Sunflower Summer Sky ACEO Painting

Here's a miniature ACEO watercolour painting of a sunflower set against a cloudy summer sky.

Its not often I paint flowers, but I fancied a change from my more usual animal subjects.

This painting is on Bristol Board, a fine illustrators card with a brilliant white, smooth surface.

Pink Flamingo ACEO eBay Auction

Heres a fun mixed media ACEO depicting a pair of pink flamingos. This one was done as part of the Animal Lovings Artists ebay group weekly challenge. The weekly challenges are of a member's pet every other week and an endangered Animal the week between.

The ACEO is a gouache painting, with indian ink and Derwent Studio pencils. The painting started out quite traditional, but then ended up getting whimsical (think Paris may have had an influence on me!)

How to Get Full Screen Images in Windows Movie Maker

If you are making a slide show movie of your art for youtube or other video hosting site, you want your movie and art to look its best. Ever wondered why you have black space around images in a windows movie maker slide show? If you read the Animal Loving Artists on youtube post, you'll see I faced a challenge in dealing with varying, untidy amounts of black space. Some images are obviously the wrong dimensions to fill a full-screen, and I'll be dealing with those later in a separate post.

What about images that appear the right dimensions, but don't quite fit full screen? You are either left with black lines at the sides, or at top and bottom, or surrounding the image when its imported into your movie maker collections. Look at the three images below and you'll see what I mean. This post outlines one method for cropping an image to get it full-screen dimensions for use in movie maker. (See the links at the end of this post for more on making a slide show movie with movie maker.)





How to Get a full-screen Image

This applies to images that are almost the right dimensions but don't quite fit. You can crop your image so it fits full-screen. The bottom line here is that to be full-screen, an image must have an aspect ratio of 4:3. If you are not graphically/technically trained or mathematical minded, this may seem a little daunting. The easiest solution is to use image editing software that will do it all for you. Fastone Image Viewer is one such program - its an open source project, so its free to download and use non-commercially, and there's no spyware/adware. You can download it at http://www.faststone.org/.

To crop an image to 4:3 ratio using Fastone Image Viewer

Open Fastone. Open the directory your image is located in, by double-clicking on it in the left-hand directory view panel.

You will see your images in that directory tiled in the main right-hand panel. Select your image for editing by clicking on it, so it is highlighted and also appears in the preview box.

Next select the crop tool (circled below) from the menu bar by clicking on it. Then in the Crop Board window, select a ratio to 4:3 from the paper ratio drop down menu (circled below), and select crop. Select crop to file, to save your cropped image and follow the prompts, or you could select crop to clipboard and paste your image into another program once you have opened it.

Also see:

Make a Slide Show Video of your Art for Youtube
And We have Youtube Sound
Add Youtube Videos to your Blog, Website or Ebay
Original Art by Naj on Youtube
Animal Loving Artists on Youtube

Paris Hilton in Jail?

Here's my depiction of the Paris in prison news story (in 2007):

I quietly listed this on eBay, out of curiosity. No takers first-time around, but a fascinating conversation with another eBayer!

I like doing this kind of work, but its more for fun, as I find its not usually a hot seller.