my third try at pens

[cody michael]

this is pen 4 and 5. very happy with how they turned out. and a letter opener. opinions?

anyway to make pics bigger and still be able to upload them? how do you imbed pictures in the post?

[John Keeton]

Cody, those look like nice pens, but you are right on the pics - hard to see them. Looks like you have a large file, but the dimensions are small - high resolution.

I use Adobe Photoshop Elements to crop, resize, and sometimes lighten or increase the contrast in my pics for posting. When I bring the pic into PE, I usually use the automatic contrast enhancement (my photo skills are minimal), and then resize to 10"x7.5" at 72 ppi. I save them as a "medium size" file (8 on the scale of 12) and that usually gives me a pic of around 100 KB depending on whether it is a light pic. I rename them at that point for upload. I do all the pics for a post prior to making the post.

On imbedding them throughout a post, upload all your pics, and then when you get the text of the post done, click on the down arrow next to the paper clip, and click the pic you want to imbed at the location where your cursor is. Then you can continue the text until the next pic and so on. I you don't do this, they all end up lined up at the end of the post.

[Rob Young]

While I'm not a big fan of the "wasp waist" style of slimline I think you did a pretty nifty job with the orange and black one.

For what its worth, the BMP you posted wouldn't view inside the forum, I had to download the image and then view it.

There are some nice, inexpensive photo editors out there. I believe InfranView is still around and can do some basic resizing and format conversion. GIMP is also very good at this stuff but might be a bit overkill if all you want is to resize.

Posting your images as JPG instead of BMP gets you more bang for the byte as far as web viewable images go.

Good luck and keep practicing, you are doing great!

[Bernie Weishapl]

Those are some nice looking pens. Pic's needs to be bigger.

[Rob Young]

Cody -

I forgot to mention in my post, if you like the idea of a "big small pen" and are trying to do it with Slimlines, consider getting some Comfort style pens. Wood-n-Whimsies and others sell them. Same Cross refill as Slimlines but a larger center band and the option for cutting a tenon at the nib end to allow a rubber sleeve. You can just as easily skip the rubber sleeve.

Another option is to make your own Comfort pens by making the center band yourself. I've experimented a little bit with making them out of contrasting wood or acrylic and it does work.

[Steve Schlumpf]

Nice looking pens Cody!

Here is a tutorial on how to post images: http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=25115

Let me know if you have any questions.