...that the day I'd published my last post happened to be the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who!  To commemorate this, I'm deciding to share an earlier picture I'd almost forgotten about: This is definitely among my favorites.  I'm not quite done with it, though--the "vortex" should probably be more like a textured, part-invisible cylinder (like in the 8th Doctor movie that I actually kinda liked in some ways but not others) rather than multiple rings made of halos , as I'd rendered.  Chances are that I could achieve first this effect using a ramp/colorband (a way to fit lots of colors on an object without textures or faces). What I should probably go for Meanwhile, I've been preparing for finals at college (which is going moderately well), digressing on careers as an author, singer and/or global dominator, and have redesigned my blog!  I'll share my Photoshop experiences later!

Finals are fast approaching for me and I notice that I've only posted one post on my college experience.  So, here's the rest of the stuff I've been doing in Adobe Illustrator: 1. Varga. You'll have to trust me that the symbol didn't start out purple.  The goal here was that I'd use the Pen Tool to "trace" the odd now-purple symbol by a man named Arnold Varga, the trick being that it had to be achieved with 25 anchors (clicks) or less. The pen tool uses Bezier Curves, a kind of curve that makes curves that are always in a 180 degree relationship.  In other words, if I click and drag and draw 3 vertical lines identical in height exactly .3 inches away from each other, they look like this: Actually, I don't know quite how else to describe Bezier Curves mostly because I don't know how they work myself.  Either way, though, you get better at it when you practice. 2. The Crash Course. This experiments with just about everything else in