I had actually planned on using a watercolor for this weeks art piece. I made it today while I was waiting for the soapbox derby to start. Then I lost my moleskine notebook. However I had just put my contact info on the first page of it this morning, so I'm hoping someone will return it. In addition to my watercolors, it had most of the art project ideas I'd been working on.

So to come up with something for this week, I whipped together a quick video from todays footage:

2007 Bernal Hill Illegal Soapbox Derby.

It's actually not too bad, especially when watching it in HD but its ok in the web format as well. I'll upload the HD version to somewhere tomorrow. I think the Internet Archive will host it since it's CC licensed.

Since it's almost Halloween, and pirates are always in style, here's a Jolly Roger laser cut-out as my 4th of 52 things.

This one was a bit more technical than the last laser cut piece. I actually figured out how to work Illustrator well enough to do it as vector work, and I had to do some precise measurements to ensure that the pieces would fit together, but it was actually fairly easy. I decided to hand draw the skull and bones as I liked the look better than the one I did using symmetrical shapes. I was pleasantly surprised that I did that all right and didn't have to do any last minute adjustments at the cutter (other than setting the stroke width to hairline). I made a dozen or so of these out of 1/8" thick balsa wood. I'll give them out or just leave them around in public places.

This morning I tried signing up at three Virtual Assistant companies. These are companies that will do pretty much anything you can do over the Internet or on the phone. Prices range from $7-20/hour. Usually the tasks are completed by English-speakers in India. At two of them (AskSunday and GetFriday), errors on the website prevented me from signing up. This doesn't give me much confidence in their abilities or professionalism. The third (and most expensive, as it is more geared towards business research) is Brickwork India and their sign up process seems to be OK so far.

Update: Steven Ludmer, a co-founder for AskSunday, wrote me back in about an hour to thank me for alerting them to the problem and to let me know it had been fixed. I've completed the sign up process now and will report back sometime on how I feel the service is working out. They have a referral program, so if you decide to sign up be sure to put my name (Dav Yaginuma) in your referral field.

I bought a cute little portable watercolor kit. It looks like a cell phone; the brush looks like the stylus for a Treo. I carry around a little jar of water with it. I've only used it once so far, to do this illustration from Warm Water Cove. This is the first watercolor I've done in nearly 20 years. I'm not too happy with it, but it's Sunday night and I didn't manage to get anything else done this week. I did say good, bad or ugly.

I joined TechShop, a 15,000 square foot Shangri-La for maker geeks located south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley. It has a very impressive array of tools available for members to use from heavy duty sewing machines, to MIG welders, to an Epilog 45 watt laser cutter. On Saturday I took a basic safety and usage class on the laser cutter and tonight I went back to make my 2 of 52 things project.

My idea was to take some nice paper I picked up at an art store and use the Epilog to cut out an intricate jellyfish pattern, then layer the jellyfish over another piece of fancy colored paper. Things didn't turn out that way, but I am pleased with the results.

I started by looking for a creative commons licensed photo of a jellyfish on Flickr. I found several nice ones, but decided to go with this one. The next step was to turn it into a black and white bitmap in Photoshop and alter it until it was what I wanted. An important issue was converting the image from raster to vector graphics. Photoshop is great for raster graphics, but it doesn't do vectors. I have Illustrator for that, but I'm really not that good at Photoshop and I'm utterly lousy at Illustrator. I spent time tracing and erasing tentacles and trying to clean up the edges. After a couple of hours of fooling around I gave up and left it in raster format.

The reason it is important to convert to vector graphics is that I wanted to cut the jellyfish out of paper. Generally speaking, the Epilog machine cuts vector graphics and etches raster graphics. I experimented a bit and found I could essentially cut out a raster image (by burning away large swaths of material) but it as no good for my image since what I really needed was an outline cut.

I etched out a few jellyfish images on paper, but in the end I scrounged around the TechShop facility for some scrap wood and ended up using that as my medium instead. I think it actually looks nicer than the paper would have anyhow.

Total time spent: 2 hours in photoshop, 1.5 hours on the laser machine.