Get Your Bed Wedge – Foam Wedge Bed Pillow 7″x 24″ x 24″. By Duro-med

Here’s a montage, illustration and animation filmed and edited by myself
with skating by James Fulton.

Finally done and you know – the slides are backwards..
Maybe when I give my brain a rest from it I’ll go back, fix it and re-export it.

Step 1:  Prep skin with a lightweight foundation.  For a matte finish that will keep the focus on eyes, zap excess oil with pressed powder, says Blandino.  To try:  Almay Powder Skin Stays Clean.

Step 2:  Using a deep purple of black eyeliner (such as CG Smoothers Eyeliner in Onyx), follow the contour of upper and lower lashes.  Then sweep a shadow in a similar tone across lids.  The hottest shades are plum, eggplant and lavender—are super wearable says Strong.  Follow with a pale highlighter just above the crease.  To try:  M.A.C. Eye Shadow in Nocturnelle.  Rimmel Metallic Eye Gloss in Notting Hill.  For a range of color options, choose a multihued palette like Victoria’s Secret Eye Artistry Shadowing Pallette in pastel Plum or Revlon Illuminance Crème Shadow in wild Orchids.  Go for glamour with a gold shade, says Wende Zomnir, creative director of Urban Decay.  Curl lashes and apply two coats of thickening mascara, such as Dior MaximEyes Mascara in Plum.

Step 3:  Impart a natural dewiness with a translucent gel  on the apples of your cheeks.  Golden shades flatter a tawny tone, while pinks are best for fair complexions, say Zomnir.

Step 4:  Finish with a nude gloss.

Source:  Fitness

Disregarding my hopeless crush on John Stortz..

Also, I’ll be part of a couple projects this fall/winter.
Here’s a little hint on one:

by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website:
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You would think that a beautiful melody is what we’re all after when we write songs. But you could make the case quite easily that the world’s most successful songs over the past five decades do not necessarily have melodies you’d call “beautiful.” Like deciding to wear a gorgeous dress with a pair of work boots, success in songwriting is all about how different song elements integrate.

General opinion would probably be that a beautiful melody is “contoured”, with a pleasant mix of stepwise motion and leaps. Such melodies are great partners for an emotion-laden poetic lyric that uses lots of imagery and allegory. But probably doesn’t describe most hit songs, most of which deal with issues of love using fairly direct, every day language, not necessarily poetry.

And in fact, if you automatically default to creating melodies with a flamboyant shape, you may inadvertently compromise the lyric and even the underlying chord structure. There are many factors involved in creating successful melodies. Here are some you’ll want to keep in mind:

1. Songs whose lyrics describe political or social-consciousness issues, or hold strong opinions (i.e., lyrics that use forthright language and terminology) will make good use of repeating note figures. In such songs, you’ll want to think about plateau pitches: let each successive section of your song dwell around a pitch higher than the preceding one.
2. Songs whose lyrics describe love, affection, tenderness or compassion will make good use of melodies with a motivic leap. Such a leap is the kind that you’ll want to repeat throughout your song, a sort of leitmotif (a musical phrase that actually represents a person or emotion).
3. Lyrics that describe a sequence of events (i.e., tell a compelling story) work well with mainly stepwise motion. Save melodic leaps for emotional moments in the narrative.

You should note that lyrics in the first category above can also include love songs that describe a persons determination to “win the love of their dreams.” And keep in mind that songs like this, featuring many repeated notes, can be contrasted nicely by using repeated note figures in one section and a more moving, animated line in another.

All this is simply to say that as always, melody and lyrics are very difficult to consider separately. Lyrics are your main tool of communication to the listener, and melody should always support that message.

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Unleash the songwriter within you! Click here.

by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website:
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In general, the energy near the end of your song should be more than the energy at the beginning. That rising energy is not a constant; it ebbs and flows in a generally-upward direction, much like a successful stock market chart. The latter part of your verse as it moves into your chorus needs to be featuring rising energy, and you can use your chord choices to help.

Let’s set up a typical scenario: A song in C major, with a verse and a chorus that both begin with a C chord, and are both 32 beats long. If this is the case, you’ll gain an energy boost for your chorus if the verse ends on the dominant chord (G or G7). This creates a strong sense of expectancy and tension that is resolved by the chorus’ C chord.

Now, let’s invent a progression for our verse. Try two beats for each chord:

C  Eb  F  C  || C  Eb  F  C

That will do nicely for the first 8 beats of our verse. We now want to create a progression that gets us from the verse to the chorus. Here’s a great technique: Take the verse progression and transpose it upward by a 4th. For the listener, it’s as if you’ve at least momentarily changed key, and it gives the entire song a shot of energy:

C  Eb  F  C  || C  Eb  F  C || F  Ab  Bb  F

As you can see, it moves the energy somewhat aggressively in an upward direction. We’ve now got to add four more chords that get us not just to the chorus, but begs for the chorus. In other words, we need to let the final chord of the verse be G. Try this:

C  Eb  F  C  || C  Eb  F  C || F  Ab  Bb  F || F  Ab  Bb  G||

If you look at the roots of each chord, you’re looking at a series of upward-moving bass notes (upward musical gestures create energy), then an abrupt transposition upward (creating more energy), building to a dominant chord at the end, which sets up the chorus to be the most energetic part of the song.

Returning to do Verse 2 means that you can allow energy to dissipate a bit, which is perfect for rebuilding the energy plan. And you should try variations on this. For example, you may want to start the chorus on the vi-chord (Am) to give a sense of variety, and maybe avoid those distinctive flat chords, for the same reason.

And of course, hand-in-hand with chord energy are all the other tools you should be using to contour the energy of your song: varying the instrumentation, dynamics, vocal and instrumental range, and lyrical content. Successfully controlling these factors gives you a song that listeners will want to stick with and listen to over and over.
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If songwriting has gone from being a joy to being a frustration, there’s a book for that! “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” bundle of six e-books were written to get you enjoying songwriting again. They’re downloadable, and you can be reading all about why some songs succeed while others fail, moments from now. Click here to get started.

Modern Pop Art -style drawing I made. À la Juxtapoz, what do you think?

I was just playing with shapes and rythms.

What do you see in it?

Bigger image here.

I decided to take a deeper dive into the whole social media thing and just started the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the University of Washington. Last night my class heard from Jeff Khadavi, the founder of GoTime.com.

This past spring GoTime released a sweet Happy Hours iPhone app for Seattle that locates you using GPS and then gives you a list of the nearest bars currently hosting happy hour. Or use the shake function and the app will choose a bar for you. And best of all, it’s free to download!

The Stranger (needlessly?) created a similar app called Cocktail Compass. I heard that it’s a good app, but signs point to GoTime having the edge on better info–more happy hours listed and constant updates for accuracy.

GoTime recently produced a Happy Hours app for Portland, and now they’re getting ready to go national, providing happy hour information for 30 cities across the country.

As Khadavi gave his presentation to my class, I realized that my hard drinking days are far behind me, but I still do enjoy the food deals that happy hour offers. In no particular order, here are some of my favorite places to get some great budget bites.

1. Contour is right by my office so I have spent a lot of time here with my co-workers. It claims to have one of Seattle’s best happy hours, and I would have to agree. You get good food for a super low price. I especially enjoy the tomato honey basil soup ($1.95) and the provolone cheese burger ($2.95).

2. Oliver’s Twist offers $2 off its artful cocktails during its 5:00pm-7:00pm happy hour. I like the classic Presbyterian (bourbon, ginger ale, soda water) and the Miss Nancy (gin, rhubarb-tarragon syrup, lemon, blood orange bitters and bubbly). The roasted fingerling potatoes in duck fat make me swoon.

3. Matador in West Seattle restaurant is roomier than its Ballard sibling, which means you’re more likely to score a table and the great deals on Matador’s upscale Mexican food. With the exception of the Tex-Mex spring rolls (get rid of these already!), everything on the happy hour menu is delicious.

4. Stanford’s in Tukwila has a long and varied happy hour menu, and it offers discounted food and drink twice–from 3:00pm-6pm and 9:00pm-close. It serves chili cheese fries and other fattening favorites, but it’s also possible to put together a healthier meal. Try the Southwest chopped salad.

5. Umi Sake House offers many different sushi rolls and sashimi sets to choose from, but I also like the garlic short ribs. The 4:00pm-6:00pm happy hour stretches to 8:00pm in the front porch and bar. In addition, Umi has a late night happy hour from 11:00pm-1:00am Sunday-Thursday.

6. Ivar’s Acres of Clams on the Seattle waterfront has happy hour from 3:00pm to close! That alone makes it awesome. Additionally, as The Seattle Times reported back in February, Ivar’s extends happy hour beyond the bar and there’s an area where families can enjoy the discounts. So now I have a place where I can hang out with my single friends and my husband and son can come too.

Now that makes me happy.

by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website. “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” suite of 6 e-books shows you how to write great songs. (His newest e-book, “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting- Chord Progression Formulas” is being offered for free when you purchase any other of his songwriting e-books.) Let these six e-books show you every aspect of how to write great songs! Read more..

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Sometimes the best songwriting techniques are the ones that listeners aren’t consciously aware of. One interesting technique to consider is to try inverting melodic shapes from your verse to use in your chorus. It creates a connection that the audience may not be aware of, but it can work beautifully.

Even the simplest of melodies will have melodic shapes that stand out. These shapes, repeated over and over again, can provide an important sense of form that listeners latch on to, and it’s part of why they remember songs easily. A flat melody that lacks any kind of shape or contour will probably lack the key element that listeners need to keep humming your part.

But even with an interesting shape and design, you need to find strong ways to connect the verse to the chorus. That’s where the identification of small shapes within a verse can work well in a chorus.

If you’re having trouble writing a chorus that works well with your verse, try this: Sing your verse melody to yourself, and identify small melodic shapes that tend to repeat themselves throughout the verse. (If you can’t identify any, you may have uncovered another issue with your song… it really needs that kind of musical “motif”.) Get a sense of the basic direction of the melodic shape; perhaps it’s a downward leap of a 3rd or 4th that happens several times.

Once you’ve identified that, you can invert it, and use it as a main component of your chorus. If that repeating element is a small descending leap, try using an ascending melodic leap as a main feature of the chorus. (For an example of how this can work, I mentioned this in my article about Taylor Swift’s song, “You Belong With Me” (opens in a new window). In that song, the verse features downward moving melodic shapes in the verse, with upward moving shapes in the pre-chorus, which helps build energy.)

The beauty of this inverting of shapes is that it provides a sense of symmetry for your song, and the listener often doesn’t even realize it’s happening. But they sense a real connection between these two vital parts of the song form. It provides a feeling of “intuitive logic” that really makes a song work.

There are other ways to use this technique of using an element from one section of your song in another section. For example, you might try taking elements from the verse and the chorus, and find a way to blend them together and use the resultant shape as a main feature of your bridge. Or you could create a melodic hook for your song, then use shapes from one part of it for your verse, and another aspect in your chorus. In many ways, the possibilities are endless!

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For more songwriting ideas, try Gary Ewer’s songwriting e-books. They can get you going writing the songs you’ve always wanted to write! They’re downloadable, and available here. Right now, “Chord Progression Formulas” is being offered free with any purchase.

Image from Nordstrom.com

I recently stumbled across M.A.C.’s #165 brush—a tapered cheek highlighter. It’s the perfect size for rolling powder onto your under eyes and the bristles are soft enough as not to irritate that delicate skin.

According to the guy at my local M.A.C., it’s a limited edition, so scoop it up while you can!

Deweb’s Tuto

Il faut d’abord aller ici pour s’enregistrer chez Boris FX, cela prend une minute.

Ensuite, voici le lien pour télécharger gratuitement le filtre FEC Wiggle Edges.

Une fois cette formalité accomplie, laissez-vous guider par ce tutorial…

Pour répondre à Alain Hulot, cette vidéo vous montre aussi comment corriger la luminosité d’un ciel trop exposé par rapport

au reste de l’image ou comment rendre un ciel plus bleu en utilisant un gradient ou filtre dégradé.

N’hésitez pas à poster un commentaire…

Agricultural practices have refined in last few years. People have broader idea about getting fruitful results out of their investment on the lands. One can ensure effective growth of plant only if the plant or whole plantation is administered with good irrigation facilities. These facilities can be helpful in providing useful gains for the farmers. By far technological advancements have gathered minds of farmers to render useful ideas into planned actions. These technological advancements can be adjudged with useful application in day-to-day life.

Importance of irrigation system

Irrigation plays a vital role in the modern day agriculture. The root tips are in search of water when they travel down inside the ground. These can be ably supported by irrigation administered by the cultivators. The irrigation methods are of varied types that are available for cultivators. Starting from drip irrigation to center pivot irrigation. Some of irrigation methods take care of all the necessary topological features that prevail in particular land. The contour of surface changes from place to place. It is quite evident that it can affect watering scheme adopted by the farmers. But this would be justified by the amount of water needed. Some crops would need large supply of water to be supplied to root tips.

Irrigation facilities promised by drip irrigation

Drip irrigation is one of the popular methods adopted by the farmers all over the world. This method could bestow useful irrigation to the crops that are planted. Drip irrigation is preferred in the gardens. The gardens that are small can be well sheltered under effective watering through drip irrigation scheme. Also some watering scheme require some additional components such as tubing that can add to the cost of establishment of watering facility. This can be cashing for the farmers initially but with effective maintenance it can fetch huge profits on long run. Drip irrigation also ensures correct level of moisture that is to be maintained around the root tips. Any variation in this can cause adverse effects on the plant.

Drip irrigations systems – Components

Drip irrigation involves use of valuable wit to design the overall plan of the system. The system includes tubing and piping needs to be satisfied before going for commissioning of irrigation system. There are several components that form integral part of drip irrigation systems. Also one needs to ensure proper design of irrigation systems can be employed to facilitate moisture monitoring. The shoot system of the plant needs supply of water and other nutrients through root. The watering of plants at optimum level ensures proper supply of nourishments for the development of crop into sizeable yielding. Special simulation software is available to map all the essential failure nodes that can lead to drastic changes in the irrigation channel. Hence it is advisable to use that software to clear out all the loopholes present in irrigation channel.

Effective maintenance of irrigation systems

Maintenance of irrigation system largely depends on the design of irrigation system. The maintenance of the drip irrigation system involves series of actions that can ensure proper working of overall system. Subsurface drip watering schemes are widely used by the farmers pertaining to different parts of world to irrigate the lawns. These can be effectively monitored for pressure inside the channel. This pressure if not checked periodically can institute massive technical failures for the entire irrigation system. People can seek expert advice to have proper maintenance. The tubing can be checked for correctness periodically to eliminate water leakage. The inlet and outlet nozzle can be cleared off from dust and mud in order to have proper entry and exit of water inside the whole watering system.

PhotoSketch is a system created by Chinese students. It automatically composes simple freehand sketches into realistic pictures.

PhotoSketch pipeline (Source: Tsinghua University)

How it works:

Step 1: The user draws simple items on the screen. Every item can be drawn as a shape contour or an ellipse, which is the default. All items and the background must be annotated with text labels, so that the system knows how to interpret the figures.

Step 2: The system searches the Internet (currently flickr, google and yahoo) for pictures applicable to the given text labels and downloads a lot of them.

Step 3: Now the system tries to exclude false discoveries and chooses the most fitting pictures:

Choosing appropriate background pictures:
The first approach is to cluster all pictures by its L*, u*, v* histograms. All pictures in the biggest cluster will be used for the next step. Example: If the user did annotate the background as “beach”, then the pictures should mostly consist of yellow and blue colors. Therefore these pictures should be all together in the biggest cluster. All pictures with much red or green will be divided into smaller clusters and thus they will be excluded. The next approach ensures that the horizon lines in the pictures are aligned well. Finally a segmentation algorithm tests how many segments of the background pictures are covered by the items. The lesser the better.

Choosing appropriate item pictures:
The first approach is to discard all pictures with complicated backgrounds, because in these pictures the separation of the figure from the background is hard to accomplish. Next the items will be segmented. This will be done by iteratively applying dilation and a grabcut algorithm until the result or the computation limit is reached. The segmented pictures will then be compared with the item shapes drawn by the user to get all pictures that match the shape best. Finally the pictures will be clustered to get only the consistent ones.

Step 4: The images are composed seamlessly into several compositions by a novel self-made blending method. The user can then choose the best one and refine the composition.

In the experiments (“two PCs with 2.66 GHz Quad core CPUs and 6 GB RAM”) the total computation took about 15*n+5 minutes (n = number of items). To compute a full scene with e.g. 6 items it takes about 95 minutes beginning with downloading of the pictures till the composition arrives. With a slow Internet connection it would probably take much longer to download all the pictures. But I think it pays off. Can’t wait to try it out.

More info and the paper can be found here.

La côte se dessine en contours compliqués et très accidentés. Pas de rives allongées, ni de plages paisibles, mais des criques acérées qui vont se succédant. On les croirait croquées, dans la tarte terrestre, par des monstres mythiques aux tranchantes mâchoires. Et les rocs écroulés, striés et anguleux, semblent les cicatrices de cet enfantement chaotique, primaire.
Par contraste les flots sont empreints de douceur. Ici ,pas de marée: des vagues sédentaires flattent le littoral perpétuellement. Et sous le soleil brut, du bord à l’horizon, les eaux se mêlent aux cieux en noces ultramarines.

Photo Ange7, Ramatuelle 2009.

=°= Et pour prolonger la visite : un feuillet au hasard =°=

Anna-That was humoring? Is that what he said? hahaha i love him so much.

No, but really.  (Self Portrait prompt for Photoshop)

So as stated in the beginning of my Blog I finally got into Red River college, and so far, its been a hell storm. The extra cost for supplies and the technology fee alone nearly match the cost of the tuition for this semester, and the kicker is I’ve already eatten up a good portion of supplies 1 month in!

Its quite the course, putting in about 40 hours a week (yup its literally like a fulltime job) and at least 2 hours a day in assignments from various courses this program is not one to be taken lightly. The first assignment alone consumed enough time for me to accomplish 4 t-shirt designs if not more, 3 – 16 hour days in one weekend, 5 – 6 hour evenings, and 3 – 3 hour courses, along with 100+ thumbnail sketches, 50+ rough sketches, 4 comprehensive inkings and 4 final mounted pieces (will be displayed in the near future) and 1 textural composition. Not to mention 4 compositions playing with the concept of varying lines, and styles. All in all, its a course I cannot take lightly, and slowly the idea of having a social life is starting to flood down the drain, haha.

All pseudo-sarcasm aside its a tough cookie, and I will continue to update my blog with new information regarding the course in the future.