Back, with a Jellyfish!

Here's a freebie I've been waiting to release, I have a sketch that goes along with it but I'll have to post it some other time. I haven't been posting recently because I was gearing up for my move to Alaska but now the move is done and all I have to do is unpack and find work.

Download (vector included)
Image Only (.png)

I have an incident that happened recently I'd like to share in the hopes it won't happen to you as well. I recently logged into my gmail account and found that it had been accessed from two other locations that I did not log in from, one of which was China. Essentially, they had managed to get in because my password was easy to guess, even though it had some numbers it had a word in it and could be figured out! I ended up spending a few hours devising new secure passwords and changing all of my login information, especially on my banking and email accounts. My beau's stepfather helped in this process and it was a huge benefit to have someone who knew what they were doing to help me come up with secure passwords.

If you're interested in getting your accounts under control and you need help with the passwords, he's devised a really useful system for creating passwords that are difficult to decipher but you can still remember. The system is available in a downloadable document for $1.99, cheaper than many digi stamps I've seen out there and I can attest to how useful this bit of information was for me personally.

Purchase for $1.99
(Paypal & major cards accepted)

The site you're buying from is very secure, the link I'm giving is the direct link to the shopping cart with the file ready to be purchased. After the purchase, you'll receive an email with a link to download the .pdf that will be good for 48 hours.

Shoot me an email if you have any questions or want to know more. :)

Free Programs

So let's face it, times are hard for most everyone right now. Most people don't have hundreds of dollars to invest in art software unless they do it as a career, and even those people may not be able to afford the price of the popular software options. But don't worry, there ARE free options out there!

Open-source software is awesome for many reasons. For one thing, it's free to use and distribute. Secondly, it's made by many people in a collaborative effort. The source code is available for developers to enhance and add onto so you can get lots of neat add-ons that sometimes eventually get added to the program itself.

Right now, I am creating using only free software. I had the Adobe suite for many years but after a change of computers in November I lost all of my programs and decided not to go through the trouble of installing my outdated pre-CS version of Illustrator and Photoshop. I needed to find new options so I looked to open source and free software and I'm very happy with my current workflow. Here's what I use.

Inkscape
http://inkscape.org/
Vector software, open-source

This program is excellent and I've found it's much simpler and intuitive than Illustrator. Don't get me wrong, Illustrator CS5 has some far more advanced tools and they serve their purpose, but as a basic vector program for creating clean images, Inkscape is pretty amazing. The only downside is the lack of keyboard shortcuts which feels cumbersome if you're accustomed to Adobe's programs. I feel like for simple black and white images the tracing features are far better in Inkscape, which is really nice if you like to draw by hand and scan in images. It does not handle large or intricate images very well, but I've been told that there are people working on that issue.

Gimp
http://www.gimp.org/
Raster software, open source

You can do just about anything you can do with a professional photo editing suite with this program. The learning curve can be a bit steep if you're used to Photoshop, but it's a really solid program and many artists use it exclusively. The color tools are fantastic, and it also has many standard features like levels, curves, contrast & brightness and much more. I'm not a fan of the clone stamp or repair options, but they'll likely be updating it in the future to get up to par with the other programs available.


I plan on writing up some tutorials for creating using these tools in the future, but for now you might want to download them and play a little bit. :)