Archive for June, 2008

It seems that the last time I showed pictures of the process of a drawing you liked it. So this time I’ll show the process of a watercolor (if it’s not obvious, my favorite painting technique). Also this time is the process of a very special (for me) painting. Not only because it was the first “serious” portrait in watercolor but because this is my grandfather (r.i.p). I did this portrait a few years after the death of my grandfather as a gift for my grandmother and although I didn’t know how it would came out , I can say that this drawing came out on it’s own, almost as if it was alive under my brush. Maybe it was the special affection carrying or. .. I don’t know. The fact is that this drawing is my favorite among all I’ve done throughout my life ….

As always, I expect your comments.

Click on the image to enlarge

And again return to upload some images. This time around I show you some designs that I did some time ago based on my old signature. I was doing tests with Photoshop effects and layers and so, and I thought of doing something taking my signature as a base. I even did two hypothetical “computers” or interfaces based on it. The last one is an animated Gif. If I had to do it today, I’d do it in Flash. What do you think about them?

Click on the images to enlarge

At last I’ve finished updating the blog and, as you will see, I’ve changed the template. I did so because I found the perfect template: Mandingo. A theme incredibly customizable and without having to touch a single line of code of the template’s key files. This template has been prepared so you can introduce the amendments in a section of the options page specifically prepared for this, among other wonders: SEO optimization , several color schemes , dynamic layout … in short, better going to it’s page and try the demo. As always, the high customization allowed was not enough for me and I’ve changed it a little bit more. And finally I was with two different designs in my hands for the blog. And here is why the title of this post. That’s because I like both so much that I don’t know which one use …. because they are totally opposite. One is “modern”, based on the scheme “orange” included with Mandingo and the other is more similar to the one in my old blog (few post below this one), and is a completely new layout (another one of the wonders of Mandingo, you can add your own schemes).

The fact is that I can’t get decided ….. because I like both and opposite poles. I use watercolors and the computer, I like to illustrate fairy tales and to do interfaces designs, I like the Lord of the Rings and Iron Man, classical music and NIN, fantasy and scifi …… you get the point, don’t you?

So I ask you, the ones that are reading this: which one you like best?. Below this post you have screenshots of both designs, “Modern”, the orange one and “Vintage” the other. And because I know that sometimes you don’t have the time to write a comment, I have included a new plugin WP_Polls so I can show a poll so you just have to choose one option and vote.

So …… Which one do you prefer?

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Well, apart from the “joke” of the title that probably won’t be understood if you’re not spanish (and probably they won’t understand either) I have already done most of the updating. I’m up to date with the version of Wordpress thanks to the magnificent Wordpress plugin Wordpress Automatic Update. In addition I’ve added some new plugins and I’m in a try-out period to be sure nothing fails. Fortunately the theme fSpring Widgets by Fredrik Fahlstad even with my modifications, that let’s face it, are not expert ones, works perfectly (as far as I can tell) with 2.51 version of Wordpress

Now the only thing left to be done is to replace the Babel plugin I was using until now to write this blog in two languages, with the xLanguage plugin that I discovered recently and seems to allow the blog to be totally bilingual, translating all: categories, pages, Feeds, etc.. and not only the posts. The only problem is that it seems far more complicated to implement and I am still studying it because I have to add  some localization files and don’t know exactly how many nor where (the only one I have is the spanish one that I put on /wp-content/languages/). Well….. everything  for internationalization.

The new plugins I used and I’m testing are:

• Admin Drop Down Menu - by Ozh, which allows a much more comfortable dashboard for the administration of the blog.
• Google XML sitemaps - To create a site map (obviously) that is more friendly with the search engines (essential)
• Maintenance Mode - To don’t drive you crazy when I’m making changes to the blog.
• WP-EditArea- by the Spanish guy anieto, it allows a much more friendly edition of the theme archives inside the wordpress environment, acting as a code editorWell, That’s it for now, I’ll keep you informed

I haven´t updated my blog for almost 6 months now. My absence during most of that time was forced, since due to problems with my ISP I was four months without internet, four months full of promises, annoyances and scandalous increase of the telephone invoice. In the end this was solved changing operator. Just when I could return to connect I discovered that the version of Wordpress had changed and this,plus the enormous work load and lack of free time were delaying the updating (and not by lack of desire). But now I’ve decided to put blog up to date, which will take some time since there are so many changes to do: to update the CMS, plugins, even template won’t probabley work with the new version (not counting the many changes I’ve done myself to the template), so I request patience, at least to the only reader who, incomprehensibly, has not eliminated my feed. I’ll be back …..