331 - Dog Tired

Day 331. Our golden retriever Buzz loves to lay around the house sleeping on the cool floor on these hot days. Here he is in all his watercolour glory, thanks to the Waterlogue app.

060 - Dry in the Doghouse

Day 60. Some daily creates are just for fun. Others are to solve an actual problem. Today's is one of those. It's been pouring with rain here in Sydney and our golden retriever's dog house has been getting a bit damp. It is under cover from our pergola roof, but only just, so if the rain is heavy or coming from a particular direction, it can get a bit of water coming into it. What it needs is its own roof.

I had a spare sheet of corrugated polycarbonate from when I built the pergola roof, so I took to it with a pair of scissors and fashioned it into a temporary rain shade that can go on top of the dog house. I had to cut notches to fit around the roof support posts, and round the corners so we wouldn't slash our legs as we walked past it, but it should keep the rain off until it fines up again. It's just a simple thing, but sometimes that's where a bit of creativity comes in the most useful.

014 - Bathing the Dog

Day 14. Two weeks down, 50 to go! Today's Create is a short video I made as I bathed our dog Buzz. I set up a GoPro camera at the end of the tub and shot the whole 10 minute was cycle. The footage was dropped into Final Cut Pro and edited into short chunks to reduce it to 4'30". I also used Adobe Media Encoder to recompress the video before uploading to YouTube (Took it from 235MB to 45MB, so worth doing!)



Short of jumping out of planes or skiing down huge mountains, what other things would be interesting to shoot on the GoPro?

006 - A Sketch of Buzz

Day 6 and I'm trying to learn how to draw on the iPad. Using an app called ProCreate on my iPad mini, I created this sketch of our golden retriever, Buzz. I started with a photo I took, then imported it into ProCreate as a base layer, then created a series of other layers on top of that to gradually build up the image. I used airbrushes, smudges, ink pens and so on, to build the image in layers. It's probably not a brilliant final result but I learned a lot about picking colours, resizing pens, customising digital ink flows, etc, so I definitely know more about using ProCreate now than I did about 30 minutes ago!

I can think of uses for this kind of layering technique for drawing with my students. How about you?