Steve Cooley Fine Art

I wanted to make a piece of art for my anniversary card to my wife, so this year I used brushes.app on my iPad to paint (?) this set of orchids. I really like the reasonable limitations and extremely flexible set of tools. I went through the tutorial a while back and started remembering the color blending a ways into this piece. I’d done several pieces of abstract work as per my normal mode in brushes.app, so doing something representational was something new for me. I guess. I do some representational works; mostly seascapes… so this turned out pretty ok given that it’s just not what I normally do.

orchid digital painting from stevecooley on Vimeo.

I had a hell of a time with this so-called-free epson printer, wasting a precious hour on changing ink and reading about how lame that is given the amount of ink left in the “empty” cartridge. Sigh. I have another “Free” canon printer/scanner sitting right next to the epson, and not only did it fire up right away, but it had full ink carts, zero clogged nozzles, and printed out a *beautiful* 4×6 glossy print for me on the first try. Whew. Anniversary card project successful.

Hey me and my group are playing a live electronic improvised jam session. Two shows, actually. Tonight at Works/San Jose and then next friday night at South First Billiards on the same street as Works… Check out the details here:

Hope you can make it to one or the other!

So I’m tryin’ to learn Cocoa, and so I’ve been poking at an application that I’ve modified from the sample code for AMSerialPort from Harmless Cocoa. I know a little bit about the arduino, and I know a little bit about cocoa, so I poked and poked and poked, and from a well timed piece of help from my cocoa class instructor Malcolm Crawford, I finally got something fairly functional working. It’s called Rosco. All it does is take input from an arduino’s analog pins and transmit the values out to OSC through a cocoa app and out to a quartz composer composition. Nothing too fancy. I’m using it in conjunction with my Arduino Project Box, but really you could send any analog value from the arduino. It’s really such a hodge podge of code and hardware, it’s bordering on being silly. This really isn’t supposed to be useful just yet, but it was useful for me to learn more about cocoa programming. Maybe you might find it somewhat interesting. Here’s a diagram of what’s going on.

Click here to download it to try it out.

Technorati Tags: arduino, cocoa, OSC, rosco

my piece “exploration two” sold at auction for $225.

Technorati Tags: art, sanjose, stevecooley, works, Works/San José, workssanjose

here’s the third and possibly last painting post for 2008. This is a tryptic. Each piece is 24″ square, for a total of 72″ x 24.

I’m not sure of the title yet. I… have some ideas. I also have a full timelapse movie in the works for this piece as well. So when I get that done and figure out the title, I’ll post ‘em up.

Technorati Tags: 2008, abstract, acrylic, art, painting, san jose, stevecooley

Here’s the second painting I’ll be showing at uproar ’08. I’ve been working on this one all year, so it’s nice to finally figure it out and finish it up.

Ah, finally.

Technorati Tags: abstract, acrylic, art, painting, stevecooley

Since my son was born ~6 months ago, I’ve been trying to cram in as much of what I used to do before he was born into my nights after he goes down for the night. I’m glad there are outlets for getting your work shown in the south bay area like Heart of Chaos and Works/San Jose because their events are good motivators to get some artwork finished.

So, here’s a new piece:

I have a tryptic and another piece that I’m wrapping up for Uproar 08.. posting soon…

Technorati Tags: 2008, abstract, acrylic, painting, stevecooley

Hey, come check out my arduino project box that I’m working on! That’s what the post about the SPDT switches was all about.

Here’s a video I made of some of the construction steps:

arduino project box construction timelapse from stevecooley on Vimeo.

I’m working on my arduino project box, specifically the wiring. I ran into a really strange problem with the blue Single-pole-dual-throw (SPDT) switches I had selected for my digital i/o pins. Strange to me until I thought about it, and then I realized how not-strange it is

The problem is that all of my toggle switches were working backwards to my expectations. (If you’re reading this and have already learned this lesson, you know where we’re going. )

Here’s a photo of the switches I’m using (thanks to banzaieffects for having a really nice photo of this component online)

Miyama is the manufacturer…   Anyway! Here’s the deal:

I wired things up to what I thought would be a logical way. Wire this to that, just like the slide switches I’d also been using without incident.

Then I had my epiphany about how these toggle switches work. I tried to imagine cutting one in half to visualize how they worked based on the scientific research that had been forced on me. My slide switches work great, but my toggle switches are all working backwards.

Aha, so based on what would now make a lot of sense, if I wanted to have my switches indicate directionality on my panel, I would need to switch how they’re wired on the back of the panel in order to emulate the behavior I want!

And now, look at that. Switching the wires will in fact give me the results I had originally intended, even though it seems like a trick I have to pull on my brain in order to get it to do what I want. Not really, but.. without being able to actually see inside the switch, visually it looks like the opposite of what made sense.

Sooo… yeah, now I have a lot of clean up work to do on my project. Recut and strip a bunch of wires, desolder and remove a bunch of work I’ve already done… sigh… Oh well. Such is the price of Doing It Yourself. my hard lesson learned will hopefully translate into less of a mystery for you.

Technorati Tags: arduino, componentry, design, DIY, diy, electronic, howto, panel, programming, wiring

well, as you can tell from parts 1, 2, and 3 of my comparisons of Zazzle and CafePress in regards to their print-on-demand services on black and dark t-shirts, it was kind of a toss-up as to which one was “better”. Now in part 4, I can show you the effects of one washing in a normal day-to-day kind of situation.

First up is Zazzle, since they were 7 whole days faster delivering my order:

If you click through and view these photos, you’ll see that the solid red color in the “sidescroller” t-shirt is not consistently covered with the original color that was there when I got the shirt. Kind of a disappointment to me. Still not a bad looking t-shirt, but not even close to the quality you would get with silk-screening. The “tea”-shirt (haha) actually fared better, probably because it’s a continuous tone image versus the relative solid color vector image in the first shirt. These shirts are actually being shown after two washes.

And now for the Cafepress shirt:

Uh oh. Now here’s a big problem in my opinion. After ONE wash, every solid area of color is cracking. This is totally unacceptable for a product that I would sell to people. So, at this time, I really can’t recommend cafepress for black and dark color shirt printing. I’m not totally sure Zazzle has the right action going on their game, but at least their shirts (which feel nicer to me, and are tagless) are free from the cracking problem that cafepress’ shirt is doing already… I would expect this cracking to happen even in silkscreened shirts after 20-30 washings, but after only one wash seems to indicate that there’s still significant room for improvement. This cracking problem certainly isn’t going to get any better from here on out, so this really isn’t the kind of product I want to promote.

So, the 2008 print-on-demand showdown winner is: Zazzle.com

* faster order fulfillment
* customizable
* nicer shirts
* no cracking after 1 wash

Technorati Tags: cafepress, zazzle