Free Pics (Weekly!)

I delete most of the unsolicited newsletterish e-mails I receive without reading them, but there is one I do look at every week from DepositPhotos.com, which features links to a few pics that are free to download that week. Mr. Parakeet here was one back in August; here are a couple more (the text is mine, btw):





The terms of use are limited, obviously, but most of the images are quite nice, and could be fun to incorporate in a blog post or use as inspiration. I've made some of the free images into note cards to send to friends (the floral quilt threat got raves) and I might use Mr. Parakeet for some bookmarks. Thanks to Maria for letting me know about DepositPhotos, too, back when I was looking for cover art inspiration for In the Leaves.

Image credits:

Bird: panuruangjan

Barcelona: El_Camino

Floral Pattern: Depiano

Pic Prompts

I'd like to challenge myself for Just Write Thursdays this year, so I decided to do a search for images based on some keywords I want to explore with fiction and see what came up. Since I had some extra credits left on my account at DepositPhotos.com I went there, entered each keyword, and skimmed through the image results until I saw something that made me want to write a story about it. Here are the results:

Keyword: secret



This was the most unusual image that came up for my keyword, and while it's a bit sweet for me I really loved the lights hanging from the tree and the aura of enchantment in the scene.

Keyword: gothic



I don't know if I'd exactly call this lady gothic, but the unusual diamond shapes on her brow and strange colorations lit up the story lightbulb for me.

Keyword: crystal



I know why this pic grabbed my attention; I'm a sucker for paths with sudden turns. The photographer tagged it with crystal for the quality of the river water, which I also found intriguing -- that water doesn't look entirely natural to me . . .

Because I purchased the right to use these images I can print them out, reuse them for other things and even work them into cover art for my future Just Write stories if I want. It's always a good idea to support photographers and artists by paying for their work, even if you only use the images as inspiration.

Image credits: Ellerslie (secret); prometeus (gothic); Photocreo (crystal)

Hello 2034 Me

Upload a photo of yourself to this ageing simulator generator, and you'll be able to see (and even talk to) a composite of your future self.

Here is what I'm supposed to look like at age 73:



It's not terribly accurate; my eyes are quite a bit lighter, my ears don't stick out, and my natural hair color right now is much whiter than hers (maybe future me has it dyed to the salt and pepper look?) I think I'll have a few more wrinkles and jowls, too, but that helmet hairdo? Ah, no. Never.

(Link swiped from Gerard over at The Presurfer)

Playing with Polyvore

Artist Sheree Burlington has an article in the Spring 2012 issue of Somerset Digital Studio magazine that practically called my name: Designing with Polyvore: Learning to color outside of the lines.

According the Sheree's article, Polyvore is a fashion shopping site that has been gradually inhabited by all sorts of artistic subcultures, thanks to their online editing tool that she and many others use to create collages using keywords to bring up online images.

At first I was a bit dubious -- I'm about as fashionable as the Amish, and shopping sites are usually very limited as to what they can offer the average writer -- but after glancing through the article and reading about how much Sheree had done with it I decided to go and see what I could do.

I was interested in building some character collages, so I familiarized myself with the easy to use, drag-and-drop editing tool, and within a few minutes I put together this collage using random images and a provided template (these are simply screenshots):



I also built this one:



I decided to forget about the templates and just start stacking images, which produced this:



And this:



I did only the most rudimentary keyword searches and simple resizing of the images I dragged and dropped into the editor; you tech-savvy writers out there will likely be able to do a lot more with it. The images are pulled from various sources on the internet (and links to the originals are provided with each image) so if you decide to play with Polyvore's editor I'd advise you employ it only for personal use to avoid copyright issues.

More Big Huge Labs Stuff

I've been back over at Big Huge Labs looking for some ideas, this time for an art project. I wanted to frame some of my own photos in interesting ways, and decided to try out their Framer generator.

The Framer offers these options to frame any image file you upload:

USA Stamp ~ USA Stamp, no postmark ~ Canadian Stamp ~ Canadian stamp, no postmark ~ Stamp border ~ Stamp border, no postmark ~ Canvas Panels ~ Canvas Panels (portrait) ~ To-do List ~ Autumn Leaves ~ Film ~ Holga 35mm ~ Holga 35mm (portrait) ~ Frosted glass ~ Frosted Glass (portrait) ~ Wood Frame ~ Reflection ~ Polaroid ~ Brushed edge ~ Brushed edge (portrait)Bulletin Board ~ ColorCraft Bonus Photo

It's very simple to use this generator; you just upload your photo, choose a frame style, select the position of your image within the frame, set the background color, choose a date (for the postmark frames) and add a photo credit if desired. Once you click on create, the generator does the rest. Here are some of the framed images I did in a few seconds:

Postage Stamp with Postmark Frame:



Frosted Glass Edge Frame:



Traditional Wood Frame:



Brushed Edge Frame:



They also offer one option that produces a nice organizational helper:

To-Do List:



For those of you who are making your own covers or promo items, this might be a useful online tool to bookmark.