CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

So, I'm doing my blog cruise this morning (because I haven't done one for almost a month), and I drop into the Aurealis site to discover they've announced the finalists. I'm not one of them, but there are a lot of fine writers who are. Why don't you head on over and check them out. You can find the Aurealis site HERE , and the finalist announcement HERE .

One of the things I was curious about was how to insert different backgrounds into an image once I had isolated it... and I wanted to see what some of the effects in Gimp did when used as backgrounds. Last week, I explored the Blend and Bucket Fill tools in the Toolbox dock, and the Difference Clouds and Plasma effects under the Render-Clouds option in the Filters drop-down. This week, I wanted to look at some of what might be done with the Colorize option under the Colors tab. BEFORE: What you Need: I usually have the following dockable dialogues visible as I work: Toolbox, Brushes,Tool Options and Layers-Gradients. You will need to be able to see these to work through the following steps. I have assumed that you already know how to resize an image using the drop-down menu under image. Please let me know if you don't, and I will write another post to explain it. How to Colorize an Image Background: Make sure you have a coloured background. (I used my P...

There is an amazing amount of birdlife around my house. This fellow was part of a small flock of galahs that settled down to feast on grass seeds and flower heads not far from my back fence: They noticed the camera with human attached and kept an eye on it: But ot even the youngest one let it disturb its feeding: I tried to capture more than one of them together, but this proved to be almost impossible, and got a very direct look from the youngest of the flock: In the end, they moved to what they thought was a safer distance and I was able to take a group shot.

Well, things have really slowed down with the start of the university semester. I’ve had to withdraw from one writer activity and turn down a beta read (sorry, Greta) already, and was almost late in prepping things for the C.M. Simpson Publishing release schedule – apologies, Ellie. I did manage to complete some short work, this week on the bus, but, as it’s not in the computer, yet, it doesn’t count. I will have to see if I can manage better, this week.   Overview New words produced: 2,070 Old words revised: 0 Works completed: 7 (for inclusion into a larger work) Works revised: 0 Covers created: 0 Works published: 0 Works submitted: 0 Competitions Entered: 0   Tier 1 Tasks Annual 13: Added 329 words Annual 14: Added 1,741 words Tier 2 Tasks RomNov14A— Country Rush : Added 1,296 words Publishing Tasks Created 1 blog posts for this blog; Did final edit, format and upload of Ellie Moonwater’s Candy Cane Dancer for C.M. Simp...