BenCrowder.net

I just watched the Beholding Salvation video, with the result that I now want my art to be more religious in nature. Specifically, I'd like to try my hand at portraying Christ. But I'm still not very good at rendering humans (in any medium, really), which leads ...

Jason Santa Maria blogged this morning about printing letterpress. Man, this is something I really need to look into -- I got goosebumps just reading the title of his post. :) (Be sure to check out the Flickr set, by the way.) I don't think ...

Lately the displays in the library have been bothering me. They show how many computers are in each part of the lab and how many are currently occupied. The bothersome parts are outlined in my comment on the library blog. (The image didn't go through, though.) ...

I'm supposed to be working on a paper -- and ostensibly I am :) -- but I was reading the BlenderNation CVS report that Blender now has render passes: Finally! This is a very good thing. :) ...

Had a presentation in my Middle English class today. I ended up doing mine on Anonymous (as a joke), and when I realized I could use Blender to pull off some cool effects, the original 30 minutes of preparation I'd planned escalated into seven or eight hours' worth. I first ...

I recently ran across some children's books which used paper cutouts for the illustrations. So I decided to try replicating the effect in Illustrator, by making patterns in Photoshop and using them as the fills. Thus "Moon Dancer" was born:...

I'm thinking about making Riverglen Press a PDF-only gig. Lulu's good, to be sure, but I like having more control over the output -- with Lulu my choices are quite limited, and it's hard to get the desired result. (Mainly with the covers; the body has generally been ...

My proof copy of A Christmas Carol arrived today, accompanied by a few problems: Problem #1: Lulu doesn't like InDesign's transparency, as you can see from the back cover (it should be roughly the same red as the front cover). The solution: I opened ...

As you've probably noticed, I've been teaching myself how to use Blender lately (incidentally, my first and only article for the Linux Journal was on Blender, back in 1999, and I shudder when I re-read it :)). Initially the going was slow, even though I had written an ...

Just now I was browsing through the children's classics section of the bookstore, the titles catching my eye with delight as memories of childhood swept over me. There were some editions that looked rather nice until I opened them up. Pathetic typography. Zero margins, or Times New ...