What do you do when your workplace has over 80 empty computer boxes to dispose of? Okay, that’s not quite accurate. What do you do if you’re me? The correct answer, of course, is to build an elaborate structure using the boxes. In this case, it turned out to be a corridor of Gateway boxes in one of the 100-level rooms of Grawn Hall. Fun times.
This one was just kind of funny. There were no new skills learned, and it only took a few minutes. It’s a ‘For Dummies’ book as if it had been written by the venerable Gordon Freeman, of Half-Life fame. His Wikipedia entry gives the title of his supposed doctoral thesis as “Observation of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures by Induction Through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array.” Simply put, “the teleportation of matter through extremely dense elements.” I thought this would be a delightfully ironic subject for a Dummies book.
New pictures from St. Patrick’s Day are up in the gallery. 104 of them, to be exact. As always, head over to the gallery to enjoy. If you haven’t registered before, instructions are here.
I made the Super Phi Tau Bros t-shirt concept in 2006 as something the actives could use for a Rush shirt, or something else, if they wanted to. I based it off of the original Super Mario Bros game for the sake of being nostalgic. I used a t-shirt template I’d found for another project, and set up layers that would allow me to color it easily. Then I sourced some images from the internet. The main one was a stylized 1280×960 background image from here. After some work to find an appropriate font to match the original “Super Mario Bros.” I had to settle for one that was somewhat close. I replicated the background of the box the text was in to remove the original text, then inserted my own with the appropriate sizes, color, and shadow.
This served as the centerpiece for the front of the shirt. But because it would be boring to just put the image alone on the front, I used the shape tool in Photoshop to make a very Mario-esque star: golden, with shallower angles, very reminiscent of the stars in Mario 64.
For the back of the shirt, I found an online flash emulator for Mario and played through the first level several times, taking screenshots at places where Mario was doing something cool, and just basically gathering elements. I then took them and cleaned things up removing extra clouds or shrubs that were in the way, and splicing Mario in or out where needed. Then, using the bricks present all over the game, I made a custom Photoshop pattern and inserted our the letters for Phi, Kappa, and Tau on three separate screenshots. Then I could apply the pattern and have them look like they were made of brick.
This was done as three separate images because I couldn’t get source images of high enough quality to make it in one large one. Although I did experiment with this later, I didn’t like the effect as much as I thought I would anyway. I oriented the three pictures with a slight overlap, from top-left to bottom right to help show that they were linked. I added two triangular stripes to the back of the shirt to spice things up a bit.
Unfortunately, no one has been able to make this shirt simply because it contains too many colors. More colors means it’s more expensive, so it’s on indefinite hold for now. I did get a ton of positive feedback about it, though, so hopefully the Super Phi Tau Bros shirt will be realized some day.
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This one turned out awesome! I needed to make a mock-up of some medals I wanted to have made, so I ended up going all-out. The resulting image was very cool looking, and extremely high-resolution. At the request of some of the other brothers, I made it into a desktop background as well.
I used two shapes (circles) to create the inner and outer rings for the medal. Inside the inner ring is a red gradient. I inserted the Phi Kappa Tau Coat of Arms, available on the Phi Tau web site, in the top center of the medal. I gave it a slight drop-shadow and bevel & emboss to give a sense of depth. On the left, bottom-center, and right, I put our letters. For the letters, and the outside edge, I applied a technique I found online that gave amazing gold letters. That technique really made the medal special.
I ordered a drape with the medals, too, and rendered that in Old Gold and Harvard Red, with a fabric-like texture. I’m extremely proud of this piece of artwork.
Source: Coat of Arms
Version 1: Medal 1
?2007 Tony Magri
This is another quickie Photoshop, from 2006. I decided Tom’s apartment needed destroying, and since it was in the U.P., several hundred miles away, I needed a better way. So, after not-so-secretly getting his exact address, I fired up Google Earth and located his exact position.
I made a screen cap of this and imported it into Photoshop. I also got out a copy of the movie Austin Powers 2, and located the scene where Frau yells, “Fire the ‘LASER!’” and made a screen capture of that moment. I added the appropriate caption to Frau, and a recticle over Tom’s apartment. I bet he’s scared now.
?2007 Tony Magri except where noted
I wanted to create this picture for a while, to use as a Facebook profile picture. The idea was to insert a picture of me next to “Buddy Christ” from the movie Dogma. Unfortunately, although predictably, the only source image I could get for Buddy Christ was very low resolution and had a complicated background. The background wasn’t so much of an issue for what I ended up doing, though.
To insert myself, I set my camera on a timer to take a picture of me posing. I needed a solid colored background, because I would have to remove it in Photoshop. The wall above my bed was the best I could get. So, with the camera perched on the dresser, set on a timer, I proceeded to strike the pose. Repeatedly. You’d be surprised how hard that ‘pointing and thumbs up’ is to replicate accurately. When I finally got one that was right, I imported it into Photoshop, removed the background, and inserted myself. I had to shrink myself to what seemed like a proportional size, and then adjust the color levels to try to match the lighting better. It’s certainly not perfect, but being that it was such low resolution, I found it to be acceptable.
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?2007 Tony Magri except where noted
Tom is a regular subject of my Photoshops. I did this one in 2005, after taking a picture of him during a LAN party in which he was wearing headphones and making a goofy face. It reminded me of the Napster logo, so I whipped up a very quick Tomster picture. He’s gonna hate me for this.
?2007 Tony Magri
This Photoshop was a fairly simple matter of removing the head of one person and inserting another. There was a bit of preparation, however. I randomly came across a graphic that I really liked quoting the Constitution’s Freedom of Religion section. I had the idea to replace the face that was originally there with a more personal one. This is, by no means, an original idea. Merely a personalization of a good idea I saw.
Tom had sent me a picture of his eye when he had had it dialated, so that was a good start. It required some cleaning up and editing, and I had to change the color of his eye, but I was able to cleanly remove the original face and insert Tom’s. Given Tom’s stance on religion, this was a perfect fit in more ways than one. He even complimented my work on it. Rock on.
?2007 Tony Magri except where noted
