Poor poor Miley Cyrus. She is just trying to do her best at the MTV VMAs (Video Music Awards) to prove on a grand stage how much of a BEARMANiac she is and the world makes fun of her. Sure I have some extreme fans but you shouldn’t treat them like they are on drugs or something.
See the performance here courtesy of MTV:
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2013 VMA, Artists.MTV, Music, Miley Cyrus
Look at me posting three times in a week. Had a quick 30 minutes to pull this off but had to put my two cents in on Ben Affleck formerly known as half of Bennifer and now known as Batfleck being announced in the role of Batman in the next Superman movie. I have no issues with Ben as an actor and actually enjoyed him in Daredevil even though the critics and box office did not.. But with superhero roles being so rare, I kind of feel that if you had your chance as one, then someone else should get a turn.
You listening Ryan Reynolds? Any other actors you know played multiple heroes in different movies?
I have noticed a trend lately as identified in today’s cartoon with people who describe themselves as introverted. Many of us have taken a Meyers-Briggs type assessment for work or fun that tries to identify our personality. Companies use tools like this to try to help teams understand the different dynamics of its members. In my days of using these tools I preferred DiSC as it measured behavior versus MB’s personality. What is the difference, you ask? If you ask people at work if I was Introverted or Extroverted they would all say Extroverted because my behavior at work is very outgoing in nature. However my true personality is introverted.
In situations where I am at work or a work function, among a group of friends or the center of attention, I behave in a manner that is very extroverted. Most other situations, (bar mingling when I was single, networking for non work related functions, etc) I am extremely shy and introverted. So behavior is situational while personality is hard fast.
So while some people are introverts in real life, I see more and more people behaving like extroverts online and proudly beating their chests about being introverted.
How about you? Are there situations where you would describe yourself as one versus the other?
I have to be honest with today’s cartoon. I have never been into Shark Week on Discovery Channel. Sure I have watched some of the programs but after a while they all seem the same. Yet the ratings each year are great so they keep rolling it in year after year.
For those who don’t understand what a “Shart” is (as many of my wife’s friends seem not to), it is not quite a shit and not quit a fart..thus shart. It has also been described as a “wet fart”. Now in real life if I came across a shark, I would probably full blown crap myself.
How about you. Anyone into Shark Week? Any animal you are more afraid of than others?
I have had requests to share my quick way to change line (or ink) colors in Photoshop Elements or Photoshop (I am not sure if GIMP has the same controls but it might). Now I know there is no reason you would want to make Paul Stanley of KISS fame into the blue colored thing on the right above but I needed a good image with a lot of dark areas to really show you the impact of what you can do so Paul came to mind.
I am someone that likes to sketch with a black color but when it is time to ink, I don’t want the same color so I use this process to change my sketch color layer to something lighter so it is easier for me to ink in black. Here is the process:
STEP ONE: Choose the layer that you want to change the color and in the Layers Palette (typically to the right of the screen) click on the square checkerboard image next to the word “Lock”. Don’t click on the actual lock image as that will actually lock your layer completely allowing now changes to be made. By clicking on the checkerboard pattern you are locking the transparent areas of your layer allowing you to easily change the nontransparent portion to whatever color you want.
STEP TWO: Choose the foreground color that you want to change the image to (in my example I chose blue) and go to EDIT>FILL SELECTION and hit OK. That’s it. If you only want to change a portion of the layer, you can use your brush tool and paint over any area you wish. That is what I did in my love bug image from a month ago.
Everything started as black ink lines and then I used the process described above to change the outline of the bug to a darker green and the heart to a darker red while still keeping the smile and the eyeballs the original black.
Let me know if anything isn’t clear. Have fun.
So as today’s cartoon shows, there seems to be more to Napoleon that many of us didn’t know. Two things I found interesting while reading this article were that he created battle plans in a sandbox and he was desperately afraid of cats. Well I would be too if I had to fend the cats off from trying to pee in my sandbox. This was fun to do so I will be coming up with more odd facts to share in cartoon form in the future.
Won’t be around the blogosphere much this weekend so please try to behave.
Anyone remember the video game Rampage? It was one of my favorites. So one of my ideas lately is to combine some pictures of Cincinnati with monsters. Last year on our staycation the wife and I went on top of Carew Tower (for years was the tallest building in the city) and I took some snapshots. Unfortunately the cloudy day didn’t make the end result of the pic that great. Yet when I saw the Fifth Third Tower in one of my pics it brought me back to pumping quarters into the Rampage game.
Now of course I didn’t use the exact monsters from rampage but did my own version of a giant ape and giant lizard beating down a building.
So what do you think? Not sure if I captured it well that they cartoon images actually belong in this scene with the coloring/shading choices I made. My wife didn’t think it mattered and loved it so much that for once she requested a print. Thoughts on making it better in future?
Raise your hand if what you smell on yourself doesn’t seem to be as bad as if it were from someone else. Or maybe you can’t believe something could actually smell that bad that you actually keep sniffing it. That is my story.
Today’s cartoon wasn’t really inspired by a smelly sock but by something I sneezed up recently. The force of my sneeze expel what I thought was a piece of my lung in my mouth. It was like a hard little ball. Actually, I figured it might be a food particle and I didn’t want to swallow it so I pulled it out of my mouth. I couldn’t identify it by sight so of course I smelled it.
WHOA!!! It was like a ball of the worst bad breath imaginable. But for some odd reason I kept sniffing it not because I enjoyed it but because I couldn’t believe something so dreadful could come out of my body.
After viewing this cartoon my wife said I should have drawn a fart because you never seem to mind your own brand like you do someone else’s.
So there was a recent meme going around the social media spheres that applauded Star Trek for predicting our current technology. Here it is (anyone know the original source, I would be happy to credit)
If you talk to Engineers and scientists of today, many will tell you that they were inspired to be what they are today because of watching Star Trek as a kid. In fact it isn’t a stretch to think that these same fans would utilize design framework from the series/movies. But of course my cynical humor nerve focuses in on the word “prediction”.
So I looked back and could have picked any number of 19th/early 20th Century authors like Mark Twain predicting the internet or H.G. Wells (and Dick Tracy’s) wrist phones which are much like our modern day cell phones. But I chose Jules Verne who predicted things like the lunar space program and even many of the things that actually came true (launched from Florida, splash down in the ocean, 3 man crew, etc). He also, much like the Star Trek meme showcases, predicted videoconferencing. The bane of all our work existence.
Any sci fi technology you are still waiting for (except of course the flying car – we all want that)?
The New Site Design is Here, The New Site Design is Here. First let me apologize to all the people I typically come read your blog. As you can see this is what has been keeping me up at night for the last week and away from visiting my friends on the net. I am NOT NOT NOT a web designer nor a web coder. But I am muddling my way through.
I still have a bunch to do on the back end like creating a “Get Mugged” page to highlight caricature commissions and other commission work. But this is the new look for now. I must have changed it 100 times as I looked at other sites and kept wishing mine was as clean as theirs but I liked having my own identity. Between design and trying to learn CSS and what it does I was either not sleeping because I was constantly thinking of changes or dreaming of coding issues.
The big deal was the theme I have been using for years called Frugal. Well two years, the maker created Catalyst Theme and I was supposed to upgrade. Well I didn’t until today so hopefully everything works out. Please let me know. The beauty of the theme is that you can design pretty much whatever you want. That is the drawback as well. Too many choices for the amateur like me to screw up.
Big thanks to InstantWP which allowed me to actually load the Catalyst Theme on my flash drive and create all the elements you see here before bringing it to a live site. As someone who doesn’t get the backend stuff, InstantWP was a life saver. Also my social media buttons on the home page were created with the help of a tool available at Image-Maps.com. I know there probably was a way to do it via CSS easier with only two images but using HTML with five images wasn’t bad.
EDIT – A big shout out to my Google Plus buddy Kenneth Poveda Mata (wordpress coding genius) for letting me know my site was mobile ready and looked like shit on it. Thanks to him I fixed some stuff that should make it look all pretty and nice.