Blog Post: Creating a fun "Frozen people in ice" icon by "yourself" PART TWO

This is the second part of the article last week; click HERE to view part one if you haven't seen it yet. So same thing as the one that we did last week with the ice cube, we're still going to make icons with Illustrator CS3 from Adobe. And this time we'll be making the person inside the ice cube by our-self, not by Google-ing the picture because, there are a lot of icons of person in internet, you probably just need to search icons about MSN and you can get it. BUT AGAIN, we're just going to make our own and so that it would looks like the person is really in the ice cube (we have to highlight etc.) Lets get started!

Step 1. First step we just need to create the outline (as usual) for the head which is round and just a rough shape of the body is good enough. (You can go online and look at the example shape of the body if you want to). 

Step 2. Then you fill the color for the head (solid color first) then remove the outline. Then, fill the color for its body just by using the gradient color. 

Step 3.  Now you draw a collar with a tie and fill with solid colors first as usual and gradient colors later/ after. And after that, group the collar and tie together and make it into just one object. To group those two things together, you can just right click and select group. Other than the collar and the tie you also have to group the head and the body together as one thing. 

Step 4. So now select the body and the head (they're already one thing) and we want to make this 1D person into a 3D person. So after we selected, click effect, 3D and Extrude & Bevel.

Step 5. Now we're in the option that we can choose how it'll look like after we make it 3D. So we have to rotate it and see the changes and do the blending to 1 (remember to have a bit shadow).

Step 6. Now we want to make that 3D shape into bunch of grouped shapes because we want to delete some of the unwanted shapes. So now we right click on the selected group and select ungroup.

Step. 7 When we now take a close look to our layers, we'll find many groups that contain clipping paths inside them plus the blue gradient color became a rasterized image basically we're in a very messy state; So now we have to delete all the clipping paths, and shapes hidden underneath and also group the blue gradient and clean up a little bit with your layers.

Step 8. There might be too many anchor points and you wanna clean it out so now you go to object, path and simplify and also you might wanna fill the gaps that are needed to be fill by just adding extra anchor points.

Step 9. When we're done lets get our tie back, you might see it as not on the body of the person because we already rotate the person so now we hide it again because we're not yet done with the colors of our person.



Step 10. So now select the person and reduce its transparency to 75% (frontal shape). and make its outline to white color.


Step 11. For the head now we fill it with gradient color (radical) like a bit yellowish and duplicate the layer and reduce its transparency to 80%. The color would show very perfect!!

Step 12. Now we want to make the head glossy, so now we'll use pen tool and draw a shape like what you can see in the picture. And then select it and use pathfinder tool intersect the shape areas to extract that much area from the shapes. Press Expand and we can see the desired shape.

Step 13. Screen the layer with Opacity 65% and cut another shape as you can see in the picture below and then gradient as well with 60% Opacity.  (Make another one with similar shape to the lower part of the face)

                   


                                       


Step 14. Lastly bring the tie back and make sure you do step 13 for the tie too and then highlight the parts that you think you need to highlight them (if you dont know how to highlight scroll up to the first paragraph you saw in this article and click "HERE" to view Part I that shows you how to highlight as well).

THEN YOU"RE DONE. (MAKE sure you put the person in the ice cube that you made with shadow effect (simply draw a rectangle shape with dark blue color and make its opacity as 35% with the amount of 25 blur)

                   

Major Concept:

Create your own people in ice Cube is very fun, its not only the person in ice cube, you can use this technique and create other different kinds of person. It again seems like it has a lot of steps but if you're used to it you can do it very easily. So it is better to practice yourself by creating things like this when you want a picture of cartoon etc. 

Advantage & Disadvantage:

The advantage of creating your own person is because you'll know how to create other kinds of person too in the future, not only the person like this (MSN style) but also you can do girl version, or person with eyes nose and mouth etc since you already know the technique from this article. 

The bad thing about this is that again IT TAKES time to do, and if its not good you might end up giving up and just Google the picture. 

Question:

Isn't it better if they don't use person in the frozen ice? Because you had to highlight so much.... Why don't they just create like something else that normally people do. (COMMON) :3

Citation:

"Create a Fun Icon of Frozen People on Ice – Part II." Vectortuts RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2013. <http://vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/icon-design/create-a-fun-icon-of-frozen-people-on-ice-part-ii/>.

Blog Post: Creating a fun "Frozen people in ice" icon by "yourself" PART ONE

There are many programs that you can create objects that looks realistic, and in this article, we'll be showing the readers a very interesting thing! Normally when people are looking for icons or pictures of the cartoons that they want,. Of course people would just Google online the pictures and use it, but there are some picture that they have in their mind and they couldn't find it in the internet, so what to do now? When you don't know how to do now you can look at an example icon that this article is teaching which is "Frozen people in the ice". This is part one, which is just only the ice cube, later in the next article (you can click the word "HERE" down the end of this article and view part two. 

Step 1. We need to find a program for creating this and it would be Illustrator CS3 from Adobe then we'll start creating an ice cube by sketching a 3D rectangle shape. Notice that a 3D rectangular has 6 sides, so we need to draw each of the side in different layers so that we could edit them separately later on.  

Step 2. After that, we want to start edit just one or two side of the rectangle so we have to hide all the sides that we don't want to edit at this moment by clicking the "eye" icon in the place where you can see all your layers. 

Step 3.  Since we know that, a realistic ice cube does not have a sharp edge, its not perfectly a rectangle shape, so now we want to make the edges curvy by using Convert Anchor Point Tool. (Don't worry if its overlapping each other).

 

Step 4.  Now we'll start to fill in some colors! We first just need to select one of the side and fill with gradient. Don't worry when you see the color black, it is the default color, all we need to do is just change the color to blue. After you've succeed one side, do the rest sides of the rectangle.

 

Step 5. Now change the angel to align the gradient and so that it'll look darker in the center. (high-lighting)

Step 6. Make the faces a little bit transparent color by change the "transparency" into 60% and for the bottom one, 80% is enough (we know that we're highlighting, so the bottom is darker).




Step 7. Un-hide the top part, same thing as what we did before, curve the edges, fill it with gradient color, and make the transparency into 50% since is at the top! After we un-hide it, we can Toggle the outline colors into none so that it look more like a ice cube.

Step 8. Even though it look like an ice cube already, but it looks a little bit fake because it doesn't look watery (an ice cube should be looking watery since its made from water). So now, we'll have to select the parts that we want to make it look watery.

Step 9. Draw like an Y shape at the edges of the front sides. After that, we want to fill it with color "white" again we're highlighting. But we don't want the white color to be too solid so now we'll make its transparency to 75%. and select "screen" for the color effects.

Step 10. For the top part we'll make some highlight also but since its at the top, its far away from our sight, so we want to make the color not just transparent but also to add at least a little bit of blue by filling in the gradient color (make sure you're in the blending mode so that the color would blend.

Step 11. Now our ice cube is looking pretty realistic, but we still need to add more at the front side by using the same step that we did before. For the last highlight that we're going to do would be a drop of water at the front side of the ice cube so that it looks like its melting.

Step 11a. Our first step for making the water drop is to create a oval shape by using the tool that we used to draw those highlights.



Step 11b. Then fill in the gradient color (white faded with blue + 60% transparency).

Step 11c. Make a smaller oval shape in the oval shape that we just created and give it a gradient of white to cyan color + 30% transparency.

Step 11d. Even though we made the smaller oval shape a transparency of 30% already but still it won't look like is a part of the bigger oval. So we need to blend the colors together, this time we would select the smaller oval's layer and click on effect and select blur > Gaussian Blur. When you select that, there will be a window pop up and ask you to enter a value of how much blur you want, and the best one is 5.

Step 11e. Even though they're now looking like "a" drop of water, we still have to add some highlight since we did add a lot of highlight for the sides. So now create some highlights at the top and the bottom of the oval shape AND also a little dot of highlight that makes this drop more 3D looking.

FINAL: Make sure you do transparency + blend + Screen. Do the same thing to the other drop at the top of the ice cube, and finally you'll get this! Its a realistic Ice cube!

This is a picture of the icon of frozen people in ice cube. If you want to know how to do the frozen people in the ice click HERE to view the next article on April 1st.

                                    

Major Concept:
The reason why this article is interesting is because normally people might just go get ice cube or whatever picture/icon at Google but here you can learn how to make it with your own hands! And the result looks very realistic too. It seemed like there's a lot of steps, but they're just repeating and they're very simple.

Advantage & Disadvantage:
By reading this article, you can learn how to make your own realistic things/object in computer by highlighting and blending etc. Not just ice that needs highlights, all the other realistic object does required this, so after you read this article, I'm sure you could do for other things too!
It takes a bit time instead of just Google it, and if you didn't do well, it might not look as realistic as it is in real life.

Question:
Is it better if we look at a a real life photo of an ice cube and make it according to that photo or a not real life picture such as cartoon? Which one is better? Because the real life picture might be too hard to make and a cartoon picture might be too easy (since some of them doesn't even have any highlights).

Citation:
"Create a Fun Icon of Frozen People on Ice – Part I." Vectortuts RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2013. <http://vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/icon-design/create-a-fun-icon-of-frozen-people-on-ice-part-i/>.

Blog Post: Tackk, a good and simple way of presenting and displaying your information!

There are many different kinds of ways to communicate information and display information. Power point presentations might be the one that everybody knows, but nowadays in the internet, it is no longer just Microsoft Presentation. Microsoft presentation is like basically an old style of doing presentation and displaying your information; You have to do everything inside there and later you have to click save also, what if you forgot to save it? and you just accidently closed it? All your work would disappeared and we don't want that to happen. So now, there's many other ways to display your information such as Google presentation, Prezi, Glogster and etc. The good thing about them is that they're online, you could just log into your Gmail, and start doing it online without losing the contents because it saved every time you make a new edition. Aside from "online", it is also stylish. Prezi and Glogster can be a way to display your information too but it is more stylish, you have free spaces to create  many things you want. And now, people had found a new online system that you can create presentation online which is called the Tackk. Tackk does not have a traditional-like presentation of displaying your work, it's not as formal as Microsoft and Google presentation, and also it is not that free and stylish as Prezi  and Glogster basically is in between. For me, I would call it a more formal form of Glogster. Tackk provide you things you need in order to write your contents like bullet points, change the font color, add media, proper text-box (the position is fixed so that it wont look not formal), and some themes. Other than that, you actually don't need to sign up for it too. Most of the online system requires log in system but not this one. Another good thing about Tackk is that, bascially if you sign up for this online presentation, you can get something better than not signing up and logging in and again, the good thing about this is that, even though you create an account, it is still free! Lastly, if you want to see other people of how they create their Tackk, you could just click "Tackkboard" and check out theirs, probably it suits whatever you're doing/displaying! ;)

 Major concept:

Basically this online presentation of displaying your information of whatever you want to display like I just mentioned those presentations, posters, etc., you can just use Tackk. It is very good because there's no log-in required, and if you do sign up for it, you can get things that normal users can't get (ITS FREE). Also another thing that all online tools have which is "auto save" is required in Tackk too. Anyways, this online tool is beautiful and simple and easy to use too. 

Advantage:

The advantage of using Tackk is again, you can display your information perfectly, not too mess and not too formal. It is very stylish to use Tackk plus is very simple to use it. Other than that, You also have "no log in required" and FREE to sign up (Optional). Compare to others, it probably would make you do the pavement if there's something special but not Tackk :)

Disadvantage:

It is very good online tool to create things that you want to display but the bad thing about this is that, it is not really a tool for "presentation" is good for "presenting things in one page" but not like what we normally do at school (have slides and animations). Since it is an online system, of course when the time comes that the internet is down, you would feel annoying because you have to make that either poster or anything done by the end of the day etc. But if you use offline system, you wouldn't have problem like this. 

Question: 

Isn't this another version of Glogster? They're so the same... 

Citation:

"Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom." : Communicate Differently With Tackk. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2013.

Blog Post: What is happening to the Internet every second, minutes, hours, and a day?

Nowadays, people uses internet every single day, even though you're not using, but there must be someone using  at that time somewhere in the world. There are 2.4 billion internet users around the world, and that's one-third of the entire global population and all these users use internet a lot in just one day. and from these 2.4 billion  in just a second, there are 2.8 million emails are sent, 333 new tumbler posts are made, and 1,633 tweets are published. In one minute, 694,445 Google searches are searched at the same time, 600 videos are uploaded to YouTube  and 320 new twitter accounts are made.  In one hour now, there are 10.5 million pictures are uploaded to Facebook, and 78,000 iPhone apps are uploaded which is $116,220 dollars in apps. As you can see, only in a second, a minutes, and an hour, there are already many things that people are doing in the internet, can you imagine now for what happened to the internet in a day now? 98 years worth of YouTube videos are uploaded, 172 million different people visit Facebook. The whole world basically spends the equivalent of 133,333 years ONLINE, isn't that amazing?

Major Concepts:
Basically, Internet is used every single second, minutes, hours, and day. A lot of things happened just in one second. Every little time, there's something happen in the internet especially YouTube, twitter, tumbler, and of course Facebook. The whole world uses a lot of internet in a short period of time, not only we're the one that are using the internet.

Advantage:
It is good that people use a lot of internet, people can talk oversea to each other just by clicking "comment" in Facebook, or "send" in G-mail and people could share how they feel, what they want to say in one click in a second. Other than this, the internet could also provide us good information when we want to do research, we could just "Google" whatever we want to find, and again, 694,445 Google searches are being searched at the same in just one minute, probably every one minute there's new information that are updated in Google too.

Disadvantage:
Since the whole world is using the internet so much just in a very short period of time, the internet server might became slow which make people that are doing serious thing in the internet like business letter etc., feel annoyed. And what if the electricity is down? Everybody would be aggressive probably because they're in the middle of the game etc. Basically, when the internet is used by many people, it might become slower which would made people that used a lot of internet have bad feelings such as anxious or depress etc. ^_^

Question:
I don't know why is people so much into internet now? And how can the internet support so many users at the same time...?

citation:
"What Happens On The Internet Every Second, Minute, Hour And Day? [INFOGRAPHIC]." - AllTwitter. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Mar. 2013.