Tragedy befell me a while ago, my work mug went missing. I’ve had this mug for ages, so naturally I panicked and made this dodgy poster to see if some kind soul would return it to me.
Later I found it at the back of the dishwasher, and peace was restored.
Page 2 of my not-really-a-comic-more-of-a-series-of-illustrations comic, about a little girl and her mischievous grannies. Of course, we haven’t really met them yet, the scene is still being set.
The comic page is presented here in png format, but over on the comic site, Emma and the Granny Fairies, it’s an SVG.
Some day, spiders will figure out how to do this, and then we’re doomed.
Once upon a time there was a web developer who desperately wanted to make a webcomic, but got distracted by redesigning the comic site eight times. One day, she eventually got around to properly making the first page, and here it is.
The comic page is presented here in png format, but over on the comic site, Emma and the Granny Fairies, it’s an SVG.
Just how far can we push CSS styling on text? Pretty bleedin’ far these days.
This is an experiment in CSS typography. Live version here »
The text is fully select-able, copy-paste-able, and accessible. Many of the effects are hung on spans, of which there are over a dozen, so semantically speaking, it’s a bit naughty. If the characters weren’t different shades I could have gotten away with a lot less span spam.
The letters are squeezed together with a bit of negative letter-spacing, and this has the odd effect of clipping the text-shadow in pretty much everything except Chrome. IE9 is not equipped to deal with text shadows, which lessens the impact a lot.
This is my entry to the 2013 Egg Decorating activity over on The Quilting Bee. It’s a chocolate egg, with the purple and gold foil being peeled back. Pixelling foil is surprisingly easy, you just need splotches of similar shades jaggedly put together.
I’m a bit behind schedule with some of the gifts I’d planned to make lately. I’m currently working on a fairly fine scarf for a friend of mine (fingering weight on 3mm needles), and it is taking forever.
So I took a cheeky break to tackle this gloriously thick merino, with the biggest needles I own. The big guns—15mm.
Oh, the speed! Oh, the luxury!
What a shame winter is over and I won’t get too much wear out of it til autumn…
Some flowers for Nana Betty. I cut them from the pots on the patio and we brought them out to the graveyard during the week.
Some traditional paper snowflakes, hastily cut out and hung up before our little Christmas party this year.
Ever since Aviary took their lovely online tools down, including my beloved Raven, I’ve been searching for a suitable replacement. Inkscape, the best of the open source options doesn’t support some of my transforms or use xlink, while Illustrator, the best of the paid options can’t always handle my tidy nested layers*. What to do?
Today, a really extreme notion occurred to me: I should draw in Notepad++. “That’s madness!” I hear you say, and maybe it is, but I’ve optimised many of my old Raven SVGs using just a text editor and a browser to view, and I think I can do it.
With this crazy announcement, I now present my first concession to convenience, the grid. This will help me to assess coordinates, and draw my characters onto their backgrounds. Isn’t it tidy? Pixel precision in action.
*Also I’m way too cheap to give them over seven hundred euro, just for one program. Feck off, Adobe.