Tag Archives: art

Tealthree

Peggy
June 12, 2016

A new digital drawing tool means revisiting the drawing I did for my last new drawing tool. Which has been replaced a couple of times but it’s not like buying a new edition of the same computer a few years later really needs a ceremonial celebration like buying an entirely new form factor running an OS you’ve never used before does.

A few years ago, when I got my first Macbook Air, I got really stoned while I was transferring all my data to it. The Magician came out and impulsively tried summoning a local spirit to inhabit the computer and make it work that much better; part of the process of this summoning was of course to draw said spirit in a way that acknowledged that it was kind of stuck inside my computer.

There’s a sticker of that drawing on the back of the current Air, just like I had a sticker of it on the back of the last one. Getting a new Air didn’t seem like it needed any ceremony. It was just a simple matter of making sure one was backed up, and restoring the backup onto the next one. But moving to an entirely new form factor and OS? I felt like I needed to be a but more complicated about it.

When I went to the Microsoft store to get the Surface, the Magician made me bring the Air along so that the genie I have living in it could sniff dubiously at the Surfaces, and so that she could start settling into one if I brought it home.

And what better thing to use to make sure I could get Illustrator running in there than a new drawing of this spirit? She’s looking a little more dragon-y than she originally did, probably as a result of living with my dragony self for so long. This was quite deliberately not a conscious choice on my part; I just went with what the voice in my head wanted . Said voice is maybe just me assigning a personality to this carefully-molded pile of metal called a “computer”, or is maybe me making contact with some kind of entity outside myself. As always with all things majgicghkal, I’m never sure if there’s any objective reality to any of it, but I’ll note that my Air was super cranky after I spent a couple days working exclusively with the Surface, until I politely requested Tealfour to not stay exclusively in one device or another.

After I finished that drawing, I did another one of this revised version of Tealfour to be the desktop/startup screen. I figured having her hanging out looking cute and offering me her stylus might help keep this as a device that I think of as my sketchbook rather than a general-purpose Twitter/Reddit/Hacker News/etc machine that I can waste away hours with.

Shut Up And Draw

 

Configuration continues to go well; I’ve changed from SharpKeys to AutoHotKey for swapping the ctrl and windows keys, which also lets me use the capslock key for ctrl-alt-shift, and gives me back a lot of shortcuts. I’ve also been playing with RadialMenu to create a tool panel I can make sprawl across the bottom of my screen and work as those shortcuts when I don’t have room to take out the keyboard, though it has some weird issues with one shortcut triggering ‘cut’ after doing its thing and some other shortcuts not working. It’s still a lot faster than grovelling through the dropdown menus.

I am sort of considering trying one of those little keyboards with like a dozen reconfigurable buttons as an alternative to having to make space for a full keyboard when I’m sitting on the bus. Right now I can only pull it out and draw with full keyboard-shortcut-powered speed if I’m sitting next to someone who doesn’t mind having my keyboard on their knee; ideally I want to be able to do it next to a total stranger without invading their personal space. Maybe one of those little ultra-programmable keypads designed for Gamerz? Though they tend to be bulky and not bluetooth. Or maybe one of those button grids musicians use? Though some googling suggests they mostly have the same problem. Maybe just a tiny Bluetooth pad with some heavy abuse of AutoHotKey… bonus points if I set things up so I can attach it to one side at the back and hold the tablet while using it. Maybe. That starts to sound like work, though. Or how about a glove? Mmmaybe not. I’m thinking “bluetooth numeric pad” sounds worth investigating, though.

I’ve also added on a matte screen protector. Out of the box the Surface is incredibly reflective; it’s so much of a black mirror that you could contact Enochian angels on it. Which makes it kind of a pain to draw outside. It’s still not usable in direct sunlight but it’s a lot better.

Five Lips

Peggy
May 11, 2016

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:

cocktongue-lipples

Unicorn Torture For Fun And Profit

Peggy
May 11, 2016

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.

some pointillism

Peggy
May 9, 2016

Saránta Eptá

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.)

Parallax: Crew art, v2

Peggy
May 5, 2016

federacracy-splash galactic-union-splash

(click for larger)

So. Nick and I have been working on the second version of the Parallax pitch bible for a while. I’m pretty happy with these versions of the cast, and will probably be using this as the art for each of them.

One thing constantly in the back of my mind is that I’d like to make it more representative of modern audiences than the straight white people most TV shows are aimed at. Gender and queerness is easy to do. One of these characters is trans. One of them is pansexual. Two of them are in a homosexual relationship. None of this is presented as a big deal in the show; it just is.

But ethnicity? The fact that they’re all cartoon animals makes that a little more oblique.

So I ask you, o Internet: Do any of these characters look like they should be voiced by someone of a particular ethnicity?

And then, a further question: would it be neat if the various characters were voiced by people whose ethnicities deliberately do not match the ones the characters look like they “should” have? With a distinct attempt to have a broad mix of voices, the US has more than enough cartoons with an entirely white voice cast.

I think that shuffling ethnic codes like this sounds like a good idea, but I also recognize that I am a middle-class white lady from a former Confederate state. If this idea is the hottest garbage fire you’ve heard of this week, then let me know so I can change it before I persuade someone to make a season’s worth of Garbage Fire: The Series.

(Also, if you are wondering, due to their Weird Names: Vaxenchalowroth is a lady; the Baron and Atber are guys.)

Twin: a fragment

Peggy
April 24, 2016

A picture of my character Twin, a sentient black hole who likes to shape (her) event horizon into a vaguely femme monster-thing.

Lots and lots of barely-visible art brushes are layered to create the subtle texture of (her) body.

This has context but you ain’t getting it.

Cloak and Dagger

Peggy
April 19, 2016

cloak-and-dagger

Today the section of Comics Twitter I follow keeps on talking about how terrible the costume of a Marvel lady hero named “Dagger”, who is basically wearing a white jumpsuit with a dagger-shaped cutout that goes all the way down to her belly-button, if not further. She’s got a themed partner named “Cloak”, who’s a big dude with some kind of shadow powers. And apparently people are talking about Dagger’s absurd costume because they’re going to be on a TV show soon, and trying to implement that full-body boob-window is going to either be a nightmare of glue, or a nightmare of Standards & Practices.

I googled them up and learnt a bit more: she’s a rich white girl, he’s a stuttering black boy, and they both got their powers from Tainted Comic-Book Heroin. Which may have been retconned to the heroin triggering their mutant genes, I dunno, whatever, I’m not gonna change their costumes to “Needle and Spoon” or anything like that.

Also I noticed that Dagger’s costume is basically designed to make it look like her head and neck are the hilt of a giant flesh-shaped dagger. Okay. That doesn’t sound dirty at all when I write it out like that.

So I asked myself “how can I make the dagger stand out against the white suit without making it be a giant cutout”, and the answer was pretty quick: make it pitch-black, and make Dagger’s skin pretty dark as well. Now she’s got a ton of internal contrast, the better to distract you when she pops out of the shadows, while her shadowy partner slips up behind you to kick your ass. I see no reason she can’t still be a rich kid. Also I gave her some shoulderpads because damn, she could use some armor. If I wanted to iterate on this a little more I’d make them work better as the dagger’s guard, but this is about as much work as I want to put into publicizing a Disney brand without being paid. Which is also the reason I left Cloak pretty much untouched, he’s a perfectly fine instance of the Shadow/Batman vibe with a nice little ‘repeated slightly-nervous lines’ thing going in his outfit.

Apparently there have been like four or five variants of Dagger’s costume and nobody’s thought to stop dressing the poor girl like a stripper. And they’ve wondered why girls never pick up her book. There sure are a bunch of geniuses working at Marvel.

And now I go back to drawing a commission of a dark-skinned nerdy girl beating up an alien with her xenobiology textbook.