An old turnaround, recently cleaned up. I was re-imagineing characters from The Wizard of Oz.. Soooo many things I would do differently in this turn now. But I still like the proportions and her attitude. I wanted to make her a little more innocent rather than the pain-in-the-butt that Judy Garland’s Dorothy is.
A couple of my coworkers (Fawn & Carrie) as well as Kris & Michael and other storyboarders have been posting little stories about adventures. I got inspired to write one about a recent experience…
One day a couple of weeks ago, one of the creators of the show I work on invited me to his Tai-Jutsu class. His name starts with a J too, so I’ll call him JToo.
He’s a black belt in a couple of martial arts (I think… don’t hurt me!) and has been doing it for many many maaaaany years. I’m a total n00b to the martial arts. I like going on adventures and making a fool of myself, so I thought “Why not!?”
Tuesday. I show up, and I’m one of the tallest in the class. It always makes me a little nervous to stick out, even though I’m not a giant (I’m only 6’3″!). But I decided to get over it in the spirit of adventure.
We tumbled, rumbled, trumbled, tussled… and I painfully rolled on my neck a couple of times. Generally it was fun though!
Thursday. I come again for another class. This time JToo is there. Again, he’s a black belt, and I’m kinda nervous. Cause… y’know… he employs me.
We bow, do our thing, and then Sensei tells me to try a particular move out on JToo. JToo grabs my wrist, and I’m supposed to do a little ditty of a move that results in taking him down. AHHHHHH I’m about to poop my Gi!
I always have this innate fear of hurting other people. JToo is completely supportive…
…but I leave the class terrified that I had hurt him.
Friday. At work, I can’t help but shake an innate fear somehow I’m gonna get punished for taking down a dude who helps sign my paychecks.
Luckily, Friday 6pm came & went without that little pink slip. Yay for still having a job!
Timmy Bighand & Suzy Backwards go fishin’.
Boy 3-point turn for the upcoming “Expressions” Art Show.
Coming in August.
Girl 3-point turn for the upcoming “Expressions” Art Show.
Coming in August.
We did some private-room karaoke on Saturday night, which was an absolute blast. I had the brilliant idea to do the “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones.
Good Lord, I forgot how long that song is.
There are a couple of funny things about my good friend Dan…
Number one is that, in every single formal picture that he’s in, he does this fake half-smile where he shows his top teeth, but only at the corners of his mouth. He looks like a passive aggressive Tiger, threatened but too timid to strike. It’s pretty silly.
Two is that he’s sensitive about his eyes. I originally had dark circles under his eyes as part of the caricature, but he asked me to make him look “less Night of the Living Dead”. Fine fine, requests requests…
Three is that he wanted to look less “like a douche”. I’m still not sure what that means. I fake-airbrushed his cheeks so he looks like a Hollywood star.
As a revenge for the “notes”, I put him in the shirt that I stole from him about 9 months ago. On his wedding day. And I was a groomsman.
Here’s lookin atcha, buddy!
I’ve really really been enjoying doing these pixel-portraits. Some of them have been successful, others notsomuch. But it’s all about the process of doing them for fun, right? So here’s what I’m gonna do: As a way of meeting different people and raising some money for charity, I’ll do your portrait in pixel-polaroid form for a minimum charity donation of $5. All of the money will go to charity; I’ma keepin’ nothin!
Right now the plan is for donations to go to Free Arts NYC, a non-profit that delivers creative arts programs directly to low income, homeless, abused and neglected children. I’ve done some volunteer work here in the LA area with similar programs (including one down in Compton), and I can tell you that Art & Animation are incredibly powerful tools in establishing bonds with kids. I’m open to other charity suggestions, however.
The technical details: Send me an email at pixelpolaroids@gmail.com with…
- A picture (or multiple pictures) and an idea for a background. For instance, I put my friend Phil on a picturesque Jersey Turnpike background, my lovely girlfriend Errrca on a UCLA court, and my Schoolism prof. and recent UK transplant Kris Pearn in London on a typically lovely day. Of course, some of them don’t read perfectly, so the simpler the idea the better.
- The dimensions you need. The portrait window is 23px x 22px, and the Polaroid as a whole is 30×35 including the drop shadow. I can export any format you need at whatever size you need, as long as it’s larger than 30 x 35 and in the 30:35 ratio. The portaits you see below are 300×350. I can also export with or without the Polaroid frame. your choice.
- What name you want on the bottom. Please keep it short; I’m working with limited space here! 
Once it’s done, I’ll email you back a screenshot with a watermark so you know it’s done. After that, Paypal me the money, and I’ll send you back a donation receipt from Free Arts NYC so you know right where the money went.
I’ll totally do group portraits. We’ll arrange something special for that, so email me!
If anyone could let me know if there’s an easier transaction process, I’d love to hear it. I’m doing this completely on the fly, so any help is appreciated. Here are some portraits that I’ve done…
Me.
America’s Favorite Uncle, Phil Rynda!
JibJabber Amanda Rynda!
Badass, fire-breather and all around great Girlfriend, Erica Sin!
Storyboarder, storyteller & tremendous instructor, Kris Pearn!
Special Bonus, Jake & Finn from Adventure Time! (see previous blog spot)
Thanks for reading! Hope to do your portrait soon.
Usually I use this blog as a place to show work to friends an family. But today, I want to talk about something I’ve been thinking a lot about, most recently with the release of Safari 4 Beta – input devices. You’ll see why in a minute.
Most input-devices are “move, stop, click”. When you use a mouse, you move the mouse to move the cursor. When the cursor is in the appropraite location, you stop moving the mouse and click with your finger. In most situations, there is enough friction between the mouse surface and the table surface to stop the click-action from moving the cursor. When you use a trackpad, you drag your finger across the surface to move the cursor, pick your finger up and click with your thumb. Again, no cursor movement is caused by the click event.
However, I use a Cintiq as my primary input device, which is basically a 21 inch monitor plus a pen device. The Cintiq basically works like this: In order to move the cursor, you hover the tip of the pen over the surface of the screen and move the pen to where you want the cursor to be. To “click”, you tap on the screen. To “double-click”, you double-tap on the screen. Since you have to physically move the pen closer to the screen in order to click, there is invariably a small amount of cursor movement, as your hand can’t move perfectly in the Z-direction (Z-direction being closer to the screen). Finder is very forgiving of these small movements. Using a pen device, it is incredibly easy to double-click on a file on your Desktop instead of moving it around physically. In Safari 3, with it’s “deep button tabs” as I like to call them (because they’re basically little inset buttons that you click), I could easily select tabs using the pen – they as well were completely forgiving of these small cursor movements. I think this is partly because the tabs were set further below the top of the window, which is where most users click & drag to move windows.
I just upgraded to to Safari 4, and thank God for John Gruber publishing this link about Safari’s hidden preferences, because I had to immediately switch back to the old-style tabs. Yes, I wussed out quickly, which is a shame because I actually like how the tabs work conceptually and graphically. However, it’s near-impossible for me to select a different tab using the pen – there is just too much hand & cursor movement involved in clicking with the pen, and Safari 4 is too unforgiving.
With the new-style tabs, the process goes like this: I’m drawing in Photoshop. I need to flick back to a different Safari tab because the image of a ram I’m using for reference was in a different tab. I click on a new tab to select it. It doesn’t work; in the process of clicking, I’ve moved the cursor too much, so the cursor movement is interpreted as a “move window” event. So I try again a second time, but I try it too quickly. OS X interprets it as a double-click event and the window is minimized. I have to take another 2 seconds to un-minimize the window, put down the pen, switch my hands over to the keyboard and hit “Cmd-Shift-RightArrow” to manually switch to a different tab, pick the pen back up, “Cmd-Tab” back to Photoshop with my left hand, and start drawing. By then, my creative flow is broken and it takes another 30 seconds to get back in. Plus I’ve been annoyed by the OS I’m so used to loving.
I can understand the desire to conserve space by moving tabs to the top of the window. I can also understand the desire to conceptually make the browser window more like a 3-ring binder filled with tabbed-dividers. It brings a stronger real-world metaphor to the browser window. However, I think the tabs should be FAR less sensitive to those small cursor movements, since users. As far as I can see, there is no advantage to this new hyper-sensitivity to cursor movements. A user clicking at the top of the window is far more likely to be attempting to select a different tab than moving the window.
Anybody using a pen-device input (including Axiotron Modbook owners) would be utterly and completely frustrated, as I am.
So, I ask, if an Apple-branded tablet was just around the corner as the rumors are always talking about, don’t you think they would have tested Safari functionality on a pen-input device?