A Little Something I've Been Working On

Well, I've been at it again and I think I might be getting a bit better. Hopefully, I can turn this hobby into some real money at istockphoto. If not, there is always the enjoyment of creation.

Net Neutrality

Imagine this...
You are driving down the road and come to a toll plaza. It's the only way to get to your destination so you pay the $1.50 and move down the road. Then you get to the end of the toll road and pay another $1.50. Leaving the toll road you reach your destination, a grocery store, you proceed to buy food. You get up to the cash register and pay your bill. When you get your receipt you see a extra charge for $1.50 on it. You go to the service desk and ask why the extra charge was tacked onto your bill and they say it is to pay for you coming to their store on the toll road. They nicely explain that they are just passing on to you the charge the toll company passes on to them. You exclaim that you already paid those tolls and they say that's just the way it is.
That in a nutshell is what giving up net neutrality is going to do to this country. By enabling the toll road companies (i.e. Verizon, AT&T, etc.) the ability to charge companies for their traffic across their small section of the Internet you are going to hobble everyone. The U.S. (you know, the inventor of the Internet) is not the number one country when it comes to average connection speeds and is the most expensive one in which to have a high speed Internet connection. Do we really want to hobble this countries Internet connectivity anymore by giving in to these highway robbers? I think not.

The Garden

Just a little Inkscape vector drawing I worked on this weekend. After I get better, I plan on perhaps submitting some of these to istockphoto. We'll see.

Butterflies And Apple Pie

And now for something completely different....

I've been looking at starting to sell my stuff to istockphoto and saw that their vector illustrations were very beautiful and daunting. The first problem is that I don't have Adobe Illustrator. I have Inkscape and the Gimp however. I thought I would tackle creating an image like the ones I saw being downloaded (some over 2000+ times on istockphoto). This is the result of that work. It is completely different from what I usually do (A heck of a lot more cheerful).

I first got a Gimp script from Gimp-Talk.com called Brush-Batch and a program called ABRViewer. Brush Batch takes any image and converts it into a Gimp Brush. Then I got some paint splatter brushes (Photoshop brushes converted by ABRViewer) and went crazy to get the background patterns for the butterfly and actual backgrounds. I got a vase off the internet and digitized it and colored it. Then I converted some bubbles from particleillusion and created some brushes from it, imported them into Gimp brushes, created some images that I then digitized and brought into Inkscape for matting. Then I used a program called PlantStudio2 (now free) to create the stems.

If only I had Illustrator (way too expensive) I would try to get this kind of work submitted to istockphoto. I'm just way to cheap ;-)