Updates on SaveJWST gear and my newfound luck

First things first: I am thrilled by the amount of interest there’s been in the SaveJWST gear that I have published for sale at Les Étoiles. As you may know from my earlier posts, the James Webb Space Telescope–successor to the incredibly successful Hubble–is in danger of being scrapped by Congress; I am very much against this; and I am donating my earnings from JWST gear to the American Astronomical Society.

To my knowledge, I am not only the only shopkeeper donating proceeds–I am the only one on Zazzle selling SaveJWST gear. My shop is small; it has a fairly steady trickle of visitors, but no torrent. So I expected to receive perhaps a few dollars from these items: a token donation for AAS, offering more a symbol of sentiment than actual support. So I am thrilled to say that, barring cancellations, Les Étoiles has earned over $30 so far from JWST gear and there are dozens of stickers, bumper stickers, magnets, and keychains out there helping to make the Webb a more visible topic.

Since my last post, I have added a lot more, with the help of the folks at SaveJWST on Facebook. They lent me the use of their logo, so I have shiny new bumper stickers, magnets, … even mini bookmarks available. Here’s a sampling:

You can find the rest at the gallery.

Now, in the title I also alluded to some unexpected luck. This post has gotten long already, so I’ll just say that I am one of 150 Twitter-followers of NASA who will be converging on Kennedy Space Center in early September to hang out, make good times, and watch the launch of the twin GRAIL satellites to the moon. I am not accustomed to winning things. :)

Show your support for JWST & Les Étoiles will donate proceeds to AAS

I was busy over the weekend, making … well, propaganda, essentially. I’ve made a bunch of materials in my Zazzle store, Les Étoiles, that you can use to show your support of the James Webb Space Telescope and to help spread the word. There are stickers, bumper stickers, keychains, buttons, magnets, and mini bookmarks (1×3″ cards). Everything I receive from sales of JWST items I will donate to the American Astronomical Society for their efforts to advance public policy.

In fact, if you purchase anything at my store and send me a message with your name & what you bought, and tell me you want to help save JWST, I will add any commission I receive from your whole purchase–JWST items or not–to the donation for AAS. There’s a direct contact form available right from my store. And you can customize pretty much everything in the store, so feel quite free to find any image on any item you like and add your own text, since you’re probably much better at slogans and witticisms than I am!

Trying sepia tone for a vintage photo effect

Someone in Palmerston North, New Zealand (a bit north of Wellington) recently ordered two prints of a photograph of Cathedral Square in Christchurch from my photography gallery at Zazzle. So I thought it’d be nice to have a sepia-tone version available as well, for a clean, warmer, classic look. Here’s the result.

I like the effect; it’s rich and warm, which is something I don’t usually achieve when I try to color an image in sepia tone. Usually, I just use the Hue/Saturation tool to colorize the image with a brown/orange hue at a saturation of 20-30. This time, I desaturated the image first, then created a color fill layer (a layer of solid color) set to a shade a bit brighter than true sepia, which Wikipedia tells me is hex code #704214. I set the layer to Soft Light mode at an opacity of 70% or 75%. Having started to play in Photoshop, I thought I’d try another image and see if I could make it look a little more authentically ‘vintage.’ Meet Sharay.

I started editing Sharay’s picture the same way as I did the Cathedral photo, but then I lowered the opacity of the image so that it would look faded. I also used a Gaussian blur to soften the image, because it seemed too sharp; older cameras needed longer exposure times, so you wouldn’t get a perfectly crisp image even if your subject tried to hold still. Finally, I swiped the image a time or two each with the Burn and Dodge tools set to a large size and relatively low opacity; I wanted to make the darkness a little less even without overdoing it.

It probably needs more fading at the edges and some dust & scratches to be really authentic, but I definitely like the effect.

New prints at Zazzle

I’ve just published a couple more new posters at Zazzle. At some point here I’ll make other items with the images, but I have several more images ready to go, and my point in toying with them in Illustrator is that it lets me save them larger, so big prints are possible if I can make them look good as graphics. Anyway, here they are.

The crosswalk image looks much better at a large size — that’s where you see the graphic style better. Not sure if I like it as is or wish I’d made it more obviously a graphic (for smaller sizes). The crosswalk itself is my favorite one ever.

Spokes: Chrome and Grunge (a before & after)

Hiya. I put a new photo up on my other Zazzle store (the, well, original photography one), except that I manipulated it so that it looks like it’s a mildly grungy black and white graphic. Here’s a before and after:

I actually overlaid a different photo on top of the b&w graphic (twice) for the texture effect with the red lines and the weathered light glare (it was a photo of sun glinting off a crack on a dirty pane of glass – the dirt/grime caught the light with a pretty cool texture that I’ve been wanting to use somehow).

You like?