Monster
Here’s a video of me drawing a couple of spreads from my upcoming book, Axel Storm – Sea Wolf. Hope you enjoy it.
Posted in Books Drawing School How to Reading and Literacy by .
On the spur of the moment, I thought I’d video the process of scanning and turning the resultant image into editable text using Adobe Acrobat. It may prove instructional for someone. Otherwise, keep watching as I put the new edition of Craig Mnure into action.
There are good guys out there! In my post yesterday about This Website Business, I mentioned how much work was involved in making sure that a shoo-tube.com registration system was secure and how I thought one of those who had registered was a bit suspicious.
Well, last night I received a very strange email. It came from Digilante – the digital vigilante. Digilante was so fed up with having their forums spammed, they bit back and spammed the spammers, taking over their email accounts, so that whenever they compromise a forum account, an email is sent to the webmaster warning them to tighten up security. How brilliant is that!
I got straight onto my admin account, closed down the login and erased the offending registered accounts. There’s a lot to think about before I allow people to log on to the site to access extra content .
It is weird though. It’s as though the Dark Knight is watching over me from the roof tops! I feel a little bit special to have been picked out for their protection – silly but heart warming. Thanks Digilante – I think you may have saved from a whole heap of hassle!
Posted in Drawing School Technology and all things digital by .
Aug 10
31
Self Publishing
I’ve been humming and ha-ing about self-publishing for a long time. Online systems make it so easy these days and the author need not be burdened with a garage-full of unsold stock any more.
More recently I’ve been dithering about which title to work on. The site I want to use, completelynovel.com, only has two sizes available at present. For my 48/64 page black and white readers, I’m convinced I need A format, which is not available at the moment. That is the size children are used to and they do resist that sort of change!
So I’ve decided to republish Craig Mnure in all his cranky, curmudgeonly glory, in a slightly larger size. I’m going to think about the cover design to see if I can make it look a bit smaller than it is.
Having made my decision, I find that the back-up disk with the text seems to have disappeared. I think it was the one that fell apart a year ago. (Better check all my other backup media!) So the first big job is going to be scanning the text from the book and OCR copy-reading it in Adobe Acrobat so I have something to work with. Then, after I’ve scanned all the illustrations, I can begin thinking about laying it out to page. I’m sure there will be a lot of hiccups along the way, but it will be a great learning process. Next time it will be easier and perhaps they will have more paper sizes available.
Keep reading and I’ll keep you up to date with the progress. Wish me luck!
Aug 10
31
This Website Business
At last year’s Christmas party, my publishers implored us to start blogging and tweeting and doing whatever we could on the internet. Well I’ve been doing that for the last thirteen years!
I decided that I would try and blog everyday so that I could show what a waste of time it was. If I spent a whole year working away at it, and nothing came of it, then I could prove it was pointless.
This morning, having won yet another minor victory in the endless learning curve that is the Joomla Content Management System, I had that, “Is it really all worth the hassle?” feeling again. I’m thinking of putting all my old experiments in online ebooks back on my site, but I thought I’d make them available only to registered users. Eventually, I might think about charging for them. So I opened up my registration window to the world and immediately received a spam registration, which makes me think it’s insecure and that I should give up the idea as not worth the hassle.
But a little research finds the information I need. More to learn and implement. Maybe I should employ someone to do this? Actually I’m enjoying it. I’m building up an incredible knowledge and confidence in my abilities as a webmaster.
I was listening to the wonderful Bob Proctor this morning. He was going on about persistence as usual. Well, I’m nothing if not persistent, but why is this website thing such a struggle? Then he said something so simple – so obvious, it’s the kind of thing that goes in one ear and straight out the other, but today I heard it.
If I am trying to prove that all my effort is a waste of time, then that’s the outcome I deserve! Duh! Isn’t that really, really obvious?
So, from today, I’m changing my mindset. All the effort I’ll put into my website will be to prove my publishers right – that blogging and tweeting, YouTubing and shoo-tubeing is all really, really worth it. Watch this space!
Posted in Drawing School Joy! Technology and all things digital by .
Aug 10
29
New Look to shoo-tube.com video site
I’ve become aware that some people, and particularly school networks, are still working on old browsers that cause some problems when rendering my drawing school on shoo-tube.com.
I’ve been mucking about with various styles and templates and have settled on one which will allow me to expand in all sorts of directions. It’s very clean and fast loading, so it should be okay on most people’s screens. Click the picture below to have a look around. If you’ve not done so before, try one of the videos and see how good you are at drawing! Make a comment or let me know what you think.
Posted in Drawing School Joy! Technology and all things digital by .
Okay this is a little weird because I’m recording this blog post on my iPhone and I’m just talking straight into it and I’m not doing any typing at all.
I’m having to think and talk a little more slowly than usual because if I talk too fast, my words will slur and the machine will get confused.
Talking slowly means that my brain is not working at normal speed and so what I want to say is not coming out in a natural kind of way. However this is my first blog post that has not been typed at all. It’s all being done just by speaking into my iPhone and the Dragon dictation software sorts it out.
Now I’m typing. I had to correct about four words and put in the punctuation. You would do this when editing anyway. Very interesting. Maybe talking more slowly and clearly is a skill worth practicing?
Posted in Technology and all things digital by .
Aug 10
28
Hints and tips for illustrators
Here’s a video that shows some of the tricks I’ve learned and worked out over the years, for making life a bit easier when drawing pen and ink illustrations. Hope you will enjoy it. If you have any questions or want to know more, don’t hesitate to email.
You should be able to see this video in schools and libraries. If not then try it at www.shoo-tube.com instead
Posted in Drawing School How to by .
Aug 10
28
No more Teachertube
I’ve done a vast amount of work on my drawing school videos this year. It all really got going when I was trying to get my videos to show up on on a smart board for one class that I was working with. I wanted to leave them with a drawing lesson they could go back to when I wasn’t there. The big problem was that YouTube is blocked in almost every classroom in the country, and in the world, probably.
Teachertube came up as a possibility. It was hard work posting my videos onto their site, only about one in five attempts being successful. But then I discovered, that if I downloaded my videos from YouTube, they were in a perfect format for uploading to Teachertube
Now YouTube, in their generosity, are presenting me with full HD videos to download, which Teachertube will not accept. (they also take forever to upload.) So now I have to reprocess my videos for Teachertube. That would be okay, but I can’t process them in a way that they like.
I’ve spent far too much time on this. Teachertube never respond to emails, so I’ve decided to give them a rest and put that energy into www.shoo-tube.com which does get into schools.
I hope Teachertube get their act together. I don’t understand why they haven’t got a massive grant from somewhere to develop their site, which doesn’t seem to move on at all. It has massive potential.
I’ve said before on my blog, that I think YouTube is the world’s greatest educational resource of all time and I’m amazed at how we block it’s use in educational establishments! We will look back on these times in wonder at our ignorance and stupidity.
Aug 10
26
Saved by the locksmith
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