Big Purple Dragon over at Wordpress asked if she could use one of my pictures on one her her home-made bags. I of course said yes, and she's just let me know she's finished the bag! You can find it here:

http://bigpurpledragon.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/dragon-art-is-in-the-bag/

It's wonderful! It's so lovely seeing one of my old pictures made into something different! I think it's funny, because that particular picture is so old and the colouring on it is rather watery (I used to colour by building up translucent paintbrush strokes in PSP before I discovered how to work with opaque colours and blending), but it's one that people always seem to like! I really am tempted to draw a few more dragons - it's been years since I drew one, having moved onto furry characters in more recent times. It's about time I lived up to my avatar and did some more drago art!

I've spent a lot of today doing some art - firstly I finished off my submission for char_shuffle, which I'm pretty pleased with even if it was a hard colouring job. Then, boyed on by this success, I drew some, er, rather dubious fanart.

( Motorcycling vampire-hunting coyboy )

( I'm a bad person and the internet should be taken away from me )

I will warn you that the second image contains a nude bottom and as such may be NSFW.

I also want to stress that it is my character Lara who is totally in love with Abe and I am not to be held responsible for her actions. So there.



Do you think there's a special place in hell reserved for squeeling fangirls?

Last night I did a bit of art for char_shuffle. I won't say who my chosen one is because the whole point is that it's meant to be secret, but I had a lot of fun drawing them! I'm pleased it went as well as it did - I had an idea, and actually managed to get it put into paper for a change. I was expecting a lot of re-drawing and frustration before I got the picture looking how I wanted it to, but in actually fact I managed it first time with only a little bit of faff. I even drew stuff I've never drawn before (again won't say what in case it gives anything away - not that anyone from that community watches my blog I think!) with use of Google image search for references and it came out... okay! I think. I can't post it here until I've posted it to the community, but it'll only take me oe evening to clean and colour it so if I do that tonight it should be finished soon.

*Is pleased*

Last night I tried to do some art. Emphasis on 'tried'. I think I rubbed out my sketchings three times before I finally produced something worth inking, and that was only because it was a very basic head sketch charactr sheet. Bah!

I have decided I've forgotten how to draw. It's been probably over a year since I seriously drew anything, and when I have drawn things it's been anthropomorphic art. I was a member of furartexchange for a couple of years and it helped my drawing immensely, but while I can now draw a cute little cartoon fox with my eyes shut I can't for the life of me draw humans!

So I've joined the community char_shuffle. It's a human and humanoid-only art exchange, which will be good for me, and the art standard seems to be what I can achieve. What I've love to do is be able to draw in a kind of vaguely manga-style, but I'd need to do it well because there is so much aweful manga art out there I'd hate to be contributing to it!

I have a plethora of humanoid characters to be drawn. If I run out I can start pulling on old D&D characters as well. It's all good!

I'm going to make this my early new years resolution - more artsing! And mroe posting art on my LJ as well. :)

I've been getting urges to draw recently. I want to draw fanart - Zelda and Hellboy and many more. But I don't, because it's been so long since I drew anything and all I can remember is the fustration of it not working. When you have a very clear image in your head as to what you're trying to produce, but when you try to put that to paper it doesn't want to work. I guess I'm more analytical than abstract - I find it hard to create something off the ball (unless I'm simply doodling or creating something fun and ultimately meaningless, even if attractive, such as an exquisite corpse. Instead I want to create something precise and familiar. Hmmm. Maybe I should try and remember how satisfying it is to have a finished piece, upload it to Elfwood, watch as the comment fail to roll in.

I think I enjoy colouring more than drawing. I'm much more comfortable with a tablet and a palet of 16 bits/channel. I'd probably enjoy drawing more if I was actually capable of doing it with a tablet, but for some reason that skill eludes me.

Tomorrow we're meeting with the BBC for the first day of filming! I'm very excited, and a little bit nervous. Mostly excited, though.

( dragons )

I'm going on a hen party for a good friend of mine in August, and perhaps foolishly offered to do the T-shirts for the night. The maid of honor is not particularlty internet-savvy so asked for help, and I stepped up! She requested a picture of Lilo from Lilo and Stitch, which the bride-to-be uses as her avatar on most sites. But as we know Disney are not very keen on people using their images - I simply could not find a copy of the picture requested in a decent resolution!

So, being all resourceful, I decide to DIY it. I find a fairly decent-sized image, crop off all the excess background, print it, trace it, transfer the trace onto plain white A4 by rubbing on the reverse (remember doing that in junior school?), inked it, scanned it, and coloured in in PSPX.

( I think I did a fairly good job )

Here's hoping this is far enough removed from the original image to count as 'fanart' and hence not come with all the ikcy copyright issues that using a direct screen-grab from the movie would. Of course I'm not making money from it, I'm printing it onto a dozen T-shirts for some girls to wear while having a BBQ on the beach.

The text is just a placeholder until the MOH lets me know what she wants.

I wanted to do a few posts introducing some of my characters, with pictures and a little backstory behind each one.

Bear in mind that these are mostly characters I created when I was young - in my early teens, or probably even younger. I have always made up characters to create stories and pictures around - something that as a very young kid would probably have been called 'make believe', but instead of growing out of it the characters have stayed with me, evloved, grown up, developed history and worlds like and unlike our own. They have made friends, fallen in love, been on adventures. Often I have pretended to be these chracters, usually when I am in bed falling asleep - my sleepy mind created unique and fun scenarios for my characters, and it helps me drift off.

I want to introduce my characters in the order they were created, but I'm starting with not the very first one but the first significant one, a squirrel called Redtail. Before Red there were probably loads that were used in games and play time for my young mind - I think I remember walking round the house on all fours aged 5 or 6, pretending to be a cat called Sam. But anyway, Redtail was the first to have a backstory, and pictures drawn of her, and stayed with me for many years.

( Redtail. Created ~1992 (aged 11) )

What do you use for animation? I used to used Paint Shop Pro 7 which came bundled with Animation Shop, but since I've upgraded to PSP X I've lost that feature since it's no longer a bundle. :(

What would you recommend in the region of shareware or cheap programmes to make basic animated gifs?

Ta!

New avatar made for jam_warrior! It's his D&D bard character Mikau the Magnificent. I might get around to making more of these for the other characters as well...

I was so bad last night and ate a whole Tesco Finest chocolate fudge brownie. It was insanely tasty, but I couldn't eat it all - good thing due to the calorific content held therein. Eek.

I keep thinking I should start eating properly -cooking more meals from scratch rather than just cooking something frozen with veg. I mean, stuff with veg is good, but it's not as good as stuff cooked from fresh ingredients and veg. I should grill chicken breasts rather than oven bake a frozen keiv. Bad Flora!

I've been inspired to draw some cartoons for the WoW comics community. Thing is, while I can always picture how I want an image to look like, actually getting that down on paper can be a different matter. Guess all I can do is try! Some of the comics submitted are truely wonderful - great art, great humor. However, there's a lot in there which is meh at best, embarassing at worst. Hopefully I'll not be among those! It's been so long since I did some drawing it would be good for me as well.

I heard last night that our friends who we went camping with in Cornwall have come home early because they were bored! I find this hard to believe, but maybe there is a limit to how many times some people want to walk along cliffs and explore coves and shorelines and hills. Not me though! :) I'd love to have taken the week off and spent more time with them. Oh well.

Should go for a jog today, but I doubt very much I will because I'm bad and lazy. Boo!

I'm annoyed at myself, because once more it looks like I'm not going to be able to finish my advent art project. I simply cannot do one pic per day, even if it is crappy and drawn in 15 minutes. Over the weekends I'm often not home, and Mondays and Wednesdays I have to rehearse for singing, which means I get about an hour at home, during which time I have to eat and relax a bit.

I'm annoyed because I've let myself get three days behind, and there ain't no catching up from there. If I could do the art and post at work then I would, but my office computers aren't internetted and hence even if I spend all day making something drawn in Paint look mildly acceptable I cannot get it posted anywhere other than on my desktop. Basically I do all my computery stuff during my breaks at work and spend next to no time on the computer when I get home.

Maybe next year I'll have a differnt routine and I'll be able to get this thing finished.

Grr.

I'm at Will and Shilpa's house, so today's advent picture is drawn on a mouse in MS Paint! Keeping to my 15 minute limit effectively quadruples the crappiness of any picture I might have drawn in PSP! Hence the absolutely terrible image below. Enjoy! :D

I completely forgot about this yesterday! I was too excited putting up my Christmas decorations. The plan is to postone image for each day of advent. I'm trying to spend no longer than 15 minutes on each image, otherwise I'm going to get bored.

Today we have a craptacular reindeer!

Any more takers for advent_art?   We need to start allocating dates soon - only a couple of weeks before the start of December!

Remember, this isn't a project that's going to take up masses of yout time. You can do as little or as much as you like - if you just want to do one day, that's fine! I know that the run-up to Christmas is very busy for most people, but more artists is always good! Have a look through the old images in the community for ideas of the sort of thing you might want to submit.

(first opportunity to use my Christmas avatar! Woo!)

Hooray for having PSP back (and not having to pay for a new version!), and in celebration of this I've made myself a sexy avatar. Cooper Love!

This is something I meant to write about when doing my summery of the holiday we recently had in France, and forgot about until now.

Of the five girls that are the daughters of Jam's parents friends, Miranda (Mimi) is the strangest. On a side note, all the girls have unusual names - Pansy, Mimi, Milly, Bella and Lulu. These are all nicknames for longer, even girlier names which I usually forget.

Anyway, Mimi is I think 7 years old, and she has the most vivid imagination of any child I've ever known. She seems to spend her entire time in some kind of waking dream, which can be at times rather disturbing to us adults. For example, when she was on a canoe trip she was staring hapilly at the water with her oar dipped in, watching the waves undulate over the surface. When asked what she was doing she replied 'I'm watching the pink dragons'.

Her art is similarly bizarre and absolutely wonderful - she draws better than many adults I know, and is obviously heavily influenced by watching Japanese cartoons (mostly Ghibli, bless her). You can tell this by the expressions on the faces of her creations, with smiling eyes drawn very manga-esque.

She draws very odd scenarios, usually with a sinister twist. For example, the classic picture of a princess in a castle, but outside the window you can very clearly see a young girl, smiling, tied up with rope. "It's the garden dungeon", apparently.

After a game of hiding under the sofa with her younger sister she draw in very accurate 3D a picture of the sofa monster, complete with claws on the arms and gnashing teeth. You can just see the figure of a girl who's disappeared underneath.

A whole notebook was filled with these wonderful pictures and I meant to bring it back, scan them and show them to the world because they really are brilliant. They reminded me of Spike Milligan pictures, or illustrations to accompany bizarre and frightning short stories or poetry (anyone read 'The Boy Who Kicked Pigs' by Tom Baker?). Sadly I forgot, but I'm sure it won't be long until we head off to France again and next time I'll try and remember to bring some of her strange, strange creations back with me.

For those of you who are artistic types, have any of you ever used watermarks? I'm talking a personal logo or text stamped over the image when posting online, rather than digital embedded watermarks.

If so, how do you do them? I messed around for a while trying to make a transparent image that could be overlayed onto any picture, but it just didn't want to save. Do you have to make an opaque logo and make it transparent each time you use it, or do you save a transparent file? I've never had much luck trying to save transparent files - they tend to go manky as soon as you merge layers.

Bear in mind I use PSP, so any Photoshop-specific talk is going to confuse me.

Lookee - new avatar! I've using currently 14 out of 42, so I figure I need some more! This was the product of an hour messing about in Paint Shop Pro's animation studio. Behold its crappiness! It actually scares me how much of a bad animation it is, but this is the first time I've ever tried to make anything! I was impressed at how easy the programme was to use - I had to combine it with the main PSP programme, but I figure you're probably meant to do that (otherwise you can't use such things as layers, and layers makes animating a gazillion times easier).

This was a rushed job. I like to think that if I put my mind (and a bit more effort into it) that I could actually make a dragon look like he's flying, not being pushed across the screen by a five year old.

But, hey, flying dragon!

Oh, and I've got a interview with the Health Protection Agency on Wednesday! Soon, all your blood sample are belong to me! Ha ha.

I've been neglecting my livejournal lately, which is very bad.

I've joined a website called meetup.com, which lists people interested in different things and brings them together to form groups and societies. I figured it was a good place to find possible D&D players in Bristol, and lo and behold I found some! Three guys currently undertaking a campaign would be interested in having me and Jam join them! Woo! I played a bit of D&D back when I was in college, but that was only for a few months and I took over an NPC without really knowing what I was doing. Slowly I learned all the fun little rules and peculiarities of the game; THAC0, critical misses and hits, and the awesomeness that is playing a dwarf. It was an absolutely brilliant way to spend a weekend, even if I wasn't all that good at it back then. It would be excellent to get back into an ongoing campaign and learn how to play it properly this time.

I found out just too late that Belle and Sebastian are playing the Colston Hall, and missed out on tickets. Well, there were stall tickets left but I really don't think it's worth paying to sit down and see a band unless it's an entirely seated gig. At the R.E.M. concert I was seated and was longing to be down there dancing and getting crushed in the crowd. It just wasn't right seeing the band from such a distance, unable to really get into the music. I might as well have bought the DVD and watched it at home.

Anyway, this has prompted me to sign up to as many mailing lists as I can, to make sure I don't miss out on tours again. I'm eagerly awaiting B&S, Snowpatrol, and Idlewild. Embrace, as it turns out, have just announced a forest tour, and are playing several outdoor gigs this June. I have very excitedly bought tickets to see them in Westonbirt Arboretum, which should be totally amazing! I'm imagining lights strung in the trees, chairs set out for an intimate school-concert type gig which maybe a couple of hundred fans. Eeeee!

I went to Hobbycraft at Cribbs Causeway today to buy fun stuff. Eyes and noses for stuffed toys and some mesh for mask-making. I've started making plushies again and forgotten how much fun it is! It's going to be a really good way to use up all the fabric scraps I've got lying about. If I get the time I might start taking requests for things to see what I can make - dragons, gryphons and the like. I'd have to ask for some money to cover postage, but otherwise it would be a gift! It would be fun just to get me some practice, as well as expanding my library of creatures I can make. Watch this space!

Also went to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at Bristol Museum. It was pretty awesome, but way way too busy. We happened to pick 'family fun day' to go and visit, and hence there were an awful lot of small children and prams around. Still, some of the photographs were absolutely excellent, and very inspiring! I want to go out there and shoot stuff, but right now it's too damned cold and wet.