cheap mosquito screen
The idea for the next animation came from our own yard, which happened to be filled with spider webs that we believe helped with keeping the burgeoning mosquito population in check. The web was made with a neat little feature called "quickweb" in Serif DrawPlus. There are a whole slew of similar images that can be made by just a click, along with adjustments for various parameters. Saves a lot of time if one wants an aliased image of this type. I just drew in the mosquitoes by hand with MS Paint. Although the graphic's concept is very simple, I used the timing of the frames to add a bit more interest.
Another quick static idea called "Caterpillar Costumes." I always like alliteration, so when I come up with a title like that I have to figure out a way to illustrate it. This one was done completely with clipart.
The best illustration ideas are appropriate to the month in which they adorn the newsletter. Hence, I like to stick to autumn topics during that season, holidays when applicable, etc. In this case, I'd heard some news about football, and I vaguely remembered that the game is mainly played in the fall. I am not a sports fan. I guess I didn't get the "Halloween" kind of morbid humor out of my system in Oct. and so needed to continue the theme into Nov. This is another animation that uses just clipart images and resizing.
 Why caterpillars don't play football |
Not enough grim humor? I even carried it into the Christmas issue with "Bug Wrap." I'd thought up this idea several months earlier, but knew it would be best suited to the Christmas issue in Dec. The web was created using the "quickweb" function in Serif DrawPlus. Although I use that program for almost nothing else, it is indispensible for making certain shapes and patterns quickly and easily. The insect and spider are scans of old engravings and the wrapping was done with MS Paint and a clipart bow. The legs and wings of the critters move because I used Photoshop Elements to chop them off and rotate them. I then put them back on using MS Paint because I don't know how to do it easily in Photoshop. I find the jerky motion of simple GIF animations to be perfect for imitating the action of a spider in a web.
 Merry Christmas |
Valentine's Day often generates ideas about love/sex/reproduction. Heck, that's what it's all about. This time I used the idea that paramecia and other single-celled microbes do not have to bother with courtship and sex in order to procreate. Rather humorously cynical for the holiday, I thought. I drew a single graphic using MS Paint. The 3D effect was achieved using a freeware program called La Fonta. The arrangement on the page uses multiple copies of the same file.
 Who needs love? |
Sometimes the humor and/or inspiration for my animations or their titles is not particularly obvious to many people. Sometimes it is not even all that obvious to me. This one started as a caterpillar waiting for a leaf to grow so it could eat it. In Feb. here in Texas that really appears to be the case, with bugs sitting around on the branches, not yet having enough foliage on which to dine. Then I was struck by how my title sounds much like the play title "Waiting for Godot." This is a pretty crude animation, done with very simple MS Paint drawn images. I used La Fonta for the 3D effect in an effort to make it a little more sophisticated and less like a kindergartener drew it. I think I was only partially successful.
Waiting For The Growth |
The Easter issue offers various symbols for use in graphics, the egg being one of the most versatile. It didn't take a whole lot of imagination to come up with a pretty butterfly emerging from the egg. "Easter Egg Surprise" is sort of like magic, similar to the bunny coming out of the hat. Both the egg and the butterfly were clipart images, manipulated in Photoshop and MS Paint.
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I had run out of animation ideas and time, so the next graphic was simply done to match the letters of the heading. Using several characters from a couple of freeware dingbat fonts, I created the colors and 3D effect in Ulead Photo Express. This program also allows for character rotation and resizing. The final "Beetle Burst" was originally round but it didn't fit very well on the screen so I squished the whole thing in Photoshop.
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The letters in the heading of the next month were rainbow colored, so that's where the idea for that came from. I thought of calling it "Dining Light," but that didn't make sense in two ways, as the larvae are actually dining ON light. However, the title "Light Meal" worked just fine. I made use of Photoshop to take the rainbow and bend and taper it. It was a bit tricky and I had to try several times to get it right. I even had to review which color goes on top - so much for my memory of physics. The rudimentary bugs were drawn in MS Paint. In the end, of course, the caterpillars leave their signature frass (entomology lingo for poop).
 Light Meal |
The Independence Day issue couldn't have had a simpler graphic. All I had to do was think about the fact that ants come in red and black, so why not red, white and blue? Putting one colorful individual in the mob of uniform black ants is just the sort of simple and silly humor that I seem to favor, so that's how "Patriot Ant" came about. Perhaps if my animation techniques were more sophisticated, it would reflect in the humor... Anyway, the whole animation was drawn in MS Paint, with a lot of counting of pixels to get the spacing on the ants right.
With the July, 2008, issue, we had produced 100 online versions of our newsletter, without skipping a month. We, if no others, were impressed. The caterpillar was drawn in good old MS Paint. Yes, there are 100 candles.
For some reason, the 100th issue made me think of the "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall" song, and its backwards countdown. The syllables of the song fit nicely with our buggy theme, so I started to think up ways they would be reduced, one by one. I came up with several verses, and a rather strangely convoluted version of the song. Of course, a single animation can only accommodate one verse, so this theme will have to continue in subsequent issues before it arrives at the expected conclusion. Don't hold your breath.
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For anyone interested in technical matters pertaining to GIF animations, there was a strange glitch in this particular one. I use Ulead GIF Animator Lite to create the animations, usually after making each frame in something like MS Paint. Afterwards, I reduce the size of the whole file by running it through a little freeware program called GIF Optimizer. Most of the time this works fine and I can shave off a lot of bytes. However, this time, the reduced animation left a small black line at the bottom after the words "stomp on the ground" were removed. When I checked into this, it turned out that it must be a problem with Internet Explorer, which was failing to keep the frame positioned correctly or was cutting off one pixel at the bottom - I never did figure out which. The animation displayed perfectly in both the Ulead program and in Firefox. I spent the time to correct it by removing that one frame, adding an extra pixel to the size at the bottom, and replacing it. As long as I didn't use the Optimizer program again, it works in even the defective IE, and I only added a few bytes to the size of the file.
Remember last month's animation, "99 Bugs?" Yes, it is continuing. Now it is down to "98 Bugs." Boy, with so many bugs to go, all I have to do is come up with a new way for one to meet its demise each month and I've got a no-brainer subject for the next few decades! Just kidding. In fact, our current heat wave, as well as my lack of patience already has the little beasts dying off in groups instead of individually.
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Down to "88 bugs" now. The next issue was for Halloween, so it's time to call in the more creepy arthropods, especially spiders. Just one little larva gets it this time. I'm finding that inventing lyrics that rhyme is going to be the limiting factor on how long I can string out this idea.
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Surprise time! Although we started this time with "87 Bugs," I couldn't resist playing with the notion of how quickly insects can reproduce. Although this was created in November, here in Texas it is still warm and I find caterpillars all the time. In fact, I'd just been finding clusters of butterfly caterpillars that were hatching out very late in the season. Even if the cold holds off, the poor little beasts will have no leaves left to feed on soon, as even here we do have deciduous trees that go dormant for our short winter.
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Now that I've messed up the original song even more than at the start of this series, I decided to end it quickly. At this point there are so many that I can only call it "Lots of Bugs." Remember, they are just bugs, and not even real ones at that! No need to feel sorry for them. A quick wrap-up to these animations, in my mind, is a very nice Christmas present to our readers. Besides, I'm not one to leave dangling ends to stories. Of course, this idea will simply be replaced in the next issue with another that is equally inane.
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With the final demise of the 99 +/- larvae of bugs, I seem to have still been on a kick to draw lots of nondescript little vermin. This time it was the Valentine's issue and so the letters of the title and the dividers in the text all had little red hearts. Chigger season for us is right around the corner, so I drew some of the tiny beasts and the end result was "Chigger Valentine." Nothing too intellectual here; this is mainly simply for the graphic effect. The whole animation was drawn in MS Paint. I always like when I can make the background transparent, but this often creates a larger file than if the background stays white. However, this time the transparent file size was slightly smaller!
Time to take a break from making animations. "Broken Butterfly" was produced by doodling, albeit in PhotoShop. The original image was from a dingbat font and I just kept playing around with filters and such until it looked interesting enough to me (thank goodness for the undo button). The color was chosen to match the lettering of the title that month.
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Anyone who lives in the South and drives a car knows about love bugs. They are not a huge problem in our area because it is on the arid side, but near lakes or closer to the coast, these flies can be thick enough to plaster the front of an automobile with their connected bodies. It's as if they prefer to mate several feet above asphalt, especially that which is under heavy traffic. "Love Bugs In the Air" was extremely simple, with only two frames. The insects were drawn with a pen and tablet device, the Wacom Bamboo.
Yet another very silly animation. "April Showers" is just a play on words using a different ending for the familiar saying. I had actually created the pixellated insects some time ago and just reused them. The clouds and the sun were created in my favorite pre-set program for basic shapes: Serif DrawPlus. I don't use that program for anything else, but it is sure handy for making shapes that would take too long to draw by hand. This animation turned out to be lighter when not made transparent, so it needs a border on anything but a plain white background.
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With Memorial Day coming up, the military theme was a no-brainer. I started with army ants (which are real) and extrapolated. All frames of "Military Ants" were made using clipart and arranging the ants in various ways on them. Nothing very profound, but why start now?
