`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door - Only this, and nothing more.'

Now Tagxedo was a little slow to start, but once I figured out how to work the text it went smoothly. I figured all cats need birds, so in a round about way, this also follows the theme of my lovely little blog. I used Poe's The Raven and found the shape of a bird, I think it turned out pretty neat. I can see using this in the future. It was a bit slow, but I understand why. I liked the different types of font, orientation and shapes you could use. The color schemes where impressive as well, but I wanted to stick with something simple, plus I'm not a huge fan of the color brown.

Grumpy cat will change your mind about political parties.

In keeping with the cat theme of my blog, I chose Felix and Grumpy. GlassGiant's ASCII Art generator and Text-Image were super easy to use, I almost thought I was doing something wrong. I adjusted the font size a bit and figured out I like the font smaller. I tried horizontal and vertical images both and had no problems. For the first image I went on search for a clear stencil, it worked better than an image with background. I tried white on black originally, but it was too much for my poor eyes. For the second image, I saw the colors allowed and immediately found Grumpy cat.
And to continue on with your viewing pleasure, this beautiful interview I discovered while combing the interwebz last night :

 Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Star Ship Enterprise...  Okay so Flame painter is awesomely fun. Almost too much fun. I made probably about 10-15 different pictures and had a hard time choosing which ones to put up. Playing with color was a lot of fun, playing with saturation was a bit boring though. I felt the whole point of this was to play with color so I maxed it out and went from there. Adjusting the speed made it feel less my work and more the programs, but too little speed made it difficult to get that special "oomph" that is the flame painter. If I was using this to add to a photograph, low speed and high focus would be key. If I wanted some sort of misty/overcast/fog attack feeling, the noise option would be fantastic, especially if I adjusted the opacity

Scribbler Too

 Well, Scribbler Too Seems a bit more stubborn. As much as I zoom in or out, I'm not able to use the entire area is shows you when you save it.With this first one I left it as is, no cropping to fit.
I tried for depth with this mountainous scene, it worked a bit but didn't allow for all the shading that I would have liked.

   For something that went along with my blog theme, I decided to fuzzy up the "Because Cats" just like my cats fuzzy up my clothes. I had to adjust the brush to increase curviness and fuzzyness while decreasing size and opacity to mimic what I was thinking and dealing with on a daily basis. I wanted to keep it relatively simple and I did crop this one.

Scribbler scribbles lifeforms

 Scribbler is my new favorite doodle site. My son's also. I had a lot of fun figuring out how it works and the rhythms it follows. I used a lot of different line transparencies to create the image I wanted, but I kept the line thickness the same because I thought it looked better in every attempt.  I also kept the "scribbliness" about the same just because I thought it looked better too. The skeleton took a bit of work and a lot of adjustment before I came out the way I imagined it.  The tree was more of an attempt to show that I played around with the different settings. My overall favorite bit was definitely the line thickness. It aided in shading the pictures.

I had a bit of a problem making sure the grid and photo's were even and still the size required for the assignment. Since I used my Nikon, my original pictures were 3872 x 2592 so it took a bit of trimming.  Even with a tripod, human error made sure I wasn't always centered and it's surprisingly hard to photograph your thumb. Since I set myself up, I didn't have to do much adjusting. I used the same background, light box, shutter speed and about the same aperture for each picture.
I would like to add, that I am absolutely ecstatic that Windows 8 has this nifty auto save feature since my lovely toshiba fell off my lap and somehow restarted itself. This saved me from losing a 4 page research paper, this blog post, serious research on exactly what qualifies a person a "cat lady/mister," and directions to the closest farmers market.

I'm pretty boring if you know me in real life...

If you know me in real life, you know I'm pretty boring. This is pretty much my day. I enjoyed trying to figure out ways to make it more interesting. I decided on sticking mostly to macro and altered the photos just enough to make them more cohesive. I reduced saturation and changed the hue a bit along with adding some contrast (it's my weakness). I was a bit confused about the whole iCloud thing, but the google slideshow was really easy to maneuver around. I felt some of the images may have been confusing so I included a kind of description with each picture.

As much as I disliked my music clip, I enjoyed making this video mashup with it. I turned this 25 minute informative mining video into something that worked well with my altered sounds. I enjoyed the overlay of the video as well as the "effects" and animations that it involved. I kept parts silent on purpose to (hopefully) lead to a bit of suspense as to what may be coming next. I wanted to keep it simple, since the first two mash ups I made seemed horribly cluttered and way out of the ball park. It's not always the smooth transition that I wanted, but I think it became something fun and interesting once it was finally put together.
I used a mix of windows media player and FileLab to create this thing, it was a bit rough going at first, which is why this third and final bit are what the masses are going to be able to see. I played around with a lot of the transitions but didn't care for any of them until I accidentally overlapped my video, immediately that was my favorite and I kind of stuck to it. Timing with the music was a little tricky, but as I said, by round three I figured out how I wanted it to mash like.
I would definitely use this again if I ever wanted to make another video. It takes time and patience for sure, but it's definitely a fun thing to do. I even think I'll bring my boy in on the next one :)