08/30/08- Starting school again in a few days. Will start work on another piece once I get a decent picture. Gonna do one more portrait/photo mod before going back to landscape or artwork.

08/14/08- Finished working on a fairly simple, but difficult piece. Working with a low-res, grainy picture takes alot of spot work. But it's done, and it's here.

08/13/08- Finally got the book I ordered from Great Britain. "Photoshop Creative Collection," basically a full color magazine type book (250+pages) based off their Photoshop Creative magazine series that I really liked (which unfortunately, is published in England only). I assumed the book would be like that, and I wasn't disappointed. Took em about a month to "air mail" it over, though I don't know how a book postparked 07/08/08 with an Air Mail stamp can take over a month to arrive. But arrive it did, and it's pretty impressive. I'll have alot more ideas to work with coming out of this, as well as some new stock photos and brushes to play with. It really is a pretty impressive book, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone playing with this stuff.

08/12/08- Just returned from a short vacation in Mexico. Going to start a new project fairly soon. Should be done by the end of the week. After that, planning to archive July's segment.

08/01/08- WTB inspiration. After the last work, need to find something to work on. So basically trying to flip through some works from other people, as well as stock photos on the web for some ideas. Just a matter of time. On another note, Washington Mutual just raised their savings account interest rates from 3.30% to 3.75% APY. Time to bank dem dollas.

07/26/08- Finished a fairly complicated project. Used a friend's pic to complete this 5 hour mod.

07/23/08- Added a guestbook last night on the About page, and finished the receipt piece today. Also uploaded a couple of the stock photos used in the doorway mod in gallery.

-edit- Just finished spiderwalk at Barnes and Noble. Sort of a more comprehensive work. Had to do all of it on a touchpad though, which was a pain in the ass.

07/21/08- Added a few works in progress. One's an experimental on

layer styling (drop shadowing, glows, etc). Still need to work on masking. Basically will be focusing on lighting for the moment. After that, it'll be distortion. Added a revised copy of eye without the dumb vector brushes. Cleaner, more suitable for wallpapers. I composed it in 1200x800, and then realized after I finished that WXGA was 1280x800. Oh well. Just stretch it.

Wall- WIP vector compositiong w/ shapes

Receipt- WIP distortion mapping w/ paint effect

Eye- revised.

These will all be loaded into gallery after completion.

-edit- Wall completed.

07/20/08- Added an html only mirror of the site without Flash for iPhone compatibility. Really fucking stupid how iPhone doesn't support Flash. Link's located on bottom right.

-edit- Got a new set of stock photos. Played around with vector brushes. Still need to figure out how to rotate brushes for spotting. Got familiar with feathering. Finally used to spamming layers for each addition. Next is layer masking. Result.

-edit 2- Finished doorway pic. Learned some blending techniques for image mapping. Played around with some more feather cropping and brush rotation. Pic was a pain in the ass to make. Firegirl with the ripple and the flower took about 7 layers to compose. Result.

07/19/08- Had more time to clean up the site. New template, fairly clean interface.

Finally found out how to set Photoshop to use pressure settings from the digitizer. The Wacom on this tablet has 255 pressure settings (which I believe is on the low end), but it's good enough for an amateur. Played around with wet and dry media brushes, and texture brushes. Used wet media brush with scattering and opacity based on pen pressure to make the quick sketch here. Nothing fancy (only 5 layers), but I'm a noob at this anyway. Just got assigned to figure out how to setup emailing from domains from my dad, so that's priority for the moment.

07/18/08- Got the domain registered, and started work on the website. First attempt at layered work in Photoshop as homepage.

A bit of backstory: A few weeks ago, I began work on a webpage for my parents after obtaining a copy of Adobe Dreamweaver. Without any prior knowledge of html or Dreamweaver, it took several weeks of revisions to get a decent design working for the webpage. There were in total three versions of the site made. Details of the process are listed on the gallery page.

After finishing the website, I got Adobe CS3 Master Collection and started playing around with the rest of the stuff. I don't think I'd be able to learn Flash in a week, considering Fagtionscript is an actual programming language, so I'm going to be doing that on and off. Primary focus now is Photoshop. Never had the opportunity to play around with the more complex techniques, so now's a good time to start. Before now, the most I'd done with it was putting in text, and modifying brightness/contrast for electrophoresis gel photos in a lab.