Saturday, April 26, 2014

Book title unveiled as contents continue to be assembled

I begin this post by announcing the title of the picture book I am working on.  It will be called One Family, Together Forever, which is also what I called my signature photo montage of the family which I created in 2012 and display again below.


I am also continuing to put together new pieces that will be in my book:
  • This week, during my break from adult school after Easter, I began work on my largest project ever.  It will feature the logos of over 200 U.S. television stations that will form a syndicated network carrying programs relating to a very important event prophesied in the Bible that will allow the Barefoot family to have the lifestyle I depict throughout all of my works.  I will make the explanations clear once the book is published.
  • Below is a second picture of Buddy Wayne, set on the back porch of the same house that is at the setting of the original illustration of the extended/blended family.  They don't match exactly since this does not have the same natural settings, but it's the closest I could find when I entered "back porch" into Google Images and found it.   My plan is to start each individual chapter about the 13 family members by photo montages just like this one.  I duplicate as best as I can the clothing from the original "group photo" so they appear to have been taken on the same day.  The original picture had a blank-looking white sky, so I added another layer and filled it with light blue to "create" a new sky.


Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Mid-week observation: A bizarre and disappointing redirect

As my spring break (post-Easter) continues, I would like to point out bad news for me on a personal level, and an unusual way I found out about it.

Those of you who have seen Jennifer's part of the biography pages know that I have been using this link to represent Brandy Barefoot, whose face I have used to represent her.  This is a real person who lives in south central Alabama, not the Brandy character I have, who is portrayed by Benson, NC resident and UNC Wilmington student Amanda Barefoot.  There will be a quiz on this.:)

The link is a heartwarming story about how "Alabama Brandy" received a kidney transplant from Aaron Strickland, a fellow member of her church, after no one in her own family was a match.  It was posted and published by WSFA, a television station in Montgomery, AL which is the NBC affiliate (although as I remember no video was posted).

I wanted to credit the web link for my upcoming picture book, but when I typed up that link in the address bar, it was redirected here.  What makes it bizarre was the contents - a bunch of upcoming events in and around Montgomery.  There is no mention of the file or the page not being found, except for the "404" code in part of the address.

I can only speculate that the unusual page is a result of the station and its web design partner, WorldNow, wanting to soften the blow of bad news.  If so, this would not be a first.  Two more examples:
  • Type up one of Belinda's doll's names (Boogerberger, MacSmelliefoote etc.) into Ancestry.com.  Notice how the result comes up that they could not find any "good matches."  Now, I've been to Ancestry.com for a long time, and even have a limited free membership, and I can recall when the same "search" landed on a page saying that there were no matches.
  • DirecTV offers a feature called GameSearch to be used if a national or regional telecast of a sporting event is blacked out.  Sometimes, this occurs because of local exclusivity; if so, it tunes to the appropriate channel.  But if it can't be seen locally at all, another message is generated that ends, "...but we'll keep searching."  This is absolutely dumb, as we all know the software can search forever and nothing will change.  (Aside: The message is a dumb as DirecTV's ad campaigns, which embarrasses me personally since I'm a subscriber.  Fire your ad agency and get a new one, guys!)

By the way, I entered their names and "kidney transplant" into the search engine in various combinations and found no results.  So sadly I assumed that at some point in the last few months, WorldNow simply purged the article.:(  Oh, well, I was able to save the accompanying picture to my hard drive, and you can see it on the right hand side of this page.

UPDATE: According to her Facebook page, "Alabama Brandy" had a follow-up treatment on March 13 - my 42nd birthday - at UAB Medical Center in Birmingham, AL.  Otherwise, she has lived a normal and healthy life for the last two years with her husband, Graham.

Friday, April 18, 2014

Any questions about Jennifer?

As my planned photo book is slowly coming together for release sometime this summer, I am still finding new ways to put together the world I have made for my characters.  The latest example is Buddy Wayne's sister-in-law Jennifer.

According to the biography I have for her, Jennifer was - appropriately - a podiatrist before leaving it all behind to join her husband Bobby Ray and their daughter Belinda in the grand experiment called the Barefoot Family Farm.  (A reminder of that is shown in the first picture below.)



However, until this week, I neglected to depict Jen in her previous job, so the impending book project was incentive for me to get to work on that.

I took a picture from the Indiana Podiatry Group in Indianapolis depicting a podiatrist's office and a scrub I found at the web site of Charles Sturt University, which has campuses through Australia.  Add "Alabama Brandy's" face, Bailey Miller's arms, and the legs of the girl found on the roadside, and there you go!  Then, just a few minutes ago, I added an inset montage, based on a photograph from the HowStuffWorks website showing a podiatrist at work.  I changed her hair and skin colors to match Jennifer's.


Friday, April 11, 2014

New photo book in the works

Some weeks ago, just before the Sprint Cup Series Auto Club 400 took place at Auto Club Speedway here in the Los Angeles area, I received a telephone call from one of my cousins, Freddie Maxie.  She told me that the owner of a store which hosted a show car display was planning to share information on the sale of the book that spun off into this blog.   (A show car is built exactly like an actual race car, but it is intended for display only.  One example is the one below, the #18 car driven by Kyle Busch; it's at M&M's World in Las Vegas, coincidentally Busch's hometown.)  Maxie then asked me if I had any plans for another book.  I told her that I did not, but if I changed my mind, it would most likely be a photo book.

After some more thoughts, that is exactly what I plan to do.  Sometime this summer, my third book will be published through Lulu.com.  It will be a collection of my work through Photoshop, Illustrator, and other related programs.  In my judgement, this is the best way for me to explain to a larger audience what the Barefoot family is all about.  Of course, most of the book will contain pictures, but I will also have short summaries of what is being depicted and I will also explain exactly how these illustrations were put together.

I will continue to create new pictures and montages through the end of the school year at ABC Adult School, then put them all together.  The plan is to have both a print edition and another for tablets and e-readers.

And here's one of the montages you'll see there.  It's the only one I created using Photoshop this week, and it's a redo of an earlier "promotional poster" of Hambone's TV series, What the Buck?  For this modification, I changed whatever was mounted on the wall (a map?) with a picture I created of Hambone's immediate family: herself, her brothers Ralph and Harvey, and her parents Popeye and Annie.  Below that is a replica license plate with my favorite two-word entendre phrase printed on it.  (Somehow, I doubt the state of North Carolina would accept a real plate with those words on it.)  The font is Orator Standard, which is the closest I could find to what states use to engrave plates.


Saturday, April 5, 2014

A moment with Brandy and Bunky

Just one new photograph to share as the third quarter of 2013-14 ends at ABC Adult School.   It goes back to the original "family photo" that dates back to the fall of 2012.  In that picture, shown immediately below, Bunky shows his obvious support for his sister, Brandy.



However, as I looked back, it should have been the other way around!  As you have read in his bio, Bunky had his life turned upside down as he moved into the house; after all, he had the most modern lifestyle, pre-Rapture, of all 13 of them.  Being without electricity or running water, let alone other conveniences, really scared him more than anything else, and he didn't know where to turn.

Brandy showed him the most support, and that should have been reflected in the original picture.  All I can say is, I just blew it!  And besides it no longer matters because the current "official portrait" as seen here shows both of them with their hands in a more conventional position.


So this week I decided both to correct the mistake and give myself one final reminder of the old photo.  How it happened: their familiar faces, arms, and legs were used; puppet warp was used to slant Brandy's left arm onto Bunky's shoulder; and the patch on both shirts were taken from a logo on the website for Barefoot Chiropractic and Wellness, a real business owned by Billie Barefoot and based in Arizona.  Finally, I added a caption that says it all.

Here is the result: