Heavy Metal

Here's another piece I started about a week ago and never bothered to finish it in time. It took some 4 to 6 hours to finish, with quite a bit of that time going into fiddling about with the line-art and coloring. I need to optimize those tasks somehow. Paint-bucketing uncolored areas wasn't such a hot idea after all, since it roughens the fill area edges rather crudely. One idea would be to quickly duplicate the line-art layer (or a portion of it), bucket it as normal, then merge it back onto the original line-art layer (or another duplicate) thus preserving the nice, gradual stepping that the lines often have. Anyway, this piece is a fictional WW2-era tank I wanted to try drawing. I drew it completely by hand, not using any line- or shape tools in it.

Vehicles 1

All systems 100% and feeling jolly good

Haha! So I'm finally rightfully reunited with my beloved desktop 'puter. It's amazing how faster I can get stuff done. Well, at least surfing the Net seems a lot faster! The lack of downtime updates is explained by my refusal to attempt another drawing with my laptop mouse. That was such an excersize in frustration that I felt it better to do without another such venture. This week's drawing portays my two household 'puters. I don't think I tried anything new with this one, but felt inspired to draw it nonetheless. And yes, my laptop is a bit on the aged and senile side of things.

Life 2

Technical Difficulties

My desktop computer blew up last week. A power-out occured, resulting in an electric surge that most likely fried the power supply along with the motherboard. It's been a week since I took it to the tech shop to have it repaired. Still no clue as to the true extent of the damage. I've been living in processing-power-limbo on my laptop in the mean time. Funny how doing anything with the ol' 'puter suddenly feels so slooow... I did the picture with Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI (dig the name...) and my lil' laptop mousie. I nearly lost my temper until I discovered the pen-tool and how to draw lines with it. Drawing with a low-DPI mouse is suprizingly frustrating. Here's to hoping I can get my beloved CPU back next week, hopefully in working condition.

Life 1

Schedules and such

I think I missed a deadline here... Hopefully no-one will notice since I did two pictures last week to compensate. There's not a whole lot to say about this week's piece. I want to get better at drawing faces, before I can concentrate on drawing other parts of the body. I think I got the basic outline of the face rather well this time. The eyes need more work. The hair appears to jut out from behind the ear. I think I should do a purely grayscale piece one of these days where I'll concentrate more on the face and less on everything else. Anyway, here it is.

Faces 2

Burst of Inspiration

Following up yesterdays creative work, here's a pop-artish, rather psychedelic piece. It conveys a distinct sense of disapproval, as portrayed by quite a stern-looking creature. This piece took, again, way more time than it should have. I originally intended to do something quick and fun, but I ended up fiddling with all the neat features of Photoshop Elements 6, mainly how to simulate color-range selection. Sadly I failed in my mission on how to figure out how to delete white-to-gray shades around the edges of the creature. I ended up simply blurring the creature a bit, then adjusting its colors to a more darker shade. Since Elements doesn't have nearly as much features as the "regular" version of PS, this was an experiment in ad-hoc, much as the very idea of this blog. Fun fact: the creature was originally doodled on notepad in roughly five seconds. Such was its charm that I had to scan and immortalize it to a digital medium.

Abstract 1

Holiday artistry

This is the first piece that I took my time making, taking a total of three days to make. Each day I worked on the image for about two to three hours, making the total workload 6 - 9 hrs. It's a spaceship cannon of sorts, with a revolverish barrel, power cells and a few exhaust vents. The background art was definitely the most fun part, especially coming up with humdrum descriptions and a graph related to the weapon. The fonts used in the piece are DS-Digital and Pixeldust Expanded. I initially drew a pipe-ring contraption attached to the midsection, but didn't turn out so well so I scrapped it from the finished piece rather mercilessly. I mainly learned that similar colors don't pop up quite that well with transparency. This resulted in some of the detail flourishes disappearing from the blueprint-style wiring at the back.

Weaponry 1

Barely there

Another 30 minutes or so and I'd have missed my blog-updating-schedule... *Phew* That said, it's not as easy to have a weekly update routine going, lax as though it might seem. This week's picture is an attempt at a baby seal, chilling on an iceberg (pun intended). I wanted to finally do something futuristic or weaponish, but maybe I can do that next week. I set out to do a comic-styled seal, as I can exaggerate the cuteness-factor more than I could if I'd have tried a more realistic approach. It would have also taken a lot more time, and I want to keep these attempts relatively short at the beginning (e.g. 1-3 hours or so per piece).

Animals 1