Here we are, at the end of Thingadailies! I think we can all agree that this image keeps well within my general theme of photo manipulation for fun without any particular talent. And nobody can argue that this isn't a kitten in space, so I feel that I've held up my end of the bargain.
I hope the rest of your year carries a little of the frivolity of space kittens with it.
I'm not sure how well this one will show up here. I probably should have blended it with fewer frames or made the image size smaller, but this is how we learn things.
I watched a tutorial which showed how to use a GIMP plug-in to help make things less manual, but then I found out that plug-in isn't supported on a Mac, so I just messed around with some things manually. Maybe tomorrow I'll find a plug-in that works for me.
I feel this one really lives up to the "space kitten" title. I think I'm going to try to animate something tomorrow. Just imagine how that will turn out!
All I can say is that I would be sad if the wave tool ever disappeared. That's probably a sign that I should put it down and walk away, but who doesn't love a good wave?
After tracing outlines for twenty-four days, I can confidently say that young kittens are blobbier than older kittens. They're all pretty cute though.
Planetary textures:
grass texture: Photo by Eriks Abzinovs from Pexels
cracked dirt: Photo by Santiago Manuel De la Colina from Pexels
sea foam: Photo by Brady Knoll from Pexels
Once again, I was playing around with book cover ideas and then added in the space kitten. Neither book cover nor kitten are very successful, but this is how we learn things.
It's a moon kitten. Or something.
It helps if you don't try to apply too much logic to these.
Only eight more days of Thingadailies!
This is as close as I could get to a metallic sheep. Why did I want a metallic sheep? I've been playing with book cover ideas and I wanted to see what it would look like. Except, you know, with the addition of a kitten because that is the theme of the month.
Original sheep: Photo by Trinity Kubassek from Pexels
When kittens play dice with the universe...
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| The picture looks better if you click on it, I promise. |
I got busy doing other things today, so I threw together some random things today. It's not a complete success, but it is a kitten in space.
Someday I will figure out how to make all the layers look like they belong together, but today is not that day. I'm rather fond of this one anyhow.
Tree silhouette pulled from: Photo by Alexander Zvir from Pexels
I started messing with this when I got on the treadmill, and it took just under 45 minutes. (That might have included a few minutes of web surfing...) So if nothing else, practicing using GIMP has made me faster. There's also 100% less aggravation because I sorta, kinda know what I'm doing now.
Lest I get too proud, I should relate that I needed to draw a simple diagram at work today and it took me 10 minutes to figure out why I couldn't just draw a straight line between two points of text, and that was with the help of two tutorials. Worse, it turned out to be the solution it always is -- the wrong layer was selected. (In my defense, I thought there was only one layer. I hadn't realized that each time I added text, it was creating a new layer.)
Anyhow, I decided to spin the stars a bit today. I think it adds an interesting touch.
Planetary texture created using: Photo by Scott Webb from Pexels
I'm not sure I can create a career out of a daily kitten in space, but at least I'm getting better at it. (For some values of better.)
All three planets are based on the same photo of lichen on rocks (credit below), but I randomly changed the colors and blurred it a little differently for each one. I think they turned out well.
The supernova is back!
Look how restrained I was this evening! I didn't even add a supernova, which is pretty much unheard of.
Anyhow, I pulled a lot of suggestions from this tutorial (https://youtu.be/am-QcH90iuE). That tutorial is also a great example of two hosts that despise each other while pretending not to, and it also shows why you should work out the numbers you want to use before you do the demo -- half the demo is just "oh, that's too big, let's undo it and do it again with different numbers", which just makes the demo drag.
Anyhow, lessons from the evening: feather selections, and also... Sparkle!
Thingadailies is one third over with!
I was doing some random things, but I can see the seed of a way to make a planetary surface. Except with the addition of the wave tool and supernovas because I am weak and I just can't help myself.
I believe the handsome kitten of the day is Shanty. He and his brother (available for adoption!) have mild cerebellar hypoplasia, but that doesn't seem to slow either of them down.
Kitten Tina is traveling through portals in space. Or something. I'm not sure there's really any logical explanation.
I almost forgot to make a space kitten today, and after looking at this masterpiece, I think we can all agree that would have left the world a poorer place.
We do all agree on that, right?
(Also, I'm pretty sure my only artistic influence is Lisa Frank, and I'm okay with that.)
Carmen's son, Filch, discovered the bowl of dry food in the last couple of days. I grabbed this frame from the video. Because you know kittens would play with planets if they could...
This turned out more or less the way I wanted it to. I wonder if I can make a layer completely transparent except for the stars... I'll have to try that at some point. I've crashed GIMP enough times for one day already.
At some point, someone should probably ask what the heck I'm doing, but therein lies the beauty of living alone (or at least, alone with a bunch of animals who don't speak English).
In addition to making this... work of art... I had a successful day in other ways as well. The galvanized pipe did not, in fact, splinter into bits when the T-joint was unscrewed, so I don't have to live in a hotel while trying to figure out how to have people fix a buried pipe.
I think I'm ready to live in a retirement community and let someone else deal with all that stuff.
Again, it didn't quite come out like I was aiming for, but... well, it certainly is something, isn't it?
As far as reproducing this, all I can say is that there was a lot of the lava rendering, some mapping to a sphere, wandering around with the wave tool (always my favorite!), and then a bunch of fumbling around with layer masks. Perhaps I'll truly figure out layer masks by the end of the month.
I did mention I was doing Thingadailies, right? Part of the reason is so I don't forget how to use Gimp (which is similar to Photoshop), but the other part is so I can do things like this!
Notes on how to make your own space kittens:
