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At work I've been putting together a number of tutorials detailing different ways to achieve a variety of visual goals using Photoshop CS2. I thought they were pretty snappy and would have found them useful when I was trying to figure out things like layer masks and adjustment layers, so I thought I'd try to port them over to some of the free video sites that are out there.

With little luck.

YouTube will not post video that is over ten minutes in length and most decent tutorials are going to hover around the ten-to-twenty minute mark. Further compounding the difficulty is screenRes. YouTube requires video at a miniscule 320x240. I had already shrunk my photoshop canvas from a sprawling 3000x1200 down to something like 1400x850 for initial recording and then resized the video for compatibility with 1024x768 screens. That works just fine. 320x240 does not. Nearly all detail is lost and it becomes very difficult to see what's going on.

So then I tried Google Video. It asks that you upload video at 640x480. And I saw hourlong videos available on-site. So that was encouraging. But then, after upload of my 25 minute test video, I checked to see how it looked and despite requiring 640x480, Google resized it to 320x240 anyway.

And double sigh.

Anyway, if you care to learn how to colour in line art in Photoshop, here's a twenty-five minute video in which I demonstrate how to colour the art I used in the masthead above.

O.M.G. Squee.

They're holding hands. And they're furry.

The Dane vs. The Linerider (part ii)

Wanting to try building a course with little of that straight-line hatching that I used on my prior two courses, I made one using solely the bumpy kind of lines that come from the natural movement of the mouse. This one has a lot of bumping and flipping in the place of speed and loops. I've entitled it Goodnight Moon.

The Dane vs. The Linerider

For those of you who are just plain unaware, Linerider is the recently hip computer toy produced by *fsk. I first ran across the little program on a few weeks back on Deviant Art, but now it appears there's a fostering community site at linerider.org.

The long and the short of it is that Linerider has two aspects: creation and play. To begin with, the user (in this case, me) has a rudimentary set of tools (i.e., a pencil, a trash can, and a save/load feature) and is given a blank canvas, not unlike what one might find on a recently shaken Etch-a-Sketch. The user then simply draws a series of lines (sometimes referred to as a "track" or "course") and when satisfied, clicks the Play Button. This begins the Play aspect of the toy. Perhaps a video illustration will help explicate the wonder of this toy.

Now that you have the basic idea, I highly recommend going forth and playing for yourself. The physics "engine" behind the toy is just fun enough to make some pretty cool stuff possible. Imagine if the course creation part of Excitebike on the old NES didn't suck. I know, pretty tough request. But if you can imagine such a thing, that is a pretty close approximation to what's going on in Linerider. And just to give you a couple ideas, here are two "courses" that I carefully cobbled together myself. Bon ape!

And for those who are interested, here is a full view of the course I made for Ups & Downs.

[[ NOTE: for those who missed it, you can download the Linerider toy here - third link in the list... ]]