Ganapati Studios

credit Ganapati Studios

Along with an order for my dvd I received a nice note from Phil at Ganapati Studios. I took a look at their site and must order some of their cards. On real paper!

This is just an excerpt. They have other charming looking products too. Somebody at the studio is a postcard collector, I guarantee!

you talkin to me?

This card sort of matches my state of mind. I see it's signed by Sarah, which is my legal first name. Sally is the nickname for Sarah.

Overwhelmed by giant squid

French Flying

This goofy serious postcard is a tribute to aviation. I'm flying back to California today. This seems to have been created in some amazing form of Photoshop in 1912. The figures and airplane are elaborately sculpted. The airplane looks three dimensional. Apparently the whole shebang was created just to sell as a postcard!



The signature is in clay. Wonder how big this thing was.
The background appears to be painted in.



I'm selling it on ebay today. Tonight I hope to be back in Northridge, Ca.

Why I like Lake Balboa

It's always surprising, especially early in the morning.

Stylin Bunnies

Aren't these the best looking dressed bunnies you've seen in a long time? I love the dance suggested by their pose, his wrists. There will be no one so well dressed on my Southwest Airlines flight today.

A Man and his Pickles

I was thinking of giving this card away but I think I have to keep it.

Walker Evans' postcard collection

Ann told me about this, that there's a show of Walker Evans' postcard collection now running at the Met in NYC. This card is a postcard Evans made of one of his photographs.

It cheers me to read postcards are getting their due. I only have around 2000 of them! (give or take a few hundred.) The cards the Met chose to include on their website were a bit dull I thought, other than this one. You could sense from the write up that the curators weren't entirely comfortable discussing a postcard collection.

This image couldn't suit me better- spent all day yesterday at Santa Anita and am watching today's races live on my computer thanks to calracing.com

A Bit a Beta

I've seen some amazing drawings done by the troopers in the last day or two, and hope to get that gallery up before I leave to visit my mother and help her move to a new room.

The evil and wondrous image above is a screen capture from my beta experiment. Informed sources say that Norman drew it.

I had to try one more experiment before I left the home base. I wanted to see if it would be possible to make a drawing dynamically and then import it into Flash. If that worked out, then you could make dynamic Flash greeting cards, for instance, or strangely personalized Flash movies.

So I put some code together, and took it apart, and rearranged it, and lost most of the day on this. Finally it works in a beta sort of way.

Draw a head in the box below. fill the head in- ie no white space or it will look kind of weird. You'll see. If you want to give it a black line, do that after you've filled it in. Press create head.



Then wait about 30 seconds. Press the button in the second app, sound on (or not).
If you don't want to draw a head, just press the button- you'll see someone's head on the body.




I coded it just for one head, so the next person who tries it will overwrite your little head. If you don't see your head, try refreshing the page, or clearing your cache if you know how to do that. I haven't tested it yet in Blogger. It may work better directly from the html page. It may not work at all.

Still, it's a new step when you can put a dynamic image in a Flash movie, and I'm sure I'll try more of this when I have more time.

Ultimate Postcard App

This one's the Cadillac of them all, with code by Ben Rhodes and eraser, undo features, plain canvas or picture, zoom, brush shapes. All it needs now is fill.



I got all sorts of wonderful postcards myself today, and even managed to figure out how to embed a flash file in a postcard. I need to save all these nifty pictures and put up another bulletin board. But it's going to be a busy week.

Last Postcard for Awhile

The only thing different here is pictures you can draw into. This information was not easily obtained. If you make a mistake use the white, clear will take the whole thing away. There are two palettes. What else would make this fun? Adding a photo you drew on, of a landscape for instance?

(I actually think the drag and drops are most fun because even non artists can create something cool, whereas when you get into drawing, half the crowd leaves the room.)

Draw it and Send It!

I've taken a peek at some of the drag and drops because they sit on my server, a maximum of 100. Just now I've put them in a show for all, because they are a treat. There are no ids except for one or two cards I received. See them in the original post. One especially delighted me.

I woke up from a dream thinking about an app. I dreamed (in Flash) that a teacher was standing in front of an outdoor cartoon classroom (funny animals) with a little easel and the dream was something about how the students thought what she was teaching was the most wondrous thing ever. I wanted to draw a minimal background and let you guys do the wondrous part, but I got stuck trying to include a background. May happen in the days ahead though.

In another dream I was told turn right at "O" street, then left at "K" street. "OK"!

So today I worked on this drawing postcard app, of course this is the kind of thing where the dirty pictures all start showing up, but maybe not in this dignified group who visits my site.

I found a charming house sitter today, so that's one major problem solved, and someone kicked the bucket at the old folks home so a room is available for my mother. I'm leaving Wednesday for quite a few days of intensive packing and moving-- timed it perfectly as I already had the plane reservation. But you hate to sound too jolly about this sort of opportunity. "Oh, someone died upstairs? In a big room? Great!"

okay enough at the keyboard, let's see if this drawing thing works. again, NOT a contest. I'm too busy.

Meanwhile, send a postcard

Don't forget the contest, folks. Only three more days. I'm selecting nuts and chews for the winner.



I struggled the last half day to get the postcard set up working, and now it seems to. I didn't spend as much time selecting the images as I did dealing with php permissions and an actual database which somehow came together late this morning.

So feel free to send a card here. Unlike many of those free cards, this one isn't doing any tracking or cookies or anything like that. If I can take it a big step farther, you'll be able to email your own drawing, but don't expect that tomorrow.

Being an old postcard collector, I've never been that keen on digital cards because you can't hold them, but I guess other people like them.