I made Hambone look better!

Before I show Hambone's new look, and how it was obtained, a personal note.

As a lifelong resident of southern California, I have lived through many earthquakes before, but I have never been in a car prior to the one that occurred on Friday night.  We (my father and I) both thought that it was some kind of failure with the car we were in at the time.   Only after we arrived home did my mother (his wife) tell us that it was indeed an earthquake.  And the scary thing is, all of us are told always to expect the worst, maybe something like the 7.1 that hit 25 years ago and disrupted the World Series that year.  I don't know if I would be able to live through that!

OK, now on to Hambone.  Since I created the character some two years ago, I have tried to find a way to show all of you her hidden talent: playing music with her body.  I tried to turn this YouTube video into a "performance" using Adobe Premiere Pro, but I just wasn't able to finish; besides, it wouldn't look right anyway, much like one of the funny videos on JibJab.  Prior to that, I captured one of the scenes as a still photo and superimposed Hambone over it, but it didn't look right, because it looked more like Reba Pearl was doing the Macarena instead of a hambone.

So this week I revisited it with some changes:

• The background photo is lifted directly from a screen grab of Steve Hickman's original performance (shown below).  Before that, only his hands were used.  In the sitting position, the performer is slapping his (her) right arm on the right knee while the other hand overlaps free.
• I replaced Hickman's Hawaiian shirt with a ladies' tee and re-colored the shirt pink.
• Using the same technique of making a selection and applying hue/saturation, the color of the pants went from Hickman's white to Hambone's blue.
• I made sure to line up Reba Pearl's face with the shoulders of the original photo.

Here are the before and after.

'Black Crow' correction

Unfortunately for me, the second post is a correction.

Some months ago, I shared the story of Black Crow on the Window, a mystery novel about rookie detective Ella Nellie Bell Littlebridge and her search for a "Jack the Ripper" in New Orleans.  Until this week, I didn't realize that I had the name of the author wrong.  It's actually Jennifer, not Annie.

I had forgotten that I had made Jennifer into a budding author in her bio, which is in the middle of this string of biographies.  So I changed the name to stay consistent, even though Annie also loves to read, too!:

By the way, here's the cover:

Ribble, Ribble!

After a week without a post due to a personal vacation in Las Vegas (tips: the Cirque du Soleil Ka show is a must-see, but the MGM Grand buffet is far from worth the money), I am back with some of the things I did during my week back at the adult school.

In this post, I share the story is another one of the shows I have made up for the mythical BMN (Barefoot Media Networks) television service.  It stars the Ribbles, who I debuted as the Bryants in chapter 7 of my original book.  Billy Bob Ribble is a famous former pro football player and bull rider.  He is the redneck version of Bo Jackson, known for mythical feats and first-class performances in both sports.  How he met his wife, barrel racing champion Krista, is the stuff of legends: When both were teenagers, Krista Bamburg (as she was then known) was traveling back from a rodeo while Billy Bob was delivering farm equipment.  When the truck approached Lake Waco in central Texas, Bamburg was involved in a single car accident which left the car she was riding in floating in the water.  Ribble dove into the water, swam up to Bamburg, and pulled Bamburg from the water thereby saving her life.  Years later, the two were at the same rodeo in Arizona when the two recognized each other.  Once the shock passed, Bamburg and Ribble began dating and married some years later.  They went on to have two children, Adam Michael and Michelle MacKenzie ("Mac" for short).  The Ribbles now have a "reality TV" show called The Best Little Ranch House in Texas.

I derived the show title by substituting "ranch house" for "whorehouse" (which was a 1982 movie that starred Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton).  As for the people themselves, they are based on the Jeters, an actual clan captured in this gallery by a North Carolina-based photographer.  Only three people were in the original picture, so I had to duplicate the original long shot, flip and trim the second picture, merge the photos together, and resize the original people.  The faces were placed on the originals as follows:

• Billy Bob is Brian Barefoot, a professional steer wrestler with the International Pro Rodeo Association.
• Krista is a woman whose name I unfortunately have not recorded, but who carried a gun.
• Mac is Kaleigh Forney, who is a student at Union University in Jackson, TN in one of Steve Beverly's classes.

When the photo was expanded, I was finally able to put in Adam, whose body shot was taken from a selection of Billy Bob's reduced to about half size.  The face is that of former Oklahoma State University tight end Bo Bowling.

Here's the end result:

Three pictures, two projects, two programs

I was pretty busy this week at ABC Adult School with the following things:

In my morning Dreamweaver class, I have learned the Adobe Systems program made to design and execute pages on the World Wide Web.  Since my first posting related to the farm "website," I have finished three more chapters from this textbook, in which I have learned to create cascading style sheets, design and fill up tables, and place pictures and rollover images.  In the first picture, I have recreated the web page that Buddy Wayne Barefoot would have if my farm - and the unofficial site - had existed.  A famous Bible verse (John 1:1) is on top of the page.

The second shot from the same project shows the fruit trees that can be found on the property.  All of these are from pictures I found on the Internet by way of Google Images.

Also this week, I stole some time from After Effects to return to Photoshop (all part of the same Adobe Creative Suite) to arrange the biggest hunting party ever seen at Camp Paradise.  The 15 participants, from left to right, are Landon (the elder), Nokelee, Bobby Ray, Buddy Wayne, Labell, Cooter, Boo Boo, Hambone, Bear, Little Jack, Popeye, Ralph, Harvey, Noah (the elder), and Alfred (the elder).  All of them are related to B.W. in some way: his brother, five great-uncles (Popeye and his brothers), two uncles and an aunt (Popeye's children), and four third cousins (Bear, Boo Boo, Cooter, and Little Jack).

Back to Photoshop

While my work continues on the mythical Barefoot Family Farm website, I was able to steal some time out of classes to create two more works from Photoshop.  (See, I told you that I was not done with it yet!)

The first is a new promotional photograph for the second season of What the Buck?, the "reality comedy" starring Reba Pearl, a/k/a Hambone.  Last season, I had her pose outside of Camp Paradise with four of Buddy Wayne's cousins.  At the time, the cousins owned the 220-acre hunting ground in Four Oaks, about four miles north of the main family residence.  This time, the photo is inside the headquarters lodge, reflecting Hambone's purchase and her pride of ownership.  She is standing in front of her office desk beneath, of course, a buck's head.  For this, I made Hambone out of a second photograph of Alyssa Barefoot's face (this time in her car heading for Outback Steakhouse), a casual girls' T-shirt I recolored with camouflage, full coveralls, and of course bare feet.  The hunting lodge actually exists and is located in Montana.

The other picture was one I frankly didn't expect to make.  It came out of a lesson that Nabawia Olivera had in my After Effects class.  Part of that class showed how to find photographs to work into a project using the special-effects creation program, and she decided to show us the flickr website on which people can post their photos.  User ps76df had a cool picture which I found by typing the word "barefoot" into the search box.  The original picture showed a woman in a rollicking pose while showing the pink flip-flops she removed; I loved it so much that I decided to re-create it with Brookie, a 15-year-old second cousin of B.W. (B.W.'s grandfather, Alfred Sr. and Brookie's, Noah Sr., are brothers).  I took Brookie's face from another Photoshop file and then erased enough of the picture to reveal the hair from the woman originally depicted.  The clone-stamp tool was used to remove the shoes, as well as two other persons in the background.  Finally, I then added a caption including where the shot would have been taken.  It's in a marshy area of Camp Paradise, most likely duck-hunting grounds.