anke

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

A True Gift has a fairy tale flair. It was written by Lyn Thorne-Alder based on a prompt of mine. As of this writing she's still open to more prompts to the theme of Gifts, gifts, and the gifted.

I also finally managed to read a good deal of Friday Flash submissions again, and pick out a few of my favourites:
Aeon by John Xero (fantasy, 101 words)
Belemnite by Gail Aldwin (slive of life)
Cause for Complaint by Emma Newman (fantasy, a bit longer)
Pine Needles & Sherry – A Christmas Ghost Story by Helen A. Howell

Octopus wants to be a clam. Tool use hasn’t been an exclusively human thing for a while.

There’s a new Simon’s Cat video up at youtube. It has a birdee. ^_^

There had been a great version of Bohemian Rhapsody on the Muppets Studio youtube channel, but now it’s gone due to copyright kerfuffle. Ehwell, it still has The Blue Danube (performed by chickens), Ode to Joy (performed by Beaker), and Ringing of the Bells (featuring Animal, see post title)

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Dark Roasted Blend mentions in a post about British Pub Signs:

The Pig and Whistle’s origin is obscure, but it could be a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon “piggin wassail” which means “good health”.

One fun part is that there is a German expression of surprise, “Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift”, which translates to “I think my pig’s whistling”. As far I could could find out from a quick web search, it dates back to the 1970s or possibly 1960. Variations on the “I think” theme include

• “…mich knutscht ein Elch” (”..a moose is smooching me”)
• “… mein Hamster bohnert” (”…my hamster’s waxing the floor”)
• “…mein Hund spielt Halma” (”…my dog’s playing Halma”)

I hadn’t encountered the last two before.

Links to share:
15th century “typo demon”

Lucky shot: Photo of an “exploding” meteorite
Astronomical Quilts

Madly Awesome Paper Craft
…and cardboard-craft (Some is like 3d graffiti!

Pretty new spider discovered
‘nother article with ‘nother photo

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Dragon wings tend to be more or less bat-based, but photos of bats in flight tend to be rarer than ones of birds in flight, making studies a bit more difficult.

For birds I recommend the deviantart account of Cheryl Moore, where you can find a great number of photos of birds in flight – most of them white birds, meaning there is no pattern on the feathers distracting from the shape.

As for bats, during the last week some photos of bats drinking from a pond in flight went through the bits of blogosphere I watch. Looking up Kim Taylor brought up Warren Photographic, which has more (albeit smaller) photos of bats in flight.

On Deviantart I found one compact tutorial on bat wings by cactusart.

The wing tutorial by Kandice Zimbleman-Wang may be a bit weird on the formatting and spelling side, but content-wise I find it very helpful.

For the sake of completeness and comparison, you could look at pterosaurs wings, too. (What intersts me more after a bit of poking around wikipedia are the various head shapes, though. Fascinating.)

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Thought I’d share/make note of a few (Windows [Vista]) tools I use for my image files.

Bulk Rename Utility
Exactly what it says on the box: It lets you rename files in bulk. It doesn’t look particularly pretty, and the load of form fields/options at the bottom may be intimidating at first glance, but I found them pretty self-explanatory when reading them one by one.
I use the “File” field on “fixed” setting together with Numbering to change the filenames of photos I take from IMGXXXXXXXXX.jpg to 2009-07-21_XXX.jpg, which helps a lot with sorting them.

iTag
With this program I can add titles, descriptions and keywords to jpg files. This is not only useful because the Windows Explorer can search these fields, but also because various websites and scripts pull that information out when you upload them, including Flickr, Picasa, and Menalto Gallery2. Saves some work if you upload your images to several places.
iTag is my favourite among the tools I tried so far because it lets you include linebreaks in the description (unlike Picasa or the function built into Windows Explorer), and ladjust the size of the form where you enter things – particularly the fact that the latter enables you to view all keywords you entered on an image.

SyncToy
…is not only useful for images, but all kinds of documents, but here goes: A very basic program to synch up different folders. I’m sure there are better ones, but this works for me.

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Just some stuff I thought was interesting.

Amazing Earth Photos: Solar Eclipses from Space – The “Field of Science” site linked from that page has bigger photos, but not all, in particular the one of Central America is missing.

The Root Bridges of Cherrapungee – The greenest architecture I have seen yet. (Link via Neatorama)

Giant Pterosaurs and how they lift off – I may have linked that before, but in case I haven’t, well, I just think everybody should see the image of a pterosaur the size of a giraffe at least once.

Ninja-Pirate-Zombie Cupcakes Flickr set. Braaainssss!

Dark Roasted Blend: Jet Engines on Trucks (For Fun and Profit) – Blog entry with quite a few photos. I particularly like the fire-engine on steroids built from military leftovers.

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity – 20 minute video speech on creativity, how people think about it/creators, and how said creators might deal with problems brought by those attitudes. Gets a bit very spiritual at the end, but all in all interesting and funny. She gets plus points for not using any slides. (Link via Jessica Douglas’ DA gallery)

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

These are some photos I found on deviantArt and liked:

Originally posted at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

BibliOdyssey – illustrations from old books. ’s awsome. I warn you though, it’s VERY image heavy – the number of (500pixels wide) images per post approaching, sometimes surpassing 20 means even on a broadband connection you need to wait a bit.

Old Picture of the Day – An American collector of old photos posts, well, one a day. The newest ones date from the 1940s, the oldest I could find in a quick check now from the 1860s – and there seem rather more of the latter than the former.
one choice picture for my friend Mutt

Dark Roasted Blend – Blog with lots and lots of different topics. Just have a look around… er, and don’t let the weird format put you off.
It’s better than I make it sound here, really <_<

Originally posted at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Sometimes, it takes some additional input to understand advice.

One thing is the “draw lines with one long stroke, not by adding up lots of smaller lines” one. I never understood how that would be possible, until I came across advice on how to improve your handwriting saying you should use your shoulder and back muscles, not your wrist and fingers for writing. Doesn’t mean I can magically DO it, but at least I have some idea of what I might try to learn.

Another are the scribble pictures. I remember doing those in art class back at school. Here’s the idea:
You scribble random loops and lines on a piece of paper
Then you look at it, and turn it into an image of whatever you happen to see in it.

I thought the idea was drawing over the lines as they were on the paper, so mostly I ended up with blobby rubbish, like snakes without heads, three-story mushrooms, or faces like this one:

Then I came across a tutorial at deviantart, which is not safe for work due to nudity, and looking at the example… You could add stuff. You could turn a circle into a face, or a hand. Yeah, I see how that might actually be fun, rather than frustrating, and result in more interesting images.

Here's the original scribble; lines darkened digitally to make sure they show up; actually I use very light pencil lines. I also turned the sheet around a bit until I spotted something...

I saw a head and a wing, and went from that...

Added feet and tail and refined some details. Would look better if I traced it on a clean sheet in ink, but I'll leave it as the little warmup practise it is.

I guess that’s a good time to upload some of the more interesting results of those warmup-practises.

The following four are other sketches, from my figure drawing class, and people who want to avoid nudity should avoid those.

Originally posted at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Police take snake into custody
Drug shop shut down – note the last line

Originally posted at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.