First self portrait in a long while

I got a lot of things wrong, like making my hair not look terrible. I also didn’t bother to draw all the BILLIONS of little flowers on that dress. It’s a simple single layer lineart. I sketched it out first in MSPaint and then drew over that. It was such a simple pose that I actually ended up drawing this lineart from memory rather than actually looking at the initial sketch.

Hilaaaariously, the bump is about that big, (and so is my chest, I can hardly stand/sit up straight) but it feels a lot bigger.

That’s the countdown according to the pregnancy app on my phone, anyway. Dither thinks Owen is going to be punctual as a CEO and hold that trend throughout his life, while the July 9-ers hope he’ll be a week early. Then we’d have four birthdays that day, (technically) across as many families. It’d make planning easy. But honestly, I’ll just be happy if he’s not three weeks late.

CAN YOU IMAGINE?

I really need to work on hands. And I need to stop cheating at heads and faces. Shame on me.

Currently, I’m deciding whether or not to give Manuscript for the iPad a try (and review, for those who have iPads and want to know if it’s worth the $3.99/£2.49 price tag), but I hedge constantly. I still haven’t bought Power Rangers Redux. I need to fix that.

Felt like drawing today

It’s been quite a while since I last pulled out my Wacom tablet for drawing instead of simply ergonomic mouse use. I didn’t have an idea in mind when I started. I just wanted to avoid a boring static pose. So after a little flipping around through magazines and comic books, I doodled a (particularly crappy) matchstick man and got started.

I had to pause for a significant amount of time to answer the door and then mop up the bathroom. I guess I should have noticed there was a water issue. Eheh. I’m too arthritic and pregnant to mop up floors. Somehow that happened, though. Anyway.

Technically, I could have done all of the lineart on one layer, but I didn’t see a reason to push myself. The colours are really, really super-lazy airbrushing and I nearly forgot to put in my signature thing.

I went back and lightened her hair so that the ridiculousness of the lineart would show up better. I’m not all that happy with the anatomy or even the pose, but I am glad that I made both hands visible rather than hiding one of them.

Yeah, the pose is kind of crap, but at least she’s not just standing there like a lemon.

Haircut again~

My hands still hurt too much to really hold my stylus or type, but I did manage to draw a doodly picture. I might try again later.

It’s fun to draw myself in clothes I actually own. Right down to the socks, of course.

 

Another mock cover for Dismal Wild And Here

When this post goes up, I’ll be heading home from my holiday. I don’t think I have enough scheduled posts to cover the time I’ll be recovering my momentum, but I should only miss one, maybe two days. (though I really doubt it) I haven’t been able to write a lot lately, since my hands are very, very swollen, but I’m considering getting some dictation software and just moving along with it.

I’ve also had to talk myself out of restarting DWAH a couple of times. I’m hard on my beginnings. But it’s still going okay.

Photo manips are a lot of fun. I should do them more often. I also started trying to do some text effects, not too sure how that went. It feels kind of weird to look at this outside of Photoshop. Hmm.

Sketched it and then drew it

I was trying to explain the idea I had for a cover, and sort of doodled it in MS Paint.

It looks fairly ridiculous, but I wasn’t exactly trying for a final product. I had actually already decided to put together something completely different, but Dither liked this so much I started drawing it in a real graphics program.

I did end up keeping one or two of the poses, but other than that, I sort of went with the flow. Still not happy with the roof, but it doesn’t need to be that impressive.

The window and the people in the foreground are my favourites. That’s kind of funny, since I have no idea how they’ll get along together.

I need to learn colour management. Oy.

Some art for GS and also a topic that is not GS

Firstly, the art!

It’s not that exciting, I just kind of felt like drawing and this happened.

I seriously cannot draw in this style.

My biggest problem with trying to draw in the Homestuck style is that the hair is incredibly simple. I actually drew her hair twice for this, but I went with the first, more complex version because it’s closer to how I drew her hair the first time. I like the bags under her eyes.

In the spirit of resting to avoid burnout, I am not planning to do a lot today. Probably laundry. There’s always laundry.

Haven’t done my daily writing yet today. However, I did go by Buster Benson‘s blog the other day (oh all those B’s!) and found out about this cool thing he’s doing called Peabrain.

It’s a write-by-SMS “app” that keeps track of people with @ tags and topics by # tags. Sort of like Twitter, but private and isolated. In the best of ways.

I don’t think I could write a novel this way, but it would be pretty funny to keep track of short story ideas using this in the most ludicrous ways possible. Not just writing Opening Lines, but impressions and Wham lines and silliness.

Speaking of short stories, since I’ve started reading them, I have wanted to write one, but my problem with writing them still stands. I have an idea for one called Fire in Your Head, as in Let Me Be The, but I don’t know if one of the main characters being a redhead ruins the title or not.

To me, a short story has to have a strong plot, since it has to state its purpose and carry that purpose a lot more quickly and with darker lines than a novel. I have a vague idea of the characters and tone, but I’m not sure about the story.

The main character is a bounty hunter named Cattalyn Waits. She’s looking for a man who killed a bunch of prostitutes. Evidence continuously suggests that there is more to it than that. When she finally finds him, she discovers that he’s a demon hunter and the prostitutes he killed were succubi. He convinces her to join him and they fight crime. I mean demons.

So that could be cool.

Also, on a slightly unrelated note, people tend to mix up “premise” with “summary”. Which I do, and still find funny when others do so with authority.

Well apparently I had the time

This is what happens when I get left on my own. I was looking at a bunch of opencanvas things (again) and watching how people do a bunch of sketches and then finally colour stuff in. It got me wondering. I don’t have the best colouring skills, but I can learn from what I look at. Sometimes. And it seemed a shame to just leave those last sketches the way that they were.

I opened up Corel Painter 9 and did a quick lineart over the MSPaint scribbly sketches. At first, I was only going to do the front-facing girl, but then I went ahead and did the other. ‘Cause it was there. Then I took a couple of hours to paint in the leftmost with digital oils and a blender (my favourite, Just Add Water <3). By the time I had that done, I was not in the mood to do anything else.

So I picked a random conte and started in on the other one. ‘Cause it was there.

Along the way, I used my sketch-obscuring layer to catch out any paint that stayed outside the lines, and I got this nice green-y blue colour that looked good against the forecolours, so I left it in and even used it when I couldn’t decide whether to colour Spinny’s hands and feet or not.

I think the thing that took the longest was either the green coat, or when I was doing the lineart, figuring out what to do with Spinny’s hands. Not the most dynamic of poses, but then, I haven’t drawn in a long time. Not really finishing like this. With colour and… stuff.

Sketches for first week of June

Probably not going to do too many of these, but I was in a sketchy mood. Totally not in a mood to draw hands though. Definitely not fingers. Still, it turned out okay. I like messing around in MSPaint, it leaves me free to just scribble and not do anything more concrete unless I feel like it.

Daily artsy-ing?

The sketch and art bugs are both in my brain, so I went ahead and tried to do a quick digital sketch. I like colour, so I added it in.

Maybe I should have tried a more dramatic pose, but this is not bad for a quick practise.

Her name is Mykal David, seventeen years old, and daughter of a DJ. While she is hiding in a museum with a friend for kicks, her father is kidnapped. There is no apparent reason for the kidnapping, and everyone else believes he has merely abandoned her. But Mykal knows.

She is a sweet Daddy’s girl who is quickly thrown into a survival horror story with no zombies and a lot of corporate guards. These are not moral men who will capture and indefinitely detain a child. Bullets are inexpensive.

Damp Towels Cure Bullet Wounds

Try as I might, I cannot come up with a better title for this world. Maybe I’ll get lucky and just end up doing a bunch of title-less flash fictions, all under this absurd banner.

Either I mentioned it to myself in my writing session, or I brought it up in a post, I don’t recall. But lately I have been having a severe influx of ideas, and very little action to go with them. I thought that dolling a particular set of characters might help me get something more concrete. Or at least be fun.

Initially, it was just Ash and whoever that other guy is, but then I felt compelled to add to their group. I was going to add two, but the other one took up so much space will all of her hair…

All right, being fair, it wasn’t just that character’s elaborate hair design. I had already taken a long time editing the bases for Ash and The Dude, then drawing their clothes, and finally shading them, that I didn’t want to spend much more time on this set.

One of the reasons that it took so long was that I started right at the end of the day that we needed to go shopping (and early bedtime) and then continued working on it around my work schedule. So it felt like it was taking forever when it was probably just about normal.

The third character I drew actually took the shortest amount of time. I used Photoshop 7 to help me tweak the skin tone (I really hate messing with skin tone, but I almost always tweak it) and then I just did the hair in one go. Curls tend to need more complicated but technically less actual clean-up, so that went quickly.

You might notice that my palettes are better in this than in that one self portrait doll that I posted a while ago. This is because I actually bothered to make my own instead of grabbing some of my old ones. That may be why the shading took me so long on Ash herself.

That’s enough jibber jabber. Here’s the current version of the doll set:

First of all, the base set was made by wish04 on deviantart. I think it’s called Hoshi. As I said before, I did a lot of small edits, most noticeably skin tone and eyes. It was also clearly made with a feminine aspect in mind, so I had to make the dude doll bulkier and a little less elastic and hip-y.

So far, there are only three characters, but I have plans for at least one, possibly two others. The characters depicted are adults. I chose to use this base set because I used it once to provide doll caricature-ish things for a story a long time ago, and I think it covers a wide range of age groups.

The main character is not at the centre, because composition-wise, it would look very strange to have the biggest character pixel-wise on the edge. At least, it seems that way to me. I do all of this crap on instinct.

Anyway, Ash is the main character. Her name is not short for Ashley. She is what is called a superhero seed, a dormant super soldier developed by some defunct organisation.

The seeds were all found in the ruins of laboratories, and sent to foster homes and the like. So hopefully none of them will angst about not having parents. But considering that at least one of them has a habit of teleporting random distances with absolutely no warning, there are other things to whinge about.

Wow, I keep getting off-track. Um. Ash picked her name, since her real one is something lame like Cynthia King, and she has the ability to make things burst into flame.

The guy on the other side of the picture is stubbornly unnamed. I mostly think of him as “Oh that guy”, although I suppose that George, Harry, or Duke would suit him all right. Considering the fact that I have been unable to pin anything to him, I’m either going to give him the ability to make his form insubstantial or something in that theme.

Petalumeir is the girl in the centre. She is, for most intents and purposes, a little goddess. She probably comes from space. She can levitate herself and other animate and inanimate objects. She’s also blue and maybe immortal. I haven’t decided yet, I only created her a few hours ago.

Since the organisation that made these people is no longer anything but a smear on no-one’s memory, it’s almost unimportant. Ash became a vigilante in response to living on the streets and being friggin’ sick of people stealing her bed.

It’s likely that she hooks up with Teddy because she catches him using his power and thinks he could be useful. A vigilante with a gang can gain a lot of power, after all. Then Petalumeir comes to them with a mission, and they have to collect people. Villains with a similar origin to Ash and Merrick will probably surface as well.

There, that’s more story than I have been able to attach to Ash (and definitely the most I have been able to even say about Terrence) since I had her face pop into my mind.

Also, a few people who know me really well will wonder why I didn’t call this guy Sven. They might even suggest I call him Darc. (Oscar! Jonas! Hedin!) Sorry for the insanely long post, guys. m(_ _)m