A true love of coffee

I admit, I really love a good cup of coffee, but never THIS much.

Another blog

I might be shot by Blogger for this, but I have another blog I use exclusively for class notes and assignments.  While it's much newer than this one it's already gotten more hits, lol, guess it helps that I've announced it to all of my students huh?

It's called designaholic.

Rediscovery

A wonderful Illustrator and artist, Aya Kato appeared on the cover of Beautiful Decay a few years ago and I immediately fell in love with her work.  She has this incredible modern asian feel to everything she does, stepping well past what might be based in anime and sinking her roots deep into her own style.  I've exchanged emails with her a few times and she's always been happy to answer my questions.

It's been about three years since I've seen her work but it's an easy romance to fall back into.  Check out some of what she's done in her Gallery.

It's a... thing

Have no idea what this is, just playing around in Photoshop during lab.  I can tell you that it started out as a dual exhaust on a chopper.

You Suck at Photoshop

Ok, no I'm not actually saying you, nor am I trying to be mean.  That's the name of a set of tutorials I found on YouTube today.  Dark, dry comedy might not be everyone's cup of tea but it certainly spices up what might otherwise be just another video tutorial.  I couldn't quit laughing when I was watching these.

Photoshop project #1

Seems like everyday my kids turn in an assignment I find some little surprise that just thrills me.  I know I'm bragging but I can't help it, I'm really proud of them.

Ok, so they started Photoshop on Monday.  I covered the selection tools, the transform tools and couple others.  I wasn't expecting much from them for this one, just some cleanly cut pieces of the files I gave them to work with.

I told them to clip pieces from this file:

And stick them on this background:

Pretty much anyone with much experience would see this as a fairly routine project and it is geared towards those that haven't worked with Photoshop before.  I wasn't expecting much.

But looking through the students files, one jumped straight off the screen at me.  You can tell he's one of the ones that already knows more about Photoshop than I'm going to be able to teach him in class, but it's still a delight to come across something like this when you're expecting so much less:

My hat is off to his creativity.  It's always so cool to find them doing this sort of work.

Think he might be a bit of a Bioshock fan?

Cordarounds

Ever wonder why you can only find corduroy pants with vertical lines? Well that's the question that powered the dreams of two guys from California who created Cordarounds. There dream became a reality and they now run a successful, not to mention fun, alternative clothing site.  The stuff you find here is nothing if not unique and so cool!

They are a great couple of guys and I guarantee laughs if you sign up for their mailing list.

While you're at their site make sure to check out the discorounds and Mary-go-rounds and you'll have a smile on your face.