For the first time

Friday, 24 April 2015

-#100THINGSILEARNT- Lesson 12: DIY Blow-pen Art :)

Why, hello there. Eapen here. Its been a while since I’ve written for the blog ( mostly cause I’m terribly lazy), but after a lot of motivation (nagging :P) from Vindhya, thought I’d post about the blow-paint art work I did awhile back using blowpens! :D

Blow pens be the shit :D

So, reasons to make this:

1) Very simple and easy to make this, even a seven year old can make this. (provided he can handle a blade :P)

2) Not very time consuming. Would take you about half an hour to make it (but then again, this depends on the kind of picture you’re trying to get)

3) Makes you seem very skilled and artistic, even if you can’t draw a straight line with a ruler.

4) Most importantly, you can use it to impress chicks cause its handmade and cheesy :p

Things you need to make this happen:

1) picture

2) blade

3) blow pens (obviously)

4) frame (to make it seem fancy and classy :p )

So here’s what you need to do :

Step 1 :- Converting image to black and white

If you already have a black and white image, then this step is useless for you and you can ignore it. If you don’t have a black and white picture, you can convert a normal picture into black and white by doing the following:

· Copy-paste said picture in word

· Right click the image

· Click the option, ‘format image’

· Format the image with the given options to get a black and white image.

The resulting image should look like this:

Step 2:- Making a stencil

So this is probably the most tedious and time consuming part of this entire project. You need to get the stencil right, to get a good end product.

To make the stencil, take the blade and cut out the black parts of the picture. The remaining bits form your stencil.

This step ends up looking something like this:

Step 3:- The art work

This part just requires a lot of blowing (stop with the dirty thoughts! :P). Hold the blow pen above the stencil and blow as hard as you can ( I’m not making this sound dirty on purpose! Promise :P). Make sure the stencil is in position and does not move around to get a good picture.

This step looks like this:

You can use different colors together to make it seem more colourful. You can also frame it and add a cheesy quote to make it seem more meaningful and beautiful and whatnot :)

Hope you enjoyed this little DIY project and I promise to write more often :)

Buh bye, for now

Eapen Ittiyera

Sunday, 5 April 2015

-#100THINGSILEARNT- Lesson 11 :How to make a scroll -DIY

College life can get a little too hectic at times ! Especially during the last month when a lot of people get a little too emotional. (If you are a graduate, you know what I mean ;) )

Anyway in this post I will be showing you how to make a scroll. You know the ones you see on TV, in some old themed movie.

So since college was almost over, I wanted to give my nearest and dearest a small gift for memory sake. I decided to make one of these scrolls.

Here is what you will need:

Chart Paper

Fevicol / Glue

Wooden Dowels or pencils

Thread or Twine

Optional:

Felt Sheets

Thats pretty much it ! The only thing you need to make sure is that you need two dowels or pencils to make one scroll. (Pretty obvious, but yeah !)

I couldn't find any wooden dowels anywhere ! So a pencil is the only other thing I could think of using. Turned out to be a pretty good decision !

So the first step is to cut out the paper. So for this you need to cut the width of the chart with respect to the length of the pencil or the dowel you are using. Make sure the two ends of the dowel/pencil pop outside the paper.

Once you cut the paper, you have to glue the dowel/pencil to both the ends of the paper. So for this, you apply the glue onto the paper, then roll the pencil on the glue to spread the glue on the entire surface of the pencil. Probably looks a little like this.

Once this is done, you place the pencil near one end of the paper and then roll the paper one round so that the entire pencil is covered. Do this for both ends and then it should look a little like this.

Thats pretty much it ! Your scroll is ready :D

Now all you need to do is write a message and roll it. You can roll it in more than a single way.

You can either bring both ends to the centre or you could leave them loose or you could bring only one end to the other or if you come up with some other idea, do tell me !!

Let me show you how I did it:

You can also add a few extras. Here's what I did:

I made a name of the person to whom I was giving the scroll to using felt sheet. With that I applied some glue, stuck it and voila!

Please do tell me how it looks or if I could make a change to anything.

Until the next post !

Happy scroll making !!

Friday, 3 April 2015

#100thingsIlearnt- Lesson 10 : How to undo an email in gmail

Hello,hello :) It has been a long time. If you are reading this I must apologize on how I have completely forgotten about the task at hand. Nonetheless, I am hoping I regularly post. the thing is, in a day I pick up so many random things that I often forget to document them, or think it is not significant enough.Like the other day, I figured out how to add shapes via powerpacks on Visual Studio 2014. And IT TOOK ME AN HOUR TO FIGURE OUT SOMETHING THIS SIMPLE. Obviously nobody blogged about it, because it seems silly. But, it really was not. Especially if you have lost touch then it most definitely is not. Gah, was that too nerdy? Well, if you dont know what VS is you probably do not need it. anyway, the point is, that I learnt nothing is too simple, so Im documenting all little things, and if it didnt help you you are just smarter than me :D. Woohoo. Congratulations(Not someone you should be comparing yourself to)Anyway, Im an avid google fanatic, so naturally my go to email portal is gmail, and I goof up sometimes when I send mails. So I was like google must must must hava a way to solve my goofiness,right? Coz Google does everything. Soooo, I browsed and found this.The pictures aren't mine, but I forgot the source. Anyway,so if you are one of those people that send an email but forget attachments(That DOES happen) or you were informal in a formal email DO NOT WORRY GMAIL SAVES YOU!!

Here is what you do:

1. Click the gear icon in the top right corner of your Gmail window and select Settings from the dropdown menu.

2. Select Labs from the row of tabs.

3. Scroll all the way to the bottom where you see Undo Send and click Enable.

4. Hit Save Changes at the bottom.

5. Now when you send an email, the yellow dialogue that displays "Your message has been sent" will also, for a few seconds (the time is configurable) give you the option to Undo. The email is only actually sent once the Undo option disappears.

6. Just by clicking on that button you can undo your message.

Pretty simple,right?

Go do it right now. God knows when it will come in handy.

Until then,

Keep learning :)

Sunday, 1 February 2015

#100THINGSILEARNT - LESSON 9 - POT PAINTING

Yes I get it, the title of this lesson is kinda funny.

But i will still tell you how to paint a pot. Its easy ! Very Very Easy !!

The main elements needed:

Acrylic Paint

Paint Brushes of Different Sizes

Newspapers (You don't want an untidy house. Do you?)

A palette

A creative mind

Patience :P (Very Very Important)

Additional Stuff to make the Pot look better:

3-D Outliners - Any color you want

M-Seal

First we need to scrub the pot with sandpaper until the surface of the pot is smooth and even.

Do make sure that you DO NOT over-scrub or scrub too little. If that happens, once you paint the pot you will find layers of paint and bumps(which DON'T look good at all)

This is how it kinda will look like.

Please dont ask me "Next is What?". Obviously it is the part where we paint ! YAAAAYYY

For those who are doing something related to art for the first time, try drawing a design on the pot with a pencil (make sure the lines are not too dark because they will be visible even after you apply paint, no matter how many coats you apply.)

If you don't have a design, feel free to throw in some color ! It will still look really nice :D

But once you are done with one coat of paint. wait for it to dry and then apply another coat until you think it is what you want. I like my colors to stand out, so for the pots I made, I applied 3-4 coats of paint.

What I do is, I first apply a very thin(dilute) coat of paint on the smoothed pot. It will dry very fast because there is less paint and more water. Next i apply a thicker coat of paint on the previous coat. This way i can correct whatever mistakes i made when i applied my last coat. I do this till I'm happy with the end result.

The above picture is one of the basic coats i applied.

Dont just stop with painting the pot. there are so many other ways to make the pot look better !

If you see below, i have used a yellow 3-D outliner to draw a random zig zag line. This makes the pot look a little different than just color, basically adding some detail.

I love getting my hands all messy when it comes to art. I used M-seal to make a flower and stuck it on the pot. One small problem with using M-seal for the first time is how much of both the contents in the box should be mixed together. I tried twice, the first time I ended up having too much and the second time it was just about right. The thing about M-Seal is, once you mix the contents, it becomes solid very fast and then very difficult to make changes to the design of the M-Seal.

This was the first attempt with M-Seal. It turned out to be bad, because i hadn't put a base coat of paint before sticking the M-Seal.

Because of this, I had to remove the M-Seal, sandpaper that part again and then apply a base coat of paint and then it looked like this.

I had no time to complete the last pot though (Stupid college :| ).

I used the completed pot to plant a cactus.Will post a picture of that soon !

I hope you learned something new and nice.

And if anyone followed my tutorial and has something like this, please post your work in the comments section or tag me at @kiranvasudev on instagram.

I cannot wait to see what you have done!

Until next time..Let the creativity flow !

Sunday, 25 January 2015

#100thingsIlearnt - Lesson 8 - Learnt more google tricks

It was all consolidated in an image. How cool is that :D :D

IF you ever wanted to come back you can just save the image. BRILLIANT.

#100thingsIlearnt - Lesson 7 -How To Stop the spam

This is going to be short and on point.
I HATE SPAM. I HATE THAT I HAVE TO SIGNUP ON A SITE I FOR SURE WONT VISIT AGAIN. THEN I GET EMAILS LIKE "This is recommended for you" "You will love this, come take a look". NO. JUST NO. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME??? *SIGH*

So i went ahead and learnt a solution, actually if you just mark an email as spam you wont see it again. But i dont have the patience to that every single time.

Hence, here is my one stop solution -
10minutemail

Does what it supposed and you get a virtual inbox too. So if you need some activation done, no problem you can get it done, coz you actually have an email address.

Thank you, internet and people of internet for being awesome :D
My headache is now gone farrrrrrr awayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

Until next time,
Keep learning,

Tuesday, 6 January 2015

#100thingIlearnt - Lesson 6: Youtube hacks we should all know

I love Youtube. It is amazing. And this is the best thing I have come across about it :D. I love this lesson I learnt. and I am keeping it short, coz one of my friends was like

Anyway, all these hacks actually send you to another website except the last one. So if they at some point stop working, it is not youtube's fault. OR mine. they worked perfectly for me :D

1)I love the songs these not so famous people upload on youtube, and I would like to have them on my phone. So I found this :D. Like I said, you get redirected to another website, follow through the steps and download, it is safe.

Replace "youtube" with "listentoyoutube" in the URL to download the audio of the video.