Tag: art

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Computers Janee's Galleries My Day

Hidden Treasures Found!

Today, I’m engaged in unpleasant tedium, but I am, in the process, uncovering hidden treasures! I’m trying to get a grip on all of my photos — to get them all organized in one place. Ah, for the days of the shoebox!

At least, I’m organized by date. Now if I could just get all of the decades together in one place. I just found out that my old Windows 7 laptop still has 4 years of photos which had not gotten put into Dropbox. And it’s not letting them go directly into Dropbox, although I don’t know why.

So I’m transferring them via thumb drive. And that drive’s not big enough, so find a bigger one. And that one’s full of old stuff so format it. … Soon I’ll have all of my pix from 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2016 in this computer.

I never thought it would be a cakewalk to get back into this after my -pause- . I just have to stay the course, praise myself for my progress, and realize that .. I’m still young.

In other news, I completed a new collection for Janee’s Gallery: Industrial Plum. Check it out!

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General myJanee.com News Janee's Galleries My Day

Cool Text Effects: Gallery Updates

Yeah! I got away from the seemingly endless photo-editing today and did some fun graphics. Here’s my Text Effects Gallery. Today I did The Spatter ones, the Comb and Drip, and TTYL. I did Comb and Drip by modifying the Type Path. I did the others with clipping groups and Lighting Effects.

Part of my struggle with this was in coming to grips with changes in the Lighting Effects “filter” in Photoshop. It just doesn’t seem as easy as it once was, and it likely isn’t. More powerful = more complicated = steeper learning curve.

What I should do pretty soon is to do a nice tutorial on using Lighting Effects to make cool Text Effects.

The TV room project is coming along again. Jack’s in there hammering right now, starting work on the 10′ piece that will be our TV stand / puzzle display case. I’m pretty excited to see all of this coming together.

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My Day Photoshop

Strutting my stuff

Argh. Yeah. I’m not used to keeping my vehicles long enough to have stuff go wrong with them. And I’m used to having Hondas, which, in my experience, just don’t have much go wrong. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that the vexing noise in the back of my car was bad struts! That plus some brake work set me back $600.

And the RV is getting fixed, finally! My little altercation with the stop sign is costing the insurance company $30,000. I know, right? I’m really going to try hard not to do anything like that again. Lesson learned!

The TV room project turned into a bit longer one than we’d hoped for. We got the rug and the pad in and waited till Tuesday to put them in, because we had to move the furniture and clean and that was an empty day. So, furniture moved, we opened the pad and put it down. Cool.

Then we opened the rug. Buzzz! Wrong rug! Very wrong rug. The woman at Wayfair was very nice and assured us that we would have our right rug in around the end of the month. Urf. So we had to move the furniture all back onto our old rug.

The bright-colored abstract rug is now in the office and I like it here.

I’ve done a little art, but just a little. Here’s a look at my sketchpad:

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My Day Photoshop

Having Fun Making Art

My client wanted a triptych work done with maybe feathers, blues, and grays. Graphic art rather than photorealism. And here’s what I came up with. Client loves it and so do I!

If you’re curious about the spiritual meaning of a blue jay feather, Symbolshub has your answer.

In other news, we’re coming closer to having our lighting done in our TV room — that side of our great room where the TV lives. When we have it done, I’ll post a picture here.

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General myJanee.com News Travel Tales

So Much Amazing Art!

That’s what I’m seeing when I review, edit, and post my State Capitol pictures!

This piece of carving was at the Capitol in Lansing, Michigan. Each of the capitols has interesting architecture, beautiful artwork, and sometimes quite over-the-top gilding. But it’s all fun to photograph. I do hope that someday someone will look at these.

We’re still pondering what to do with our lighting in our media room, which is actually just the part of our great room where we watch tv. My original shelf concept was nixed because it conflicts with the height of our arched doorway.

I know, why do we even HAVE an arched doorway? Historical value. I want the archaeologists of the future to have a time with it. They will certainly think that it has some religious significance.

So now I’m thinking about a shelf that stops short of the arched doorway enough that it doesn’t call attention to the doorway, but rather is an architectural feature in its own right.

Someday, when all of this industrial stuff is hopelessly out of style and only old people have it, well.. I’ll be old. And I’ll love it just like today’s old people like the rounded oak furniture of the 80’s.

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales

More State Capitols Uploaded! Crowds in Awe!

Yes! Check out my Our United States link to see all the progress I’ve made. AFAICT, I have just 18 more states for which I have pictures to post. My latest additions are Illinois, Tennessee, and Rhode Island.

Getting going on a bit of art. Some’s on the computer and some is still in my head.

We’re working more on ideas for our media room lighting. Every time I come up with an idea and bounce it off Jack, he thinks that I’m changing my mind. I have difficulty explaining that I’m developing a plan and formulating ideas, that it doesn’t always just pop out as a finished blueprint on the first lightbulb flash.

Of course, with every idea I mention, he’s talking about how to build it. I’m interested in how to build it, too, because I don’t want to fully develop an idea that’s not possible to execute, but I don’t want him to have the whole thing mentally built before I have my idea fully conceived.

If he read my blog, he’d know more about how my mind works.

I am thinking at this point about installing a wide cedar beam, running horizontally high along the wall. Then, from this beam, we’d have pendant lights hanging down, sort of above and behind us, to act as reading lights.

The individual fixtures would have on/off switches on them and the entire affair would be controlled by a wall switch. I also want some kind of up-lighting from the top of the beam.

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Janee's Galleries My Day Photoshop Travel Tales

New Artwork! New Links! Still zero visitors!

LOL that headline got a score of 74/100. Today I did some more art! And I finished up with my Archive Tutorial updating project! If you should happen to be reading this, should happen to go to my Archive Tutorials and find a link that needs to be fixed, please use the Contact Janee link above to find me and tell me.

So in my updating, I am reminded of what an amazing body of work lies in my tutorials. Not only did I work very hard on them, but they are quite good! Of course, a few things have changed while I was away, but just a few.

So here’s the image that I’m about to post in my Text Effects gallery. I can’t even link to it, because it’s not even a page yet!

Hey! We finally got an estimate for our RV’s boo-boo. The cheap fix, which leaves out the minor scratches on the side, which we figure we would do in the first year from tree branches anyway, and the back storage door, is north of $6500. The good-to-go ready-to-put-on-the-sales-lot estimate is north of 11,000.

The good news is that State Farm will not be re-rating us for this, since we have been such amazing accident-free and reliable-pay customers for … nearly 40 years. So now I have to figure out which way to go. Maybe I’ll ask on Facebook. Those folks seem to know everything. And I did. The consensus is to go on and have the whole thing fixed. An insurance guy said that it doesn’t matter to the insurance co if it’s 6500 or 11000 – a claim is a claim!

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My Day Travel Tales

New Art on Display

Yay! It’s about time I did something creative that I can actually post. Today I finished a piece of Celtic knot art. It’s in Photoshop, of course, and I did it all in vectors this time around. And I did it all mathematically, so that it’s pretty regular. This is on display in my Geometrics Gallery.


So what else is new? I just noticed that my blog entries are no longer showing a date! I will fix that.

I’m done grousing about how bad video tutorials are, and I’m welcoming the present into my life. To be more precise, while I’m not buying into the idea that print is dead, I’m going to make some video tutorials and get set to teach some video classes.

I need to get a camera, and I’m in negotiations with the man who shares my house as to which one to get. I’m usually one to spend nearly as much as I can, and I like to have the good one. Jack is ok with spending as little as possible and then buying another in 3 months, when it’s obvious that the cheap one isn’t good.

I’ve done some more research, jumping down interesting rabbit holes, and have added more links to my Photoshop Resource Links pages.

Still no word on whatever astronomical estimate we’re going to get for our new RV. I’m still hopeful for a November get-away, but as that month comes closer, I’m less sure that it can happen. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

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My Day

All new Photoshop Art: Geometrics Gallery Revealed!

I was busy yesterday! I did some new art and I posted a new Geometrics Gallery! This piece is reminiscent of one I did for the cover of Photoshop Elements Most Wanted in 2002.

I’m eager to be useful. I want people to discover my work and to see that I offer good instruction that will make them into real Photoshop artists.

Mostly I want people to be able to learn Photoshop, instead of just watching other people do it. Sure, many people enjoy those cooking shows, where you watch other people cook. But, if you really want to make something, you’re searching online for a written recipe, or you’re going to your cookbook collection.

Which brings me to another complaint I have about the ubiquitous youtube tutorials: Many are just a recipe for some effect. The goal is the effect and not in teaching anything outside of that particular effect. Whine. LOL.

Today I did some more site tidying. I have been working on my Photoshop Resource Links, getting rid of dead stuff and adding new good links. I’m also working toward getting all of this stuff onto the WordPress arm of my site.

And, of course, I did some more Jodie-art!

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My Day

New YouTube Artwork

Today I did some touchups of my site, fixing some dead links and nosing around some old dead parts of my site. It seems that my site has so many rabbit holes into which I am prone to fall!

Today I read all of my class descriptions and procedures. I will do things a little bit differently next time, but it’s mostly good. I reread the comments that I’d posted from my students about the classes and it made me eager to get in and teach again.

I did some art! This was for my YouTube banner. They say how large to make the art and in what aspect ratio, so it sounds easy. I made my file, created my art, and uploaded it.

Too big. Nothing showed except the very center. So I found another dimension in another place. Too small. So I moved things around so that I thought it might work, and it seems to work. Above is the way I wanted the image to be.

Below is how it is, except that they chop off most of it, so all you get is just barely above the text and not down to the purple line. Oh well.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

New Video Tutorial: Pearly Button

I just finished and uploaded another video tutorial: Creating a Pearly Button in Photoshop. I’m still working on fine-tuning, and there’s still much to be learned about the inner workings of Camtasia, but I’ll get there.

I also figured out how to upload to YouTube. Most people are searching YouTube for tutorials, so it’s where all the cool people are these days.

I did a bit of art!

It remains idiotically hot here. If I ever say anything like “I’d like to stay in Sun Lakes this summer,” I want you to just shoot me.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement Travel Tales

New Photoshop Pen Tool Tutorial

I’ve been busy, busy! Today I finally finished my all-new Pen Tools in Photoshop Tutorial! In this one, I go through some detail with how to use the Pen tools and why anyone would want to do that in the first place.

I take you through such riveting projects as creating my feather to the right and making this flourish as you see below.

I just love doing vector graphics, and should probably take another dive into Illustrator, but not today.

And Jack and I bought an RV yesterday. We had sold our 2019 View the day before. It was just too small for us. We did like the beds in back, but, once we got out of bed, it was a fail. We decided that we just need more space for all 3 of us.

We found a 2019 slightly used Pace Arrow 33D in Anthem, went to see it, and loved it. They’re doing some little projects for us: adding solar panels, installing window awnings, putting in a washer/dryer. We will be picking it up in 2 weeks. Here are some teaser pics of it:

Jodie became instantly well when we went and got her a new bag of food. We’re still feeding Pro Plan Savor, which she LOVES, but that was just a bad bag. I emailed Purina, but got no answer. We had been feeding her puppy food, and it was suggested in my Standard Poodle FB group that she should be on adult, so we switched.

We also had her groomed yesterday and, so far, knock wood, she’s doing fine. Recall that she had gotten sick the day after her grooming every time we have taken her to her first groomer. We took her to a different groomer this time. If you have a reason to want to know what groomer we are now patronizing, email me.

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Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

New Opal Text Tutorial for Photoshop

Opal Text in Photoshop

Yeah! I’ve completed and published an all-new Photoshop tutorial to create Opal Text. I’m kinda loving it! I include some exciting tips for techniques that I’ll bet you have not seen.

So what’s next? Thinking. I’m still working on my Gallery pages, of course. And I can always create new art for that.

Jodie’s still not quite herself. Pepto seems to have cured her tummy issue, but she still isn’t interested in her food. I hope she didn’t read that posting in the Poodle group about how the people feed their poodle turkey with broth and Green Giant vegetables. A picky dog is not what I signed up for, and I’m not going to cave to that. She won’t starve.

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Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Text in Photoshop: a fun new tutorial!

I posted a new tutorial yesterday! This is a bigger piece of work than many of my tutorials. This one took the better part of two days to put together. And I learned new things about Photoshop along the way. The new tutorial is called “Text in Photoshop.”

In this tutorial, I cover all the basics of text in Photoshop: sizing, color, font, subscript, special characters. I also go into text on a path and images in text — Postcard Text. Good stuff!

At this point I have 29 all-new-for-2020 tutorials. As far as I know, nobody has found them yet. The index of all of these tutorials can be found at THIS LINK.

Thinking about other things to teach. It seems, from looking at the work put out on the PS groups on Facebook, that many people don’t get the whole look-at-it notion when it comes to creating art. If you want the hat on her head to look real, it must cast shadows. A card propped up on a desk will not have a shadow that looks like a drop shadow. Maybe I’ll look at a way to teach this.

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Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Create a Zoom Trail in Photoshop

I have just posted another NEW Tutorial! This one is on creating a Zoom Trail in Photoshop. This is a modern improvement on a piece I wrote for a book I co-authored in 2002.

https://myjanee.com/new/photoshop_tutorials/sigbrush/This was a book that had barely made its first run off the press when the publisher went out of business. I got paid, but, other than the author copies and a few others, I don’t think that it ever saw the light of day. Shame, because there’s some good stuff in there. I have reproduced some of my other effects from the book in my tutorials like Burned Paper, Hot Hammered Text, Swoosh Text, and Wood.

I’m also working laboriously on updating my extensive Photoshop Resource Links. At one time, this was an invaluable source of Photoshop information, but people move on, give up their sites, new sites come online, new media appear out of nowhere, and pages like mine go out of date. But I’m fixing it.

If you’re reading this and you have a *relevant* site that you’d like for me to consider adding to my listing, please email me. I do not do reciprocal links, but rather curate my list so that the links are of interest to my readers.

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My Day

New Art Galleries Posted! Crowds amazed!

Today I’m working on more site updates. And I’ve made some art! I created a new Gallery page yesterday, and today, the Gradations link is no longer “in progress.” It’s posted! I have some beautiful things up there for your viewing pleasure. Here are but a few:

I’ve also been working at tidying up more of my thousands of untidy HTML pages. I’m working. It’s working. I’m bringing my site up to where it needs to be!

I’m frankly amazing myself with how well I can actually fix HTML. Sometimes I’ll have to repost a page several times, before it works, but usually I get it on the first try!

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My Day

Hidden Zodiac Page is found

Not really! But here’s how to do a redirect page in HTML: Paste this onto the page:

<meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”0; url=’https://www.whereyouwantittogo.com'” />

The 0 is how many seconds you want the viewer’s browser to wait before redirecting.

I’ve also done a bunch of site upgrading. I redid my Galleries index!

I now have different categories set out for my artwork and photography to make it all easier to find. And I dug through some art and found some new things to post. And I updated some pages with my new top banner.

I found my hidden Zodiac page. I remembered I had hidden it because people were hotlinking the images.

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My Day

Photoshop Fun: a Pause Button

Today I did some fun little Photoshop foolery — nothing worth publishing, but fun nevertheless. Ok, if you insist, here’s what I made: It’s a Pause button. I copied one I found, but all these pixels are mine. I may write a tutorial for the process. It was fun to do.

Then, this afternoon, I worked on getting my Archive tutorials set up and ready to be archived. I’m not really sure how exactly I’m going to DO that, or what it means, how accessible they will be, etc.. What I did do was to improve the navigability in those pages and got rid of some obsolete stuff. Like my Bloomington address, for example.

Because this part of my site is in HTML and not in WordPress, I have to do some coding to update and change stuff. So .. ewww. I never learned html very well, so it intimidates me.

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My Day

Amazing Gradient Maps

I’m just doing some horsing around today and learning some new (to me) techniques. Also playing with old stuff I know and love.

Ok, can you tell which was the before and which the after? Pretty fair job, I say. And this led directly, of course, to these:

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My Day

I love these new icons!

Jack is working through my Elements class from way back when it was version 3. And this has me thinking about what I will need to do to get them into shape to have a new batch of students working on them. I’ll just say right now that I’m not ready to give myself a deadline.

First off, I wrote them all in WYSIWYG HTML, back when that was a thing. And I don’t know HTML much, except to copy/paste and just be a bit dangerous. I was a maniac with GoLive, which they discontinued back in the early aughts.

So I am thinking that, while my ideas are still very useful, relevant, novel, and fun, the screenshots need a bit of touch-up, which essentially means my redoing and reshooting all of the projects. And, since the formatting is html and not WordPress, … yeah. I’m going to be retyping everything.

Today I looked through my wealth of files, including my image files. I was looking for my raw work on my little Tip, Project, Question, and Digital Digression icons. I wanted to take the paths that I KNOW I made and recreate these images a bit bigger.

I couldn’t find them anywhere short of digging into my old hard drive and.. I don’t have that one anymore, since it was like 4 computers ago. I just made new ones, but I made the same as my original designs. I just love these:

Tip
Project
Question
Digital Digression