Bits and Bytes

Archive for the ‘Drawing’ Category

Artweaver is a simple Freeware program for creative painting. You can create sketches from photos and experiment with a wide range of brushes. The brush simulation is as realistic as possible.

Advantages of Artweaver

• Support of many different digital brushes e.g. chalk, charcoal, pencils…
• Standard image editing tools like gradient, crop, fill and selection tools.
• Transparency and Layers support.
• Effect filters like sharpen, blur, emboss and mosaic.
• Support for the most common file formats like AWD (Artweaver), BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIFF, PNG, and PSD.
• Pen Tablet support
• Support for many languages
• Artweaver is Freeware.
• And much more…

This tiny application installs a number of very useful plugins for Paint.Net. By no means should this be considered as “the installer” for Paint.Net plugins, it is a merely a collection of plugins that I have personally found useful. There are many other plugins available on the Paint.Net plugin forum located at:

http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewforum.php?f=16

Download:

• Paint.Net Plugins Installer (1 MB)

The default installation path is to C:Program Files\Paint.Net\effects, if you are installing this on a Vista computer you will need to run the installer as Administrator.

In June 1992, Patrick Logan and Brian Metcalfe were fortunate to attend a workshop that Brenda Longclaws, Aboriginal Education Consultant, organized for all coordinators and consultants in our Division. Brenda arranged for Rosemary Ackley-Christensen, Director of the Indian Education Department of the Minneapolis Public Schools, to speak to us about aboriginal education and meeting the needs of all our children in our classes.

Rosemary provided a very enlightened workshop which gave us a better understanding of the aboriginal culture and how we might better support educators working with aboriginal children. Brian particularly remembers one story that Rosemary related. She asked us how we as educators would traditionally reward younger children who had completed assignments or who did well on various tests. We generally agreed, of course, that all younger children love to get “stickers” on their papers as feedback for a job well done. Rosemary went on to explain that aboriginal children did not view the “happy face” in the same way that other children might.

Rosemary spent a great deal of time with aboriginal children determining what types of “stickers” might provide them with the “warm fuzzies” that are so important to young children. When Rosemary was told that “my grandma’s smiling face makes me feel good” or that “I feel safe in my grandpa’s arms”, by young children, she started to make up stickers with pictures of elders to which the younger aboriginal child could better relate. With so much of the learning of an aboriginal child dependent on the visual as opposed to the auditory process, Rosemary began collecting and designing clip art which she could introduce into classrooms.

Patrick Logan asked if Rosemary would be willing to share a copy of her clip art masters with him. She graciously agreed and Patrick spent a great deal of time scanning in these images and converting them to .jpg format.  A good deal of the graphics include the faces of children, with images ranging from blossoms, leaves, pine trees, feathers, eagles, rabbits, and other animals.

Originally written by: Brian Metcalfe, 1992

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Photoscape is a very powerful, relatively easy to use application which offers many interesting options. It’s a combination photo editor, collage creator, image splitter, the list goes on, and on…  The interface can be a little daunting (features, features, features), but once you get use to it I doubt you’ll want to give it up, it’s absolutely phenomenal – and it’s FREE (no nag screens, no placed advertisements)!

Key Features

• Viewer: View your folders photos, slide show
• Editor: resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, back light correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal, blooming
• Batch editor: Batch editing multiple photos
• Page: Make one photo by merging multiple photos at the page frame
• Combine: Make one photo by attaching multiple photos vertically or horizontally
• Animated GIF: Make one animation photo with multiple photos
• Print: Print portrait shot, carte de visite, passport photo
• Splitter: Divide a photo into multiple parts
• Screen Capture: Capture your screen shot and save it
• Color Picker: Zoom in screen on images, search and pick the color
• Rename: Change photo file names in batch mode
• Raw Converter: Convert RAW to JPG

Download (from WSD) – New version 3.3

• Drawing
  • Inkscape
    (very powerful drawing application – open source)
  • Inkscape Videos
  • Dia (similar to Visio – open source)
• Paint
  • Paint.NET
    (very powerful paint program – free)
• Interior Design
  • Sweet Home 3D
    (Free interior design application, place furniture on a house 2D plan, preview in 3D.)