Crabs of the World - #6 Space (Part 3)

Suciô's cold is getting better but he's left with a lingering cough and a feeling of disgruntlement. Pandering to our readers' medicinal-hygiene needs has rather kept us away from being mean-spirited to anyone (other than KU cheerleaders). Hopefully we'll make up for lost time when this animation is done. In the meantime there's always the comments section of your blogs. Go on, make my day, post some more Dr DRE, or dubstep, or some life-affirming shït about puppies.

Stage 3 - Who is This Super-Hero?

Time to start work on our "gun". Given our theme, we obviously need a phallic image. We were going to go with a simple pixelated erection, but google image search came up with this winner:

"My parents laughed when I told them I wanted to major in Drama,

but look at me now."

(You can be as cool as this guy for just $49.99.)

We think the model in the picture above has had enough humiliation for one lifetime. We'd like to replace his face with that of an utterly debased public figure, with not a shred of dignity and no redeeming features. We also need someone who's light on his feet. Who better than ex-Whitehouse Chief-of-Staff and soon to be king of the Cook County kleptocracy, Rahm Emanuel?

Ballet Rahmbert.

One complication is his finger: lost in a tragic goosing accident when Nancy hiccuped.
(We'll ignore it : pretend he's wearing a "fingldo" prosthetic.)

Behold! Rahm, the Hebrew God of Dicks.

We know Rahm's light on his feet. Is he light on his balls?

Looks good. Now we just need to add a black background and mask trailing frames...

The Balled Avenger rides again.

Tomorrow we'll get him "shooting". (Unless the Illinois Supreme Court enjoins us not to.)

P.S. Google is pure genius. Just previewing this brought up ads for "email marketing". Don't mention H3RB4L V14GR4!

Crabs of the World - #6 Space (Part 2)

A box of Kleenex (not in a good way) and half a bottle of malt whisky later and Suciô is feeling a bit better. He's still not in the mood for any marathon shooping sessions (or watching any more φυκινγ Dr DRE "music" videos).

Stage 2 - An Unstoppable Army of Crabby Minions.

The lice we made yesterday. Let's call them "Up" and "Down".

Make 5x1 arrays of "Up" and "Down".

Then 5x4 arrays of alternating "Up" and "Down".

Now create a black background big enough to hold 9x9 crabs.
Paste the 5x4 arrays into successive layers starting with 5x4Up in column 5, row 1, then 5x4Down in column 4, row 1, etc. (Don't forget to black out the trailing edge column.) Save as a .GIF with a 1000ms delay.

Jerky, unconvincing animation - just like the real thing.

Now let's add some bases. We have a "grassy knoll" that looks right for the part¹.

Tomorrow we'll start work on the "gun".

1. We're sorry to disappoint our redheaded readers, but after a week of in-depth "research" into crab-related posts, Suciô would rather not see any more "burning bushes" for a while.

Crabs of the World - #6 Space (Part 1)

After a week of crab-related posts we think that our readers probably have all the special shampoo they need, so it's about time to move on to another subject. But first we'd like to give our little friends a special send-off with one last, extra complicated animation: we're going to call it "Personal Space Invaders".

Unfortunately, Suciô has a heavy cold at the moment (too much snow shoveling), and the large quantities of medicinal whisky and brandy he's consuming make extended shooping sessions impractical. So, we're going to split the post into several stages.

Stage 1 - The Invaders

The original image - courtesy of the Wellcome Trust.

• Cut out the louse - just like we did with Mitt Romney's head.
• Cut out the body....
• and legs and antennae into separate layers.

• Rotate each of the legs and antennae individually and merge them back with the body.
• Add back our original cut-out image as a separate layer.
• And save as a GIF (I've added a black background and 1000ms frame-delay).

Tomorrow, cold and whisky permitting, we'll assemble our invaders into rows.

P.S. Just saw my best search referral ever: "Rub Kim Jong Il's belly for luck"

Crabs of the World - #5 Bikini Bottom

Hello, I'm Mr Krabs and I like money.

Well, these crab-related ads are surprisingly lucrative. Some of you must really like Maryland soft-shell crabs, or Kansas University sports memorabilia. Or perhaps you really need a hermit crab terrarium.

It couldn't be anything else could it?

Crabs of the World - #4 Kansas

A Kansas Pom-Pom Crab (Lybia tesselata kansasensis)

pictured here with head cheerleader Ginger Muffington.

Bio-Theologians from Kansas University today shocked the scientific world with the publication of the first definitive proof of the theory of Intelligent Design. Their findings show that KU cheerleaders are infested with a unique sub-species of pom-pom crab with coloration exactly matching that of the KU Jayhawks.

Team-leader, Professor Chip Quackenbush told a packed press conference: "of course all cheerleaders harbor a rich and varied assortment of crustaceans, but the odds against this color combination occurring randomly are literally astronomical."

At an emergency meeting, the Texas Board of Education ordered the recall of all Biology textbooks from the Texas school system. Teams of fundamentalist Bio-theologians are working round the clock to rush out new texts with all reference to Darwinian selection removed.

Famed Rationalist Professor Richard Dawkins declined to be interviewed before his retirement to a Trappist monastery on the Franco-Swiss border.

Crabs of the World - #3 The Kenyan Robber Crab

State of the Union.

Crabs of the World - #2 Japan

"Man with pubic lice"

(Scene from the 12th century Yamai no Soshi - Scroll of Diseases & Deformities.)
[Blogger really hates this image: it keeps disappearing as censor-bots freak over the title then get overridden.
I'm going to tint it a non-flesh color and re-post below - just as an experiment.]

"Man with blue pubic lice"

[Let's see if the censor-bots react the same way to an image without flesh-tones.]

Japanese spider crabs can grow to 13 feet across and can weigh 40lbs.

Just Hangin'

Google image search came up with these while I was looking for "spread thighs"
(don't ask).

(This is great: I'm getting ads for tree-surgeons! Pubic topiary? Is that based on image recognition?)

Completely Blotto

Today we'd like to go step-by-step through the process of "interpreting" one of Rorschach Redemption's ink blots. We'll use an old blot from December 21st last year that we found particularly fun.
So, staring at the blot, what's the first feature that strikes us?
We see a figure in a suit in the middle of the image that dominates all the other things we can see. We have a picture of an "anon" suit from a post about Nietzsche that's just right.

Okay, now we're suited up, what's the next most striking feature?
Probably the scorpion/spider/crabs at the bottom left and right.
Scorpions would be nice. Scorpions with penises for stings would be even nicer (psychoanalysts love genitalia).
Hmm, can't find any of those but we do remember seeing a spider with tits in one of Doré's illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy.

Nice! What next?
The figure appears to have cloven hooves. That's good - analysts like religious imagery almost as much as genitalia and goats are a little of both.
We remembered seeing some silly cloven-hoofed boots as fetishistic accessories to a fashion shoot. A quick image search soon turned them up.

Now, our figure needs a head.
It looks a bit like Kif from Futurama but that's not going to mess with anybody's head. We need a narrow-headed figure with religious or sexual connotations. Guan Yin should fit the bill - her depictions are often very attenuated. (We suspect it started out as a pragmatic solution to fitting a figure into an ivory tusk and then became part of her iconography.)

There we go. Now what? Still no genitals: a snake will do.
Fortunately there's a suitable snake-head like white space above the bodhisattva's head.

We should probably have stopped here but having covered up all the other bits, we're left with a pair of bushy-browed eyes and a Freddie Mercury mustache. We thought of putting Nietzsche's face in the background but we can't think of any head on pictures of him (he was probably cross-eyed).
Who else do we know with a gay clone look?

Let's mess with RR's head a little and use his old profile picture.
(Perhaps he changed it after trolling the onanomaniacs at Omegle a little too hard.)

...Maybe not - only his Mother would recognize her little boy under all that junk.
How about cat's eyes?

Let's go with this fellow instead.

Okay, that'll do. Now we just need a pretentious name with a pun and/or double entendre.
Maybe a quote from the movie with Freudian overtones? How about "You know, you remind me of my father"? (Suciô fell asleep half way through the movie so we're struggling a little here.) imdb.com to the rescue: let's go with

"Never start with the head, the victim gets all fuzzy".

Descent Into Madness

So far, the only one who's been bold enough to send his work to us at

gallery@vote-sanchez.com

has been Rorschach Redemption. Working on the age-old principle that hard work and initiative should never go unpunished, we're going to post his work to show his steady descent from naughty schoolboy to psychotic gunman.

Small-Print Tutorial - Blink Damn It!

Today's tutorial was going to be a worked example of making a clip-art ink-blot submission to Rorschach Redemption's blog, but, while posting the animated .GIFs above, we found that the damned things just wouldn't animate. When we posted .GIFs a couple of weeks ago (Bart and MARiZA) we could just upload the images in the Blogger "New Post" window and they animated from the get-go.

Comparing RR's creations to the pictures of Bart & MARiZA, we suspect that the key difference is the pixel size of the image (not the size of the image file). Bart is 200x150, MARiZA is 256x204 while RR's pictures are 378x596.

So, how do you post a "large" animated .GIF on blogspot? You need to upload the file onto another image storage service. I use docs.google.com. a) it's free and b) you're already signed up if you're logged into blogspot.

You can access Google Docs either directly at docs.google.com or via the link at "My Account" on your blogspot dashboard.

Click the upload button and follow prompts to upload the .GIF. Tick the check-box for the image file in the main Docs window and use <Share><Share Settings><Change> to make sure that the image file is a "Public" document that can be accessed by anyone.

Click the image file once to bring up a docs window. You'll note that the image isn't animated. Right click on the image and <Copy link address> and you now have a link to the animated version of the image in the clipboard.

Back in the blogspot "New post" window, you can switch from "Compose" mode to "Edit HTML" and replace the src="<URL of the image at blogspot>" with src="URL of the image at Google docs".

Phew! I've underlined the steps that you will forget.

Or you can just say "screw it" and shrink the image (<Image><Scale Image>)

After this slight diversion, we'll post the Ink Blot Tutorial tomorrow: I need a drink now.

The Other Woman

Most people spotted three of the four ringers we used yesterday: Chun Li, Yao Ming and Bruce Lee. Nobody recognized the other woman.

The lovely Lucy Liu.

Small-Print Tutorial - the Making of a Caricature Actress

The first step is to find an image that you don't mind staring at for the next hour of your life.
Preferably one with a simple background that's easy to remove.

Clone the original picture (<Layer><Duplicate Layer> or Shift+Ctrl+D).
Add an alpha channel (<Layer><Transparency><Add Alpha Channel>).
Make sure the original image is invisible (click it's eyeball in the layer window). Back in the cloned layer, use the Fuzzy Select Tool, the Free Select Tool, the Eraser Toll and the delete key to clear away the background.

Use the free select tool to outline Lucy's head. <Edit><Cut> (Ctrl+X) and <Edit><Paste> (Ctrl+V) into a new transparent layer.


Use the scale tool (<Tools><Transform Tools><Scale> or Shift+T) to grow her head.

Use Free Select to copy bits of her hair and shoulder to fill the gaps. (I used separate Hair and Shoulder layers - that way you can move them from the back to the front of the stack of layers until you get the desired effect.)

In the head layer, I used Free select to copy each of her eyes in turn, and then scaled them up and moved them into place before pasting back onto her head.


For the final image, I messed about with colors and added a willow pattern background.


Try it yourself on a loved (or hated) one.