creativesomething: Discover yourself by creating.

First, please understand that as a trained actress, stunt person, ninja, and generally responsible person, I have a deep understanding and heathy respect for stairs. Those of you who know me will understand this. Second, know that as the designated and contracted Health and Safety Officer for The DS106 WorkPlace, I can only advocate for a most […]

itscolossal: Artist Isaac Cordal Leaves Miniature Cement Skeletons on the Streets of Mexico

creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by stevendepolo You do know the irony of #ds106 #4life? Right? With a four month fellowship at TRU starting in late October through March and no plans to teach ds106 for a while, I shall be dialing back my role in keeping the lights on inside the web site. The other thing about ds206 is that it rests on not one person. As previously aired on this blog, Mariana Funes and Giulia Forsythe have agreed to keep the Daily Create fresh. That one is really hard for me to stop doing, and I probably will not stop. As for everything else, I had a video chat with Jim Groom Friday, and he has all the info to take over the keys to the main site and it’s ancillary parts. But more than that, he’s returning to teach a regular semester version […]

MegaBytes, GigaBytes, MegaBinaryBytes, GigaBinaryBytes….it’s all so confusing!   Looks like they are using the definitions of Giga in odd ways. Giga, in normal math usage as a decimal metric prefix, means 109, and Mega means 106. (I bet you knew this.) However, in modern binary-based storage usage (i.e., disk drives and memory), Giga means 230 […]

One of the features of ds106 that has been most beneficial to me is The Daily Create. Every day we are challenged to be creative. Whether we participate in a particular Daily Create is our decision to make. Sometimes, I have completed one every day; often I’ve skipped one or more. But every day I […]

It has been a while since I have written a post here. I have been posting my art (See? calling it ‘art’ not ‘artefact’ anymore :) but not narrating the process. The truth is that narrating process is hard and as I get more into making art, I am less able to run the ‘witness loop’ to be able to accurately explain my creation process. This is, of course, natural when creative flow happens. We ‘lose’ ourselves. What this means is that we lose the judging mind and align in activity. 

I want to make an effort to narrate this daily create because I believe this to be my graduation assignment!

There are many goals to set going forward, but for the first time since I started participating in DS106 I have made something that is inherently and standalone pleasing to me. Awesome feeling. I have had glimpses of it when making animated gifs but this time the intensity was different. 

It started with me scanning the daily create site and seeing what others had done for today. The prompt made me go: meh. I am in the middle of another project for our Summer DS106 Story doing a trailer in the style of a silent movie (something that is proving more challenging than I expected). May be I get one with that and forget about the daily create today. Or may be not.

I watched a video today that admonished me: ”The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” I decided to make an animated gif, I know how to do that. 

I had the idea of many hands moving and that gave me the slogan you see in the image. Hands were dancing in my head and I started, predictably for those who know me, to make a gif. 

Where to find hands? @cogdogblog introduced me yesterday to the most beautiful resource I have found in a long time The Public Domain Review. Looking for images was a great excuse to lose myself there for a while. Actually, I found what I wanted straight away. The physiognomy of hands in 1917. Use these images in Photoshop and make the hands dance whilst the slogan pops up. Boom. Not Boom. I could not keep the background still whilst the hands danced.

Each time I watched all my layers I could hear a faint voice saying - it looks great as a still image. I ignored it for a while and kept trying to make the hands dance. I knew what I was doing. Until I was willing to suspend knowing. 

I abandoned the idea of an animated gif and looked at ‘what the marble wanted to be’ as they say Michelangelo thought of sculpture. Not that I am comparing the output, just the process. I spent hours playing with Photoshop selecting, blending positioning the hands. I tried many fonts and colours and then I noted that this was a kind of ‘silent film’ poster. 

Off I went down another Google rabbit hole. Find a font that suits the silent era. I have never installed a font, I just use what is there and match it as best I can. Lazy creator. This time was different. I wanted to shape the poster as it seemed to want to be shaped. Worked out how to install font and restarted machine. Boom. Like. Now I thought about the inter-title screens in silent films. It needs a frame. I looked and could not find anything. 

I remembered that Photoshop now has Picture Frame to use. I needed a tutorial for how to use that. I played around until I made something the fitted the style. 

Boom, my poster for today.

It really helps not to be struggling so much with the tools. As Ira Glass reminds us ‘our taste is impeccable, it take a couple of years for the execution to start to align with our taste and we know when we are falling short’. Well, today I did not fall short. There is a big difference between quickly getting something done, and losing oneself in the process of creation. I have known that from writing all my life, but this is the first time I experience it with digital art. Thank you daily create for the ‘boring’ prompt today.

I’ve been thinking about the new Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (PDF). I was never a big fan of the current ACRL Standards, mainly because I find them too unwieldy – 5 standards, 22 performance indicators, 71 outcomes, … Continue reading →

You may have heard of glitch art. You may already know all about it. I have seen some of John Johnston’s experimentation at http://jjgifs.tumblr.com/, and had some awareness overall, but had no idea how to produce my own. And Alan Levine recently posted a tutorial on his blog (http://cogdogblog.com/32217) about using Audacity (the audio editing […]

" Making the indiscernible and ephemeral into the eternal" Ordinary Landscapes Transformed With Bursts of Flying Paint | Most of the images are shot when the water is still connected as a singular body, but some show it as it disintegrates in mid-air....

I’ve been challenging myself to do something around the theme of “light” this week at the Making Learning Connected MOOC, using only audio to tell a story. I failed at it many times. It turns out that telling a story completely with sounds is pretty difficult, even with the experience I had doing this with […]

The Daily Create TDC918 said to make a birthday card for my Super True Friend, Christina Hendricks (@clhendricksbc, on Twitter) and because she is a Philosophress, like me, I made a Philosophy card for her. It was another time to practice making things look old in Photoshop. Plus I am wearing a toga thing like […]

Trippy. The frames of this gif (image data) were edited in audio editing software. It’s in the realm of glitch art as the effects created are largely unpredictable. It’s a matter of saving an image in an uncompressed format, importing into Audacity, applying an effect or two, and exporting back again. I saw a link to it via a retweet by Hilary Mason What happens when you use audio effects on images? http://t.co/LcxCGPrW14 — Brett Camper (@professorlemeza) July 13, 2014 Brett Camper’s post on Data Bending With Audacity has a long list of examples. I was able to do it with both this post and a prior one by Antonio Roberts. I started with a JPG of a photo rummaging around my desktop pictures, a photo of a cholla cactus I took maybe 10 years ago: In Photoshop, I resized it to 800x600px and then exported it as a TIF […]

Well, this started out as The Daily Create TDC916 two-limerick Physics lesson, but there was a little more to tell to provide the proper context, so I wrote down a little bit more limericks to say a bit more of the story.  Now it has six instead of just two. But not all about Physics. […]

Well, The Daily Create TDC915 for today said to make a picture to cheer up the Lonely People because today is “Cheer-Up-the-Lonely Day”. I looked at the website and it said muffins and sunflowers and also backyard warmth. I also figured that something important was missing, and so I added in a part about True Friends! (Duh!) […]