… and part two of the omnibus covers (increasingly uncommon) digital work.
So this “character sketch” from 2011 starts a series of digital paintings in which I implement a “hybrid” shading using pencil lines and digital color. I would not even think about doing this now, but at the time I needed a crutch to distinguish hard and soft divides in my shadows, which had been blurring into a muddy mess in the past few pieces.
When J and I joined BayLUG there was still a fairly active group of folks building Space MOCs, and the Space theme seemed to be much more popular in the community at large. One of the acronyms thrown around between the space people was SHIP or “Sufficiently Huge Investment in Parts” (I had to look that up), and this typically referred to MOCs (and perhaps not even necessarily Space MOCs) at least 100 studs in length [1].
Continue reading The Last LEGO S.H.I.P.Ten years ago in 2009 I wrote an NW post highlighting pieces that significantly influenced my drawing over the previous ten years. I don’t write about art much these days as it doesn’t change nearly as much, but I think another ten-year omnibus is appropriate.
I’m going to split out traditional and digital media because I find that variations in my digital painting are much more exploratory than progressive, while my traditional work – pencil, pen, colored pencil, even watercolor – does actually improve.
Continue reading Art Evolution Omnibus 2019Hey a post about art!
For as long as I can remember I’ve had trouble digitizing traditional media, and have thus been a bit reluctant to do a lot of colored pencil or watercolor work.
At the same time, I’ve always scanned on the family all-in-one printer/scanner, the latest of which is an HP OfficeJet Pro 8600, which is a pretty vanilla low to mid range unit. These AiOs have always been fine – or maybe even good – for scanning pencil and pen drawings because they’ve tended to wash out a lot of color. I don’t know if this attribute is specific to HP, to cheap combo devices, or to something else, but it helps when all you want to keep is dark lines.
Continue reading Canon Canoscan LiDE 300It always comes back to the noise.
I was starting to use my last build for more things than just WoWS (making WoWS videos!), and I decided that it was too loud. It’s not that it was insanely so – far from it, even at full load – but it was noisy enough to be distracting at moderate loads. Trying to quiet the machine down of course led me down the slippery slope to what is practically a new build…
Continue reading New Old Build 2019
