Photoshop Column at The How-To Geek

So I've managed my way into the How-To Geek circle of writers, promising my expert hand for a column on Photoshop and Graphics.

The whole team has been great and I've enjoyed working with everyone, even though it's only been a little while. This is sort of a bit of a dream come true for me--I'm a big fan of How-To Geek from his articles on Lifehacker and his own site. I've also wanted to write my own Photoshop column for a long time, and this gives me a wide platform to be heard.

I'll be reblogging links to my articles on my Twitter account and to my Facebook page.

Experimenting With New Painting Styles

I’ve been trying to figure out a less airbrush-style and more painterly look for my digital paintings and I feel like I’ve stumbled up on the right combination of elements that’s giving me what I’m wanting. I’m excited to see how this painting looks when I finish it.

DeviantArt Is Full of Teh Hax

DA, I’m getting sick of you and your dubious advertisers that are putting all kinds of Adware Spyware Virus slag onto my computers. My friend Deric actually nearly lost his computer because of this garbage.

DeviantArt is a staple on ‘Teh Intarnets’ these days. You would really think they would be able to afford to stop this sort of thing and build a site that isn’t poison to us all.

First Meeting of Tampa Drink and Draw!

Had a blast at the first meeting of the Tampa Drink and Draw Social Club. Good turnout, even a few people I didn’t invite or know, and I hope that trend continues in the next meetings.

Tampa Drink and Draw Social Club

Doctor Who Poster-Research

When turning a set of Dr. Who novels into a framed poster, I’m afraid I would be doing the good Doctor a disservice if I didn’t do all my planning in the most unnecessarily complicated way possible.

I started by writing formulas in OO Calc to help me figure out what size frame to buy and how to build my matting. Calc helped because not only will the formulas figure out the sizes with my formulas, it also helps because I’m fairly visually oriented. When I was satisfied with my result, I drew the matte in illustator.

I’m embarrassed how long I messed around with the Spreadsheet formulas. I also wish I had a better understanding of Linear Programming, because this would have been a perfect opportunity to use the Solver in OpenOffice.

From there, chopped up the picutre I took in Photoshop and put it into the digital matte to get an idea what I was going to get in the end. This looks really good, although I might should add an extra inch on either side, because the frames I’m looking into cut in an extra 5/8 of an inch and won’t look exactly like this.

Regardless, I have a good roadmap for what I want to do and I’m pretty excited about it.