I’d like to see something involving any of the following: hippo, cuttlefish, penguin, octopus, praying mantis. They don’t have to be playing poker and smoking cigars. Really they don’t. I mean, that would just be silly.

Timbrook produced this:

You’ve got to admit he pretty much nailed it.

After following his project on Facebook for a month or two, I decided I’d request a drawing. As I recall, the price at the time was $20 for a black-and-white drawing, or $40 for a color drawing. I sent the payment via PayPal and emailed him the request. It took him almost three months to get to me, but he finally drew my drawing. He will be stopping his Drawing A Day project soon because he has been unable to live up to the challenge in its title, but I’m very glad I got my request in while he was still going.

My request was:

Please draw my daughter, Nora, riding an elephant, one of a herd, on the moon.

My request was right around the time I did this artwork myself. It wasn’t easy to find a photograph of Nora to send him since I hardly have any, but I sent him a link to my my Nora Flickr photostream. It looks as though he combined the hair and dress in this photo with the sunglasses in this photo to produce his masterpiece.

I absolutely love it! Bravo, Dustin. Thank you very much!

At some point the idea occurred to her that if she cut a perfect circle of just the right radius in the front of the card with an X-Acto knife, then one of her origami chrysanthemums would fit there perfectly and be both held tightly in place and completely cover the hole. This discovery ushered in a Renaissance in Joyce-made greeting cards.

A birthday card of mine from 2009. The little plastic jewel sticker in the center of the flower serves to hold down all the folds.

This is what the card look like on the inside. The flaps already present in the design of this origami flower hold it in place. No glue necessary.

This card was for our second wedding anniversary. The origami flower trick works perfectly on top of flowery clipart.

Just this month I’ve seen a brand new technique for greeting card decoration, one that I would never have come up with: sewing. If your card stock is strong enough, why not poke holes in it with a needle and pull some thread through? What could you create with this technique? Just about anything, actually…

This is Marga’s birthday card she opened yesterday. How did she do that? Curious, I peeled back the white paper perfectly pasted in the inside to cover the back of the sewing.

Wow! A perfect circle of holes, with radial lines of holes, and then an awful lot of clever sewing, with loose threads held neatly in place with tape. Amazing!

This past Thanksgiving, Marga specifically requested a Christmas card with the Three Wise Men on it, since they play a more central role in Spanish Christmas. The result, using silver thread, was beautifully elegant.

By far the most creative card I’ve seen from my grandmother was for our third wedding anniversary this year. It was a 3D popup card made from one of our wedding photos. I’m fairly familiar with how to make what are called “virtual 3D photos”. I’ve been meaning to play around with the technique sometime. Here’s a great tutorial on it. The trick is to cut out an object in the foreground and then somehow fill in the background behind it by guessing what it probably looked like. Usually this involves using the Photoshop clone tool or copying some other similar part of the background and pasting it in the hole where you cut out the foreground figure. This is pretty easy with Photoshop, particularly with CS5′s “content aware” feature.

What really blew my mind was that my grandmother did all this by hand, with actual cutting with scissors and actual pasting with glue. The effect was nearly seamless, and if I hadn’t been educated in how this technique is done digitally, I might not have even noticed that it had been done at all, which is about the highest compliment you can give to a special effect. I couldn’t take a good photo of the card to demonstrate just how incredibly done it was, so I had to record a video. Check this out!

The popup card was actually made from two different photos, but we still had to be removed from the background photo.

Update: My grandmother tells me that the inspiration for these cards, with the exception of the 3D popup, came from her daughter, my Aunt Carol. When Carol visited in October of this year, she brought along a book called Sewing on Paper, from which they learned various techniques.

Unfortunately, she has since had the idea to go “tagging” other objects in the house, managing to draw a little on a wall before getting appropriately chastised by her mother. I fear that for not nipping this behavior in the bud, I may have unleashed a vandal.

When I looked under the table, I saw this:

Well, okay, maybe it really looked a little more like this:

When we got home, I gave her a pen and paper, and she scribbled away like a tormented artist. She seems to slightly favor her right hand, but she’ll scribble with her left as well.

It’s cute how, when her mother rotates the page to give her a clean canvas, she gets upset and demands it be rotated back to how it was.

When she finishes a “drawing”, she likes to carry it around the house for a minute or two until something else catches her eye.

I’ve been walking a lot lately, so we decided that I would drive the car to Laredo in the morning, park it as close to the downtown parade site as possible, and then walk back home. I took Nora with me since she isn’t any extra work on walks (when bribed with cookies), but she is a handful to care for around the house. Then, at 17:00, we set out walking to Laredo. Immediately the sky began to look ominous, and about halfway there, it began to rain. We managed to find a little shelter and soon the rain slowed and then stopped. We got there late for the initial lap (for the judges to see the floats), but we caught the entire second lap (for the awards to be given) and a little of the third lap (for the awards to be paraded, literally, around the town).

Watching the Batalla de Flores reminds me of going to an art museum; the first few pieces you see and really focus on totally blow your mind with the creativity and skill with which they were created, and then every piece after that is like “Oh, look, another one… Meh!” The dedication and time and energy and teamwork to put one of these floats together, with the flowers added the day before the parade to keep them fresh, is truly to be respected. It seems that every year there is an oriental float with dragons, a circus float, a marine life float, a musical instrument float, and a float with superheroes or cartoon characters to please the kids. In addition to the prize for the best float, there is a prize awarded for the dresses and costumes of the adolescents standing in or on the floats. This year, the same float (I can’t remember which one) won both first place prizes.

Here are some photos I took with my phone. I chose not to make the effort with the real camera. I think I might be falling into the rut with the locals that actively avoid such festivals because once you’ve seen it one year, you don’t really have to go again. Hopefully my daughter will keep my eyes fresh.

You can see the slideshow larger here.

Here’s a short video of Nora watching the action. She very much liked the colorful floats, but very much disliked the emcee that came on the loudspeaker abruptly, making us both jump.

I suppose we’ll probably go for the next few years, when Nora will be excited to see the flowers, and then never again.

VIDA

Después de todo, todo ha sido nada,
a pesar de que un día lo fue todo.
Después de nada, o después de todo
supe que todo no era más que nada.

Grito “¡Todo!”, y el eco dice “¡Nada!”.
Grito “¡Nada!”, y el eco dice “¡Todo!”.
Ahora sé que la nada lo era todo,
y todo era ceniza de la nada.

No queda nada de lo que fue nada.
(Era ilusión lo que creía todo
y que, en definitiva, era la nada.)

Qué más da que la nada fuera nada
si más nada será, después de todo,
después de tanto todo para nada.

LIFE

After everything, everything has been nothing,
despite that one day it was everything.
After nothing, or after everything
I knew that everything was no more than nothing.

I shout, “Everything!”, and the echo says, “Nothing!”
I shout, “Nothing!”, and the echo says, “Everything!”
Now I know that the nothing was everything
and everything was the ash of the nothing.

Nothing is left of what nothing was.
(It was illusion that created everything
and that, in short, was the nothing.)

Who cares if the nothing was nothing
if it will be more nothing, after everything,
after so much everything for nothing.

If we write down the equation for the ratio of the picture area to the border area (the full frame size – the picture’s area), we get this:

If we set our ratio to Phi and solve the equation, using the quadratic formula, we get that our doubled border width, x, is:

What does this give us? Now, for any length and width of picture, we can calculate how wide to make the border around it such that the ratio of the area of the picture to the area of the border is Phi…or any number for that matter!

Picture Border Ratio Calculator

Using the calculator below, if you input the length and width of your picture, and the area ratio (picture / border), it will tell you how large to make your border. And below the calculator is a rendering of the values you enter. Note that the default values in the calculator are for a golden rectangle and an area ratio of Phi. Looks pretty nice, doesn’t it? Go ahead, try out other picture sizes!

In short, Apple has manufactured not only the best mobile phone on the market, but also the most awesome coaster ever!

Looking straight down into the glass.

For the last picture, I agitated the beverage a bit to generate some foam.

Oooh, pretty!

If you think this is pretty when you’re sober…try it with a few beers in your belly!

The author of this post is not responsible for any damage you cause to your iPhone.

Obiter dicta are incidental words, things said in passing. Obiter picta is a collaborative photo blog updated Tuesday through Friday. The participants’ contributions are not coordinated in advance. Any consonance or dissonance perceived in the themes, content or composition presented here is coincidental.

With year-long photoblog projects you can go really strict and demand that each photo is taken the day it’s published and a photo is published every day of the year, etc. We considered doing that for at least a second before saying, “Nah, let’s relax the rules as much as possible.” That’s why there are only new posts four days a week. I like to think of it as, “how you would arrange your homework in school if you could,” with nothing due on Monday so you never have any homework over the weekend. Also you can submit any photo you took any time ever, so it’s not like it’s forcing us to be on the lookout for new photography subjects. I posted 488 photos to Flickr in September and October, so it’s not like I’m strained for material.

I’m not sure what the point of it is yet, but I do like to let my brain puzzle over the daily juxtapositions of photos, searching for patterns. It’s also kind of fun to get to know three people I don’t know only via four photos each week.

This is the homepage as it is today on November 5, 2009. I really like the simplicity and elegance of the design. Lance does all the work for designing and hosting and maintaining the site.

So anyway, head on over there and check it out. The most fun thing to do is to hit the Random 5 button and watch as it randomly selects a photo from each participant and places them in a random order. Sometimes you can get really cool juxtapositions.

As always, I recommend that you click through to see it in HD.

I was surprised this year at just how much of a lantern my jack-o-lantern turned out to be. With the lights out, and a single candle lit inside, the entire pumpkin glows ominously. Very cool.

The obligatory with-flash shot. The design was inspired by Nora’s current dental layout.

I’d say that’s scary enough.

See how the whole thing glows?

This is my favorite shot, I think. The only light in the photograph is coming from the candle inside the pumpkin.

[puts flashlight under chin]

Nora begged us to cut a hole in the bottom and let her wear it as her Halloween costume this year. But when we put it over her head, her head seemed to vanish completely leaving only an empty gourd upon her shoulders! Bwahahahaha!!!

Happy Halloween!

Just like last year, as thanks to Andrés and for my work to be seen, I’ve left the jack-o-lantern with the local grocery store all day today. Gracias, Andrés!