Thursday, June 13, 2013

Standing around a rose bush stark naked in Tasmania

Looking cute too in their fur coats, and that is just the wild life. It doesn’t do much for the rose bush though which has had its leaves stripped like others of its kind. The culprits are wallabies. They browse the garden like possessed web surfers. The small but prolific lemon tree is a recent gastronomic discovery. The lemons add zest to their diet no doubt. The critters have become gourmets. Herbs are a delight: everything from basil to rosemary is nibbled down to stalks and twigs. Patio pots full of skeletal remains would do justice to the most bizarre tastes of dark souled ghouls who detest flowers. It suits the winter season in a way, and the rabbits who have been known to ring bark trees, seem to have been ousted this year by the local mob.
Talking about being starkers, the Dark Mofo Nude Solstice Swim will take place next week on June 22nd. It nearly did not happen, being described as ‛contrary to public decency’ initially by the police, but it is back on again, (not with the clothes though).

Photo Story 3 wmv file – do you need to convert for upload to YouTube?

APPARENTLY NOT. The raster to vector video mentioned in a previous post was created using this free Windows software. I thought it would need to be converted in order to upload it to YouTube and I battled with software like VLC and FormatFactory, trying to convert to an mpeg or flv format, but it appears that the wmv file created using Photo Story 3 has a codec format that confounds these. I even tried importing my file into Windows Movie Maker, and changing it that way, but my project seemed to be in a muddle within that and the result was incomplete and bad quality.
In the end I just submitted the file as is to YouTube and to my relief found that YouTube swallowed it up and created the result I wanted with no effort.

Big Mouth and Lips escape from the Sivablood raster to vector tutorial

Sorry! They found freedom. Wish we all could. Watch the video in the previous post to find out what these clowns are like!



They wanted me to tell you about their T-shirt.


Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Raster to Vector tutorial with Crazy Organ music and clowns

A Sivablood video tutorial was recently posted on YouTube. It concerns raster to vector image conversion using free open source software called Inkscape. The video uses one of my original drawings that was scanned and tidied, and gives a step by step run through of the process.
A slide show approach was used by preference, as in this instance it suited the task and you are able to
pause the video at the exact shot you want. The whole thing is set against a musical background, one of my latest pieces called ‛Crazy Organ’. Oh - and please be patient with the clowns!