Programmer by Day...
Musician By Night...Welcome to the website of Brett McCoy
Enter freely of your own will and leave behind some of the happiness you bring
Latest News
The New Year
Published: 2009-01-01T19:36:00.001-08:00I'm not one for making typical New Year's resolutions, but I do like setting simple goals to keep myself busy. So my (almost daily) goals for the coming year are:br /br /1. Sketch in my sketchbook every day, even if I just fill up a page full of ears or somethingbr /br /2. Compose music every day, even if it's only 4 barsbr /br /3. Practice guitar for at least 30 minutes every day (if not more)br /br /4. Exercise at least 3 times a week, even if I just go for a walk in the evening after supperbr /br /This is separate, of course, from working on extended projects in art, music, animation, etc.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7449702846579200930-3737615146195588297?l=electricminstrel.blogspot.com'//div
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Orchestration Final Project
Published: 2008-12-20T18:15:00.000-08:00I've finished my final project for the online course in Orchestration through Berklee College. It can be found here:br /br /a href="http://www.electricminstrel.com/solo_player.html"http://www.electricminstrel.com/solo_player.html/abr /br /It's the one titled 'Spirit of Fire'.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7449702846579200930-2766314070168046597?l=electricminstrel.blogspot.com'//div
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Broken XML parsing
Published: 2008-12-19T11:18:00.001-08:00So it seems that PHP5 has broken XML parsing now, according to this site:br /br /http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=45996br /br /Which means that if you are reading this via the Electric Minstrel website, you are seeing a bunch of broken HTML. Hopefully my site provider will fix their installation of PHP5, since I use an RSS parser to fetch posts from Blogspot.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7449702846579200930-5960382253327165550?l=electricminstrel.blogspot.com'//div
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Returned!
Published: 2008-12-19T07:05:00.000-08:00I am back to using Blogspot again! br /br /I have had a busy 2008. In addition to studying caricature under people like Jason Seiler the gang at the National Caricaturists' Network, I also took a wonderful course in Orchestration through Berklee College under Ben Newhouse. Actually, I am finishing up my final project now and will post it when it is done.br /br /I am still using TVPaint (upgraded from Mirage) for most of my art, although I do occasionally use PhotoShop for some things. Oh yeah, and I still use ArtRage but haven't touched it in a long while. Now that my music class is closing out this week, I will be back to doing more art in the coming weeks.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7449702846579200930-8347829435055758505?l=electricminstrel.blogspot.com'//div
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ArtRage
Published: 2008-02-28T13:27:00.000-08:00I have been experimenting with a neat painting tool called a href="http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html"ArtRage/a. It is a simple application intended to emulate the uses of oil paint on canvas (or other types of media). It also includes a palette knife tool, ink pen, pencil, chalk, crayon and glitter. How Kindergarten, huh?br /br /Actually, considering it's free (or you can get the full application for $25), it's fairly sophisticated. Of course, it can't really compare it to high-end graphics tools like Photoshop, The Gimp, Mirage, Corel Painter, etc., but it's not trying to be any of those kinds of applications. ArtRage is simply a natural media painting tool and nothing else. However, it does support importing of reference images, tracing images, layers (and pretty much all of the layer blending modes supported by the high-end apps), scaling, rotation and fairly sophisticated coloring tools.br /br /What I really like about it is the simplicity... you don't have to drill down through a bunch menus or hierarchies of dialog boxes to get something done. Everything you need is right on the screen (although there are some config menus if you need them), and the workflow is very similar to painting. It's especially targeted for use with a Wacom tablet (which I use, although need a bigger one!).br /br /It doesn't support things like custom brushes, textures, animation, and some of the advanced digital art stuff you might find somewhere else... but... once you get into that stuff you are getting away from traditional painting techniques, which is what this application is for.br /br /I did this quite quickly... a lot more I could do, of course, but I was amazed at how easy this is to use.br /br /a href="http://www.electricminstrel.com/images/moonlight_sonata.jpg"img src="http://www.electricminstrel.com/images/moonlight_sonata.jpg" height="270" width="443"/abr /br /(Click on image to see it full size)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7449702846579200930-8841855536468546785?l=electricminstrel.blogspot.com'//div
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