Manias de Geek has just written a better tutorial for the picture mixer than we have on our own site. Welcome Portuguese-speakers!

Since our shoulder tattoo picture mixer design was getting some interest, we’ve added a more powerful back tattoo design. It looks like this:

You can move your tattoo around the body and scale it as you like. Just prepare it as a “png” image with transparency, upload it, then work on placement. This way, you can get an idea of how the tattoo might look on you.

The body in the design is from the excellent makehuman project.

There’s a new Book Design added to the picture mixer. It lets you put a custom front and back on a 3D book model. If you want, you can animate the book flipping from a view of the front to a view of the back, and tell a little picture story that way - just hit the “make animation” button. Remember that after you make an animation, you can adjust its timing. It is often good to add a longish pause between the end of the animation and when it starts over again, so as not to make it too overwhelming visually.

If you are using our Picture Mixer tool to create pictures, animations, or webcam effects, but would like to change the result in some way we haven’t thought of, you can just download the design from our site and tweak it yourself in Blender, a free and open 3D graphics program. For those who haven’t used Blender before, we’ve prepared a list of tips and tutorials for getting started. It is definitely a skill worth acquiring, even if just for the fun of it!

Big site update. Where to begin? We’ve refined our mission statement on the main page. The picture mixer interface is a lot better these days, and you can now download your pictures or animations as webcam effects for use with ucanvcam. There are lots of examples of designs from users showing up. We’ve posted a call for blends to start the search for blender designers who might want to use the site to “package” their work in an attractive way. Lots of activity, and lots more to come.

You can make a slideshow of zooming images with our slideshow tool. It gives you an easy way to set up controlled Ken Burns effects, rather than the random zooms and pans of other tools. Here’s an example:

What are you going to write in that card?  Mrs. Bell has just posted a list of tips for writing sweet messages.  My favorite tip: make joyful reference to the future (”You. Me. Snuggles. Tonight.”)  Wahey!

If your message is electronic, don’t forget to check out our list of snazzy online gizmos that can help you spice it up.  And if it is for a loved one, you might want to read our checklist for love letters to make sure you’re on the right track.

Now when you make a picture or animation on our site, you can save it with a short URL, such as http://makesweet.com/test on our site itself.  This skips the step of downloading and emailing or posting elsewhere.  Just look for the “save to” option on high-resolution pictures and animations.  Enjoy!

What is in your pocketses, my precious? Today, there should be a poem, at least if you live in New York city. Poems eh? When is the last time you read one? Almost forgot that they existed? Well they do. Here’s part of one I like (Among School Children, Yeats), where he basically sums up all of philosophy:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

I like Aristotle’s approach, very solid.

Introducing our latest picture mixer, the candle.

Your picture or text appears as a label on the candle as the view rotates.