… and other daily creates from this week.
I haven’t blogged about my daily creates for 6 days in this 30-day daily create marathon, so I’ve got a bit of catching up to do. And I am behind on one of them from this week already.
The daily create for June 12 was:
Maps are crazy things, full of inaccuracies, strange proportions and distortions, and there often be dragons hiding off the edge of the World!
Add to the craziness of cartography by using the tool at Map Stack to create a visual piece of art that uses a map (either of your place or some other place) as the source of inspiration. Add layers to make a rich interpretation of the world.
Map Stack is a lot of fun. It’s like an image manipulation tool like GIMP only for maps (and not as powerful). Here is the one I made of the area of Melbourne where I lived when we spent a year on sabbatical in Australia (2012-2013…I first took DS106 in the Spring of 2013).
The daily create for June 13, 2017:
ZOMG ROTL art! Follow the lead of Slut4Art and create a TIL, TFW, ICYMI type tweet for what is going on in classic art.
I took a long time for this one. I went to the openly-licensed collections listed in the Creative Commons search tool to find an image I could say a TIL or TFW or ICYMI thing about. Finding the right image took at least an hour…I can’t remember exactly how long. Here’s what I came up with:
If I’m just going to add text to an image, usually I use Pixlr Express because it’s super easy and fast. But I wanted to use speech bubbles and that just wasn’t working out easily. Once you set text or stickers in Pixlr Express you can’t move them again later, and that was too limiting.
So I used GIMP for this, and created speech bubbles myself. I used the rectangular select tool to select a section on a new, transparent layer, and then used the bucket tool to fill it in. I used the free select tool to create the little arrow thing pointing to who is saying what. I put each of the speech bubbles on different layers so I could move them independently. Having them on layers meant I could adjust the transparency of them as well, which I liked.
The best part about this one, though, is that I got a reply from Skagens Museum to my tweet with this image in it (a set of museums focusing on Skagens painters, of which Anna Ancher is one):
well done! we’re giggling
— Skagens Kunstmuseer (@SkagensMuseum) June 15, 2017
The daily create for June 14:
Panorama clone yourself!
More of me? I mean you? Yes! Try this low tech approach to place yourself multiple times in a mobile phone panorama image.
You will need a friend to operate a mobile phone camera in panorama mode. The idea is to have them pause their movement after they pass your first position, then you run around behind them and set up just ahead of the continued motion.
I played around with this multiple times and had some pretty strange results sometimes. This one turned out the best. Thanks to my son for moving the camera!
You can get strange effects with this, like this one where my son’s arms disappeared in the middle image for some reason.
The daily create for June 15:
All this one said was: “I am nervous.”
I did a quick drawing…
This was the only thing that came to me when I saw the prompt.
The daily create for June 16:
Design the poster for a movie with this plot: “A mermaid rebuilds the Brooklyn Bridge out of paradoxes.”
(from Magical Realism Bot on Twitter)
This was a challenge. I spent the day trying to come up with something, and in the end what I did was kind of literal–a mermaid spewing paradoxes that actually hold up the bridge.
Sources for image:
- Brooklyn bridge, licensed CC0 on pixabay.com
- Mermaid icons purchased from thenounproject.com (I have a yearly subscription, which also allows you to download in colour). The Noun Project has a handy app that’s great except that you can’t find links to the icons on the website through it, so I don’t have a link for the mermaid icon I used.
I’d like to say I made the speech bubbles easily like in the Anna Ancher image above, but I tried to do something fancy with the one holding up the bridge and spent way too long on it. I wanted to warp it to fit the bridge shape, and spent a long time trying to figure out how to do that in GIMP. Suffice it to say I didn’t really figure out a good way, though much time was wasted playing with Tools->Distort->Curve Bend, which works okay except you can’t see exactly what it’s doing until you close out of it and so you have to do it over and over (there is a “preview” function but that didn’t seem to do much).
In the end I used the free select tool to make it more rectangular, and then used bucket fill as well as the eraser to take out the curves I had added and make the speech bubble more like a rectangle. Overall, this was over an hour’s worth of work, which is far too long for a daily create, especially for results I’m not that excited about.
The daily create for June 17:
Terrible, terrible headlines!
Use the Upworthy Generator to see examples and create your own DS106 Unworthy Headline. Bonus internet points if you find an appropriate image to go with your headline.
And wrap a story it innuendo about it.
Okay, so I hadn’t actually heard of Upworthy, and I had to go look not only at the parody generator but the original site too. Even then the easiest way for me to go about this one was to find an image first. I searched through some of my old images and found one I took in Costa Rica last December. A friend who is a botanist said it’s some kind of passion flower.
I took a picture of it originally because I thought it looked like something out of Dr. Seuss. Hence the headline here.
I did this one in Pixlr Express, which also has, I discovered, a “splash” tool that desaturates the whole image and lets you ‘paint’ the colour back in where you want it. This one truly took me more like the 15 minutes a daily create should take!