A Cluster O' Goodies

So I clustered these so close together on a page of notes to a political theory class that I am just throwing them all up. The top head looks like the Ron Glass character from Firefly (they should not have axed him and Wash in the movie, damnit), only up on smack. The guy with the arrow in his head has been Kyudo'd, which is a joking rip of a recurring premise in the Teen Girl Squad spinoff of Homestar Runner, and my interest in Japanese ceremonial archery: Kyudo. The little round guy was just something that git stuck in my head when the word buoyant was stated, or something like that. And the big windup robot thing was also randomly started, but ended when I added the winding winch in the back and kept thinking of the 80s funk classic, I'll Be Your Freakazoid (Come on and Wind Me Up).

Yes, I live in a very eclectic internal universe.

A little diversion

Well, I have a bunch of things that need to be scanned in, but I have been a bit occupied. I did however, recently dig up a cd-R of unused bits of small tile-esque elements.

This one stood out. Based on the time it was done, I am guessing acrylic paint/ink, maybe screenprinting ink and/or gouache and some digital tweakery.

I have wanted to create large grids of these things, but just have not gotten around to it (like so many other projects -- such is the problem of having more ideas than there are hours in a day or arms to render them).

Electric Boogaloo

And so here is a personal favorite post-it doodle. Its a robot doing some poppin'/breakin, and like the it says in the margin, Listen to Kurtis Blow (which is classic hip-hop, yo).

Yes, I am (a) a child of the 80s, and (b) much, much cooler than you.

New GIMP on the way

So it looks like GIMP is getting ever closer to being in the same class as Photoshop and Painter. Next month, the release of 2.4 brings some new tools (including an extraction tool that bears some resemblance to Corel Knockout, only sane in usage), pressure sensitivity with the airbrush tool, and a variable method for desaturation. There has apparently been some UI cleanup, and the only thing still missing is lack of CYMK, which really only affects the professional artist doing printwork more than anything else.

I have been using it off and on for years, and at some point may (because of Adobe's onerous costs and in some cases, bad business behavior) make it my primary app. Actually, I suppose I have already in a way, since I stopped upgrading at 7.0, and have yet to see a condition which would make me want to upgrade.

Alif Baa

So I wanted to experiment with Inkscape, as an alternative to the resource hog that is Adobe Illustrator, and as a chance to try to get reacquianted with vector-based art (my numerous sojourns with Illustrator, as well as the early 90s offerings from Corel and Aldus, were never very satisfactory).

While far from wher I want to get, I think Inkscape and I might do fine. The manner by which it handles bezier curves seems sane, its potrace integration is great, and it works decently on lower powered machines; in my case a PII IBM Thinkpad.

To the left is my first stab at something. 3 letters from the Arabic alphabet that I noodled through while commuting on Amtrak.

Flaming Sprouts

And so today we have a pair of post-its. The first was a scrap done while on the phone with a co-worker (waiting for a win32 based server to finish committing seppuku) and listening to Prefab Sprout in the background, specifically the song Appetite (but the mix of focus may account for my lack of spelling). Next to it was a superhero I made up after going to Ape-Law and admiring Jon Morris, with his great absurd takes on super-heroes. This one is my Human Torch knock off, a campy Truman Capote meets Johnny Storm dweeb called Flambe.

Sometimes Ya Just Gotta Say...

...well yeah, that about sums it up.