Playing around more with Blender, I used a lattice to deform a cube. (I’m teaching myself animation.)
The background is painted in Photoshop, then composited in via Blender’s node editor. As for the animation itself, I subdivided a cube, then added a lattice modifier and used shapekeys on the lattice. Seems to work pretty well.
“That Men Might Be,” a new illustration, painted in Photoshop (using some custom brushes that I recently made).
Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy. —2 Nephi 2:25.
Today’s book release: Charles Perrault’s 1697 French edition of Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, avec des moralités: Contes de ma mère l’Oye, more commonly known as the Mother Goose tales. It’s available in PDF, EPUB, and Kindle formats.
The collection contains eight stories including “La Belle au bois dormant” (Sleeping Beauty), “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (Little Red Riding Hood), and “La Barbe-Bleuë” (Bluebeard).
This book marks the beginning of a series of fairy tale and folk tale collections that I’ll be publishing. (The original 1812/1815 German edition of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen is next and is almost done.) Future books in this series will include the Arabian Nights (including Galland’s original French translation), the eight-volume Russian collection by Alexander Afanasyev, Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, and Joseph Jacobs’ English fairy tales, among others. (And while there will certainly be an emphasis on the earliest editions of these tales, I’ll also be publishing English translations.)
If you know of any pre-1923 fairy/folk tale collections you’d like to see in this series, let me know.
Remember my Mormon Digitization Project? I recently renamed it the Mormon Texts Project, and we’re proud to (finally) release our first text on Project Gutenberg: Joseph Smith as Scientist, by John A. Widtsoe.
We’re currently working on Orson F. Whitney’s The Life of Heber C. Kimball (and we could certainly use some more help, so if you’re interested — mainly in proofreading and fixing typos — then email me).
I’ve spent some time transcribing audio in the past (both Mormon Artist interviews and family history recordings) and it’s nice having keyboard shortcuts to control audio playback. There are some nice desktop apps that do this for you, but last night I realized that with the HTML5 audio element and some Javascript magic, it’d be super easy to code up a web app to do it instead. And it was. It’s called Crosswrite, and you can try it out on the demo page.
It works pretty well in Chrome and Safari, but it doesn’t work in Firefox. This is just a demo, not a full-blown app. All things considered, however, it only took ten or fifteen minutes to write, and the hardest part by far was deciding what keyboard shortcuts should do what. (I’m still not entirely happy with my choices.)
I’m on an illustration roll, it seems. This one, “Choose Ye This Day,” was originally a simple black-and-white piece I made back in 2006 in Illustrator for the Mormon Artists Group New Symbols book project (which sadly didn’t see the light of day). I recently colored and textured it in Photoshop.
“Iscariot,” a new illustration painted in Photoshop. And in case you’re wondering why the circles, this and First Vision Triptych are all part of a circle series. (I’ve got a baptism illustration in the works for the series, too.)
When blogging about genealogy, it’s nice to be able to easily embed pedigree charts in your posts. I realized yesterday that it would be pretty easy to write a script to do just that. It’s called Emperor. Here’s a live demo:
* John Doe | b. 1850
** Father: Richard Doe |
** Mother: Maria Taylor | b. 1825
* Samuel Smith | 1823–1825
** Nicholas Smith | 1800–1824
*** Frederick Smith | 1773–1812
*** Annabelle Hansen | b. 1770s?
** Irene Yolen | 1825–?
*** Grandmother: Caroline Eastman | 1801–1899
* Mark Goldman &
Evelyn Washburn | Jackie (b. 1935)
** Stephen Goldman &
Anne Rhys | Gary (b. 1899) |
Ned (b. 1902) | Maggie (b. 1903) | Tanner (b. 1903) |
Richard Goldman (b. 1908) | Mark Goldman (b. 1913)
** Robert Washburn &
Zanny Holdmann | Evelyn (b. 1915) |
Lawrence (b. 1917)
If you’re reading this in a feed reader, it won’t look all that impressive. (That’s one of the downsides to doing it via Javascript instead of server-side.) Here’s an image showing what it looks like (from the sample page, included with the source):
The code (on Github) comes with instructions on using it. (Just upload the emperor.js file to your server, link to it in your head, and put your pedigree charts in a div with class="emperor-pedigree".) Oh, and you can style the pedigrees with CSS. There are still some issues to be resolved, but it’s fully armed and operational.
Mormon Artist Issue 12, our special international issue, is now available. This one’s a gem. Enjoy:
Update: A donation came in today from a generous benefactor, so I’ll be releasing the app after all (in the near future).
Update 2: I ended up deciding not to release the app (and refunded the donation). It was a fun proof of concept and introduction to iPhone coding, but that’s about it.
For the last six months I’ve been working on Hwaet, an Old English dictionary app for the iPhone. It’s based off Bosworth & Toller (digitized by the Germanic Lexicon Project), and I also got permission from the Labyrinth Library to include their collection of Old English texts.
The app works (it’s fully functional). The dictionary’s there (although there’s still a bit of work to be done cleaning up the imported definitions — mostly errors from the digitization as far as I can tell), some of the texts are there (and I wrote a script that made it super easy to import the rest), and the project was going quite well.
So why am I not going to release it?
Mostly because I wanted it to be a free app. Apple requires developers to pay $100/year (and that’s a totally legitimate cost, considering what you get in return for it — I’m not complaining about the fee), and since I won’t be writing commercial apps anytime soon, I can’t justify spending $100/year on it. Especially not with a baby on the way.
Maybe someday I’ll write a web-based mobile version, but in the meantime, here’s what Hwaet looked like:
