Design-a-week: Multicolored box tiles effect with Gimp

I’ve been trying to do a design thing every week.  I doodle a lot, and make lots of scratches, and I might show you a few of those, but as a web developer I have to keep my hand into the design side of things.  Recently, the magazine Photoshop User had an article on doing “Multi-colored Box Tiles”, an effect they consider “a classic.”  It turned out to be significantly more difficult with the Gimp, but I did finally manage it.

Take your subject in front of a neutral background.  Here, I’ve put my daughter, Kouryou-chan in front of  a medium blue background with a slight lighting gradient.  Open the Layers dialog (Windows -> Dockable Dialogs -> Layers, or CTRL-L).  Now create four new layers (Layer -> New Layer) above your subject.  Select the first new layer, set the pen to color #cccccc.  Create a couple of random boxes, making sure that one encapsulates the head completely (otherwise it’ll just look weird).   In the second layer, do the same thing, but using pen color #999999. It’s okay if the boxes overlap.  In the third, again but this time with color #666666, and in the fourth with color #333333.  You should by now have completely obscured your subject.

For each layer, set the Mode to Overlap (On the layer dialog, Mode -> Overlap), and play with the opacities, and you’ll get a nifty mosaic effect.

Now for the 3D effect, here’s the fun part.  Create a new image, transparent background, big enough to hold your subject.  Go back to your working image, pull up the selection editor (Select -> Selection Editor).  Pick one layer and click on the selection editor.  You should see that layer’s boxes highlited– but the selection is inverted, so Select -> Invert Selection.  Now copy the selection and what it contains (Edit -> Copy Visible).

Now go to your blank image and Edit -> Paste As -> As New Layer.    If you’ve got a complete copy of Gimp, you should have Layer Effects installed, so you can just Layer -> Layer Effects -> Drop Shadow, but if not, drop shadows are simple: Duplicate the layer, go to the new layer and fill it with a dark grey, blur the edges (Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur), then position in behind your existing layer as you like.  Once your drop shadows are nice, merge down the existing collection of boxes on top of its drop shadow layer, so you get a few random boxes and their drop shadows.

Do this with all four layers.  Now that you’ve got all four layers on your new canvas, it’s time to play puzzle, moving the four layers to construct the whole image again.  You can set the upper layer to 50% opacity; that’ll help make sure you’ve merged the textures correctly.  It’s just a lot of fiddling; up the magnification to 400% or 800%, that’ll also help a lot.  Once you’re done, set all four layers to 100% opacity again.

For the new background, I just picked a nice grey with a gradient, the glow centered behind the subject’s heart.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

Dear Hollywood: Stop raping my childhood. Again. KThxBye.

Dear Hollywood: Please stop raping my childhood, okay? The Transformers thing was fair, but GI Joe was so ultimately sad, and thank the Gods you never got as far as you wanted with Knight Rider. But The A-Team? Really? With Liam Neeson as Hannibal Smith?

At least Masters of the Universe had the finest homoerotic S&M flogging scene ever filmed for a children's movie.

More art du jour

Eggcellent

You know, eggs really are a difficult medium. But they're fun, and they keep me out of trouble. Here's the two I did for the kids this week.

Review: Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

So, I’ve finished reading The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson, and my reactions are mixed, to say the least.  My primary reaction was one of intense sadness: she really does believe that she’s braving new territory.  She is completely unaware that she’s hacking through a jungle right next to a long, well-trodden road and the crew that’s building it is far, far ahead of her, and her course takes her away from the best conclusions.   She’s off in a strange, dualistic universe in which robots come to feel “just because.”  There are dialogues about how humans have emotions and yet this obviously emotional robots does not, and yet not a single word toward the general consensus that emotions are what give us the capacity to come to a conclusion, to shut rationalization down and make a decision, to break ties between competing choices, and without emotions we would be helpless.  When a video game acts as if it wants to defeat you, it has been given that want by its developer; at some stage, we turn off the abstraction and act as if the game wants to defeat us.  Winterson picks up the glittering tools of modern science fiction and engages in bronze-age reflections with them.

The Stone Gods is science fiction written as an excuse to do whatever the hell she wants, without regard for the reader’s sense of continuity or rationale.  The sense of used furniture is stronger than ever.

Winterson is trying to do too much: she’s trying to tell a love story.  She’s trying to tell a story of ecological disaster.  She’s trying to tell a story about fatalism, and about how fatalism is the only logical attitude to take given Mankind’s tendency to destroy himself.    Individual death is a metaphor for the world’s end– not in an entropic sense, but in a personal one, and an immediate one.

Toward the end of the book her lyricism returns, coupled with some really stupid scenes stolen from the worst post-apocalyptic fiction you could possibly imagine.  Think Shirow’s Appleseed, watched without translation or subtitles, and the author then tries to re-write what she saw as farce.   That’s where it’s going.

But the ending makes me cry because the writing is so good, even if the writer is telling you the character is hallucinating as she dies.   But Winterson makes me cry reliably.  I wouldn’t waste my time reading her “science fiction” ever again.  If you love breathtakingly beautiful writing, check out The World, And Other Places, her collection of short stories.  Each is small, worth your time, and not an insult to your intelligence.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.