Making a Widget

Hello all! This blog post is all about making your own online widget. Widgets are very useful for connecting your blogs and other internet adventures together. For instance, I have this blog, but I also post regularly on two other blogs, so you can see the little widgets I have made on the right column for ididnotdrawthis.blogspot.com, my art blog and treesclaptheirhands.tumblr.com, my photography blog.

Since posting these widgets, I have had an increase in views for both blogs, so its a great way to get more traffic to your internet projects. Here's the resource I use: http://www.widgetbox.com. And here's how you do it:

Creating Art on Photoshop: A Basic Tutorial

So, for this post I am going to show the basics of how to create and post digital art on an art blog, using my Gulliver's Travels illustration. First of all, you'll probably want to use a fancy thing called a tablet. It's a kind of plasticky pad you draw on with a stylus like a pad of paper. The points on the pad correlate to pixels, so its like you are drawing straight onto the screen. A must have for any digital artist. It can connect via USB ports to the computer. Here's mine a Wacom Intuos 3:

These can get pricey, so if you don't have one, go take your ID card to the media lab in the basement of the HFAC (provided you are a BYU student, of of course), and you can try one out for a few hours. For this tutorial I am using Adobe Photoshop CS4, but any of the recent photoshop versions will be great, this is a pretty simple tutorial.