Today's Word

Today's word is "pareidolia." 

According to Wikipedia, Pareidolia can cause people to interpret random images, or patterns of light and shadow, as faces.

I took this picture of an X-Ray machine mount at my dentist's office with my iPhone yesterday.

It reminds me of Edvard Munch' "The Scream."

Revisiting Illustrator Revisited

Previously, I shared an Adobe Illustrator drawing that I was thinking of using as a subject in the framing/matting course that I'm taking.

I showed it to one of my Ukrainian friends, and her daughter made lots of useful suggestions.  As a result of the suggestions, I completely overhauled the color work of the original, collapsing a variety of disparate colors into a very limited palette of art history colors.  The results are not unpleasing.

First of all, the daughter thought that the white background of the original was too glaring.  Rather than fussing with mat color schemes and conspiracies, the suggestion was to just use a harmonious background color and frame directly to that.  After experimenting with the creamy-yellow color that's in the flower petals, I tried the green that's in the leaves.  That received several thumbs-up.

I just ordered an 8"x10" print through Superior Photo.  I can't wait to make this one of my first framing projects.  Prior to this, all of my classwork has been with cutting mats.  That experience has been frustrating, to say the least.  It was almost an epiphany for me to realize that I didn't have to mat this particular work.

Bang, bang!  Maslow's hammer came down upon my head.

Illustrator Revisited

I'm taking a ten-week adult learning class on picture framing and matting.  Most of my effort is with my photographs, but I thought that I might resurrect one of my Adobe Illustrator drawings from a few years back.

I took one of my favorite pysanky designs, the "piven," which is a stylized rooster.  This is it, in the front-right.

Going the extra mile, I touched up some of the rougher areas around the cock's comb and tail feathers.  The nicest effect that I tweaked was making the flower stems on the bottom look like they were passing through the scroll work of the "feet."  Previous attempts had the stems breaking at the junctures.  This left tiny gaps that you could see in the blown up image. This time, I copied portions of the scrolling and placed them in a layer over the flower stem.

When I mat this, I'm thinking of a couple of concentric rectangles.  Even the $2,000 mat cutters in class can't do oval cutting.  The inner quarter-inch mat would use the light green color from the picture, and the larger outer mat would use the reddish brick color.  Something about the way that this browser is rendering the artwork is making the brick color look like cherry-red.  I sure hope the final printed copy remains brick!

Crash Course

I read today that they're going to make fatter crash test dummies in the U.S. in order to keep up with  increasing obesity trends.

Not to let a stupid idea pass, I figured that it was time for another book:

 

I can't believe how much I've forgotten about using Adobe Illustrator.  It's a wonder that I could do this much.

Diet Aids

I've seen ads like this all over the web, and this is the first thing that comes to my mind when I see the phrase "Never Diet Again."

Dead Friday

For quite some time I been using my original Mensa for Dummies artwork as the opening screen for my iPad.

I decided it was time for something new:

It's a Cookbook!

The origins of life (Michelangelo meets Warhol) 

I couldn't leave well enough alone.  The soup can needed a bit of work (it still does), so I re-worked the picture to the version you see above.   Below is the originally posted version:

The old collage try

I'm slow to change things.  The simple color theme on this Blogger page is a classic example. 

It has been a couple of years since I had done the collage of Adobe Illustrator-generated pysanky that I used as my iPhone lock screen.  After hunting down images for my latest Easter basket attempt, I thought I'd also update the collage.

I had to play editor and leave out a few favorites because they just didn't go well in this arrangement.   Though the individual eggs are done in Illustrator, it was not computationally feasible to try an arrangement.  PhotoShop to the rescue.  I added a little neutral gradient shadow effect near the base of the eggs, and I added a lighting effect coming from the top-left.  The background gradient is a Blue 1 from the photographic gradient palette.

So, here are my eggs of 2013, rendered for the iPhone 4 screen of 640 by 960 px.

Basket-O-Trouble

It's a pisser when you lose some of your favorite graphics files.  I had created an Easter basket with pysanky a couple of years ago using a combination of Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop.  When I recently got around to swap in some of my newer eggs, however, I discovered that the only thing that I had was an empty basket -- literally.  The candles were gone, too.  I had to start all over with gathering and arranging my eggs in the Easter basket.

Here I am, starting all over again.  Got some new eggs in a somewhat pleasing arrangement.  Now I have to re-learn the art of candlemaking and futz some more with the cloth (rushnyk) arrangement.

Ringing in the Sheaves

This yet another attempt at re-working a previous design, which is based on a Bucovinian motif that I saw in the Flickr Easter Eggs group.  Although not as colorful as many of my other efforts, I'm pretty happy with this rendering of the pseudo-grain sheaves. 

Ringing in the Sheaves

Getting around that time of year again

... when an Adobe Illustrator obsessive's fancy turns to pysanky.  These are based on some Bucovinian designs I found in the Easter Eggs group on Flick.

Pysanka for Dog Days

There's nothing particular about the dog days of August that would inspire me to try a new pysanka design in Illustrator.  It's just been a while, and I felt like futzing.

The main part consists of Illustrator stars -- a couple of eight-points and a four-point.  The "bug antennae" added to the outer white star lend a unique look to the design.

Here's the pattern that I used for the symbol.

The scroll work between the diamonds is recycled from an earlier Poppy design.

Here's the completed egg:


I wish that I could take credit for this design, but I've adopted it from So-Jeo's work.

Simplicity is Complicated

The other day, a co-worker asked if I'd be able to modify the A&W root beer logo with some custom text in place of the "Since 1919 Root Beer" text along the top and bottom.

I used Adobe Illustrator and simply added a layer over the original graphic, where I masked out the text and replaced it with what he wanted.  End of story.

Except... afterwards, I began to wonder how one might do the logo entirely in Illustrator.  Those two arcs behind the A&W -- in orange and brown -- turned out to be really tricky.

My idea was to use various oval shapes and create the arcs by overlaying two ovals and then using the Pathfinder "Minus Front" to leave just the crescents.  That worked okay, but when it came time to match up and overlay the orange and brown crescents, I saw the conundrum:

While I had achieved a nice 3-D ring effect, I really needed to be able to overlay only the top half of the brown crescent.  In the actual logo, the bottom portion of the orange crescent overlays the brown portion.  Try as I might, I couldn't achieve a simple, elegant solution.  One inelegant solution is to create a duplicate section of just the bottom portion of the orange crescent.  I could then place that layer over the brown crescent.  Because of issue with stroke and fill, however, inelegant also became technically awkward.

What I finally ended up doing was create a custom-shaped crescent arc and then mirror that in its corresponding color.  This allowed me to maintain the white strokes, which work so well to accent the opposing arcs.

I layered those arcs over a slightly larger white oval, and I got that tricky part looking pretty darn close to the original design.

The golden brown "plaque" behind the rest of the logo  is basically an oval united with a rounded square.  I had to coax and fudge the paths of the square to give it a slightly rounded appearance.

The lettering for the "A&W" was a lost cause.  I simply did not have a matching font set that came close.  I ended up using a Palatino Linotype bold italic to get something that I liked instead.  One layer of brown text over a layer of golden brown, offset slightly.   I couldn't even come close to matching the glyph for the ampersand.  That ended up coming from the Brush Script Std Medium font set.  It was placed as the top-most layer.

It's a hack job, but that will do, pig.

Pushing the Pysanka Envelope

It has been a while since I have done any pysanky in Illustrator. One design in a YouTube animation that someone had sent me caught my eye. Here it is in a screen grab, which shows a novel (to my eye) pysanka design:
I used the "place" command in Illustrator to lock this image down so that I could trace out the shapes of the dancers.
A couple of transforms to daisy-chain the dancers into rows, and then I made that grouping into a symbol.

From symbol to egg, here is the final pysanka:

Although this is far from a typical pysanka motif, these dancers depicted here are a performing a rite of Spring known as Vesnianky-hahilky.

Endless Tweaking

Not being able to leave well enough alone (see previous post), I realized that the criticism about lack of shadows was valid. My hesitation to act on that criticism was partly because I was sick and tired of endlessly tweaking that work. The other reason was that I just didn't have the knowledge and experience with lighting effects in PhotoShop.

So, I rested and I learned (a little). Results are more pleasing:

Notice a couple of new eggs?

Putting my eggs into one basket

In a previous posting, I described how I made a basket using some simple tools in Adobe Illustrator. Here's the same basket loaded up:

This final composition was done in PhotoShop. Each of the eggs, as well as the basket, table cloth and candles, is an Illustrator drawing. If I try to put all of that together in Illustrator, I quickly run out of memory.

A person who I rely upon for PhotoShop advice offered the criticism that shadows were noticeably missing from this piece. Each egg should have a shadow..., etc.

Damn! No, wait. My picture is just well-lit. That's it.

Illustrator Basketmaking 101

The Distort and Transform tool in Adobe Illustrator can really do some cool effects. This basket that I recently did was easy and involved just a few tools and techniques.

Here's how I did this.

I started with a small swatch that I made of short lines in various stroke weights and shades of brown/tan. I turned this into a pattern brush.

Once I had the pattern brush, I used the circle tool to create an oval that matches the lip of the basket. I applied the brush to the oval and tweaked the stroke some more until I was happy with the look.

The rest of the bowl was really simple: I used the Transform tool and started with an arbitrary 29 repetitions. I then tweaked the horizontal scale control down into the minus category (the Preview feature is really handy here). Then I tweaked the Move Vertical a bit into the minus category, watching the preview until I stopped seeing white space between the rings. Expand the Object, and that was all there is to the bowl of the basket. I added some extra body to the basket by copying the bowl layer, pasting it over the top of the original and shifting it horizontally and vertically several keyboard clicks. This worked to fill in the occasional blank space between coils.

The lip of the bowl was created from a fresh circle that I visually matched up with the top ring. Once again, I applied the pattern brush to that. To get that the cool windings, I used the Zig-Zag tool in the Distort and Transform tool set. You can see the dialog box for that below:

Like always, I turned Preview on, so I can see what I'm rendering. By setting Points to Smooth, I got a coiling effect instead of the basic zig-zag. Then I just pumped up the Ridges per segment slider until I got some tight coils. Voila!

Finally, the handle is the top half of a circle arc with the same wood brush applied. After thickening it up a little, I put another circle arc over that and applied the actual zig-zag transform to that.

Now I'm ready to put some Easter eggs in this basket!

Where's the Beef?!!

Somebody at work turned me on to this guy's blog page, Words From The Mountains. If you clicked on that link -- why didn't you? -- you'd see the July 22, 2010, entry titled "The Ghost of Woodburn Hall." It tells the story of a prank from more than a century ago, when some agricultural students led a cow up into Woodburn's bell tower.

Cows being -- well -- dumb, this one managed the climb up several flights, but it seemed unable to walk back down. Consequently, it was removed in much the same way that the dead horse in Animal House had to be removed from the dean's office, albeit before the days of chainsaws. Thus was born the legend of the Woodburn Hall Cow, whose ghost is still mooing in the night.

Now the reason for the story about the unfortunate cow is because I had done a vector drawing of Woodburn Hall, based upon a night-time Christmas lights photograph that I had taken. I was able to catch the night-time look of the building, but I was hesitant to attempt the lighting effect.

Something about my showing this Illustrator drawing to a coworker caused him to remark that my picture needed a cow, whereupon he told me of the legend. Lest you think that I keep strange company, this person is a director-level at the University.

It's funny how an idea grows.

Stitching in Illustrator

Still on the subject of Ukrainian rushnyky, I thought I'd take on one of my mother's pillow embroideries (left).

She does these patterns free-style, with no design in mind when she starts. My interpretation used a single, uniform cross-stitch, whereas my mother's original features a variety of stitching styles.

I flipped the central portion and made it into a repeating brush pattern (right). It's funny how the eyedropper tool in Illustrator interpreted the orange-gold color -- it came across more bronze in Illustrator.

Illustrator stitches

Some time ago, I showed off a few faux cross-stitch patterns of traditional Ukrainian "Rushnyky," literally towels.

I doubt I could claim credit for applying the techniqe of using a cross-stitch "X" pattern to build an elaborate design in Adobe Illustrator, but I came up with the idea on my own and developed it through experimentation.

Here's an inset portion, showing a two-color stitch pattern:Once you have a few patterns, you can start to replicate them and lay them out into a larger work. Here is a completed rushnyk from a design I copied:

There's a really cool trick you can do in Illustrator, where you can take something you've designed and make it into a pattern brush. The pattern brush can then be applied to a vector shape like a line, rectangle or circle. The basic square of this pattern lends itself particularly to a rectangle, because you can designate a specific design to be a corner piece in your brush pattern.

To do this, I first stripped away the outer zig-zag border. Here's what the replicated squares would look like in a corner pattern:Once the pattern brush is complete, you can begin applying it. Here is a circle within a square with the rushnyk brush pattern applied:

Note that you can change the stroke. The circle is one-half the stroke of the square. The only problem with creating these elaborate designs is that you can run out of memory when you try something large based upon an elaborate design.