My first lesson in silk screen printing at college (a few years ago now) had us making monochrome collages to transfer to screens.
I recently updated my fav image I made for this project, and even after all this time, I love it still. This was one of those precious times when the muse was with me and together we generated something I really don’t tire of looking at.
If you read my post on digital editing you’ll recognise it as the image I used to demonstrate the technique.
Since I relaunched my website a little while ago, some folks have commented on the loop of images scrolling round at the top of the home page.
Loads of sites use scrolling images, and there are umpteen plugins and gizmos to magic up some kind of animated doodad like this. I used Electric Carousel, but there are many others out there.
Like everything, it’s easy if you know how. So I’ve put together this thing on how to prepare the pictures for a seemingly seamless picture-roundy-thing. It will assume a working knowledge of Photoshop.
So here’s how:
Starting out with one of the images you want to include, open it up in Pshop.
Now go Image>Canvas Size… [Alt+Ctrl+C]
What we’re going to do is put all the images together as a super wide picture like mine up there, then slice them up into separate images again. This’ll make sense again in a few steps time.
In order to do this we want a much wider canvas to work on. For the sake of the screenshots I’ve done 300% width, but in reality I think I did about 1000%. Eyeball it. Use your best judgment.Or actual pixel numbers, if you’re that way inclined.
*Be sure to do these things:
Uncheck ‘Relative’. Otherwise it’ll make it taller as well as wider. We don’t want that.
Move the anchor point to Mid-Left. We want all our new canvas area on the RHS
Using the Rectangular Marquee tool you can select the LHS half of this image and copy to a new layer Layer>New…>Layer via copy [Ctrl+J]
Drag this new layer over to the RHS.
Shuffle your original layer to the left until the raw edges meet up and just touch, so you can’t see the join. Zoom right in.You wanna get this bit pixel-perfect. There will be an annoying hiccup if it isn’t bang on.
From here you can bring in your other images as new layers and arrange them as you wish. (I haven’t done this, pretend there are more images in the middle of this)
Now to chop it back up into separate images set vertical guides at regular distances across the width of the image. View>New Guide…
Grab the Slice tool and hit Slice From Guides.
And finally, File>Save For Web & Devices [Shift+Alt+Ctrl+S]
Set your settings where you want them and hit Save
Give it a great name like scrolly_thing.jpg or RoundAndRoundAndRound.jpg or whatever…
Be sure it’s showing Format: Images Only & Slices: All Slices in the options
By the magic of Photoshop you’ll now have a set of lovely images, neatly numbered in a file called ‘images’, ready to load into the whizzy-roundy-thing of your choice.
I hope this is of some use to someone out there – drop me a comment if it is/n’t, or if there’s anything I haven’t explained clearly.
For all the intrusions and all the insights, in equal measure I love and I loathe the presence of social media in my days.
Just as I’m about to switch back to analogue in a huff of indignation at the stupidity of falling into yet-another-time-sink, something like this pops into view.
I’m reminded how blessed we are to live in this age, where an idea can be expressed so succinctly in a beautiful image and then shared with millions of people with the click of a mouse.
I believe that every age and every era has its own magic.
I’m especially enjoying this one, as someone who reached adulthood before the www became ubiquitous. I’ve embraced it, and I’ve got the perspective of life before 24/7 access to misinformation and click bait.
A while back I was remembering an episode in my life when indulging in messy painty art just wasn’t practical. Limited by space constraints, impeded by my environment – a short term let in a flat with a brand new carpet.
This coincided with the opportunity to teach myself to Photoshop. Digital cameras were still quite new. It feels like a thousand years ago compared with the ease of tech we can enjoy now.
I took to pixel-pushing immediately. What I thought was just a temporary work around became a big part of my world. An all engulfing passion.
Some years later when I went on to fulfill the life long ambition of becoming a proper full time art student, and I threw myself back into all the real tangible visceral creativity that comes from paint and ink and clay and the such.
Contrast. It’s how I thrive. When I’m feeling flat and lacklustre I know I need to turn direction and play somewhere else for a while.
Just lately I was recombobulating my website, and in doing so I got back into photoshopping together some imagery. It’s been like spending time with a very dear old friend.
Now I’m nourishing my spirit by reinventing some of my doodles and paint sploshings in the realms of the crisply clean vector curves and the hazy glow of a Gaussian blur.
I’ve set myself some new challenges which I’ll show you soon. Meanwhile here are a handful of my favorites from a while ago…
Dawn Daisies II
Digital Pondlife
Abstraction
Aquascape
Vector Cats
(Prints of all of the above, plus lots more, are available from my shops on DeviantArt & RedBubble.)
Do you know Mike Dooley? He’s a proponent of this idea, as I am too. This was in my mind this week as this page took shape.
Everything begins with a thought.
The idea of this book didn’t seem like a realistic thought 11 months ago when it was born.
Although I’m behind in showing you the pages, they’re still emerging a page at a time, a week at a time. Just a few pages to go now – doubts disproved.
I don’t know the origin of this character… Maybe someone just floating through….
Still playing catch up : I’m just a few pages from bringing you up to where I am in the book now!
This week’s collage fodder includes some ex-pages from a gridded notebook, and a recycled envelope with a pleasingly matching tiny-gridded inside pattern.
Coloring in the squares makes a tranquil meditationy pass-time. Time to brain-idle for a bit. Coloring in the bitty little envelope-innards squares was more of a tiny dot technique that was less restful, and less pursued.
Color-wise I’ve got a big Red/Blue thing going on a lot in my life. Season of contrast – I want to balance out all that muted wintery grey and fog.
Edit: I just noticed this: the poppies! That was a subconscious thing I didn’t register at the time. I actually had to look back and check the week this was, and yes, it was the week with remembrance day.
This week I’m mostly wearing red & blue. (Did I tell you I have blue hair right now. This color obsession has literally gone to my head!)
His finely tuned systematized out-sourcing structure is a few bounds further than I will stretch, but I’m finding workable elements to feel more productive before they even manifest out of the theoretical.
One rule is ‘Don’t multi-task’
This is a truth I already get.
It’s just a way to do more than one thing simultaneously, less efficiently, with added confusion, and slower. And don’t get me started on all the associated women vs men BS.)
I totally get the point of not multi-tasking
So being reminded made me smile…
…as I witnessed my self simultaneously fail at several tasks, as my inner rebel will neither listen to her own advice, nor that of the instruction she’s currently agreeing with.
I mean – the whole audio book thing – is surely a vehicle to enable the doing of too many things at once.
Sure I can read an actual book, I’d enjoy that.Oooh, but what if I could distractedly miss chunks of the content while concurrently doing just a few other things….
Y’know, so long as you can appreciate the irony, and it makes you smile.
On the theme of streamlining efficiency, being less time-wasteful. Bullet-journaling has bobbed up on my horizon a few times.
I’m a long time journaler, diary writer, and exhaustive lister. It’s the best kinda brain-dump, and as a bonus I love to read over the thoughts of a previous me, comparing a today from another year, another era.
I’m drawn toward bullet-journaling cos I find so many notes and lists are repeated in fragmented form over years. I can round them all up in one book, once and for all. Resisting beginning with a list of lists, this looks like it could be a solution.
From the start of December I’m going to utilize a variation on this system. At the time of writing, I have over a week before it begins for proper, but I’ve already acquired a new notebook, noted some notes, listed some lists.
Each week I complete another page of this book, each page is similar but distinctly individual, echoing the shape each week takes.
More often than not I’ll be listening to the radio, a podcast, or someone speaking to me from the internet. And the words that resonate loudest often find their way into the page. This week the words came (again) from Bashar
“… the key to riding the wave of chaos
is not to resist it
but to allow yourself to know
you are a part of the energy of chaos.
To allow yourself to be chaos
and in becoming chaos
and allowing a new form of organization in,
rather than imposing your old system of organization upon it,
by letting this new idea in
and, as you say, riding it,
going with it,
not resisting it.
you will then, by becoming chaos,
allow the chaotic action
to show you through sychronicity,
what it is you really need to be aware of,
how it is that life will organize itself
using you as a guide post.”
Sometime earlier this year I fell upon the Four Agreements (Miguel Ruiz). This week they fell back into my mind, so I caught them here on the page. If you don’t know them,
The Four Agreements are:
1. Be Impeccable with your Word: Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the Word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your Word in the direction of truth and love.
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
3. Don’t Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.
I remind myself of these to keep on track. Again and again. There’s something magical about the physical act of writing words. I think the process is wired up to a special section of the brain that remembers differently.
There’s a lot about contrast. By which I mean to say – everywhere – it’s all about contrast, isn’t it? And on a smaller scale too.. Yester-page saw the words shouting out unhindered by art. This page is the opposite as from almost the outset the wordage got drowned out by heavy paint.
But it’s ok, I know what I wrote. The words are still fresh in my mind and readily retrievable from this bountiful online repository of stuff.
This page saw me in the mood for change. Random artifacts. Desk findings.
‘what if… it happened. what if…’
Moleskine users will recognise this addition (I never had cause to use these stickers – or these others that turned up a recent tidying flurry – but as somehow-un-throw-out-ables, there’s quite a collection to use up now)
It’s been a few pages since I played with the paints. So that was the spark to the first layer of word covering.
But…oh…
too dark.
Bring contrast: Add white
splurged on white
Thick dollopy white – oh THE PATTERNS!
OH MY DAYS!
But…..
Now too much white?
glimpses survive, but … more color to balance that white…
Like the proverbial kid in the sweet shop, or the bull in the china shop, I am the loon with the oil pastels, making the lumps and rhythms in the white paint come to life in all the colours of autumn that my eyes have been unconsciously soaking in.
Not usually a fav medium to me, I’m just developing a fondness for the slightly icky messiness involved.
And yet again, while the page (week) has a certain overall heaviness (ugliness)
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