Apples, Pizza, and NetMail

A long day spent battling my website, it seems that even fairly minor updates, if they involve more than a few images or changes, are an ordeal. As a result, I have a rather splitting headache at the moment.

I did manage to finish the Ruby Apple image, which is now in my gallery as well as below. I expect to use it in a self-promotion postcard mailer campaign soon.

Which remains me, I just received my "sample" postcard from the post office today. The US Postal Service has an online mailing service known as NetPost, from which one can create, upload, have printed, and have mailed various sorts of letters, brochures, and postcards. But, I must admit I am rather disappointed in the print quality. Which is a shame because this is such an easy way to do small mailings and so much more convenient than having to do all of that stuff manually. *Sigh*

Well, I'm off to Sarah's for an evening with The Fam: pizza, movies and such. Should be fun.

Art Rage and The Key

So I discovered a really nifty new computer paint program... It's called Art Rage. One of my favorited artists on CG Portfolios had updated with a new image and listed this little program as one of the softwares. I liked the effect so I googled it. After playing with the free version for a few hours I bought the paid version. This $20 program it has Photoshop and Painter beat for oil painting on the computer. There is such a wonderfully visceral feeling of paint about it. Not to mention it is fast, has a nice interface, and even lets you tack reference images up along the side. And the tool shortcuts are all numbers! (Something I'd wished for in both Photoshop and Painter for years). Below is the product of my playing around with Art Rage 2 for a couple of hours this morning. I love the oil painted look.



I did indeed see Harry Potter Order of the Phoenix in IMAX. It was almost too big. I think part of the problem is that the seats we got were far to low. If you ever go to an IMAX the highest middle seats are best! I have mixed feelings about the film itself: I loved the acting, the effects, the direction, but I hated the way they left so very much out. To say they cut out the plot by 1/2 is being generous... It was also very choppy feeling in parts, like they'd tried so hard to include certain things that they only showed a few seconds of certain scenes, giving the movie itself a trailer-like feel (complete with one-liners) that was unsatisfying. Fun to watch, but certainly not my favorite Potter movie. All four that came before this were better by far. But what was I expecting when the longest book is made into the shortest movie?