In a form on the Adobe site a question asked for my assessment of Adobe Products. This is what I wrote:

You are my love, my life, my sun, my moon, my stars, my reason for being. When I arise in the morning, I am lost in the sweet folded caress of your software. During the day, you provide the focus for my creative ecstasy ; and when I lay down at night, I dream in the pixel inspired excesses of your unrestrained digital abandon.

I am addicted to your creative mojo. My blood flows in the color of Adobe Red. I hunger for your updates, and revel in your playful inventiveness.

You complete me. Without you I am nothing. I am your willing submissive slave, and ardent champion.

I am, and will always be, yours; completely, until the end of time. I look forward to our growing old together, hand in hand; a single pure expression of that multifaceted sensibility called love.

****
Some how it seemed appropriate to post this answer here in my creative collective catch-all.

This is a model sheet for a new character I am working on. The Character is the mother of the protagonist; a little boy named Joshua. Whenever Joshua is faced with a problem, he goes to his mother who helps him “think it out” to find a solution. Joshua’s mom is a superhero of sorts (as all mothers are). She carries a purse which has EVERYTHING in it, and a utility belt that would make batman jealous. She always carries a Leatherman-type pocket tool and can usually be found in the Kitchen or Garage building or baking something wonderful.

I am unsure about the anime hair. It sort of works but it also feels too “trendy.”

It’s funny. Every once in a while, while I am rummaging through Amazon, I will run across a book cover that I have designed. I have done lots of these covers for a variety of clients. I have worked with big publishers and small independents. I have held the hands of self publishers, and have dealt with large bureaucracies of editors, project managers, art directors, and authors. I have worked in trade paperbacks and educational textbooks. I don’t do as many of these that I used to, (book covers I mean) but each time I run across something like this it makes me long to get back into it. This particular sample is not one of my best, but still, it was fun and a wonderful example of why I liked doing them. It has a feeling of a logo, but with a more intimate directed focus. The ultimate expression of integrated typographic design and illustrative visual.

Between my bouncing around in advertising, web design, and illustration, my summer activities have included a new commitment to finish my children’s book. It is nothing of great importance, but if opposition is a measure of anything worth doing, then it must be of some value. Along with this undertaking, I am putting finishing touches on a English/Spanish flip book that may have some merit. When these are done I will offer them as e-books as well as your typical case-bound hard copy versions.

There is a great amount of discussion lately on the validity of this new wave of “freeconomics” that seems to power the web. Within this idea, the creation of products (like books) are no longer the end focus. Rather; creating a channel where people can connect and take part in the evolving stream of conciseness, seems to be the order of the day. Within this collective hand wringing, products can be purchased, of course, but the driving distribution paradigm is in the building of this hive mind.

It is a dichotomy of sorts. Much like building a boat in the middle of a desert or building the same boat in the middle of an ocean; too early or too late can kill you.

Some have espoused social networking as a safe middle ground for the exercise. It is a natural base to gather a collective of “followers” if only passive in nature, and use it as a jumping off point for when you are ready to leverage the power of your channel (or network).

Along with this network, is the idea of “giving away” your product. For example, giving away an e-book that can be read on a iPhone, tablet, or computer. People watching such things say that free e-books drive sales to hard copy books of a more traditional nature and profit margin. I have reservations as how long this will last as technology becomes more and more portable over time. It feels like a transition solution. Still, the idea has merits.

It is all very interesting from many points of view. The new breed of publishers, marketers, advertising aficionados, and content producers are looking at this and saying: Hmmmmmm. Myself included.

With school starting, and work piling up, and my personal “things to get done” list getting longer, I find myself a bit behind in so many areas. Yet the sun continues to rise and set and oddly enough I find myself in Idaho Falls promoting Bitterroot Mountain publishing and in turn promoting my online ebook Artiste Gullible and digital illustration / book jacket design skills

Speaking of Mr. Gullible, I have decided to release him to the real world on Oct. 31st, under his own domain and host. I have figured out as much as I can hidden under this domain (vanettenstudios.) and I think I am somewhat prepared to move forward with a general public release. Of course after attending a few of the writing meetings here at the conference I am tempted to rewrite whole sections of the story line. The nice thing about the web is I can truly edit as much as I like.

This is going to sound silly, but it wouldn’t be the first time. I needed to create a digital mosaic from a piece of Illustrator art. Not one of those high tech picture mosaic, where a person’s portrait is rendered with a thousand little pictures. I am talking about the old school little chips of tile, cut and clipped and assembled piece by piece to create an image or design. Of course I have neither the time nor inclination to do one by hand and the nature of the job I am working dictated a digital solution.

PhotoShop has a mosaic filter which is more of a name than a tool. It will apply a mosaic-like texture over a photograph and I am sure (like most of the filters) it is a great place to start to develop random fields of texture from which to build or apply masks. But as a stand alone solution it sucks. Not very mosaic like. Alien Skin Software makes a plug-in for PhotoShop that has a mosaic effect, but it falls short as well. While definitely more mosaic like, it nver the less looks “canned” and delivers a buggy, gap filled, inconsistent mosaic patten.

AutoFX also has a plug-in and a stand alone product which really doesn’t do much more than PhotoShop’s basic mosaic filter (plus or minus a few bells and whistles.)

After studying a few mosaics I stumbled across a solution that is perfect. I am not sure why I didn’t go here before but I never really thought of it. It is a tool I use a lot — but over the course of years have never uncovered this gem hidden in a menu that I obviously glaze over in search of other things.

Corel Painter has a Mosaic tool, that is not strictly a filter but uses your pen to fill in or “paint” tiles. This can be done freehand, (like the real deal only faster and digital), or you can use a cloned color source and paint over top. What really makes this outstanding is the natural way you control the pattern of tiles. Because it works like a pen, you can control the direction, the overlap, the natural gapping, the color, everything! You can override a portion or a single tile. You control the grout color and width and it works as fast as you can draw a line.

After drawing my test mosaic, I dumpped it into photshop, attached a layer effect to give the tiles some dimention, and exported it out to my program 3D texture program. Very cool.

This has been an awful test of my patience, but I have stumbled across a third party direction on how to fix my WP 2.5 problem. The generic and almost useless direction from WP forums was to reinstall all the files and make sure that they were copied correctly. I did this three times (there are hundreds of files) and found nothing. A blogger then wrote to check on the “wp-includes/media.php and wp-settings.php” and make sure they are intact (re-upload them). I did check on them and sure enough there were partial files there in the directory when compared to the original files. (You can deduce this by comparing file sizes, in this case 10k vs 16k). I immediately re-uploaded these files and cleared the cache and restarted the browser and all seems to be well.

So the bottom line is; Yes the forum support was right. Make sure the files were uploaded correctly and all is well. However, why did I have to dig off some third party site to focus on these particular files? Or is this just me protecting my ego? Anyway. it seems to work.

Here is the link to the FAQ that answered the question.