Liquid Sky

Peggy
February 16, 2018

So last night Nick and I went over to Scarecrow Video. We browsed around and got three things that sounded interesting. As I was standing there paying the rental fee, something popped up in the back of my mind: I’ve never seen Liquid Sky. I bet Scarecrow has it. I mentioned this on the way back home; we pulled up the trailer for it, shrugged, and went right back out to grab it. (Scarecrow is literally a block away; this is not much of a journey.)

I decided to let the random factors decide which one we were going to watch. So I handed all four discs to Nick and told him to shuffle them, while I invoked Eris’ aid in choosing one, and rolled a d4.

We ended up watching Liquid Sky. Which… damn that film is a hell of an artifact. Slow, full of borderline-unlistenable music, with a main character who is completely, scarily flat. It’s like she has absolutely nothing left inside her, burnt out by her life of clubbing, drugs, and… having every man in her life refuse to listen when she says she doesn’t want to have sex with them. Luckily(?) for her there is a tiny flying saucer on the roof of her apartment, which feeds on the chemicals released in people’s brains when they orgasm, and kills them.

Her name? Margaret. Which is.. my chosen name. I was very, very glad I was sober when she got date-raped by a character who has my birth name. Because that sure was complicated to watch even without that extra coincidence.

Anyway. It’s a freaky little piece of the eighties, from before “punk” and “new wave” had really split into two very different subcultures. Kind of fascinating to watch and imagine how alien it must have seemed to most people; all these aggressively androgynous people running around having Very Bad Sex and playing extremely difficult electronic music. I seem to remember it getting some play as a midnight movie, aiming for the same crowd that regularly did the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I can certainly see some commonalities – RHPS was very much a fifties-themed package of Queerness that spread across the country, and this is a very eighties one. It never took hold as A Thing the way RHPS did. Probably the fact that the main character has like five very uncomfortable sex scenes in it didn’t help.

Resolute

Peggy
February 11, 2018

So the other day I was reading a book about astral projection when the back of my brain said “draw your dragon self in cool fantasy armor”. I was also very stoned at the time. I then worked on this on and off over the next few days.

Did you know that drawing cool fantasy armor is kind of a pain in the ass?

Technically, I’m happy with this one. There’s a lot of use of gradients in ways that come together quickly, that make it look a lot like a painstakingly masked out piece of airbrush art. Which ALWAYS makes ten year old me ecstatic to be able to knock out.

Elements That Cannot Be Used In A Brush

Peggy
February 11, 2018

So there you are, working away in Illustrator, making something that you want it to repeat a whole bunch of times for you. You drag it to the Brushes panel and you get something like this.

Perhaps your first instinct is to start searching for what elements can’t be used in a brush, and then object>expand all of those parts into things that can be used in a brush. But, you know, that starts to feel like work or something, and if you’re at all familiar with the way I use Illustrator I’m all about skipping those parts.

So instead of doing all that work, how about making Illustrator do it for us? Ever since 17.0/CC, Illustrator lets us put bitmaps in brushes. And there’s nothing saying we can’t generate those bitmaps directly in AI.

So: select all the stuff you want to turn into a brush, then do object>group, then do effect>rasterize. And now you can drag this into the Brush palette.

Looking at it up close you can see a tiny bit of pixelization going on. If that bugs you, then select your original group and visit the Appearance palette to change the settings on that rasterize effect, then alt-drag it on top of the brush in the Brush palette.

You will want to save a copy of your original art somewhere in your drawing. I usually put it on a layer named something like “construction” that I keep hidden most of the time. If you try to access the original art by dragging the brush thumbnail onto the canvas, you’ll just get an uneditable image.

majgickqgh

Peggy
February 7, 2018

Tool-Assisted Sigil.

Process: write statement of intent, cast out vowels/duplicate letters, draw cool sci-fi versions of letters, rotate/join/overlap until happy. Make pattern fill, crash Illustrator a lot while doing so (because I accidentally did my source imagery at a very large size, I think).

Abandoned version, part of the results of an hour or two of fooling around with a very stylized font I recently acquired.

fog

Peggy
February 6, 2018

Another one of those “someone on /r/illustrator asked an interesting technique question” pieces. The question posed was “how can I get this fading-into-the-fog” effect, with this as the reference image.No idea who it’s by, or what the actual medium is – I could guess anything from “3d rendering” to “an actual fucking dead horse chopped up and suspended between pieces of foggy plexiglas” given that the image was on the Saatchi Gallery’s asset server; image search just turns up the cover of the eponymously-titled first album by a band called “Nothing But Thieves”. [edit: it’s by one Miriam Sweeney]

Anyway. My initial technique suggestion was “make some alternating layers of fog and parts; the fog layers just hold a background-colored rectangle at like 10%, the part layers all have a blur effect applied to the whole layer, with succeeding layers more and more blurred”. They came back saying “this looks better than my initial attempt but still has some banding”, so I actually fired up Illustrator and fooled around. I refined it to “move some parts to the next-deeper parts layer, and draw some shapes at 20-50% on their original parts layer to add a bit more definition to the shape”. And of course I drew a dragon because I am a goddamn nerd who likes drawing dragons. :)

And here’s the source if you’re curious. fog source.zip

(worth noting: there’s an opacity mask on the frontmost layer of dragon parts, to blur the transition a little bit – I liked the way that looked.)

40min, could use some more love on the parts poking out of the fog bank if I was going to call this a truly finished piece.

fill doodles/cheap illustrator puppetry

Peggy
February 5, 2018

Now and then I go through the Adobe Illustrator subreddit and answer some questions nobody else has had a good answer to. Usually this means I am procrastinating.

One person wanted to know how to draw a thing and kinda do puppetry with it.

I usually do stuff like this this way:

Draw your limb.
Select it and drag it into the brush panel. Make an art brush.
Choose “scale proportionately” under the brush scale options.
Draw some lines with this art brush. Maybe hit the “options” button in the brush pane and turn on “flip across” if needed.

If one part ends up way off-center as a brush, try this:

drag the brush to an empty part of the artboard (do not drag it over a shape, if you do AI will try to apply it to that shape, even if it’s on a locked layer)
view>outline
notice the big invisible rectangle around your shape? Drag it out (using shift to constrain the drag) until its center is pretty much on the center of your shape.
select all the stuff that makes up the copy of the brush you just dragged out, including the invisible rectangle, and alt-drag it over the brush in the brush palette. (Mostly I don’t draw limbs with this to be honest – I use this for a lot of repeated details in my comics like tattoos or logos on clothing.)

With everything selected, you can see that the arms and legs on those two dudes at the bottom are just simple lines, quickly drawn with the pencil tool. I grabbed the point at right elbow of the running dude and moved it around until the elbow roughly aligned; originally the big elbow bump was very definitely not on the joint.

(Also this way of drawing elbows is totally based off of the way Fred Hembeck draws knees. Because it made me laugh, and whenever I do images to explain or work out something asked on a forum, I always try to make them funny.)

You could easily do full-color art for your puppet parts; I didn’t feel like bothering. Also there is the new Puppet Warp to fool with; this way is a lot easier if you’re gonna do a lot of re-use. I don’t use it for puppet parts, but I do use it for repeated stuff in my comics – logos on clothing, tattoos, whatever.

And then here is some abuse of pattern fills.

“use pattern fills full of whatever” was one of two and a half ways I gave someone who wanted to duplicate an image that was made of two colors: white, and a big bunch of smeary painterly color swirls.

Draw your thing in B&W
On a new layer, make a bunch of multicolor stuff that more than covers it. Probably just draw some semi-transparent shapes with gaussian blurs applied. Or whatever.
Select all that stuff from step 2 and drag it into the Swatches palette to make a pattern fill.
Turn off that layer.
Select all your black stuff (select>Same will help here). Apply your new pattern swatch.
With everything still selected, hold down the `/~ key while using the Selection, Direct Selection, Scale, or Rotate tools. This will affect only the fill pattern’s location. (The Free Transform tool will not do this. Use the older, separate tools.)

(The half a way was to use a global swatch to draw your stuff, then alt-drag the pattern swatch OVER the original swatch. And the other way involved putting your B&W art in a layer’s transparency mask, then drawing a bunch of colorful stuff on the layer. I’m sure I go into that in more detail somewhere in the Illustrator posts on here.)

I didn’t save the source of the puppetry piece but here’s the fill pattern’s source.

A Fancy Lad

Peggy
February 4, 2018

So today’s D&D session was a bit of a weird one. The DM had recently pulled the curtain back and revealed that half of our identities were false, due to us actually being emissaries from a city that had come unstuck in time, trying to make sure our homeland continued to exist. We spent the session group brainstorming random bits of history to hook things into – a player would pick an aspect of their past to dig into, and then everyone else would roll a d20 and the high roller would fill in some of the gaps.

This is one of the new bits of the backstory of my character. He is a shy, bookish dragonborn teen who is amazingly oblivious to how hot he is; he and Saranté would hang out and shoplift together and join slam poetry contests together. They got good enough at the former to gain the notice of the thieves’ guild (“join up or stop stealing on our turf”) and good enough at the latter to pick up the odd Honorable Mention or third prize at the poetry contests.

I didn’t intend for him to look this sexy, but it kinda happened in the sketch and I went with it.

Peggy
February 1, 2018

so um yeah

we were stonedly discussing some stuff about parallax

then the subject drifted

and suddenly nick was proposing marriage

and it was mostly for legal reasons, we are pretty much married in all but name at this point but

holy shit did that conjure up some feelings

because “marriage” has a lot of shit tangled up in it

then we went back to talking about parallax but yeah i guess this is the day i got a marriage proposal and said yes

we are so not getting married anywhere near valentine’s day holy shit no

Santa Barbara

Peggy
January 21, 2018

So today was my first full day in Santa Barbara. I got up and visited the same coffee shop I went to last night (it’s two blocks away, I’ll probably be a regular there until I leave this rental), and met my hostess on the way back when I picked up a plush husky that her kids had left on the ground and put it somewhere more visible. Then I sat with the computer and hopefully nailed down exactly why dragon.style went down last night and this morning, and hopefully made sure it won’t happen again any time soon. Welcome to the People’s Glorious Social Network, which is maintained by people in their spare time rather than people tied to a pager.

I thought about doing laundry but blew it off; cobbled together an outfit that passed the sniff test and walked a couple miles down to the beach. When I got there I realized that Santa Barbara has one thing I kinda consider a problem in places I might consider living: it’s generally a very smooth slope down to the sea, which means that if a tsunami happens the whole place is basically fucked. Yes I think about things like this. I come from a place regularly savaged by hurricanes; I can’t not think a little bit about the local disasters when I wander around a place.

It’s a nice town aside from that. Lots of Spanish architecture, which always makes me happy – New Orleans’ French Quarter is actually mostly Spanish work, so that tends to feel kind of homey to me. On the way down I was delighted by all the flowering plants; it may be the dead of winter but flowers are still happening and bees are doing their thing.

Birds of Paradise! Growing all over, opening their petals to all and sundry.

Xeriscaping getting pretty aroused here. “It’s tentacle season”, said a friend who lives in town, and this definitely wasn’t the only one of these absurd obscenities I saw.

At one point I tooted that “I am filled with happiness by the sight of a Latino dude driving by in a pickup truck with large knobby wheels and a CONVERTIBLE TOP that’s down.” Because that is such a perfectly California thing. I hope he had the most awesome day, because seeing him and his car sure made my day.

My first stop was the beach, where I took my shoes off and stood in the Pacific for a bit. I tend to feel a need to do this every time I’m near it; it’s some kind of ceremony I don’t entirely understand. This time it felt somehow important to tell the ocean that my mother had died since the last time I stood in it. It didn’t care; I didn’t expect it to.

I may have left a sigil drawn on the sand some distance from the beach, in sand made wet by my feet, asking for the ocean’s aid in bringing me back to SoCal again. I may have photographed it and posted it in a secret place. I may even have wandered away down the beach and been completely unable to find it again when I passed back, and been pleased by that. Nah, I’d never do anything like that.

I wandered about downtown. Sat in the outdoors section of a cafe looking over Nick’s script for Parallax and liking what I saw, while slowly eating a “BLT”. Which, this being California, was served on a six-inch long sub-type piece of bread. And was open-faced, full of some mild but tasty hot sauce, gourmet pork bellies, artfully shredded lettuce, and a fried egg daintily perched on one end.

Eventually the shadows got long enough that I decided to walk back to the place I was staying. About an hour, going up seventy feet over two miles – I might rent a bicycle for a few days tomorrow. I changed my clothes, then went out to that nearby cafe again and roughed out a couple pages based on the beginning of the script I mentioned earlier.

And now I am sitting here while the laundry machine in this apartment does its thing, wondering if I wanna go find some kind of supper, or if the sandwich I had around brunch plus the snack bar I had in the morning is enough given that I had a personal pizza last night… maybe another snack bar to fill in the gaps? Feh, I wish I’d thought of this on the way back and stopped at Ralph’s. I really don’t feel like walking a half hour there and back after all the walking I already did today.

The bottom of my coat now smells vaguely like the sea, and this makes me happy.

Peggy
January 20, 2018

Today, I got on a train in San Jose. Five hours later I got off in Santa Barbara, where I’ll be spending most of the next week.

Normally I’d have pulled out my computer and gotten something done on a trip like that. Trains are great for working – room to spread out, and really shitty cel/WiFi. But this time I went to the observation car, plopped my ass in a seat, and just watched. For five hours. And I am pretty sure I made the right decision. There were some amazing views as the train wound through the mountains outside of San Luis Obispo. Lots of farms and hills and distant mountains before that – which would normally be tedious but were kind of compelling, once I’d made the decision that I was going to experience the vast majority of the terrain I was covering.

And then, finally, the train came around some hills and there it was. The Pacific Ocean. I think I have missed being near it ever since I left LA a bit more than a decade ago. I kind of haven’t let myself acknowledge how much I missed it, and I won’t let myself remember this when I go back to Seattle, either. I drank in prettt much every inch of its coast I could. Endless waves on rocks. A little town with lots of trailers and a couple kite-surfers. The occasional lone surfer on a secluded beach. A single car parked by a scenic picnic bench. And. The sun. Slowly setting out over the Pacific.

basically the shittiest photo of a beautiful sunset I have ever taken

I lived in LA for most of a decade and I never got tired of its sunsets. Every one was gorgeous, and I often stopped on the way home from a long day feeling sad about where my animation career was going when I’d cross a street and see yet another magnificent sunset.

I don’t have a point I’m making here. Just that I sat watching terrain pass by for five solid hours and holy crap I wish I could have that kind of attention span more often. And that I’m in SoCal again.

also Santa Barbara we need to talk about your font choices darling