This Sunday, I suddenly found myself thinking “I want to be able to work in Illustrator on a tablet badly enough to deal with Windows”.
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A Perfectly Legit Business Transaction
Click for fullsize. NSFW.
A long-delayed commission from RF2014. I am a slacker.
a model sheet
(click for fullsize, because boobs)
I felt an urge to do a model sheet of my cobra character Kalinda. Who is also occasionally an archaeopteryx, and was probably a raccoon in her backstory; it’s complicated, and she’s not really a reliable narrator.
She does wear clothes. Just not in this model sheet.
I really should organize all my character model sheets in one place sometime for when I want to get other people to draw them.
air travel is so romantic
So a while back I decided to apply for TSA Pre-Check to skip the lines when I fly. I do it enough that it feels like a luxury I won't waste.
I went down to a little office near the Seattle airport, forked over $90 and my fingerprints. A little while later, I got e-mail and snailmail welcoming me to the program, and giving me my Known Traveller Number, which is the ID for the thing.
This weekend, I went down to the airport for my first trip with my brand new shiny Known Traveller Number. I'd entered it in the form when I booked the ticket, and was expecting a little Pre-Check note to show up when the ticket got printed so I could go through the fast line.
It didn't.
I went to customer service and we tried looking for my name in the database. It wasn't there. I tried looking it up on the Pre-Check website (whose name of course has nothing to do with “Pre-Check” or “TSA”) but the wireless in the terminal was garbage, time was short, and I was stressed.
I gave up, and went through the long line with all the other schlubs. Went off and did my trip, had a good time, I'll be posting something about that soon.
Now I'm sitting in a bar in the airport, on my way home. There was a Pre-Check application office in the unsecured zone of the airport; I asked about my problem and all they could do was to give me a card with a number to call. I checked on the website and there it was, the exact same KTN that I had written down in Evernote.
I called the number. I get to the start of a hold queue, then it says “Goodbye” and disconnects.
It did this on multiple tries. Once I actually got into the hold queue for a while, then managed to hit the wrong button while trying to turn up the earphones, and hung up instead.
I would probably be pretty frustrated if I wasn't sipping a Mai Tai right now. I'm still frustrated enough to decide its best to give up on this before I get pissed enough to throw the phone through a wall or something.
Five Lips
Click for full-size because NSFW.
I dunno, looks like I just have lipples on the brain tonight?
Decide for yourself where the fifth set of lips is.
Also, thanks to a tumblr ask:
Unicorn Torture For Fun And Profit
yeah so the ex-with-benefits linked to a picture of a unicorn with her mouth where one nipple should be and then we kinda went off on a tangent of my cobra sorceress character doing Absolutely Horrible But Sexy Similar Things to the ex’s unicorn character, who is sometimes said cobra’s magically-altered sex toy.
Don’t worry, Noelle gets her arms back and her mouth where it normally belongs as soon as it stops being funny, or once the scene ends.
Applied Xenoarchaeology
Commission. And an experiment with pixelization brushes.
some pointillism
Fooling around with making Illustrator do stippling for me via the magic of a few scatter brushes. Because holy shit all those dots would be a ton of work. Especially when I decided to retroactively make them tiny little skulls once it turned into my Bloodborne character.
Illustrator, about ~30min to draw, plus another half hour fooling around with turning the dots into different things.
edit: here, have some brush settings. They’re all called “leaf” because I started with one of my standard toolkit brushes, a jaunty little rectangle scatter brush I use for abstracted leaves. I ended up replacing them with a skull made up of five paths (overall shape, each eye, nosehole, highlight) joined into a compound path. I made the others by just duplicating the first brush and changing the settings, mostly by either widening the scatter range to create a broader stroke, or by raising the spacing to make it lighter. You could easily make a few more if you wanted to take a stippled piece further than I did here. Things may start to get a little sluggish though. Use multiple layers, hide them and maybe make simple gradient proxies, consider writing up a feature request for something like Expression’s “freeze layer” function again. (Expression was a wonderful natural-media vector package that Illustrator is still trying to catch up to; one thing it could do was “freeze” a layer. Which was like locking it except it also rendered a moderately high-res bitmap, and used that for building the preview instead of rendering everything from scratch. It made working with complex drawings a lot faster.)
darude – sandstorm
There I am, walking down fraternity row on my way to the rail station at the far corner of the UW. One house has a lawn full of shirtless fratboys in great shape, throwing sand or dirt around with shovels. Maybe they had a beach party last night, I dunno. I slow down to enjoy the view.
The music they’re blasting as they work ends, and another track begins. One voice rings out, full of possibly-drunken enthusiasm: “DUDE! This song is AWESOME!”.
It’s Sandstorm.
I can’t stop giggling until I’m out of earshot.
darude – sandstorm
There I am, walking down fraternity row on my way to the rail station at the far corner of the UW. One house has a lawn full of shirtless fratboys in great shape, throwing sand or dirt around with shovels. Maybe they had a beach party last night, I dunno. I slow down to enjoy the view.
The music they’re blasting as they work ends, and another track begins. One voice rings out, full of possibly-drunken enthusiasm: “DUDE! This song is AWESOME!”.
It’s Sandstorm.
I can’t stop giggling until I’m out of earshot.