|  Your graduated choices for a custom avatar …
I’ve never been a fan of the default avatars available for WordPress from Gravatar. You’d think Gravatar would offer you an option in your account to point to a custom default for those leaving a comment on your blog. Since that isn’t the case I went looking for a WP plugin,and found this nifty option to install in your wp-content/plugins directory. Now I can create custom avatars,and give those leaving a comment the option of choosing one. Granted it’s all my artwork,but it sure beats the bland quilt square,boring mystery man or (not scary) monster avatars. For the moment,my custom avatar choices are limited,but size matters,so comment away. The name of the plugin is Custom Avatars for Comments created by Nicolas Kuttler.  Pen and Ink drawing from altered book series. …
On January 1st,friends and I got together to begin an altered book project. The idea was to begin the year by setting a tone for creative fortitude across the next 365 days. The people who attended each picked a book,already full of text,some containing pictures,diagrams,recipes. There were dictionaries,cookbooks,books of obscure science fiction,board books for little hands.
The book I chose is a thin,compact,hardback,bound well,with fibrous,absorbent paper (and kind of pulpy,like coarse,heavy newsprint). I thought it would do well with ink,markers,fat Sharpies and dye. I decided to cut out every fifth page,(thereby removing one fifth of the book),to make space for the addition of glued-in goodies.
I just love simple pen and ink. This drawing was done using a Micron,and quite satisfying to make–lots of simple curves and hatch-marks. Lovely layering of styles,musical,encoded and digitally rendered. Today a preponderance of juxtapositions:intense sunshine and spring rain,a marriage of musical fragments converge:My Bloody Valentine,David Bowie,Built to Spill,Palace Brothers,and The Latin Playboys,merging into a song by Sparklehorse:(yeah a couple actually):“More Yellow Birds“ ”Babies on the Sun”and “Apple Bed.”
Ribbon effects in CSS3 (it is rumored that IE9 will actually support CSS3—imagine!). Brilliant.  New iGoogle theme available for your iGoolge homepage Topping it all off,my first design submission to iGoogle accepted,called “Fractal Rainbow One”(check it out,try it out). More to come,‘fo sho’. Okay,it was back in the Photoshop sandbox with me. New to javascript,I was chomping at the bit to try this technique first seen on my friend Corey’s blog. I thought it was so unbelievably cool that I spent the better part of a Saturday night tweaking and uploading,and tweaking some more. The [...] On a Mac,there’s a little-known utility that’s installed by default called “Digital Color Meter”,which will show you the current color (in hex,or an RGB tuple) of anything on the screen under the mouse cursor. A nice built-in option for anyone using OS X in addition to the fabulous FF add-on Colorzilla. In [...] A screen shot of the images I uploaded to MOO for their free offer. …. Have I mentioned just how much I love Moo Mini-cards? Probably not on my blog. But I’ve done the appropriate amount of squealing,gushing,strutting,and effusing about them to friends,coworkers and strangers who take my cards. (And [...] from wikiHow –The How to Manual That You Can Edit Artist trading cards,or ATCs,began in the tradition of business cards,but with a personal,artistic twist. Most ATCs are created on paper,but they may also be any other medium that can be worked in a suitable size. ATCs are traditionally the [...] Passionate Flower … Right here in my little corner of temperate geography,the first bloom from my Passion Flower vine,planted late in the season last year,struts its eccentric self. Lucky me! |