Instant Art

I've once again picked up a few shirts, and have been taking pictures to share them here.

This is one of them, a Christmas shirt from King's Hawaiian. This was the shot of the front, it has a Christmas tree with the King's Hawaiian logo on the top. Could be a Christmas sugar cookie.

Photos had done one of their “pop out” effects, and I'd been planning on using that when I posted about it.

I enjoy King's Hawaiian, and have always liked the Bing Crosby classic, Mele Kalikimaka, and it has a Hawaiian themed snow globe with a plate that says Mele Kalikimaka on the base. That's probably got a lot to do with what sold me on the shirt!!!

Today, photos offered to do a remix of a photo. This was a new one to me, I'll take a look. It's got several styles to re imagine the picture. The one that looked best to me was the drawing style, so I gave it a try. Came out pretty good!!!

That came out pretty good, I'll try another!!! This style looked nice, but it came out with an outdated Halloween theme!!! Not bad, but I feel like all it kept was my face!!!

Next I tried a 16-bit style one, it also came out pretty good!!! I noticed that it actually kept the Christmas tree, but flipped it to the other side and swapped the King's logo for a star!!!

This one was the last I tried, I feel like it kept my face pretty close, but semi cartooned the rest of me!!! And what's with the arm tattoos???

OK, that was fun!!! Let me see what else it can do... Not long ago, Sid was balled up on the perch, and I went to take a picture. Of course, he doesn't cooperate, but I got a decent picture of him peeking over the edge. Let's see...

Tried the illustration kind of look, and even not seeing his lower part it got the markings location right, but the color was off.

Since I liked the style it had done for me, I tried it as a drawing on lined paper, and once again, it came out pretty good, even though he lost his original pose for all of the generations.

Finally, I had it do it as a claymation kind of look!!! The colors are still off, but I still like the result!!!

Good times!!!

The Ridge Run

Here we go again with the Catalina vacation!!!

This is the post for the ridge tour. It was the last full day we were there. It departs from the plaza. They put surrogate in the passenger seat, or as they called it, the co pilot seat, and the younger and I were directly behind him.

We depart from the plaza, and of course we have to go around the back of town, since Crescent is pedestrian traffic only, something I didn't really even consider, since we normally are the pedestrians!!! Came out Clarissa Ave. right past Green Palace Jr., and I got a picture as we drove by. Onto Crescent to Pebbly Beach Road, past the landing.

You know what else is out a ways on Pebbly Beach Road??? Buffalo Nickel!!! We had just been there the night before.

There's a lot of the infrastructure that you don't see staying in Avalon. They've got the cargo docks, the only gas station, and the garage where they house and maintain the Catalina Island Company vehicles. Had one of those sweet Flxable buses there!!!

A little further on, there's the power plant.

Not much further on from there, we left the paved road for the dirt road up the side of the hills. Spotted a red tailed hawk perched on a tree!!!

From above, our driver and guide, Bear, pointed out the quarry near the end of the island.

While we were ascending, you could see Avalon from above!!! We were high up!!!

And there's some of the dirt road!!! Not really, with the exception of the first part of the dirt road, it was fairly flat with only gradual climb. Bear said, “one of these day, I'm going to try climbing that!!!” We encouraged him to make it that day, but as expected it didn't happen.

And there's the first we saw of the other side of the island!!! As well as the ridge road off in the distance.

And there's a couple of ravens!!!

Great view!!!

As we reached the other side, you could see clouds streaming in off the ocean and up the mountains, very cool!!!

Towards the end of the canyon that Avalon is situated in is the Wrigley Botanical Gardens, that I had been thinking I'd like to visit at some point. They moved the original pavilion that had been where the Casino now is up there, and converted it into an aviary. I didn't know, but they had also made a mausoleum that William Wrigley Jr. is buried in, that is visible at the end of the canyon in this shot.

The dark spots on the ocean are the shadows of the clouds!!!

After we passed some radio towers and the reservoir, we began our descent down the other side of the canyon towards Avalon, down Stage Coach Road.

Another shot, from above, of the Descanso Beach area... which, incidentally, we never made it out to this year!!!

Good times!!!