In Northern Canada, the various aboriginal people build stone structures called Inukshuk (literally “person stand-in”). They are made from unworked stone and are generally arranged to look something like a person. They serve as markers in the tundra (which is an extremely featureless place): they may serve indicate a way point, identify a cache of food / tools / shelter / etc, or simply serve as a reminder that someone once passed this way.

Image of an Inukshuk overlooking Husdon’s Bay by subarcticmike  used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence. I modified the original image in the following way: adjusted brightness, contrast and white balance, resized to be 800x600 pixels, saved as a lower quality JPG. The original image is here.

Instead of using rocks (which are so-o-o-o-o primitive civilization) I have updated to using materials likely to be found in any modern, progressive, Western home.

“I have passed this way and left this as witness.”

Wow! It has been 28 days and I managed to post a thing or two every single day.

It has been fun. It has been stressful. It has been frustrating (Error 500 anyone?).

It has been inspiring. It has been delightful. It has been nourishing. It has been enlightening.

I was always amazed how each day I could discover something new and then wonder how I had missed it. I am sure there are innumerable treasures I have missed and I hope to come across them over the coming days.

Today, I take you back to the shrunken apple head from two weeks ago. It is progressing well. Although, I see now that I made the mouth too-oo-oo-oo-oo big.

This is a new thing, in the vein of my creations from the first week. A praying mantis made out of

• asparagus
• parsley stems
• bay leaf
• bit of shaped broccoli
• two toasted sesame seeds
• a few bits of tothpick

It was too weak to stand up on its oown, so I needed to hold it.

As well, I think I should have made its forearms from snow peas (but I didn’t have any).

Of course, everyone is welcome to visit my website - though, I don’t anticipate doing a thing-a-day there

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In a tangentially related aside, this website (discovered this morning) presents for your consideration inventions, patents, creative ideas and innovative products.

I did these last night. I was inspired by cignoh's latest avatar attempt and wanted to see if I could achieve the same effect.

I had tried last year to cartoonify myself, but the result (while not horrible) left something to be desired.

The steps I followed (using GIMP) were:

(1) load my picture

(2) create a blank second layer

(3) trace the major lines in my picture (this is a little harder than it looks)

(4) coarsely pixelize (filters -> blur -> pixelize) the original image - nice big blocky pixels

(5) sampled colours from the pixelized image to floodfill the areas in my traced image

Over all, it worked a lot better than my attempt last year at cartoonifying.

However, I still though there should be a more mechanical way (i.e. avoiding having me draw / trace stuff) of doing it. So I played a little more and came up with this (as an intermediate result, but I liked it, so I kept it):

One thing I did was to (1) create duplicate layers of the image, (2) seriously blur one of the image, (3) do a difference of images, (4) invert the image. This resulted in a nice image as well.

The following illustrates the steps I took to achieving this:

Well, it was still gray today (Actually, it rained), but it was much milder. The sun did peek out a bit later in the afternoon - that was nice.

Materials:

• plastic shower cap
• 2 wigs for dolls (I assume they are for dolls – found them in my daughter’s arts and crafts drawers).
• an unravelling poofy pink yarn ball

As I was bathing, I thought the shower cap would make a very credible jelly fish body. The problem was finding something for the tentacles.

While sitting in the waiting room of Ecole Québec Musique as my kids took their piano lessons, I was thumbing through some nature magazines when I came across a photo of a Chamois (a type of mountain goat). I wondered how some paleobiologist would reconstruct it millenia from now. Would (s)he give it leathery skin, like a reptile, or fur, or feathers and paint it blue and red with splashes of yellow?

I decided that I would like to try to transform this animal into something reptilian looking.

I was not terrible successful. I wasn’t anywhere close to creating something passable as a flight of fancy. Clearly I need a lot my practice with using GIMP.

Basically I ran into two problems. The first and major one was finding some sort of reptile skin pattern to use. I couldn’t find samples big enough and if I tried tiling the little ones I had, there was noticeable pattern repitition. The second problem was getting the texture to flow naturally over the skin, rather than looking like a flat surface applied on top of the image.

However, not all was lost, I did make this image I am rather fond of (and, yes, in my quest to make reptilian skin, I even tried using a brick pattern).

The original photo is here.

Seems I have been alternating a lot this TaD between doing something with my hands and doing something with GIMP.

I took an image from my TaD of 19-February-2011 and performed some simple operations to it: (1) selected and copied half the image, (2) flipped the image vertically or horizontally (depending on whether my selection was vertical or horizontal), and (3) repeated step (1) & (2) for the other dimension.

I also rotated the image 30 or 45 in some cases before applying the above steps.

This produced some pretty kaleidoscope effects (and no mirror required - although, to be fair, it think it would have been easier to use mirrors).

The original photo and candy arrangement.

Today it was cool and gray in Madrid. I missed the sun. The sun definitely makes the days brighter.

So, to cheer myself up, I made a little butterfly.

Materials

• 1 sheet of paper folded in half
• some crayons
• pair of scissors

Drew the outline of half a butterfly along the edge and cut it out (I did not trust myself to draw a symmetrical butterfly – I certainly didn’t manage to colour it in symmetrically). I think I should have pressed harder with the pencil crayons (or maybe used markers) to give the butterfly more vibrant colours. The butterfly is photographed against a white background.

After I put the kids to bed, I decided to try a little more drawing, still buoyed by my success with the rabbit a few days ago.

I started by sketching in the outlines of things - mostly the trees. After doing that, I was ready to give up, but I stuck through and started colouring in. Once the colour was in place, I became more appreciative of what I had done and not embarrassed to post it.

If only practicing didn’t have to take so long.