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

Distraught week

Somehow a lot of negative things managed to pile up on this week. I concentrated too much energy on things that actually required very little, such as this week's art piece. Had some trouble with my drawing tablet. The thing seemed to have lost all my carefully laid-out appliaction-spesific hotkeys, that I spent an hour or two setting up. I made a backup file this time, which will hopefully prevent tragedies like this from occurring in the future. Anyway, about the picture. I had this vision of drawing the wooden plank acting as the "front gate" into the mine in much more detail than I actually managed. I drew this landscape with my usual blurry style, and exaggerated the effect by adding light wind filters here and there.

Scenery 2

Also, here's a special bonus picture a certain visitor drew. 

Guest 1