Jamie's Blog

For a friend’s birthday in 2004, we made him Magic the Gathering cards. I got a lot of help from an online forum, misetings.com, which I think became misetings.net and now http://forums.goodgamery.com/. I made an entry back in 2004 about the birthday, and recently updated the link to the cards. The trickiest thing was finding a good template (and modifying it) and spending time to edit some of the more complicated pictures. The flavor text and card abilities were really fun to write.

For the past 2 Halloweens, my friends and I have gotten together to carve pumpkins. This year, we continued the tradition. Here I am laughing maniacally with my pig-monkey pumpkin!

This year I participated in two White Elephants. One at work and one with friends. For the one with friends, I painted a chess-board onto a cheap foldable table from Walmart and created a custom knight-shaped gift box.

A bunch of us got together on Halloween to watch the Phillies game  and make some masks. My mask has a sort of sun theme. Lisa and I pose in our masks below.

For our nephew’s 1 year birthday celebration, I worked on an image that would emulate a famous baby-food maker’s logo. We printed the image onto a mug using CafePress, a popular custom vendor, which will print your images on just about anything.

Here are the results:

For Candy’s birthday, I created a vector image in Illustrator by tracing a photograph and modifying her pose a bit. Then, I cut out the image and made a pop-up birthday card.

This image was printed and cutout to create a pop-up card.

Candy Image Original File

This past weekend, we went on a little AC trip with a few friends. Although we were supposed to have an 8-person group, we never quite met up with the other half of our troupe and we spent the day as a 4-person cell, gambling, dining, and shopping.

Lisa really enjoys playing roulette, which has superseded her previous addiction, Sic Bo. They are similar games of chance that involve betting on outcomes of an external device.

We had the typical Halloween for our family, we didn’t dress up, didn’t go trick or treating, and didn’t pass out candy. The only Halloweeny kind of thing I did was pumpking carving. I carved two pumpkins this year, one personal pumpkin and one with the team at work. I carved a Naruto-like face for the first pumpkin (it was my first ever) and our CEO’s face for the second pumpkin.

For the first pumpkin, the Naruto image, I used a spoon and dremel. I drew a quick outline using a Sharpie on the pumpkin and did the rest by eye. I found the toughest part to be the fact that my pumpkin was still wet, having been hollowed-out only a few hours before.

The second pumpkin I worked on along with my team at work. We entered a pumpkin-carving competition at work. Our strategy was brown-nosing, so we carved the faces of our CEO and CIO.

For this carving, I used Gimp to posterize a picture. Then I taped it to the pumpkin and scored key sections. Next, I removed the pattern, and carved the rest by eye, using the scores as a guide.

Here are a couple of clay pieces I did in a sculpture class Lisa and I took at Fleisher Art Memorial in South Philly.

The class was broken up into different sections including: fruit, plants, cloth, body parts, and machinery. My pieces for the fruit and body parts sections are below.

This birthday card template features radial text around a portrait of June. This was done in illustrator. The font used was lost at the time the image was generated, hence the collapsed radial text.

Birthday card template

June Birthday Card Template (PDF)

One of my first vector drawings. It’s of my wife, Lisa.

Lisa Vector Profile