Kevin Smith

Shouts & Hollers is an online "ezine" of sorts that is published by Charleston, WV, area bloggers.  Bill Gardner got in contact with me to answer a few questions regarding a recent sideproject of mine.  Read it here.

Thanks Bill!

Via http://www.polyp.org.uk

Bored and playing with different tools in Illustrator.

We've been working with Flash in my Intro to Computers in Art class and I wanted to play with with Flash a bit more than the assignment I've been working allowed me to (even though the assignment has allowed me to play and learn quite a lot, a clock wouldn't be able to fulfill its requirements). I searched around and found a basic tutorial on how to create a very basic clock and I went from there. I didn't want to simply do numbers so I quickly plopped out another idea. Here's a very simple, very ugly clock that depicts the way most 9-5 people spend their waking hours.

My roommate lives off Chinese takeout and McDonalds.  Here's a menu with an amusing typo.

Going home for the first time in a while this weekend.  Happy Birthday, Dad!

The assignment: "Create a vector-based self-portrait. Using the photographs we've taken in class as a guide, make a vector-based self-portrait with Adobe Illustrator. The object of this project is to be as visually detailed and honest as is possible while using only strokes and shapes. Illustrator-based effects such as blurs, blends, and gradients are not permitted. Strokes and shapes - that's all. Your primary tools in this project will be the pen tool (and its subtools), the pencil tool, and, possibly, the brush tool."

The Result:

I enjoyed it for the most part.  I plan on delving into Illustrator a bit more when I get time.

I also have quite a few pieces from my ceramics class that I recently fired.  I'll try to get some pictures of those when I can.

Oh yeah -- Woot for Obama.  His speech was very powerful -- it almost brough a tear to my eye bahaha.  I don't know if I was just feeling very wimpy last night or if his words were just that powerful.  I'm going to say it was a mixture.

I just realized I haven't shared any of the stuff I've done since I've been back in school.  Here are two pieces created within the past few weeks.

This first one was a project for a class.  Here's an excerpt of the requirements: "This project is conceptually simple - create a new creature in Photoshop. This can be anything from an animal hybrid, something impossibly cute, or a scary monster. Using the skills you've acquired so far and developing few more, you must make the image visually convincing. There should be no visual clues that the photograph is a construction. Your creature must be situated in its natural habitat (swamp, sewer, house, street, forest, zoo, science lab, alien landscape, Applebees, etc.)
I took an image of a market, elephant, and goose to create this:

And this is a project I did outside of class because the text and class assignments didn't cover tool manipulation in great detail -- I wanted to play, basically.

Discovered this via StumbleUpon but the site quit working when I sent it to a friend.  Too much traffic from SU, I'm guessing.

October is breast cancer awareness month so I decided to change my blog/twitter color scheme to have a pinkish tint for the month of October. I urge you do the same.

D2

Update: To prevent any confusion the code highlighter might cause in the post, I added a plain text version of this post here.
I noticed a lot of sites allow user submitted content but prevent autolinking of urls. Some of the most common instances of this are on Twitter sites (much like my own creation: SecretTweet.com). So I threw together a function to autolink urls:

 
<?
$text= 'Hey go to google.com moo http://google.com moo www.google.com moo http://wwww.google.com/404.php moo';
function linkify(&$text)
{
//CONVERT *://.* TO LINK (EG HTTP://KEVINSMITHDESIGNS.COM)
$text = ereg_replace("[a-zA-Z]+://([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*", "\\0", $text);
//CONVERT *://*.* TO LINK (EG HTTP://WWW.KEVINSMITHDESIGNS.COM)
$text = ereg_replace("(^| )(www([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*)", "\\1\\2", $text);
return $text;
}
echo linkify($text);
?>
 

Would return "Hey go to google.com moo http://google.com moo www.google.com moo http://wwww.google.com/404.php moo".

And since I made this primarily for Twitter, the following will linke @ replies automatically, too:

 
<?
$tweet = "Hey @mozunk! Go check out http://digsby.com -- I think you will like it.";
function twitterify(&$tweet) {
//CONVERT *://.* TO LINK (EG HTTP://KEVINSMITHDESIGNS.COM)
$tweet = ereg_replace("[a-zA-Z]+://([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*", "\\0", $tweet);
//CONVERT *://*.* TO LINK (EG HTTP://WWW.KEVINSMITHDESIGNS.COM)
$tweet = ereg_replace("(^| )(www([.]?[a-zA-Z0-9_/-])*)", "\\1\\2", $tweet);
//LINK @USERNAME
$tweet = preg_replace('/([\.|\,|\:|\¡|\¿|\>|\{|\(]?)@{1}(\w*)([\.|\,|\:|\!|\?|\>|\}|\)]?)\s/i', "$1@$2$3 ", $tweet);return $tweet;
}
echo twitterify(&$tweet);
?>
 

Would return "Hey @mozunk! Go check out http://digsby.com -- I think you will like it."

I'll be implementing this into SecretTweet pretty soon. I haven't decided if I want to autolink URLs or not...maybe just @replies.
---
automatically link urls php
autolink @ replies Twitter automatically link php