steve cooley presents

I wanted to make a piece of art for my anniversary card to my wife, so this year I used brushes.app on my iPad to paint (?) this set of orchids. I really like the reasonable limitations and extremely flexible set of tools. I went through the tutorial a while back and started remembering the color blending a ways into this piece. I’d done several pieces of abstract work as per my normal mode in brushes.app, so doing something representational was something new for me. I guess. I do some representational works; mostly seascapes… so this turned out pretty ok given that it’s just not what I normally do.

orchid digital painting from stevecooley on Vimeo.

I had a hell of a time with this so-called-free epson printer, wasting a precious hour on changing ink and reading about how lame that is given the amount of ink left in the “empty” cartridge. Sigh. I have another “Free” canon printer/scanner sitting right next to the epson, and not only did it fire up right away, but it had full ink carts, zero clogged nozzles, and printed out a *beautiful* 4×6 glossy print for me on the first try. Whew. Anniversary card project successful.

Hey me and my group are playing a live electronic improvised jam session. Two shows, actually. Tonight at Works/San Jose and then next friday night at South First Billiards on the same street as Works… Check out the details here:

Hope you can make it to one or the other!

So I’m tryin’ to learn Cocoa, and so I’ve been poking at an application that I’ve modified from the sample code for AMSerialPort from Harmless Cocoa. I know a little bit about the arduino, and I know a little bit about cocoa, so I poked and poked and poked, and from a well timed piece of help from my cocoa class instructor Malcolm Crawford, I finally got something fairly functional working. It’s called Rosco. All it does is take input from an arduino’s analog pins and transmit the values out to OSC through a cocoa app and out to a quartz composer composition. Nothing too fancy. I’m using it in conjunction with my Arduino Project Box, but really you could send any analog value from the arduino. It’s really such a hodge podge of code and hardware, it’s bordering on being silly. This really isn’t supposed to be useful just yet, but it was useful for me to learn more about cocoa programming. Maybe you might find it somewhat interesting. Here’s a diagram of what’s going on.

Click here to download it to try it out.

Technorati Tags: arduino, cocoa, OSC, rosco

well, as you can tell from parts 1, 2, and 3 of my comparisons of Zazzle and CafePress in regards to their print-on-demand services on black and dark t-shirts, it was kind of a toss-up as to which one was “better”. Now in part 4, I can show you the effects of one washing in a normal day-to-day kind of situation.

First up is Zazzle, since they were 7 whole days faster delivering my order:

If you click through and view these photos, you’ll see that the solid red color in the “sidescroller” t-shirt is not consistently covered with the original color that was there when I got the shirt. Kind of a disappointment to me. Still not a bad looking t-shirt, but not even close to the quality you would get with silk-screening. The “tea”-shirt (haha) actually fared better, probably because it’s a continuous tone image versus the relative solid color vector image in the first shirt. These shirts are actually being shown after two washes.

And now for the Cafepress shirt:

Uh oh. Now here’s a big problem in my opinion. After ONE wash, every solid area of color is cracking. This is totally unacceptable for a product that I would sell to people. So, at this time, I really can’t recommend cafepress for black and dark color shirt printing. I’m not totally sure Zazzle has the right action going on their game, but at least their shirts (which feel nicer to me, and are tagless) are free from the cracking problem that cafepress’ shirt is doing already… I would expect this cracking to happen even in silkscreened shirts after 20-30 washings, but after only one wash seems to indicate that there’s still significant room for improvement. This cracking problem certainly isn’t going to get any better from here on out, so this really isn’t the kind of product I want to promote.

So, the 2008 print-on-demand showdown winner is: Zazzle.com

* faster order fulfillment
* customizable
* nicer shirts
* no cracking after 1 wash

Technorati Tags: cafepress, zazzle

here’s a sneak peek at a font I hope to release later this year. it’s a block letter wildstyle. I’ve been wanting to do this kind of typeface for a long time, and fontstruct seems to be one way to get it done. It’s a little stiffer than I’d prefer it be, but I’ll see it through and maybe take another stab at it later in life.

Technorati Tags: fonts, fontstruct