centaur

Did you know Bernard Cribbins, who played the Doctor Who companion Wilfred Mott in David Tennant's run ALSO played companion Tom Campbell in the Peter Cushing "Dr. Who" movie Dalek's Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.?

Me neither. But apparently David Tennant did, as you can see him here checking up on his old companion (or, technically, his alter ego's companion) as they faced the Daleks ...

Ain't Photoshop grand?

-the Centaur

P.S. Typing the title "Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D." hurts me. It's grammatically correct, but hanging onto that by its fingernails and is SO clunky. "Dalek Invasion of Earth: 2150", please, or just the original "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" from the TV show.