Well after this last post about the art, I decided that since I promised a longer update soon, I’d see if I could go ahead and write one tonight. Lots more new stuff going on in my reality.

With Valentine Day come and gone, WholeRomance.com sort of coasting for the next few months, and my partnership with Karyn becoming more artistic and less romantic, my focus has moved from romantic art to visionary/psychedelic art. The samples I uploaded are just the warm up, as I’ve discovered several new open source graphics programs (I”ll list them at the end of this post for those interested). I’ve been playing and reading tutorials and learning 3 new pieces of software all at once. It will take a little time before it all starts to gel, but I expect to be creating much cooler stuff over the next few months as I learn these new tools.

Soon, that learning will take a back seat to earning my share of the rent for at least a bit. I finally got a copy of my Texas driving record, and dropped it off with all my other paperwork at Oregon Taxi today. I expect to hear back from the owner tomorrow and start driving with the next week. The company is moving towards more owner-operators than leased company cabs, and is making it pretty easy for drivers to buy a cab from them, so I may end up not just driving but actually owning a cab sometime soon.

I was sad to miss the Hightailers’ anniversary, glad to hear it was a blast, and I look forward to making a trip back to Tejas for a couple of weeks to see you all and dance on the sand at LCC myself.

Be Well All,
Taylor

Free/Open Source Graphics Software Review (for those who care)

Blender – The one is the one that got the current ball rolling for me. It’s full-on professional grade 3-D design software that Open Source and totally free. It has a huge user community (each new version gets around 200,000 downloads) and there are lots of free online tutorials, user groups, examples, etc. Write me if you get of into this one and I’ll send you some useful links.

DAZ Studio – It’s like an open source version of Poser. It lets you create realistic models of people, tweak just about anything about them from size to shape to skin, hair and eye color, then pose them however you want, and export them to other 3D software. You can also animate them in DAZ, but I plan to use it mainly to add human figures to art I’m creating in Blender.

InkScape – Vector-based graphics software. Sort of like Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. I like it better than Corel already, but haven’t learned it well enough yet to drop Corel entirely. Also the windows version doesn’t behave quite as smoothly on the screen as Corel – a problem that will be solved when I build a new Linux box to run all this stuff on without the bloated overhead of Windows.

GIMP – Photo editing software, a lot like Adobe Photoshop. I’ve looked at GIMP several times over the years, and returned to a copy of Picture Publisher I bought many years ago because GIMP just wasn’t “there” yet. It’s there now! I’ll be switch to it once I’m doing most of my graphics under Linux instead of Windows.

I’ve also downloaded and played with Bryce 5.5 (commercial software but still free) which creates natural outdoor landscapes and skies), Wings 3D (3D design like Blender but without animation and easier to use for beginners), TrueSpace 7.6 (commercial but free like Bryce – more powerful than Wings 3D by far, but still easier to learn then Blender). In addition to these general purpose apps, I’ve found a couple of apps aimed specifically at creating content for Second Life (where Karyn has a clothing design business I’m working on helping with). If you are into SL and want to make sculpties, check out PloppSL and Sculptie Paint. Blender can also create sculpties for SL, and can do much more with them than either PloppSL or Sculptie Paint, but Plopp is bases on a program for small children, it it takes about 5 minutes to learn, and Sculptie Paint also pretty simple software compared to Blender.

Hope some of this is useful to some of you.
Peace Out