October 2007

alien egg photoshop tutorial

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to create these glowing blobular Alien Eggs in Photoshop

01 :: First, create a new file with a good canvas size & large dpi:

02 :: Next, create a new layer, fill it with a dark colour, and name it:

03 :: Then, to give our Alien Eggs a translucent appearance, wherein their cell walls are visible, we need to modify the properties of the Paint Brush Tool:

– Select the Paint Brush Tool
– Open the Brushes module & select Wet Edges

04 :: Any Alien Eggs worth their weight will give off an odd glow. So, with Paint Brush Tool still selected:

– BRUSH SHAPE: Choose a soft round brush (for best immediate results, use a px size at least 1/4 size of canvas)

05 :: Set some other critical Brush properties:

    – OPACITY: 100% (default)
   – FLOW: 100% (default)
   – MODE: Linear Dodge

06 :: Lets see what these settings get us on the black canvas.

   – Create a new layer on top of all others.
   – Select a vibrant colour; I’ve found that bright orange gets fantastic results.
   – Drop & drag out a few circles of your colour
   – Make sure the edges of at least 2 of them overlap a little bit

SUMMARY:
To describe the Photoshop Fu before you, we have blobs of colour that, by themselves, have cell walls and glow.

However, when they overlap, the Linear Dodge + Wet Edges causes the chosen colour to increase.

The more you mouse-down over existing blobs, the more saturated & bright the overlap appears.

The effect is eggs that appear to be connected, as if bubbles in a liquid. Even when the blobs approach each other, their glow overlaps, creating the appearance of 2 seperate eggs with connected membranes.

Try out different colours & note how – without editing the Brush Tool settings above – each colour behaves a bit differently.

For even further Alien Egg effects, create larger eggs shapes, and using darker & different colours, create smaller Alien Embryo shapes within. All the while, play with Brush Opacity: have the larger earlier Alien Eggs have like a 75% Opacity, with the inner/later Alien Eggs having closer to 100%.

Enjoy!

we’ve got one that can see

WHEN & HOW WILL DAP SHUFFLE BECOME AWARE?

I sometimes feel my ipod might in some unquantifiable way be aware. The math involved with the coincidence seems skewed. At just south of ten k tracks on perpetual shuffle, I often hear artists come up after having had a conversation about them earlier that day. Sometimes sooner.

I know its lunacy. Hell, its impossibe for a stock 4G ipod to carry that feature. But I also know it floors me sometimes.

Somehow parsing from ambient space either beat recognition & identification, or speech recognition. Then using that data as tags within my music library. Any given music library.

Is that gaming the shuffle?
Would there be a throttle?

a fathers lesson lost

The unavoidable pang of regret when a father looks back on the rearing of his son and feels much more could have been done if only the child were less of an individual.

The interests of the mentor subverted by the will of the ward, however unintentional.

There are core values I have planned, and expect to instill in jude. Some of these are values I wish were more surface & documentable in my every day. But all are in my mental agenda for Right & Wrong.

My concern – the WHY in writing this – is that these values will be lost on Jude as he ascends into his own self.

And on the heels of this is the desire to confront my father and at once excuse myself for missing his lessons, as well as request a review (by him) of myself as a man to see which of his lessons stuck… Which if any are visible today.