walkies (2)

Peggy
January 12, 2024

So on the Illustrator subreddit, a challenge was issued: what can you do with just one circle?


Well, I can do this. Custom brushes were allowed for this particular challenge as long as they were a single color, and I abused that – there’s some tricksy things going on with 0% opaque shapes in the “tunnel line” brush to help it overlap less messily.

It’s a reimplementation of this piece I did back in 2021 at the behest of someone asking “how do I make a tunnel effect in Illustrator”; the original version was pretty minimal, and honestly I wouldn’t want to do it with any fewer paths than I actually used. But hey, sometimes you have to do things the hard way.

And just for laughs here’s what I get if I use the same appearance stack on a couple different shapes…

Not how I was planning on spending an hour and a half of my work day, but, well, sometimes when a challenge is issued you just have to take it.

Source: walkies.ai

what if I started animating again

Peggy
January 7, 2024

Lately I’ve been flirting with animation programs again. It started when I picked up a copy of Moho 12 for $30 somewhere in June. Since then I have upgraded to Moho 14 for $200 around Black Friday. I haven’t gotten too deep into it, I’ve experimented with rigging characters but haven’t really done anything with it. Yesterday after a couple of my industry friends told me how much they love it, I fooled around with the demo of Toon Boom’s Storyboard Pro for about two hours ($590/y subscription) and made the stupidest thing I’ve ever made in my life.

fart mov.mov

I found myself really impressed by a lot of SBPro’s tools, I don’t love its drawing tools but it’s really laser-focused on turning a script into a storyboard in a studio environment in some really interesting ways.

Before doing that I also spent an hour or so fucking around with the current version of Flash Adobe Animate, relentlessly bouncing around the drawing tools, trying to see if I can convince it to have the same core workflow of ‘draw a shape, have it appear as a filled shape with no outline and various effects’ that I’ve honed in Illustrator. I couldn’t. It went back on the scrapheap. And while I was thinking about Adobe’s tools I knocked my subscription to their suite down to $30/month for “everything” by using the discount they offer when you go to cancel the $55/month subscription I’d let it slip into. And put a reminder into my calendar to do this next year. $360/y for Illustrator and the possibility of using the rest of their stuff when I need it is a lot nicer than $660/y.

I am both toying with and dreading the idea of playing with an Illustrator/After Effects workflow. But before I do that I am probably going to fuck around with Toon Boom Harmony ($230-1000/year, depending on which of three editions you get, I’d be getting the priciest one because the cheaper ones put a sharp limit on how many effects you can use, and my Illustrator practice is all about piling up effects).

I don’t know why I’m doing this. I kinda don’t actually want to get back into animation. But I feel this need to explore different tools. Part of it is that I feel like I’m simply hitting the limits of Illustrator’s Appearance palette and want an environment where I can quickly draw vector shapes and have the computer apply a bunch of effects to them automatically; being able to animate them is a bonus. I’ve been specializing in this one tool for the past twenty years and I guess it’s just time for a change. Maybe it’s also because I’ve decided to do my new comics project in a format that’s very much “accidentally an animatic” in an attempt to make it mobile-friendly and I’m just doing a lot of things that’d be a lot easier with a timeline. I dunno. I was hoping that writing this out in a blog post would help me see why I want to do this but I have no idea. I guess I just keep on experimenting on and off and see what happens.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this since leaving the Hollywood animation scene. But pretty much every other time it’s ended in about a week, after I end up opening up Flash Animate, fucking around with it for a bit, remembering what I hate about it, and going back to Illustrator. This one’s been persisting and it’s weird.

Anyway. Epiphany was the other night, which means it’s not a sin against all the gods we call up during Mardi Gras to eat a king cake, and I think I’m gonna get dressed and leave this freezing house for the merely chilly outside world and get a king cake, and figure out what I’m doing with the rest of today.

experiments, 2023

Peggy
December 31, 2023

I just spent a few minutes going back through the ‘experiments’ tag in my filesystem for this year, which is where I store the results of playing around with techniques, sometimes because I have an idea, sometimes because I saw a ‘how do I do this in Illustrator’ post that felt interesting enough to open up Illustrator. Here’s a few I’m especially happy with.

variable width line + zero-length dashes with curved endcaps * transform effect with multiple scaled/rotated copies

zig zags + rounded corners * blend * stick it in a pattern brush and vary the stroke width = this is so much less tedious than using a Spirograph

there are so many strokes rendered on each of these paths, omfg

I’m really pleased with this randomized rainbow mosaic, it is a gradient stroke with the dotted-line trick going on and a lot of roughening to produce a somewhat randomized rainbow, then a halftone effect on top of that to turn it into grids. I should use this as a background for something sometime.

That’s it without the halftone.

 

I’m not happy with this one yet, it’s an attempt to create some randomized fire. I’ve got perfectly fine effects stacks for fire and energy crackles but it’s worth playing around.

automatic vaporwave or something

Peggy
December 14, 2023

So tonight I decided to fool around with some appearance stacks I developed while drawing insane furry porn on something a little more… shareable outside the horny furry zones, y’know?


This took me ten minutes to draw. No pre-planning. Just derping out some shapes on autopilot. A tiny bit of added highlighting, but mostly this is Illustrator doing all kinds of stuff automatically.

That’s all I drew. Eighty paths.

Twenty minutes more of fooling around and I had this. Pretty neat.

Another ten added this. Neat.

45 minutes in now. No plans at all, just drawing shapes and improvising.

Fifteen minutes more. One hour total. All this in one hour.

Neat.

I drew the simplest, dumbest shapes, and Illustrator applied a few fairly simple transformations to them and airbrushed nice gradients on them for me. Here and there I used Astute’s Opacity Brush to smooth out transitions. But all this nifty abstracted detail happened with no intervention on my part.

I feel like I could get some interesting work by throwing together a few more pieces like this and shopping it around. Dunno if I want to.

If you wanna see how it works then source is over on Patreon.

Transmissions from the Titty Dimension

Peggy
December 12, 2023

Yesterday Sabs showed me a very horny drawing of a lady with an absolutely absurd amount of titties. I kept on thinking about it and stonedly decided to draw something along those lines, containing our horny characters.

But then I remembered that I’d been threatening to draw basically that for Devalynne for a while. So I drew that. And when I went on to draw Sabs’ version I decided to just kind of merge it with the first one. And then I decided to do one with Cordite, because I’ve been making similar threats for a while. And then one purely for me because I feel like I have not been drawing horny pregnancy art any where near enough lately. And today I came back to it and started adding one for the SO, too, after asking which of their characters they’d like to see in this sort of situation. That one’s not done so it’s not part of this.

Illustrator, about eight hours, I’m not sure exactly how much time I spent finishing up the fourth part versus starting on the  fifth part.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

Source and a WIP of that fifth part on Patreon.

from the effects tag: luminous overlapping squares

Peggy
December 7, 2023

There’s been an image floating around on the Illustrator subreddit (a still from this looping animation, it turns out) with a lot of stabs at duplicating it in Illustrator. Today, a pretty good recreation got posted. I followed their instructions and got a pretty decent version, then decided to see if I could squish it down from four overlapping blends of two squares to one blend with some complicated Appearance stacks, so it would be a lot easier to re-use.

I think I did a decent job; here’s my source file. All basic Illustrator for once.

And this was the results of trying those complex Appearance stacks on more arbitrary shapes. The one on the left has “knockout group transparency” turned on, which is the default when blending shapes together. Looks like some kind of sex toy, really.

Evening Repose

Peggy
December 4, 2023

Sometimes you just get up and it is incredibly obvious that the right way to spend the day is to draw a luxuriously gravid snake lady lounging in front of a sunset. Or maybe it’s just me? Today was one of those days. Anyway, the snake’s name is Veriti.

 

Illustrator, 4h. Source file on Patreon.

 

While working on this I also bitched about a long-standing Illustrator bug that annoyed me while I was doing some background stuff, kludged up a script to work around it, and finally made a file for some tree-leaf brushes instead of either constantly remaking the same brush or swiping it from another file.

fixing an Illustrator bug: blend open paths with a spline

Peggy
December 4, 2023

Illustrator has this annoying behavior where it only generates a spline for a blend if one or more of the paths being blended are closed. My working method is such that I almost never generate closed paths, so this is super annoying.

There is a simple workaround, but it is annoying to do: swear, undo the blend, close the first path, make the blend, open the first path. You would think the swearing is optional but in practice I find it to be mandatory.

Today I got annoyed enough at this behavior to write a script to do it for me.

blend with spline.jsx

Throw this in your Illustrator scripts directory, and assign a hotkey to it via whatever method you choose – I used Alfred to bind command-alt-shift-b to a ‘launch apps/files’ action, which is the key I used to have assigned to object>blend>make. Now blends Just Work for me.

(And maybe go upvote the relevant uservoice issue if this annoys you too, I’d really rather have this choice something switchable in Illustrator without this kludgy workaround.)

 

Also, huge thanks to Past Me for setting up a workspace in Nova that points to my collection of Illustrator scripts and lets me hit command-R to run what I’m working on in Illustrator, damn. I stuffed an alias to Illustrator’s Javascript docs in there too so that Future Me has absolutely everything she needs to hack up a script without going looking.

Insistent Voices

Peggy
October 25, 2023

Yesterday, my SO showed me this sketch from something like fifteen to twenty years ago.

It’s a mind-controlling insect from an obscure corner of Marvel’s comics massaging the brain of an anonymous raccoon. It has survived three purges of their “accounting” directory at this point and they’re still horny for it. Maybe, they asked, I could finish it?

I took it into Illustrator and spent two hours doing just that, using the automatic shading methods I’ve been fooling with lately. It’s really weird how they fuck with my brain, I will knock something out and it looks so finished that I don’t want to do anything more to it, but it’s also nowhere near finished. I need to figure out how to get around this and firmly convince my brain that something that looks the way this technique does is Not Finished so that it’s easy to dive in and add some more shading by hand where it’s really needed, like I did in this one. Overall though I would say that “I can draw something in a few minutes that looks so superficially polished that it breaks how my brain thinks about what to do next” is a pretty good problem to have!

The Illustrator source is over on Patreon, if you’re curious as to how I got this done in two hours. It uses a bunch of Astute’s effect plugins.

goodbye, Quicksilver, and thanks for all the fish

Peggy
October 24, 2023

For years, I’ve been using something called Quicksilver as one of the ways I control my Mac. It lets me pop up a little control window to do various things. But last week my bike got stolen, which meant I ended up upgrading to the latest version of the OS so I could share the location of its AirTag with the cops. It didn’t get found, sadly; the airtag’s been sitting a block away from what I am told is a notorious chop shop under the I-10.

Not too many things broke in this upgrade, but Quicksilver did – its windows are now showing up at the top left of the screen, instead of the center; a lot of searches are just not working any more, and half the hotkeys it provides are broken. Which is important when a couple of them are calling scripts that do things in Illustrator as part of my regular workflow. 

I was putting off dealing with this, but today I looked at Quicksilver’s ‘about’ got this. And that just doesn’t feel promising for having it get upgraded, y’know?

So I just spent an hour or two figuring out how to get Alfred to do the things I had Quicksilver doing.

I am gonna miss Quicksilver’s “noun,verb” two-panel interface. I’ve been using it for about two decades and I don’t have to think about it any more.

Eventually I will get used to Alfred’s “one search bar” mode. Eventually. I’ve got my shortcuts for Illustrator wired up again, as well as the ones to bring iTunes up and to skip to the next album, and I’ve configured it with the same colors I had for Quicksilver, so I’m mostly good.

I dunno. I’ve been using Quicksilver for two decades now. Feels weird to be switching.