Houdenbako Blog

Calligraphy Girl

Somewhere along the way, I picked up a Japanese book on Calligraphy (ISBN:4-522-01080-X ...but, what you find at that link might be hard to read.)

There is a short discussion of materials and technique, then copious examples of the brush strokes, how characters are built up from the brush strokes, how phrases are built up from characters, and fancy calligraphy situations. I have always loved the illustration of proper posture when using a brush to write. Saturday, I got the urge to scan it.

Of course, it wasn't that simple... I had to kick-start my scanner, because it was fussy about being connected through the new USB hub I bought. Calling up the scanner from Photoshop caused Windows some temporary catatonia. But after messing around with cables and restarting every link in the chain, it got back to normal.

I love Japanese books because they're on nicer paper and they're printed with a finer halftone dot-screen - Both very good qualities for scanning. Even still, some text showed through from the other side of the paper on the pink shirt. I cleaned up the images, layered them together in one file, then exported the file as an animated... Wait: where's the option for animated GIF?

I swear it was there in "Save for Web"... Under the file type selectors. Under the color palate. It was not there.

To The Manual!

The manual described something very different: I was supposed to launch ImageReady, which has an Animation panel. I've never done it that way before. Actually, this way is much more powerful, but then I noticed that I didn't have the layers aligned just right... Matching the edges didn't look good to me. I prefer to have the shirt and the table edge stay together, even though that throws the bulk of the line art around. Getting the layer positions right required moving back and forth between Photoshop and ImageReady a few more times. And, here is the result:

I noticed that the three images remind me of a dance - Like a progression of dance steps. It's a nice thought, but it you pay attention, you may notice that the brushes are not the same sizes. In fact, the images depict different positions for the different sized brushes. You're supposed to hold smaller brushes closer to the tip, and these illustrations show you postures appropriate to the size of the motions you will need to perform.

I Have Solved The Mystery...

The animation control I thought I saw was real: It was in Photoshop Elements - The cheap version of Photoshop. (I used to laugh that everything labeled "Adjustment" in PS was an "Enhancement" in Elements.)