Joel on Twitter

I still have mixed feelings about Twitter, but I generally agree with the points that Joel makes. In particular I think that if you can do more listening than you do talking you can maximize its usefulness as a tool. He writes:

Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.

The other day I was having a conversation with my parents about the purpose of Twitter. I argued that it was to attain useful information. I use it to find interesting articles and conversations. I think the key here is that it helps me find them. The entirety of these conversations does not actually occur on the Twitter platform. My parents argued that it was yet another tool of my generation that provides entertainment to the ever-growing portion of the population who have a short attention span. The difference between “learning” and “empty enjoyment” may help illuminate the segmented market of Twtitter users. So, when you use Twitter, do you find yourself gaining knowledge; do you “learn” something of interest or value? Or is it just a way to pass them time; a vehicle for empty enjoyment? I think the answers to these questions are important for the impact Twitter will have on my generation.

Cartoon Yourself in Photoshop

I just finished creating a cartoon image of myself to use as an avatar in my Twitter profile. I think using a cartoon image is a pretty neat alternative to a plain image. I searched the web for sites that would convert an image into cartoon for free, and didn’t find anything that really matched what I wanted. So, I decided to try to do it myself in Photoshop.

I’m fairly new to Photoshop, so this was my first attempt at creating something from scratch without referencing online manuals and tutorials. In celebration of this, I’ve decided to post some of the techniques I used in creating the final image. If you are impatient like me, you can scroll to the bottom to view the final product.

Step 1) First, take a picture of yourself that has a nice big shot of your face. You’ll continually reference this picture as you create your cartoon. It will help you determine where to place each part of the face as well as shadows. The key is to create new layers, and hide completed layers while you work so that you can refer back to the original photo image. Create a new layer, and label it “outline.” In the new layer, begin to outline the features of your face, as seen below. I used a black brush, size 9. If you have difficulty with a the freehand brush, hold down shift so that your lines are more smooth.

Step 2) Once you have the outline complete, color the entire space (or just the skin area if you want to be more meticulous) a beige color. I used #b1856c. Next, set the color to your hair tone, and use the pen tool to go around the outline of your hair. Do the same for your eyebrows. For the eyes, use the pen tool to create the white space, the brown circles, and the eye pupil. I added a little white circle in the middle, which creates a little glare. It actually looks kind of wierd if you leave this part out.

Step 3) Create the nose, mouth, and add  a few shadows. For the nose, select the eyedropper tool to get a shadow color from the photograph. Then use the paint brush tool to outline the lower part of the nose. Add a Gaussian blur at a 3.0 radius to smooth it out to make it look more like a shadow. Apply the blur until it looks right. For the top part of the nose, do the same thing but with a lighter skin tone.

I found the mouth to be the trickiest part. It always looked a bit off when I tried to outline it using the pen tool. So I went back to the original picture, used the lasso tool to cut out just my lips, and then applied a dry brush filter (Filer->Artistic->Dry Brush). I used Brush Size 8, Brush Detail 9 and Texture 1.  Once this is done, insert the image into your working file. Use the erase tool to get rid of any excess skin color, so that all that is shown are the beginning of the red lips. If you want, keep a little bit of the shadow right above the lips, I though this added some nice depth.

Why not just do the whole face this way? It really doesn’t look much like a cartoon if you do the whole face like this, but I’d suggest you to utilize this method for any features you have trouble with.

Go back to the original picture and make a note of where the shadows fall on your face. Use the same technique you used for your nose to add a few shadows (perhaps add an even heavier blur to make it more subtle.) For my cartoon, I added shadows above the chin on my face, and below the chin on my neck.

Step 4) Add color to your background and whatever clothing you are wearing. To find nice color combinations, check out Adobe’s kuler. On the shirt, I added some shadows for texture (using the pen tool and a slightly darker shade of the color I was using for my shirt) and also a few buttons.

That’s it! It doesn’t take too long, and looks pretty cool as a Twitter avatar. I’m not a Photoshop expert, but its pretty fun to take a stab at things like this once you have the basic skills. Check out how the finished product looks as my avatar on twitter.