Inspired by the latest news about Mars' opposition, I was thinking astronomy when I came up with the next image. Although the design is simple, I had to learn to use a new program in order to render it. The caterpillar began as a clipart Windows metafile, a narrowly used format that has many limitations, but also some nice features. By using a program called Metafile Companion, I was able to change the color of the caterpillar to gray, eliminate a shadow, and add the lines and stars. Without going into a lot of detail, the benefit of working with the metafile in this case was that the final image would have uniform anti-aliased edges when I converted it into a GIF for use on the web. The graphic is called "Vermiculus Major," a name I invented for an imaginary caterpillar constellation. The translation from Latin basically means "Big Grub."
I couldn't think up anything original and so decided to do something a little different. I take a lot of photographs of flowers, insects, and other small creatures, partly because I am interested in that type of photography and partly to provide illustrations for use on our Garden website. This image departs from the norm of having a title. It is simply a photo of an inchworm in a rose, taken at Zilker Gardens, here in Austin. The frame around the picture was designed to match the letters of the heading.
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After a break from creativity, I got the urge to do something a bit more involved. Halloween images are always particularly substantial grist for the animation mill, and the old song about the worms crawling in and out lends itself nicely to simple GIF animating, so "Ghoulish Grub" was a natural. The skull was from a clip art collection and the grub was drawn directly in MS Paint. This was another case of using a Windows Metafile for the original image, so that I could change the colors quickly. After converting it to a bitmap and keeping it aliased (no smoothing of the edges), it was easy to manipulate the jaw and also move the grub along through the cartoon. Worms and skulls can be portrayed in a variety of ways and so this idea may appear in an alternative form sometime in the future.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out... |
Just before creating the November issue for 2003, we had a rather intense wind storm that finally blew most of the dying leaves off the trees in our yard, all in one night. This gave me the idea for "Autumn Caterpillar" which simply plays on the idea of more than just leaves falling. All the frames were drawn in MS Paint, hence the simple look to the cartoon.
Good thing it only happens to trees... |
I was on a roll with the silly animations and continued with the Christmas issue. "Kissing Caterpillars" was, once again, drawn completely in MS Paint, but the mistletoe is actually a separate clipart graphic. Having started out as a Windows Metafile, I changed the colors and removed detail from the original image to match my hand-drawn caterpillars. It might be noticed that most of my recent animations are not transparent and so need a frame when shown over the gray background image of these pages. Although I'd like to have the aesthetic quality of the transparency, the file size of the GIF animation can be reduced far more when it is left out, sometimes by as much as 80%. Because our newsletters always have a white background, it makes no difference until I transfer the images here to the archives. Although I like to add graphics to our pages for cosmetic reasons, I am ever aware of bandwidth usage, especially for people viewing our pages through dial-up modems.
 
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Once again using a clipart image as the basis for an animation, this graphic was a bit more subtle than most. The images of candy were simply color shifted to give the different "flavors" and the one animated piece has a maggot drawn in MS Paint. Because all the action takes place within the border of the image, no transparency is necessary. The surrounding "candy box" is simply an HTML table. I added the text at the top because I wasn't sure that the illusion of candy was obvious. Perhaps only somebody who has eaten an old piece of chocolate and then discovered worms in it can really appreciate this little cartoon. The words below were created using the text function in Ulead Photo Express, a program that happened to come with our scanner.
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The issue for which the following design was created happened to fall just before Mardi Gras and the letters of the heading were colorful and festive in appearance. As I've done before when a better idea just wouldn't materialize, I took elements from the letters of the text and turned them into larval insects. Once this graphic was completely, the caterpillars had a rather angular and modern look, thus inspiring the title "Punk Caterpillars."
Not quite ready to do another animation just yet, St. Patrick's Day was the inspiration for "Clover Caterpillar." While the design looks pretty simple, it actually involved a lot of different steps to get to the finished product. The clover leaf was a Windows Metafile clip art image, which I altered, colored, and then made 3D using a program called La Fonta. It was then reduced numerous times in Batch Thumbs. The caterpillar was another clip art image that only had to be rotated and reduced, then combined with the other images.
We were having a bad (or good, depending on your point of view) spring for caterpillars in our yard, with so many of the wee beasts that some of our smaller trees were completely defoliated as they started to leaf out. It was also a great spring for many flowers, so the following animation merely evolved from those ideas. The entire cartoon was drawn in MS Paint, except for the flower petals, which were designed using a "quick draw" function in Serif Draw Plus. After reductions in the size of the images and the color palette, and optimizing in a program called, appropriately, GIF Optimizer, the total size of the animation was reduced to a manageable number of kilobytes and "Super Cat" was born.
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Sometimes a rather strange idea can result in a graphic for which nobody really needs to know the background. The following image began with the eggs, matching animated letters in the title in which the letters "hatched" out of eggshells. For some reason, I thought of green caterpillars and then of the Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham. Twisting the words around resulted in "Green Cat and Eggs." The egg was a clip art illustration and the caterpillar was scanned from an old engraving, colored and given 3D effect, using various programs for each step.
