Iphone painting

Look at Earth before it’s Gone!!!!!

I figure, we’re half way done with 2010 so according to the Myans, overly mystic hippies and superstitious dooshbags like myself and many others, we have, like, 1.5 years to see pictures of the earth before it is destroyed forever in some celestial wrath.

Notice the beautiful topographic features of lush mountainous regions – Gone

Notice the serene blue orb as seen from the heavens – Gone

Notice the wonder and marvel of the modern western metropolis – Gone

Notice the availability on the iphone, ipod touch and ipad – Gone

Thank you Earth App as I wipe tears from my eyes…
(prices and participation may vary, blah blah blah)

Samples

A couple of weeks ago I posted music from the artist Aember. The tracks were short and were designed as samples and raw beats. Here’s a complete set…

the iHuka! It had to happen…

Yes, the iHuka.

Let me repeat, the i…huka..

Suffice it to say, ihuka is a simple app which will wow your frat friends for approx. 15 minutes before the beerpong tournament heats up and all the attention goes there.  (I’m sure there’s and ibeerpong somewhere in a dark corner of the app store but don’t try ihuka and ibeerpong in the same party.  FYI.)  Anyway, buy it.  My research shows that ihuka will increase your likelyhood of scoring at a party by, like, 15%.  This pales in comparison to winning ‘actual’ beer pong which is estimated at, like, 20-25%.  Results may vary, you may not win, and the research doesn’t take into account the ‘beer goggle index’ of said score.  It’s a jungle out there for sure…

Bandcamp

There are a lot of music websites out there, everything from the big guys like itunes to the small guys.  An affiliate (for lack of a better term) of Photasm has recently started using one of the small guys, a music site called ‘bandcamp’, and has rave reviews so far.  Here is a test track smartly entitled ‘test’ to, you guessed it, test the usability, embedability and all other abilities of bandcamp.  Please download the awesome hip hop loop for the miserly cost of ten cents ($.10) to help with this test.  The Gods of independent music will smile upon you.

The track is a short loop meant to be added to, mixed, spun, edited, whatever. I have word that it is part of a library of original loops used for iphone and other mobile device applications.

Thank you

“Yellow Fever”

FYI

On the subject of digital Wallpaper, I just found this site which also peddles wallpaper and seems to consist of mostly very hot Asian chicks… super girly super stylish… Asian chicks.

I know nothing about this site, I don’t deem it ‘stumbleupon worthy’, it does, however, have a certain…appeal.

Again, FYI

http://snsd4u.wordpress.com/category/images/wallpaper/

by Dojo

Graffiti!!!

Graffiti!!!

I would buy it if it had only two exclamation points!

This is easily my favorite photo app.  What’s better than Graffiti?  Hundreds of Graffiti pics from around the world instantly accessible from your ipod.  Homey.

To prove I love graff, I’ll post some graffiti style images created and edited on the iPod.  Dope.

Graffiti Painting Part 1

In keeping with the theme of Graffiti let’s do a graffiti style painting using iPhone apps.    This is a challenge, normally Graff is  several feet by several feet – wall sized.  In the iphone we have a couple of inches.

Asian Painting

First, let’s start out with a line drawing.  I like the Asian Painting app – unique among all iphone apps because the ‘line quality’ varies.  Quick strokes with the finger create thick to thin strokes on the screen.   I don’t know of any other painting app that actually varies the line thickness.  Asian Painting is good for interesting, organic lines.

In this exercise we’ll pretend that this actually says something.  (I just dont want to give away my tag name)

Save the image.

Now pull up Brushes.

I like this app in that it actually has decent painting functionality.  In my never ending quest for decent photo editing/drawing apps, it’s actually rare that something is even worth 99 cents (or even the memory it takes to run a free app!)  The only problem with Brushes: no line variation.  (Hence starting with Asian Painting)

Import the asian painting graffiti sketch into Brushes and choose a small brush with a little interest.  Next paint some outlines in white, making sure to keep the interesting line weight stuff of the original image.

Here’s a screenshot of the layers as I had them.  Once yer done, choose another layer with the plus button in the layers menu.

In my other quest for ugly colors, I chose a lime green fill.  Take the opacity down with the transparency dial.

Now continue to draw a white outline on yet another layer (flatten the first two but leave the fill layer in tact in case you want to adjust it)  I’ve outlined the black and put another line outside of that one.  We’ll call it faux graff.

Let’s choose a brush and a red-ish color.  Not it is not a Christmas burner, we’ll deal with that later.

Of course, we wont be able to get into all the little nooks with a large fill brush but do what you can.

OK.  Done.

Choose a smaller brush to get all those hard to reach places…

At this point, let’s add some little ornaments with white.

Now it’s time to color edit.

I’m using Filter FX

Filter FX

Filter FX is one of those weird, off-the-wall apps with a terrible icon, which one may not think is worth the buck 99 it takes to get it onto your mobile device.  The graphics are garish, the rendering slow, etc.  BUT… after using a legion of pretty apps with nice icons and all sorts of other garbage I realized that this app does one thing and one thing well – it alters color.  It has multiple fields for the Red, Green, Blue channels (RGB for the noobs)  has a killer brightness and contrast usability and, generally, does everything it says it will do.  This is good.  (in the next blog we’ll spend some time ripping on apps that do stupid things in the name of image editing, FX is NOT one of them.)

Now, I alter the color channels to get some kind of respectable pallet.  Wall graffiti often uses bright, contrasting color to call attention to itself.  With the image I’m making, It looked a little too much like Christmas…

Save the image, again, to your photos.

Now back to Brushes…

(Catch Parts 2, 3 Soon!)

Dragonfly Edit 2

Montage App

In this article we’ll be using the dragonfly image we edited in PhotoForge from last article.  We will be using  the app Montage to be ding a little more work on it – namely, adding some ornamental text, background and general graphic design.

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First I open the image from the previous post in Montage. The opening menu gives several options for image sources, I simply scrolled through my ‘photos’ on the iphone to find the dragonfly. Choose ‘Quick Add’ to put it in the document. There are several other things that you could do to the selected image at this point, but I don’t need any of them.

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With a little pinch and drag of the image I resize it. This won’t affect the resolution. (Think of it like you would a smart object in CS3.) In Montage the ‘pinch’ usually skews the image along with resizing it. Once it’s sized push to line it up straight.

In this case, I think it’s too big anyway so I shrink it a bit and set it to the right.

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Next I pick the background color. Choose then the menu will come up.

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Perfect… Now time to choose and format some text

a b c

d

With the add button a menu pops up. Choose ‘Add Text’(a).   Next just type in ‘Dragonfly'(b).  When you’re done typing in the super-original text, choose ‘Format’.

Just choose from the available fonts and then a color(d).

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Next, I want something else to add visual interest. Another image, perhaps?

With the Add button again choose something else. In this case I chose some random texture built in Sculpt Master 3-D.

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With the button I bring down the opacity on the new image, then position it.

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Next, resize the text with an open pinch, then bring it’s opacity down too.

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Note on Navigation in Montage:

The arrow keys select between the layers

And this moves a layer toward the top.

I chose the text layer after adjusting the opacity and with bring it to the front.

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Finally add new text. Add each line as a different layer, adjust color and size to taste.

San Francisco Cont’d

I was pondering the San Francisco App, and the funniest thing happened: of all the painful, beautiful and marijuana-tinged memories, the strongest was the SLANG – yes, the funny words that I began to use!

SF Slang List:

Hella- Variations: ‘hellof’ ‘hellafuckin’
Use: Thats ‘hella’ cool. I’m ‘hella’ stoned, etc etc etc

Tweak- Variations: ‘tweaked’ (not to be confused with ‘tweaker’ which usually refers to a user of methamphetamines.)
Use: I had to ‘tweak’ the gear shaft on my road bike. Dude, that’s ‘tweaked’.

Random- Variations: none
Use: as an adjective. I.E. Let’s be ‘random’

There had to be more but, for some reason I can’t remember them.

Also, Here are some painting/sketches that were done several years back which are now just faint reminders of my beautiful-ish art school experience in the bay area.

If you, the Reader, can think of any more SF bay area slang, please leave it in the comments section!

include variations and usage, just for kicks.

Thanks