Here's looking at you kid - Eyes from Filter Forge

The Eyes have it. Feel free to download any of these eyes if you can use them in your own work - they are in .jpg format and are on a white square of 300px. I will be making some in .png and .svg for the site over the coming days so there will also be an opportunity to buy more eyes if they are your thing.

I am a huge fan of Filter Forge and I have blogged on this subject a number of times, in fact I used to run a dedicated blog on the subject but now I spend too much time actually using it to dedicate my time to blogging on the subject all the time. Having said that I'd like to boost my Make Snake Policy over at Project Isabella Graphic Workshop by adding the odd post or two regarding some of the creation processes that I go through to develop characters, clipart and graphics.

So last week I put a lot of hard work into developing little characters with walk motions for Scratch and other programming tools and I'll be going into more detail about that next week but I needed some eyes. So this is an ideal opportunity to get searching the Filter Forge Library (not that I need an excuse!) and see what I could find. This filter at the moment strikes me as the most suitable. It is a filter called Cartoon Eyes by Redcap submitted in 2009 and I will no doubt be giving it some hammering over the weekend. I did tweak the original and removed an option called "Diminish Eye Size" as I didn't need my eyes diminished. Keep an Eye (oops a pun) on the Filter Forge website at the moment they keep having absolutely mad sale reductions on the price of the software which can be bought outright or as a subscription.

Next week I'll let put together a post on how these eyes get used.

Stegosaurus in the night with moon and stars

Having recently sold a stegosaurus hat on Zazzle I was actually really pleased and flattered as there are some great designs by some other folk on there in the same theme and I thought I'd spend a bit of time sharing those too.

Alice In The Maze - Scratch Project

I have been testing out a new character with animated poses - a little preview of Alice here at Scratch

Alice is a vivacious blonde that has been developed with a swinging walk and a lively run. She has a number of outfits that are bright and some of them work to a defined palette to make your design processes smoother. These will be added to Project Isabella Graphic Workshop next week.

Change My Name

Although I can hardly say

Everywhere I went people knew my name
Written on my face were the scars of fame

quote Trading Yesterday - Change My Name

I did think it was maybe time to change the blogs name to something that suited me and the thing I get up to a little better.

So "Impromptu Art" has now been renamed "The Secret Life of a Lollipop Lady" where I get to describe all the things I get up to creatively to learn and develop my business Project Isabella Graphic Workshop 

I have some posts lined up regarding activities on Scratch the fun I am still having with Filter Forge and Carrara and all this to proof to the new small children at the crossing that I don't actually stand there all day!

Why I develop graphics that can be used in Scratch.

Years ago I travelled the world as a Software Engineer. For many the exciting aspect of that phrase would be the idea of visiting beautiful cities in Europe, visiting Australia repeatedly and traveling around America. For me however my passion truly lay in the coding and problem solving. I actually happened on programming and the fact that I had a brain for logic after completing a Theology degree. A training course was offered after an IQ test. I was the only girl on the course. I think I surprised my family as I was a day dreaming novel reader, perhaps the term woolly headed and flibberty jibbet may even have been applied. But then that's family for you!
For me I would love to know that every child has the opportunity to learn programming in schools. There are cost effective ways that children of all ages can be introduced. Some of the articles below work through many of the, I have over the last 2 years worked with my own daughter in a couple of environments - Kodu so far has been her favourite and was particularly useful as she really struggles in her reading. The commands are developed with images but the overall environment is good looking and fun.
My daughter was quite delighted on the occasions when she solved problems in the coding, she displayed a natural talent and it has given me great joy to watch her work. This half term I will be working alongside her in Scratch to see how she gets on there. She is excited to know she can use the graphics from Project Isabella and I am looking forward to the holidays.
I would love to encourage children, parents and teachers to give at least one of the methods for introducing programming for children a go and if developing pretty graphics that support systems such as Scratch helps, then that would make my me so happy!
So that's why the SVG graphics at Project Isabella contain a snippet like this.

Use our graphics with Scratch

Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. It is available for free at      http://scratch.mit.edu Scratch enables young students to program their own interactive games, stories and puzzles. As Scratch is a graphical programming language these our SVG multi pose vector clip art developed at Project Isabella Graphic Workshop is ideal to use within the Scratch system. Contact us to see how you could get these graphics in bulk and very affordable to use in your school or programming club.

20 Resources for Teaching Kids How to Program & Code ...
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Isn't it amazing to see a baby or a toddler handle a tablet or a smart phone? They know how technology works. Kids absorb information so fast, languages (spoken or coded) can be learned in a matter of months. Recently ...
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In 1967, Seymour Papert and colleagues invented Logo, a programming language designed expressly for kids and intended not to teach programming per se, but to teach 'powerful ideas' in mathematics, e.g., iteration and ...
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I really like teaching, and whenever there's an opportunity for me to talk about what I do or to teach kids to code, I take it. I want kids to feel like I did when I was little: “Oh yeah, obviously programming is the best job!” I love the ...
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