Category Archives: Uncategorized

gems

Peggy
September 7, 2024

so today I got stoned and saw the results of someone doing a gemstone tutorial on the front page of furaffinity, and I decided that trying to replicate it procedurally in illustrator sounded like fun

this isn’t a direct reproduction, I went off in my own direction after a little while, but each of these gems is drawn entirely with one graphic style, overlaid on itself

they’ve all got the same underlying paths, they just have different stacks of appearances applied to them

I ended up making three variations of these styles, with different amounts of sparkle; this one combines some of them. Same paths though.

Then I used these styles to draw a horny witch and her fox spirit friend. I tried organizing my work on this one via grouping stuff instead of layering, and I’m still not a fan. Really I think the one thing layerers have is that they can select an entire group with one click on the canvas and I have to do a fiddlier thing to select a whole layer. A select tool that selected the entire layer containing it would be useful here.

 

I might post the source to this on Patreon later. It uses a lot of Astute effects so I dunno how useful that is. I gotta take a cat to the vet now though, Peebs is having trouble peebing.

edit. Back from the vet. Peebs is going on a diet for cats who have peeing problems. Whee! Also the source file is on Patreon now.

thoughts on a facebook timeline full of photographs of hurricanes

Peggy
August 30, 2024

Nineteen years ago today I was sitting in a car with my mother and one of her friends driving around the Gulf South wondering if there would be a New Orleans to come back to.

I’d just gotten off a plane from the West Coast a few days ago, all my stuff was in a container in a warehouse that ended up being completely flooded and ruined (not that I knew that until a few weeks later). I was planning to stay with my mom for a while and figure out what to do with myself now that I’d given up on the animation industry.

It all worked out okay for me I guess, not too long after I was on a plane to Boston to go live with some friends, one of whom is now my husband. It was pretty traumatic for a while. And the city’s still barely recovered. I made it back here again after fourteen years of increasing seasonal depression in Boston and Seattle, but a lot of people still haven’t.

It’s raining outside. I should go get some brunch.

I feel like I should have some coherent story to tell here. I don’t want to spend the day digging through the chaos of my memories of the aftermath of Katrina and trying to find one though.

horny doodling (NSFW)

Peggy
August 26, 2024

I was looking for something else and I found the figure that became this in a Horny Peggy Doodles file from 2016. I decided to throw some of my 2024 coloring methods on it; an hour later it had just sort of turned into genie/potgirl/modular weirdness.

I have a whole lot of files full of horny doodles of my fursona in these sorts of situations. Sometimes they get finished. A lot of them just stay doodles.

SKELEBOAT

Peggy
August 26, 2024

Tonight I went out to have some pizza with Nick. I started doodling and this came out.

Then I looked at it and started humming “Sailing, Sailing over the bounding main” in a derpy voice, and it made me giggle, and we came up with Skeleboat’s backstory:

Skeleboat comes off as an affable moron but he is actually very intelligent. He just finds that people are a lot less likely to run away screaming from the bones of a forgotten Titan, fashioned into an immense, impossible boat, with a full-sized frigate perched atop its gargantuan hat, if he affects the tones of someone whose role in life is to be comic relief.

I do not know what Skeleboat’s name is. If I do a 3×4′ painting of Skeleboat, hang it in a gallery, and get asked to pitch a show based on Skeleboat, then I will hit the books and either find the name of an obscure Titan to borrow, or come up with a terrible pun in Ancient Greek and/or Latin. Or if I have a dream in which the Muses come to me bearing a scroll upon which Skeleboat’s true name is meticulously calligraphed in letters of gold, then hey, I have a dream journal next to the bed, I’ll write it down.

He may be a character in “The Hentadekaion of Prometheus”, aka “Prome’s Eleven”, a heist story set in Greek mythology that Nick and I have kicked around forever.

 

Anyway. Say hi to Skeleboat.

ok, grandpa vs. ok, great-grandpa

Peggy
August 19, 2024

Today I decided I wanted to recontectualize the American presidents of my lifetime in terms of intergenerational power struggle. Once I had a few data points I started to notice that there was a distinct cluster starting to emerge around the span of years that is disputed boomer/genx territory, so I decided to pull out the graph I did of that sort of thing a while back (you can see the full chart here) and plot some points on it. And then I decided to plot some failed bids – I skipped everyone who failed to turn their opponent into a one-term president, sorry guys.

This definitely confirms my initial suspicion that the Republicans generally like much older candidates than the Democrats. With the exception of Hillary and Biden, every Democrat candidate is 10-20 years younger than their Republican counterpart.

Does the clustering of presidents around the years that different demographers claim for different generations mean anything? I dunno. Does the concept of a “generation” even mean anything, or is it just a bunch of bullshit dreamt up by assholes who want to sell you useless shit? I dunno. I’m just plotting numbers on a timeline here.

Part of me wants to rework this with the years people were elected instead of their numbers in the list of presidents, and insert the rest of the losing candidates. But most of me wants to get some lunch and some cat food and work on finishing the roughs for the next part of No Pizza On Luna.

 

Peggy
August 12, 2024

So this morning I got some email from Patreon: Apple has made it very clear that they do not like the per-creation model that I’ve been using since opening up a Patreon campaign back in the first year it was possible, and that continuing to have it as an option is incompatible with Patreon continuing to have an iOS app.

Because Patreon is very much A Corporation now their example of a post I might make about this says nothing about this coming down from above, but positions it as entirely a change I’m making “both for the consistency it provides to members and us, and the flexibility to consider other benefits we can provide that aren’t tied to the number of paid posts we make”. They made it a lot more clear in the message they sent to me, and whoever else is still using the per-creation model that they’ve been trying to get rid of for a while:

Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024. This means that starting in November, new memberships purchased in the iOS app will be subject to Apple’s 30% App Store fee.

You’re currently on a per-creation billing model, but Apple’s in-app purchase system only supports subscription billing. Apple has made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.

So, starting in November, your fans in the iOS app won’t be able to purchase subscriptions to your membership until you switch to subscription billing. And, as a result of Apple’s mandates and in order to make sure that you can continue getting new members in the iOS app, we’ve started a 16-month-long migration process to bring all creators onto subscription billing by November 2025. This means that your current billing model will be discontinued in November 2025.

Bold is theirs.

I guess it’s time to start figuring out how my tiers should look, then.

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A Visit With Future Me

Peggy
August 8, 2024

(This is an eight megabyte animgif, give it a moment to load.)

“Visit your perfect, wise, future self,” the guided mediation said. And I got this.

The next morning I decided to doodle the image in Illustrator. And then a little voice in my head suggested doodling it again in Moho, the animation program I’ve been playing with lately. I did. And then I set it up for animation, put a little breathing cycle on it, and started playing with various rendering effects. I spent about three hours here but once I get the hang of this thing it’ll probably be more like a half hour to do a little “living photo” cycle like this again, and that’s pretty cool.

shitportraits

Peggy
June 28, 2024

So this week I had a really stupid idea.

Richard Feynman, 45min.

Fuck around with refining my automatic lighting methods, and get better at drawing humans after several decades of mostly drawing furries, by plopping a photo of some Famous Person into Illustrator and working over it.

Jim Belushi, 1h

Then slap on a quote from someone else who is vaguely related, and attribute it to a third person. Post it and say it’s yet another person. Ideally these people are just close enough in most people’s conceptual catalogs to be really annoying.

Beyonce, 1:20

And declare it “finished” in a half an hour.

You will note that the times quoted for these are nowhere near a half an hour. Bill Murray had like a half an hour of expanding the lighting system I’m playing with in these as part of his time, and some work lost to a crash near the end. Margot Robbie had an entire half hour figuring out how to make Illustrator do the hair curls for me in a way that looked good but didn’t become absolutely the most important thing in the drawing due to having too much detail. Before I did her I also spent a half hour expanding the lighting system in another file; now I can easily build a set of styles that let me draw a simple shape and have it automatically lit and shaded in multiple directions.

I am not 100% happy with how the lighting system is working out but it’s definitely going somewhere, Illustrator is generating a lot of paths and effects for me here. If I’d painted all the lighting by hand there would be 2-3x more shapes visible in these outline views, with a corresponding increase in the time I’d spent.

If you would like to play with it, here it is.

lighting system.ai

The intended use is to use the ‘lighting’ Graphic Styles as parts of other styles – bring these into a new file, pick a direction of lighting, turn off the other lights/shadows, and add more fills at the bottom of the appearance stack with the colors of your actual subject. Tweak the lighting color by changing the global swatches, and possibly by reworking the associated gradients. Apply the individual light/shadow styles to entire layers to add bigger chunks of light. If you’ve got the Astute Graphics plugins then make liberal use of the Opacity Brush to clean up edges on overlapping lit shapes. If you don’t then I guess you get to manually make a bunch of opacity masks or something. There’s a bunch of refinements I’d like to make to this system but I’m really not in the mood to spend a half an hour changing all these styles right now.

Once I get a few more styles together for various kinds of hair, I should be able to get a lot closer to doing one of these in a half an hour, and that’ll be nice. If I’d left Robbie’s hair as a simple flat abstraction like I did for Einstein and Murray then she’d have been more like 45min and that’s doing pretty good.

Illustrator source to the actual images is over on Patreon.