My collected "Hints of the Day" - zero APM 💡❕

zeroooc (55)in #tips • 7 years ago (edited)

Occasionally even I can be somewhat educational! Turns out that not all of my stuff is exclusively nonsensical. In that vein I have compiled all of my Hints of the Day that I enjoy adding to my posts and have separated them into categories for #Art, #Photography, #Software and #Life for your perusal!

Art:

If you ever forget to clean your brushes right after using them and they turn all hard and sticky you can usually restore them fairly easily by wrapping their tops with newspaper soaked in water and a bit of brush cleaning liquid (low alcohol content rec.). Afix with a bit of masking tape. Leave it over night and the next day you can wash em easily and they'll be almost like new! ^^.

The ideal distance from spraycan to wall is about 30cm (1 foot).
For an even coat of paint - thanks @fraenk

If you mess up your proportions in your original sketches, fear not! If you scan the image into Photoshop you can fix and even improve most perspective issues using the transform, skew and warp tools along with cut and paste and the magnetic lasso. For the lazy anyways ;)

One of my favorite places to hang out online and learn about Art when I was younger were (and still are) the conceptart.org forums!
Tons of inspiring artists, stories, processes, resources and more.

Playing with water and paint is one of the most therapeutic activities ever. Sometimes add a little too much and then blow over it and see what happens. Use paper and tools to take away extra color. Keep combining shapes and letting the paint flow and even the most unskillful artist might end up with something beautiful!

I can't stress enough the importance of investing in good paper! A higher quality sketchbook is so much more fun to draw in and it's really worth the couple of extra bucks.

Photography:

One of the greatest boons of DSLR photography is the .RAW format that preserves an amazing amount of information in the image (Did you know that CMOS technology comes from space?). The Adobe RAW editor is one of the most powerful photo editing tools in my mind. Exposure/Levels/Blacks/Whites/Contrast, you'd be amazed how much more you can get out of a RAW than say a JPEG.

The greatest aid in producing a decent photograph is having enough Light. Either natural light (sun) or artificial light (lamps/lights/LEDs). It's as simple as that.

The faster the shutter speed of your camera, the more in focus subjects that are moving will be! Of course you must remember to have sufficient light to capture fast moving targets.

#DSLR lighting conditions:

During daylight (or with good lighting) keep your ISO low (100+), shutter speed fast and aperture wide.
During lowlight conditions keep your ISO high (800+), shutter speed slow (multiples of 25) and aperture narrow.

Software:

Know your Photoshop hotkeys! Here are some good ones:

Eyedropper tool - Hold down the Alt Key
Save for Web & Devices - Ctrl+Shift+Alt+S
Filling a Layer with a Click - Alt+Delete (foreground) or Ctrl+Delete (background)
Brush Size & Hardness - Ctrl + Alt + Right Click then drag your mouse to right/left to change the size and up/down to change the hardness.
Drawing straight lines - Hold down Shift, works with most tools
Merge All Visible Layers - Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E

The software I use to make a digital timelapse:

OBS - For streaming and recording software
Adobe Photoshop CC - To make the image
Adobe Premiere Pro - To edit the video and make a timelapse

Assuming you are on a PC, if you wanna speed up your rate of work in any OS or Software, learn the hotkeys! In Windows for example some good ones are WIN (Windows Button) + D goes to the Desktop. WIN + E opens the explorer. Ctrl + Shift + Escape opens the Task manager. In Internet browsers like Firefox or Chrome Ctrl + T opens a new tab and Ctrl + Shift + T opens the last tab you closed again. ^^

I wrote this post using Typora which is a lovely little Markdown editor. It helps me make my entries a little more stylish. Check it out and discover some of the cool development work going on for Steemit and develop your code/styling game.

The good folk over at CreativeCow have provided an amazing amount of quality Photoshop, Premiere and many other software tutorials over the years. Their archive is impressive and it certainly is useful knowledge for us creative types to be able to push all the buttons in the correct order. Check it out!

Life:

A hangover is best cured by ingesting a lot of fluids and vitamins the day after. Bananas, bread and bacon if you can manage! Soft circular motions with your fingers on the temples can relieve stress and lessen headaches. Extended naps and showers are also useful. God I'm getting old xD

Don't forget to occasionally step back and see the bigger picture if you're feeling overwhelemed. As always, don't panic, have a cup of tea and break down big tasks into several smaller objectives.

I also encourage you to come by our Steem Artists Discord Channel. There is a pretty sweet community emerging here with talent worth supporting methinks. #steemartists for the win! ^^

hope you learned something :)

Nikki a.k.a ZeroOoC