Using Color Schemes

Have you ever looked at a colorful painting and wished that you can extract all those vibrant hues and use them on your own project? If only things were that easy, huh? Well, actually they are. That’s what we learned during our Playdate this month when we experimented with Kuler and color schemes. Kuler is an application that helps you generate and create color schemes for just about any project like business cards and invitations, web pages, and even the motif of your brand new house or wedding reception. We’re afraid brand new houses and wedding receptions are still a bit far-fetched for us, so we had to settle for something more low-key like the miniature dream houses that we previously drew. Playing with color schemes was fun but not particularly challenging, though, so we thought of raising things up a notch by seeing who can make the most colorful and most beautiful house within three minutes. Since not all of us were familiar with the application, some of us tried it for a bit before starting the game. The cool thing about it is even if you know next to nothing about color schemes, you can still generate magnificent colors simply by uploading a picture you like or browsing through the thousands of photos on Flickr and picking the one whose colors you like best. It will then show you the dominant colors that were present in the picture then you can experiment with them by adjusting the general mood that the colors evoke such as bright, colorful, muted, deep, and dark. With everything all set, we started taking turns coloring the houses that got randomly assigned to us, laughing all throughout the game, because although we picked photos whose colors we thought were really good, using them at random proved to be not a very good idea because we ended up with psychedelic houses, ominous clouds, blue lawns, and other things that would probably look a little too out of place in the real world. Still, we guess that’s the fun part – getting the opportunity to stray from the usual path and having fun with it. And had fun, we did. You’ll probably have too.. Good luck! Related Links Kuler http://kuler.adobe.com/...

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BNP Sportsfest: Palaro ng Lahi

Do you remember the time when we used to go out and play in the sun all day? When we scour our villages in search of new hideouts to brag? Back when we pride ourselves with how fast we can run? Sure would be nice to relive those times, don’t you think? We thought so too, and that’s why we organized the very first BNP Sportsfest, with the games centering on traditional Filipino games that we all loved and played in our childhood. Taguan First on our list was one of our old-time favorites – the “Taguan” (hide-and-seek). This was an ideal game because our studio is located in Le Jardin de Fleur, a compound surrounded by towering trees and other plants, so there were plenty of places to hide. The only problem was running around with our fragile bones that have not experienced proper exercise in weeks, although the thrill of hiding and slipping past detection seemed to have overpowered that as we spotted fellow staff members crawling on all fours as they slowly inch towards the “safe” base. Tumbang Preso Still on a roll from the Taguan, we proceeded to the second game on our list – the Tumbang Preso. We apparently played slightly different versions of it when we were kids, so we decided on the official rules first before choosing the “it.” The first few rounds were a bit easy because some of the staff were still trying to get the hang of the game, but after things warmed up a bit, the game started to become more challenging as the succeeding “prisoners” aggressively pursued those who tried to retrieve their slippers. Holen With all the running around starting to take its toll on us, we decided to give ourselves a chance to catch our breaths by playing a less strenuous game for the third game. This time, we chose to play with “jolen” (marbles). However, while it did give us an opportunity to recharge our batteries while preparing for the other more physically demanding games, we soon learned that it’s no less competitive than the previous games as the staff focused hard on taking the most number of marbles home. The game even came to a standstill after the last marble remained rooted to its spot despite the staff’s successive attempts to knock it out of the ring. A winner was eventually declared, though, and everyone posed for a commemorative photo showing their spoils. Patintero Feeling recharged thanks to the previous game, we moved on to team sports, picking Patintero first. Like the previous games, members of the staff proved they were serious about the whole thing by strongly defending their posts, creating several deadlocks throughout the game. However, what the players were not able to achieve through sheer speed and agility, they made up for by using feints and distraction techniques, and after a prolonged battle of wits, Team A emerged as the winner. Batuhang bola Eager to make up for losing the previous game, Team B wasted no time in attacking the opposite team, effectively eliminating three fourths of Team A in the first few throws. The agile Team A captain proved to be a difficult opponent to bring down, though, as she continued to evade one attack after another, ultimately managing to “revive” all her fellow teammates. The game continued for another round, but even with Team B successfully preventing Team A from scoring another point, the game eventually ended in Team A’s favor. Football A combination of football and baseball, this locally adapted game is played with the same rules...

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How to Make a Collage

Another year has come and passed, and to celebrate the year that was, we decided to do a collage of the things that inspired us, intrigued us, or brought a smile unto our faces in the year 2011. A collage is a compilation of random things, usually pictures, scraps of papers, ribbons, yarns, buttons, or other materials with flat or semi-flat surfaces, combined together to create a whole new piece of work. It’s very simple to do and can be quite a lot of fun too. To begin the activity, we’re going to need the following materials: Old magazines, newspapers, brochures, stationery or pictures for clipping cork board buttons stickers glue scissors paintbrush cup any other random materials that you may want to use Once we have our materials ready, we’re going to get things started by deciding on a theme. This part is actually optional, as you can just go for whatever you feel like combining together. But if you want something meaningful and memorable, you may want to pick a theme that helps you express yourself. It might be about your journey in life, the people you met, the lessons you learned, the achievements you made, your favorite things, or just about anything that’s close to your heart. Then we can start cutting the clippings that we’re going to use for the collage. They don’t have to be of a specific shape. Aside from using different cuts for the clippings, you can also rip them apart, tear them into shreds, or burn their edges to give them a more interesting look. Next, we’ll need the cork board. As the base, we can either leave it as it is, or we can also cover it with a thin layer of colored paper to serve as a background for the collage – which is what we did in this activity. When our cork board is ready to use, we’ll start pasting the clippings we’ve previously gathered together. For our inspiration board, we decided to group the colors with similar hues together to create a smooth transition. Of course, you can go wild and wacky and put clippings with random colors wherever you please. If you want to add a 3D look, also throw in some folded pieces of paper as well as some small and thin materials like yarn, buttons, ribbons, laces, leaves, or flowers. Additionally, you can add some strips of paper with text written on them such as an important day in your life, a quote from your favorite movie or book, or you and your loved ones’ names. You can also paint the collage with glue to give it a glossy look. Here’s our new inspiration board: Number of hours to complete: 4 hours Number of people in our team: 7 So that’s about it! We hope you had as much fun doing it as we did. Until next time!...

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Christmas Jingle

December at last, and just like what we promised in our last post, we’ll be sharing the product of our year-end challenge for this year. Presenting: Jingle Bells featuring BNP Design Studio! A little plugging for our baby project – Talk@tee too! Pretty neat, huh? Okay… Maybe not… Just kidding! But really..Please don’t take us seriously We were just tinkering with some drawings when the idea crossed our minds. If you want to produce a music video like this for fun, though, here’s how we did it: The Drawing Part This was probably the easiest part of our experiment. The BNP staff is mainly composed of illustrators and digital artists, so coming up with caricatures of the gang came easy, not to mention that we already have our original talk@tee characters to work with. Don’t be discouraged if drawing isn’t your forte, though. Caricatures don’t have to be visually stunning or technically accurate, so just have fun drawing what you want. The Recording Part Nope, you don’t need a recording studio and recording equipment for this. Of course it would be great if they’re readily available for your use, but in our case an electronic keyboard and a regular headset were more than enough. We just used the microphone of the headset to record our voices and the keyboard to play the sounds of the various instruments we used in the music video such as the drums, guitars, cymbals, and shaker. The Editing Part Sound editing may come across as an intimidating prospect for some, but it’s not really as difficult and complicated as it sounds unless you’re aiming for a commercial CD. It doesn’t have to be costly either as there are several decent sound editing software that you can get from the internet for free and there are also those that you can use until the trial period has expired. With some cutting here and some pasting there, you’ll be good to go. The Animating Part The complexity of the animation process would depend on what kind of animation you want to do (traditional or 3D) and how realistic you want your animated illustrations to be. Since we just wanted a simple traditionally animated video, our efforts were mostly focused on recreating multiple frames of the same illustrations with some slight alterations and combining them in a way that creates the illusion of movement. Post Production Most of the work we had to do was done during the recording and animating part, so there wasn’t much left for the post-production stage. We just combined the animated illustrations and background music together, added some credits, uploaded them on our social networking sites, crossed our fingers for luck, and that was it – mission completed.  b ^_~ d Resources If you’re curious about the programs we used for this project, you can try them out for yourself by checking the list below. Adobe Illustrator (Illustration) Adobe Audition (Sound Editing) Adobe Premiere (Animation) Macromedia Flash...

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Christmas Teaser

It’s that time of the year again, and just like last year when we did the 101 Christmas Tree Designs Challenge, we decided to push our limits one step farther by issuing another challenge to ourselves – only this time that challenge took us way outside of our comfort zones. 😀 We’d like to tell you all about it now, but we want to save it for the month of December so you can truly feel the holiday spirit behind it – and might as well  give ourselves some time to enjoy what remains of our *cough* dignity *cough* before our little experiment goes public. 😀 Until then! Keep an eye on the site for updates, alright?...

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Basic Writing in Japanese

Do you remember the time we taught you some basic words and sentences in Japanese back in January of 2011? This time we’ll teach you how to write them. Well, not exactly the same words and sentences but we’d share an overview of what we studied today for our October Creativity Workshop. For starters, the Japanese have three ways of writing. There is the Kanji, the Hiragana and the Katakana. Of the three kinds of writing mentioned, two of them – Katakana and Hiragana – are syllabaries composed of characters representing a syllable usually formed by combining a consonant and a vowel, while one – Kanji – is composed of symbols that represent a whole variety of things. Let’s take a look at these examples: Image source: www.w3.org The symbols that you can see at the first and second rows are the Kanji characters. Kanji characters are of Chinese origins and are used for words that trace its roots to the Chinese language. Say for example the word love, both Chinese and Japanese Kanji writes it as . The same goes for strength which is written in Chinese and Japanese as . They have different ways of pronouncing them though, so you might want to consider the context of the word or sentence they were used in when reading. The cursive characters that you can see on the third row, on the other hand, are Hiragana characters and they are used for native Japanese words. Say for example, you want to write Konnichiwa which means Hello in Japanese, you can write it like this  or if you want to say Ogenki desu ka which means How are you, you can write it like . Lastly, the angular characters that you can see under the Hiragana table are the Katakana characters. They are commonly used for words that have been borrowed from other languages. However, please note that loan words are written the way they are pronounced in Japanese and not the way they are spelled in their original language. Take the word soccer for instance. In Japanese it is pronounced sakka* so it is written as . This is similar with the word basketball which is pronounced as basuketboru** in Japanese and written as . Those are pretty much the basics. Of course the language is much more complex than that, but if you just want something to scribble on your notes, use as a design on your shirt, or use as a nametag to mark your lockers like we did with ours below,  learning those can be a good start. You can learn more of the Japanese language and Japanese writing systems by checking out these resources: Hiragana – contains some background information and basic rules on writing Hiragana Katakana – contains some background information and basic rules on writing Katakana Basic Kanji – contains a compilation of basic Kanji characters that you will need to learn to write more complicated Kanji later Kanji-Hiragana-Romaji Converter – features a handy tool that converts Kanji and Hiragana into Romaji (Japanese words written using the English alphabet) Japanese-English Dictionary – features an online Japanese-English/English-Japanese dictionary that provides translation for both languages as well as illustrations on how to write them. Japanese Pronunciation – provides a brief overview of Japanese pronunciation Japanese Loan Words – provides helpful tips in pronouncing Japanese loan words as well as some common examples   Notes: *There is no ‘er’ sound in Japanese, so it is replaced with an “a” sound instead. This is true for words like gemu oba (game over), pasokon (short for personal computer),...

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