My experiences with this so far...

[markem]

Went to Texas Art Supplies store and found that they have leads for a number of mechanical pencils. Got three different company's 4B lead. All of them work in my Staedler pencil and they all seem to be the same in quality. What I find very interesting is how you get the lead out of the container. It has been a long time since I last bought leads and it used to be that the lead came in a tube. You just opened the tube and slid out your lead. Now all of these containers have a push area which causes the leads to come out of the container a short distance, you pick your lead, and pull it out. Nice - but the tube was probably just as good.

I was looking at the site and saw the basic layouts for characters that others have provided. They are very very nice. I was reading up on how different people approached making figures. I do not own a light box so mine are going to be more...er....basic? In any event - working on some general images. I hope to upload some really bad drawings soon. :-)

[squirmydad]

Looking forward to them.

[WackyAnne]

I don't own a lightbox either, but I do have airmail/onionskin/tracing paper which I'll be using. Just need to get my scanner back up & running - my littlest one ran away with an ink cartridge and hid it we know not where. Have to replace that before the machine will do anything other than complain

[squirmydad]

Onion skin and tracing paper were what we required to use in my scenic design class for all of our plan drawing and elevations so we could do overlay presentations. No need for a lightbox, they do help though.

[cowboyleland]

I've often used a sunny window. Also, a hard screen (like an old TV) can be a useful aid to tracing, but I do my tracing in gimp and I was glad to hear that Sir Kev does the same, so I'm not totally crazy (or at least that technique isn't.

[bravesirkevin]

Sept 18, 2013 16:30:13 GMT -9 cowboyleland said:

I've often used a sunny window. Also, a hard screen (like an old TV) can be a useful aid to tracing, but I do my tracing in gimp and I was glad to hear that Sir Kev does the same, so I'm not totally crazy (or at least that technique isn't.

Actually I use a whole mix of techniques including tracing elements in Photoshop with the brush tool or the pen tool. Technique I use most commonly is something like what I've detailed below (copy/pasted from this thread on Giant in the Playground) with the prologue of creating a blue-line either with a non-photo-blue pencil or by setting up a digital rough and converting it to print in light cyan.

Today I read that if you're using a scanner, you can use red lead in much the same way as blue by applying a filter or something (I'm kind of sketchy on this point) in Photoshop.

The technique is pretty straight-forward:
1. Scan your artwork. Do this in full colour. This should automatically make it RGB, but if you have a fancy scanner you might have to tell it to choose RGB over CMYK.


2. Go to the channels pallette. Select the Blue Channel (if you used a blue pencil. Red for a red or pink or yellow pencil)


3. Select Grayscale from the Mode submenu under Image. Say yes when it asks if you'd like to discard the other channels.


4. You're done! You can apply Levels and other filters to get the image looking as clean as you want it to. If you mean to colour it after, be sure to switch back to RGB again first.


This technique will also help you out with the trouble you have with inking. You can scan your original drawing, convert it to blue and print it out. You then ink the blue line print out and scan it back in and clean it up using this technique.

[WackyAnne]

Sept 18, 2013 16:30:13 GMT -9 cowboyleland said:

I've often used a sunny window. Also, a hard screen (like an old TV) can be a useful aid to tracing, but I do my tracing in gimp and I was glad to hear that Sir Kev does the same, so I'm not totally crazy (or at least that technique isn't.

You know, it only occurred to me today to use a sunny window. That's because I was making paper minis on the fly on a picnic with my son. But that's a whole other thread!

[cowboyleland]

I confess my favourite paper minis ever were A frames made on the fly when the DM had forgotten the ones he had prepared. Each player drew an "Order of the Stick" version of their character and we all smiled all night long.

[markem]

Ok - after weeks of trying to find my bag with my pencils in it, finally finding it, having to go buy leads for the Staehler pencil, drawing until my eyes were red and tonight going to go see the Empire of the Sun concert (left left in the middle of it. It wasn't bad but we had had to stand for over two hours before they started and a bunch of teenagers rushed the crowd when the concert began and almost knocked me an several others down. I had my ear plugs in but all I could really hear was the BOOM-BOOM-DA-BOOM! of the the drums. Couldn't hear a word he was singing and barely could hear the guitars. I decided I'd just stick to listening to the videos and mp3 recordings. They are a lot nicer.)

Anyway! Today I managed to draw (partially) my plant man. So I just got home (12:04am) and brought up Visio and did a better rendention of him. He is without hands or feet and does not have the leaves on yet - but it is a start. I'm thinking of transferring him over to Illustrator so I can upload the line art so everyone can use it. Criticism is welcome as I have already said - my drawing capabilities has badly deteriorated over the past thirty years doing just computer programming from dawn until dusk. When you can only test your programs at 3:00am until 5:00am because that is the only time all of the astronauts are asleep and you are still expected to work a full 40 hour work week - something has to give so you can sleep. So I gave up playing the guitar, drawing, and a lot of other things I liked to do. Only in the past ten years that I started playing D&D again. Now I'm back to playing games on Saturday with friends and playing D&D during the week with other friends. I also referee my ruleset (Simulacron I). It is something like Talislanta only there are some large differences in various areas. (I only recently found out about Talislanta. Like two weeks ago.)

Anyway - here is a start on my plant man. :-)



I still have to put his hands and feet and leaves.  This isn't exactly like what I drew at work but it is close.  The drawing has more of a pronuonced face and the body is a bit more indented.  Like I said - just got home and am doing the visio version from memory of what I drew at work today.  At least the body and head are in porportion.  They weren't last week!  You should have seen some of the images I've been drawing!  But today things seemed to pop into place more.  I think a few more weeks of drawing and I may actually be able to make something better than what probably looks like a set of pipes put together.    I am soooooo tired from standing for three hours (and I only got a few hours of sleep yesterday.  I went to bed early but woke up around 2:00am.  I think I was just so excited to go see Empire of the Sun I just couldn't sleep.  Anyway, I am going to begin modifying this tomorrow and try to make it look more natural, get the hands and feet done, make the body a bit more angular, and maybe make the head more indented so it looks more like bamboo.

Heh.  Last night my wife was going "Whatcha doin?"  Me: "I'm relearning how to draw."  Her:"Let me see."  Me:  I show her.  Her:"I'm guessing you have a ways to go yet don't you?"  Me: Just looks at her with that look you give people who are telling you something you already know.  Her:"They really are nice."  Me: Closing the sketch book. "It is alright to say they are bad.  I know they are bad.  The people at work know they are bad.  Everyone knows they are bad.  But I am getting better."  Her: She doesn't say anything.  Just gives me the look as if to say "I think it might take a few decades to improve."  Me: I sigh and put up the sketch book for another night.  It is still sitting on the staircase which leads up to the computer room (and cat room).  Tomorrow I will take it back down, sharpen the 4B lead, and start again.  Unfortunately for me - the only sketch book I have really is a Watercolor sketch book.  What can I say?  The texture allows me to practice my control with the pencil.  It gets stuck in the grooves and I have to be careful not to puncture the paper or rip it but to also not allow the pencil to become stuck and pop out of the grooves thus messing up the image.  I do practice on plain paper also.  I have lots of copier paper.  It is what I use to print things on so I have reams of it sitting around.  But I like the sketch book because it is a challenge.  I practice curved lines, straight lines, boxes, circles, triangles, eyes, lips, teeth, fingers, hair, ground, trees, clouds, or just about anything that I see on TV.  Started a Zeba (spelling?) drawing just by looking at NCIS the other night.  It was coming along nicely until the show was over.  Have an ok facial outline.  We watched Dexter and I did the same thing for Dexter's sister.

In 4th grade in San Antonio I had a lady named Ms. Westberry.  We did art one day.  Everyone else did finger painting more or less.  I used a pencil to draw Ms. Westberry's feet, legs, waist, and stool.  Unfortunately, class was over by then and I had to be graded on my art - such as it was.  Got an A+ for it but never finished it.  Oh well - I'm rambling and it is now 12:32am.  Need to feed the cats, take my meds, and get to bed.  I'll try to spruce up the bamboo man tomorrow and re-upload him.  He will look a lot better then I'm hoping. 

Goodnight guys and gals!

[markem]

Something a little less stilted perhaps?


Still working on it.

[markem]

Ok - you know you are out classed when an elephant can paint better than you can draw!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNogdpHeuiE

[markem]

Well, it has been a very busy week here at work. And of course the week would not be a week without something happening to my computer. My monitor died. Ordered a new one. It will be here next week.  Been practicing my poses as stick figures. I've gotten them much more relaxed. Found my Tooya Pro graphics tablet, began working with Photoshop to get used to using it. Came home two days ago and the monitor had these really strange looking bands on it which moved. Very thin lines really. Yesterday I went upstairs and the monitor had a black screen and was making this...er...weeping sound? Sort of like "eep........eep...." like some kind of small animal. A bit freaky. I tried several things to see if it would start working again but no. So I tried turning it off and - it wouldn't turn off. So I wound up just unplugging it. I have a friend who's an electrician who takes dead monitors, fixes them, and then sells them to make some money. I'm going to give it to him to fix and sell. The monitor is about 13 years old anyway so it was time to get a new one. I found a 22" monitor at TigerDirect.com for $99.00 ($117.00 with S&H). So I ordered it. It should be here early next week. Bummer.

On the bright side - I may be able to scan in some drawings on my graphics computer laptop. It doesn't have a monitor other than the LCD screen for the laptop. Anyway, I'm going to see about uploading something over the weekend if I can.

My main thrust at home is still trying to scan in all of these books and convert them to a digital library. I just finished a huge number of Apple ][ computer books and found out that one of the programs I have been using was doing something I'm glad I caught. I scan in the books which go directly in to a PDF file (because that is just what the Fujitsu SC1500 scanner does with the images). I then have to extract the PNG files, rotate them however they need to be rotated, reorder them if the pages were out of order in some way/shape/form, renumber the pages, and then re-create the PDF file. For some reason on this one manual it extracted pages 1, 2, and 3 and then the next 36 pages were just page #3 over and over again. I'm glad I caught that. Don't know why it did it. I also upgraded the graphics computer's (the one used to do the books and which has two other scanners attached to it via USB) memory from 2GB to 4GB and now it runs even slower than it used to. Yeah - what can I say? My life is just weird sometimes.

And to top off the week - my wife decided to work until midnight on Monday and Wednesday she came back down with pneumonia. So more antibiotics and steroids. I keep telling here she needs to take it easy and she keeps pushing it. She had to stay home yesterday because she had a fever. Pneumonia is one of those things that once you have it - you have to take it easy for three to six months. Any kind of exertion can cause a relapse. Her being a teacher is enough stress to bring it on. But staying at work until midnight is a great way to cause a relapse.

[markem]

Just a quick stop by. Long weekend filled with going to friend's houses to play games, being chased by another driver at 2:00am for reasons I will not go in to right now, trying to get some time to do some sketches so I could post them and looking on line for ideas that might match what I am trying to do so I could see their anatomical layouts. I found two. The first one here:

luisxolavarria.deviantart.com/art/Plantman-re-imagined-281308524

is very interesting but is not what I am trying to do. The second one though - here:

www.toplessrobot.com/2008/09/the_10_least_terrifying_justice_league_villains.php

down where the "Plant Master" is - is similar to what I am trying to do. I downloaded Plant Master, put him in to Photoshop, dismembered him, and played around with him for a while. Although he has leaves instead of ivy leaves, and a strange looking head - he is basically what I am working on drawing. Sorry for not posting sketches but just too much went on again this past weekend. Maybe in a day or two I will have something to post. Seems like every time I sit down to do any kind of sketching at all someone is calling asking for help, or to get together, or one of my family members needs me to help somehow. What can I say?

[markem]

Ok - as I said - when I get the time I would do a new sketch to show how I am coming along. I just finished this one.


It is a bit better and I used the Plant Master image to start from.  Time for bed.  If I can, I will upload another one tomorrow night.  I want to twist the body so it is facing sideways.  I'll do a stick figure to show what I mean as I struggle to get the porportions correct. 

[markem]

Well - as fate would have it - the you-know-what has hit the fan. Since my last upload our lawyer called me in to say he was dumping our case. He no longer feels that there is any money to be made handling the case (even though we finally got an expert mold person to come out and he gave us an estimate at $112,000.00 worth of damage). Then my wife went into the hospital. Her white blood cell count had gone up to 16,000 (normal is around 10,000). Then it went up to 17,000. The doctors gave her antibiotics 24/7 and I am glad to say that it is down to 14,000. So not out of the woods yet but getting there. This past week I got sick and was home for the past few days sleeping a lot. I'm back up and around now. No word yet on when my wife is going to be coming home. I also spent the last week doing a ton of scanning to get all of the legal papers into my computer as PDF documents. I've still got to go in and remove the blank pages (ie: the backs of the pages) and to then change them into searchable PDFs. My former lawyer could have done this for me since everything is on Lexus-Nexus and he had it on his computer - but instead he just gave me all of the paperwork. When I asked him about it he said "Oh yeah. That probably would have been a lot easier on you." Duhh.....

So now I have to finish up with the paperwork, read through everything, write up my case (or cause - as lawyers call it) and submit it to the courts.

So it has been a typical couple of weeks for me where everything that can go wrong - does and I wind up handling everything with no time left over to any kind of relaxing, enjoyable stuff like drawing. Ugh. I'll try to get something posted this week - but don't hold your breath. As I said - I have a lot of extracting from PDFs, removal of blank pages, searching online for legal precedents to what has happened to us, writing up the court case, probably will have to go to the court to talk to the judge about the case, continue scanning in books, been working on my new game I'm making, trying to write some PHP scripts to do some graphical images I'm planning on using in my online game I've been working on, finish up the automated spell book creation program for people who play RPG games with a referee, and check in on my wife, maybe drive the 100 miles out to my mom's house to say hi (I bought her a tablet computer so she won't be bored and I am setting that up for her), an maybe find some time to sleep, eat, and do other normal things.

Should I have a mental breakdown now - or after the trial?

Anyway - talk to everyone later!  Gotta go.  I was supposed to be at a friend's house an hour ago to help him with a computer problem.  Gotta run!

[WackyAnne]

Wow. That is a lot to hit you all at once. I'm very sorry that you and your wife are in that situation, especially since you are having to go at it more or less alone. I hope things improve, and soon. I've been in situations where it seems like it's all going to hell in hand-basket all-at-once, so I can sympathize. In the meanwhile, take time to eat and rest right (tho' resting at home doesn't sound like it's a good thing). The more stress you deal with, the more it can affect your health. Although over on the Fat Dragon forums, someone linked a TED Talk about stress actually being a good thing, _if_ you think of it as such. Here it is, maybe it will help you: www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend.html

[markem]

Hey WackyAnne! Thanks for the link!

Well, my wife is out of the hospital only now she has lymphedema in a bad way (swelling of arms and legs). We are wrapping her legs every day and washing the bandages in Chlorox every night. Her insurance, after about a month and a half of this, has said enough is enough and that they are not going to pay for any more of her going to the clinic to get her legs wrapped. We made it through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years by staying at home for most of it. Presents were minimal. Four DVDs for my wife and some after shave for me. We got my mom and younger brother $20.00 Olive Garden cards. Thanksgiving was weird in that our families went to Ryan's. Ryan's decided to not let my younger brother have a large enough table for everyone because we were 15 minutes late getting there so we had to sit at separate tables. At Christmas, my mom (who has Alzheimer's) decided she was not going to come and meet us so we wound up waiting three hours for my younger brother to convince her to come. So kind-of a weird Christmas. And then New Years Eve some nut decided to do spinouts up and down our road. I called the cops on them and before the cops arrived they took off. I have to assume they have a police band radio so they knew the cops were on their way.

On the positive side - I finished creating my second game. My problem with making games is that I am slowly finding people who can produce things for me at reasonable costs. You need that in order to do prototypes. My first game was Maze'd - Quest for the Crown which everyone who played it loved it but it was very hard to produce because I did all of the production by hand. I used peel and stick tile for the backing of the pieces. So imaging just how hard it was to cut that stuff by hand. For my second game (Trains & Tressels - The Lands of OxiDiHydride) I finally found someone who can produce the chipboard pieces. The printing of the pieces is really good but the cutting of the pieces is just ok. Some corners are not flat and the back of a blank piece has a major crease on it (but it is just a blank chip). Still - the pieces look very nice. I'm thinking of re-printing the Maze'd pieces using this company. All of the other company's I have talked with want something like $15,000.00 to print 1,000 games whereas this person only asks $4.00 per 8.5x11 sheet. Quite a bit of a difference. Maze'd takes six sheets and Trains takes three sheets. So the cost would be $24.00 and $12.00 just to print the pieces. It is also $4.00 for the box and $10.00 to print the board on a per game basis. So total cost is $38.00 for Maze'd and $26.00 for Trains. I'm going to be at Owlcon this year to demonstrate and have people play the two games as well as take orders for the games.

I haven't had time to pick up a pencil to draw anything since last I wrote. My contract at the Houston Chronicle ended at the end of November so I have been out looking for a new job. I start one next week. Maybe I will have some time at the new job to go back to trying to get the figure to look how I wanted it to look. I finally decided on the pose. So now all I have to do is to actually get the drawing done, clean it up, and then post it. Yeah - and finish reading through the legal papers from the Sears case as well as work on the new case against Liberty Mutual. Blech....

Oh well - off to bed. I have a lot to do tomorrow as well as talk with two other recruiters and let them know I am not going to be available for work again. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Years.

PS: Lymphedema is directly related to having mold in your house as is asthma, nasal bleeding, conjestion, and other respiratory problems.  Bad stuff this mold.

[colonelshofer]

Thoughts are with you all, bud.

CS