I was looking for a simple way to allow users at work to resize some images -the field guys tend to upload photos at max resolution which bogs down the server a bit. I found a free Picture Resizer at RealWorld Graphics. The quality and ease of use is excellent and they have some other nice tools. Check them out.

Just a quick tip for Outlook 2007 users who may have shared tasks and want to share color categories. The Color Categories are unique to each user and but there are a handful of third party products to help you maintain a central shared list. I found a quick low tech solution which met my simple needs of sharing only about a dozen categories; I have a task list in Public Folders that we were all sharing. I add a "Color Category List" task and assign all the Categories available. Now all users who share the list can open this task, right click in the Categories column, click on All Categories, click on each of the Color Categories which show the name but "not assigned to Master Category List", then click New and assign a color. You can update the Task as needed and all users can add to their own lists with the same name at least.

For Outlook 2003 right click on the 'Color category List" Task, select Categories, copy the text in the 'Item(s) belong to these categories', click the 'Master Category List' button, then paste the text in the 'New Category' text area and click 'Add.'

If you ever needed to create a new set of color swatches or styles you usually have to load one and then delete all of the ones you don't use. I do this often enough that I just create a simple 'starter' style and color swatch file. You can drop these in the appropriate Photoshop Presets folder usually something like this

Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5\Presets\Color Swatches
Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5\Presets\Styles

EmptyStyles.zip

EmptySwatch.zip

One more tip; when you want to delete a lot of colors or styles from the respective tab group (with the little stlye/color swatch squares), instead of right clicking and using DEL for each one, just hold down the ALT key and click on each one.

I spotted an upcoming game called Legend of Grimrock on GOG. It caught my eye because the game play reminds me of some old dungeon crawler games that I loved playing way back. I'm looking forward to trying this one out.

This is a nice animated film by Dave Cockburn of SqueakyPictures.

Paul Manchester just started a new little online comic; a couple of the episodes are here

The Fungi Within

fun for kids and those with 'kid-inside' on the label.

He also just finished his first book Pursuits of Whimsey - just ordered my copy. If you want to support a very talented artist then get your own copy.

Minor news - new site background. Why? The site is boring me. I want to redo it but when I think of the time required to do it and test all the templates I'd rather spend it working on other projects. I created these templates right after I was laid of from Animax where I had worked on a bunch of kids art (like Beanie Babies and Ty Girlz) for a year. While I liked them well enough, if I get the time I would just as well a dynamic graphic novel or comic book look, or sci-fi or even a nice clean web 2.0 interface - but for now all you get is a cheesy background. ;)

As the media announced the death of Kim Jong il I watched Google search fill up with ominous warnings of North Korea's short range missle tests and uncertainty of the new government.

The warning bells have begun to sound from broadcast towers everywhere. For some reason I flashed to Denethor's famous line in Lord of the Rings: "My sons are spent. My line has ended. Rohan has deserted us. Theoden's betrayed me. Abandon your posts! Flee, flee for your lives!"

Personally I'm not worried about North Korea's missle tests. You see, I have been watching the news for many years and I am pretty certain that we'll all die from a heretofore undiscovered asteroid striking the earth, or global warming will raise the level of the oceans and wash away North Korea, or the world economic crisis will explode and North Korea won't have money for bullets, and will ride bicycles into battle like the Cuban military, and we will all have to fight using sticks.

Of course the best sticks will come from the Amazon Rainforest so it will be cut down, and then there will be no trees left and there won't be enough oxygen left so we'll all die. Throw in the teflon in the ocean, the radio signals which are giving us all brain cancer, monster hurricanes caused by global warming, anticipated local events like the earthquake dubbed "The Big One", the mad cow virus, the flesh eating virus, and the congressional virus and I think you can see - you don't have to worry about the North Korean's missle tests.

Millions of years from now a race of intelligent roaches will inherit the earth and have essentially the same conversation.

Working on a few ideas for a figurehead for the boat in my Hope's Journey project.

Here's a few more. Lots to learn... be sure to join in if you want to practice and learn too.

I found a web site that I hadn't seen before. It has a collection of little utilties to optimize images. No frills but they work quite well.

We needed a way for non tech users to just drop an overly large (filesize) image on the icon and spit out a smaller image. In our case ScriptJPG at this site did the trick. The owner provided a simple modification so that we could automate the picking of option 6 (maximum compression) each time so that our users wouyldn't even have to press a button. I'll paste that edit below. The web site is at

http://www.css-ig.net/

If you want an "automatic selection" of option 6, just edit the ScriptJPG.cmd file with a text editor. Line 80 you have the "choice" section, corresponding to user input. Instead of :

:choice
set /p number=# Enter an option [1-6]: 
if %number%==1 goto optimize
if %number%==2 set qua=90 & goto jpgconv
if %number%==3 set qua=80 & goto jpgconv
if %number%==4 set qua=70 & goto jpgconv
if %number%==5 set qua=60 & goto jpgconv
if %number%==6 set qua=50 & goto jpgconv
cls
goto iuser

Replace it with :

:choice
set qua=50 & goto jpgconv
cls
goto iuser

This modification will run option 6 without user interaction.

I found this nice small collection of free animated sprite effects at Pow Studios.

Weapon Attack Effects Pack 1

Bright Flash Animations Pack 1

Blood Animations Pack 1

Electricity Animations Pack 1

Fire Animations Pack 1

Smoke Animation Pack 1

Still have a lot to learn but I think this is it. It is better than the first effort anyway.

Here are some of the steps it took to get here.

Trying my hand at painting a female face in Photoshop entriely with the Wacom. I've neglected practicing in this area much and most of my girls look like Shrek with a wig. Anyway here is my progress so far.

Well got my first critique. The stuff is too soft (need harder brush), values need to be better defined (dark to front light to back) and less detail (just focus on shape and value). Finding it initially a little hard to avoid detail and get more accurate with my Wacom. I limited myself to 10 minutes per thumb here as I find I want to add extra detail otherwise. Expect to have more time tonight and will do a lot more.

I found a nice thread on the ConceptArt.org forums. User DANJAN has created an interactive post to teach the basics of environmental design. There's some good information there and I recommend you join in and work your way through the challenges. Its been going on for a big so I am behind, but by reading the thread posts you can start and catch up. I just did the first 8 of 20 thumbs and am wwaiting on feedback. These are just rough thumbnail drawings designed to work out ideas without spending too much time (in my case they took a little longer as I have to power up my Wacom skills).

You can see my first efforts here.

You can find the forum thread here.

I needed to quickly compress a few heavy png images and found PunyPNG did a great job. You can use it free or spend about $5 bucks a month for an increase in the amount of images and sizes that can be uploaded.

Check out PunyPNG >>

My son's middle school uses a lot of online resources. The kids learn how to use the technology and also have some fun.

Here is a Glog he created. Your kids might like Glogster too.

Worked out another rough for Hope's Journey ...

I'm working on filling in some missing 'concept' images for my Hope's Journey project so I can put together an animatic and try to get it funded on something like Kickstarter. I added a new image last night - I really suck at drawing people and based the girl on the beautiful 'mother and child' art of Katie M Berggren. Without looking at her images my girls look like pumpkin headed freaks or cross dressers. Note: the story beats are missing a key sequence (the 'ME' giant and the kettle burners) which I still have to write in and create concept art for.