Maps, moving pictures, and mermaids…

… 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:

Appraising the Day’s Work by Anna Ancher (1883), licensed CC0 on Europeana.

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):

 

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!

Dinner would be done quicker if there were more of me.

You can get strange effects with this, like this one where my son’s arms disappeared in the middle image for some reason.

Look ma, no arms!

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!

 

 

Illustrating logical fallacies

The #ds106 daily create for June 11, 2017 was:

Are you sick of slippery slopes and red herrings? Do illegitimate appeals to authority set your teeth on edge? Why not channel that emotion into art?

Channel your anger at politicians and illustrate their fallacious reasoning instead. Pick your favourite fallacy and illustrate it for us.

Through this daily create I found the great site yourfallacyis.com, which has a nice summary of various logical fallacies along with examples.

I saw this great one by Jenny Hayman and decided I wanted to do a comic as well. And I remembered that Kevin Hodgson often does comics for the daily create. I looked around at various online comic maker sites and I didn’t like most of them but I liked the look of stripgenerator.com. I think that is one he often uses. It’s pretty minimalist and you don’t have a ton of choices for objects or characters, but it gets the job done and you don’t have to sign up for any service (you can do it anonymously).

Here’s what I made:

And here it is on stripgenerator, as an “anonymous” strip.

This was fun, and something I could maybe use in teaching. Students could make comics and not have to sign up for anything, and it’s pretty easy to do.

Nordic cat

The #ds106 daily create for June 10 was: “What are the Nordic Ministers summoning? A mythological creature? A weather related phenomena? Some force we can only imagine in dreams? Create, draw, write a story of what these people are calling up from the seas…”

Here is the original photo from a tweet by @TVMaury:

Ministers of Nordic countries standing in a circle with their hands on a soccer ball in the middle

 

And here is what I made. They just all wanted to pet the cat! But the cat isn’t so sure about it.

 

I wanted to think that with all the political shit stuff going on in the world lately we could all just be happy petting a cute animal. And then I thought–well, the cute animal may not be that happy with so many people holding it, and this pic of a cat fit that idea I thought … its eyes signal to me: “I’m really not okay with this but I will stay still and hope it’s over soon.” Or maybe: “I am burning this into my memory and you will feel my wrath someday. Not yet, but someday.”

 

Actually, the cat one is the second one I made. At first I tried with a hedgehog, but it just looked weird because the fingers in the front were covering its face so I had to get rid of some of them otherwise you couldn’t see its face. But then it just ended up odd:

I told myself maybe it could look like their fingers were in its fur but really, that just wasn’t what it looked like.

 

Process

I followed the same procedure for both of these. I put the two images into GIMP, with the animal one below the ministers one, and I used the eraser tool on the ministers one (after adding an alpha channel to it to allow it to be transparent underneath) and erased the portions where I wanted the animal picture to show through.

This was made easier by increasing the transparency of the ministers picture so I could better see the animal picture below it while erasing. I also had to scale the animal pictures so they were a realistic size.

The hardest part was finding good source material. The pictures of the animals had to be such that they would “fit” into the hands in a good way, or at least so I could erase parts of the hands and not have it look weird.

I used these two pictures licensed CC0 from pixabay.com

Cat picture

Hedgehog picture

 

 

Catching up on some daily creates

June 2017 is the 30 day challenge for ds106 daily creates. I did a few this week that aren’t already on this blog.

For June 5, the daily create prompt was to goad people at the NMC conference into finding out the source of the dubious claim that we process images 60,000 times faster than text. See Alan Levine’s blog post about this for more info.

I really struggled with this one. At first I wanted to make an infographic about the claim, the need to substantiate it, etc., and I checked out Piktochart which looks cool…but it was just taking me too long and it was late at night and I was tired. So I downloaded a CC0 picture from pixabay.com and added some text with pixlr.com.

60000 times faster?

 

For June 6 the prompt was: “Give us your toughest Sergeant Hulka face in a selfie.”

I also used pixlr to add text to the image on this one.

Sgt. Hulka says make art dammit!

June 7th’s daily create prompt was to put a latte in a ridiculous container like the Avolatte. I spent a year in Melbourne, Australia, and I loved both lattes and avos there, but I am glad I wasn’t there when that amalgam came around.

This prompt inspired me to use an image of Brussels Sprouts in a cup that I had used for the Networked Narratives course I popped into for about a week.

This one I did completely in GIMP. I found a picture of a latte on unsplash.com and added text with GIMP. I used the eraser tool on the latte image to just get the coffee part (added an alpha channel to the layer first).

Then, the only tricky part wass that I had to add the block of semi-transparent darkness behind the text at the bottom, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to do it. I tried selecting it and then using the colour bucket tool, but that did a weird thing where it filled different parts of the image differently. Then I remembered I should have done it on a new layer anyway so I could change the transparency, so I made a new layer and just used the paintbrush tool to paint inside the selected area (wow, GIMP just automatically paints inside the lines of the selection when you do that on a layer with a selection!). Then adjusted the transparency of the layer so it wasn’t entirely opaque.

Sprout-a-latte

Latte image by Frankie on Unsplash.com: frankie

Finally, the June 8 daily create asked us to get Obama to say something through Talk Obama to Me: “Can you get hime to recite a song lyric, a short poem, or just an affirmation of how good it is to do Daily Create?”

Since I was/am behind on my daily creates, and wanted to know if I could still get my Creatorist badge from Talky Tina even if I’m behind but I still do them all, I decided to have Obama reassure me:

screen shot of what I had Obama say through the Talk Obama to Me app

And here he is saying it!

 

 

Now it’s getting late again and I’m still one day behind, but I’ll try to catch up by doing two tomorrow!

Sparkling strawberries

The #ds106 Daily Create for June 3, 2017 was: “What drink would define you?”

I decided to draw a picture:
WhatDrinkWouldYouBe-June2017

Because it’s not necessarily obvious what that is…

I would be sparkling water with strawberries, because it is refreshing, thirst-quenching, and reminds me of my favourite season: summer!

I used a drawing pen, some coloured pencils, and also some pastels on this one.

Head in the stars, on the ground

The #ds106 Daily Create for June 4: “Show us that your feet are on the ground, or that your head is in the sky. Or visa-versa for that matter. Or both if you can?”

Here is what I did for this one:
Head in the stars, on the ground

Process

I used GIMP and made two copies of the same image.

For the one on the top layer I desaturated it (under the “color” menu), and played with the “curves” controls under the “color” menu to get the kind of light and dark I wanted (or rather, I played around until it looked okay, not perfect…I didn’t have much time to spend on this one).

I also added an alpha channel to the b/w image, so that it would be transparent when I erased parts of it. I right-clicked on the layer in the layers dialogue on the right, and picked “add alpha channel.”

Then I used the eraser tool and erased where the yellow flowers were. The image on top was b/w and the one on the next layer was in colour so when I erased parts of the one on top, the image on the bottom showed through.