Lidsville

I have a cold. Or the flu. Possibly a random plague. I blame Julie. She cursed me – a pox upon my house no less! Sure, sure, she promptly lifted the curse, but obviously not fast enough. Because a couple weeks ago Kyle got sick. And Kyle never gets sick! And then while we were in Santa Cruz, Erin started getting sick. She was sick all last week, poor baby. And now I am sick. So yes, I blame Julie. Although I believe she has paid for her sins. She was also sick last week. And then yesterday she called me for tween anecdotes for an article she is writing. Ha! she ended up listening to an almost certainly feverish me babble on about Kyle for 30+ minutes. I have no recollection of what I said to her. More ramblings of a lunatic. She should have been recording that shit. Chopped it up, added some random images and a funky electronic dub, uploaded to YouTube, and become an instant internet phenomenon. Oh well, maybe next time she’ll be ready for me.

Warning. Abrupt change in subject.

I have been collecting images of Erin in all her hats. Girl likes to wear hats! And if Chris wants to point his genetic blaming finger at me for that one, well I’ll take it. Hats are cool. Use to wear them all the time myself. Still have a couple funky hats, but most are of the practical and warm variety now. Hmm, will have to remedy that situation at some point. More funky hats for the people! Anyway, Erin loves to wear random hats around the house. She’s also obsessed with her bike helmet. Shocking. This hat was pilfered off a stuffed dog that Kyle gave her. It always cracks us up when she wears it. She looks like a stoned snow-boarder, or one of the McKenzie Brothers.

"Beauty Clark!"

"Take off, eh!"

And that’s all I’ve got for ya today. You too can blame Julie. Or Sharon. Sharon has not yet paid for all the suffering she’s causing me. I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow. Or as soon as Julie’s pox removal cream starts working. The nice man on the TV said the results were guaranteed or I’d get my money back less shipping and handling. That’s a good deal right?

I love a Tutorial

More than a parade! Although there was that one time at Ventura College when I saw a line of students walking across campus all carrying globes – now that was a parade.

Anyways, I am following a bunch of web designers on Twitter, and they are always sharing cool links to articles, graphics, tutorials, etc. Apparently the look of Pressed Lettering (embossing) is all the rage is web design for 2009! Yeah, you heard it here first! Unless you already knew about it. But hey, I like to be trendy – ha! Ok, I like a good tutorial. We all can agree on that yes? So, this one looked cool and lord knows I need to be honing my rudimentary Photoshop skills whenever I can. So, I followed along and made this:

Pretty nifty eh? We’ve got the starry space background that it so en vogue right now. Really, if you start to look, you’ll see it everywhere. And then I cut out the Blanchfield Photography letters so that background shows through. If I told you how I did it, I would have to kill you. Or – you would die of boredom as I rambled on about layers, masks, radial gradients… although I think Kyle hung in there pretty well. My little designer-in-training. Either way, don’t worry about the how , "oooh pretty" is the proper response.

And I will save the rant about my name for another day. Lucky you. Chris wasn’t so lucky. He never is.

So. There I was with this... thing image... that I created.* What was I going to do with it? Well, first I resized it to 160x107 pixels. Then I did a bit of html cut and paste and viola! It is now a badge over there on the left that links to my photo website. Cool. Except at that tiny size you can't see the stars or the cut-out effect of the letters, so I had to write this post to show it off and here we are. And it is still to small in Blogger to really appreciate it. I advise you to click the image to view it in all its glory! By the way, have you calibrated you monitor recently?

*Ooh! I'm going to make a monster next so that I can say "I've created a monster!" And I won't be talking about the children. Chris frowns upon that.

Actually right now I'm making spirographs designs in Illustrator. When I'm done with those I'll make a monster.

Happy Birthday Kyle!