Grease Fotonovel 1978 – Tell Me More, Tell Me More

Walking past David’s Bookshop, Letchworth Garden City, this afternoon I noticed this in the secondhand books trays outside. As Grease is in my Top-Ten-Desert-Island-Movies-best-ever-feel-good-watch-over-and-over list I had to pick it up.

Published by Fotonovel Publications in 1978. It’s by Allan Carr and based on the Grease screenplay by Bronte Woodard.

Originally $2.50 with a Futura Publications sticker £1.25. Dated Christmas 1978.

I don’t know about you, but I’m hopelessly devoted. It’s the whole film from before the opening credits to Sandy and Danny flying away, including song lyrics.

What did you do this summer, Sandy?

You sure got a lot to offer a girl

I got chills

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Books and their illustrators from my childhood

Last week I saw this article in The Guardian, Writers’ favourite classic book illustrations – in pictures  and it reminded me of my childhood reading experience. We didn’t have a television during the period between me being five and twelve (ish) so I read – a lot.

I was read, and later read, the Narnia stories over and over again. I poured over Pauline Baynes’ delicate illustrations for hours. One year my nana gave me The Observers’ Book of European Costume illustrated by Pauline Baynes. (If anyone finds a copy with To Jill Love from Nana and Grandad inscribed in it it’s mine!). I’ve had a lifelong love of historical costume, and I think this was an early addition to my collection of costume books. I really like use of the two colours and the way the illustrations form a frieze. Published in 1975, the book starts at 1st century Roman and finishes at 1900 with a detailed 37-page glossary.

From Observer’s Book of European Costume illustrated by Pauline Baynes

I was going to talk about some other books and other illustrators, but I think I’ll leave it for later – so more later!

Five things I didn’t know about Photoshop last week

This weekend I studied a course on www.lynda.com called Photoshop for Designers: color by Nigel French. I love Lynda.com courses and can’t recommend them highly enough.

So five things I learned from the course, or came across as a result, that I didn’t have an inkling about already.

1. You can set up soft proofing so you see as colour-blind people would see. Apparently colour-blindness affects more people than you would think.

Soft proof. Colour in the navigator

This more useful for more graphic work, seeing where there is enough colour contrast, but interesting none the less.

2. Match colour. This is where you can map colours of one image on to another.

Before

After

Hey presto!

3. HUD colour picker. If you want to pick a colour as you go – ctrl alt  cmd click will bring up the colour picker. If you want to jump from one slider to the other press the space bar. Groovy!

4. Locking transparency. This is just a scribble, but if you lock a layer’s transparency, you can only effect pixels that aren’t transparent (so you can’t colour over the lines).

Locking transparency

5. Getting a hex number from the eyedropper tool.

Right click and the dropdown menu shows copy colour as hex number or html. These are numbers sampled from a rainbow gradient.

A rainbow of hex numbers