illustrator

I was recently inspired by Jeffrey Miller's embeddable Advent Wreath widget to try my hand at illustrating and animating an advent wreath in HTML5 with the <canvas> element or by animating an SVG.

My heart was in it for a while, but I ultimately gave up on the project due to the fact that I had already spent a couple hours on it and wasn't happy with my progress...

However, I did end up with a fairly good illustrator/vector wreath and candles (I spent a bit of time trying to get the flames looking just right), and also created a brush to create the actual wreath, making it look somewhat like an evergreen wreath.

Recently, I had to recover my iMac from a Time Machine backup and a hard drive replacement (my old drive flaked out—see how I repaired my hard drive here (video included!)).

Upon trying to open any Adobe Creative Suite 3 app (I use Photoshop and Illustrator daily...), I got the following error window:

I was taken to this Adobe Support page, which suggests a variety of options for fixing the problem—all of which didn't work for me.

Creighton model NFP students will recognize the dancing baby above. I am starting work on a project related to NFP, and I was in need of the image. So, being handy in Illustrator, I snapped a shot of my fiancée's chart, zoomed in on one of the dancing baby stickers, and hand-traced the lines in Illustrator.

I might clean it up a little more sometime, but for now, this will do. After a second glance, it almost looks like a cage-fighting baby. Hmm...

While I was attending Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, a few brother seminarians and I had a long run of Monopoly tournaments, and we became quite adept at the game. Of course, my winning strategy was to always give up any and all properties to get Boardwalk and Park Place, buy a hotel, and hope someone hit the hotel before I went bankrupt...

I created this vector file (below) in Illustrator after many hours of path-tracing original Monopoly board art, my own hand-drawn designs, and some clipart. I was intending to print it on some cardstock and mold some actual pieces (like a biretta, a Liturgy of the Hours book, a pipe organ, etc.) to play the game, but never got around to that part before leaving.

(Click image to view larger).