Pixels, Pencils, Paint and Photoshop

Since in my "other" life I'm a web designer, I'm always looking for cool techniques for web pages.  In the past, finding a relatively easy way to make gold text was, well, difficult.

Until now.

Check out this online tutorial from Deke McClelland.  He's a master Photoshop guru.  :)

Writing Thank-yous

Hi!
We're finally getting to our Christmas thank-yous....  Mom gave Mike one of my Dad's rings, one he wore all the time and my favorite.  We just got it back from being re-sized, and it looks pretty good!!

I may just have to draw this...  :D

Anyway, I did some Photoshopping to it, and got it to the right size so it would fit in the little "thank-you" card envelope, and it's all ready to go!!

Finally...

After using Dreamweaver for, well, years I am taking some classes.  I won a 1-month subscription to the online Lynda.com site in December and was I impressed!!  I've known about that site, again for years, but always thought it was a tad bit pricey.  Of coures, I was looking at the per year price, and didn't consider the month-by-month rate.  


So, in January I decided to shell out the $37.50 for a one-month subscription (I know, not going to break the bank here) which includes unlimited classes for one month PLUS all the Exercise files.  Yee HA!!


When I started in December, I took the Dreamweaver and Wordpress class.  Awesome!!  I also got the "Build your Own Wicked Wordpress Themes" from Sitepoint.  So the combination are terrific.


But, I realized that there was so much to Dreamweaver I didn't know!  So now I'm taking the Dreamweaver Basics class.  One of my all-time pet-peeves is folks thinking they can do web pages without learning basic HTML and CSS.  So, in support of this......

Learning web design

Dreamweaver CS5 Essential Training | by James Williamson

View this entire Dreamweaver course and more in the lynda.com Online Training Library®.

No, I'm not affiliated in any way with Lynda.com.  :)

Hope you have a terrific day...
Cheers!

Current project

I've decided I need to get back into journaling.  But I haven't been doing a lot of art lately, and am a bit rusty.  So, to get the juices flowing, I've joined a Journaling workshop, the Strathmore Online Artist Journal Workshop 

And, here's my flickr site with the first week uploaded.   More to come!!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sddonlon/

Ah, Back To School!

Recent work

Hi there!
Well, I've been getting back to painting.  By working smaller, I can just hammer a bunch of stuff out.  Plus, being relatively new to water-soluble oils, there's a lot to experiment with.

A lot of the online art stores have had back-to-school sales, and I'm ALWAYS up for a sale, especially art supplies.  I was able to get a bunch of 8 x 10 canvases cheap. 

Living up in the boonies makes it difficult to practice my favorite subject matter, portraits.  Anytime Sean or Mike see me coming with sketch pad and pencil, they mysteriously have very important stuff to do...somewhere else. 

But, knowing a teenage boy's need for $$, Sean was willing to sit for me...for a price.  Kids, sheesh!!  So, below is the work I did...in 3 stages. 

Day one:

Day two:

Day three (and final):

 Let me know what you think!!  Thanks for looking!!

-s

Turn a Photo Into a Drawing in Photoshop

One of my Photoshop heros is Bert Monroy. In this vid he shows how to create a drawing on a canvas from a photo. All courtesy of the cool folks at CreativePro.com and Revision3.com
Enjoy!