Category Archives: Uncategorized

Test post, please ignore. Again.

Peggy
December 30, 2015

Here’s a test post from my phone on wordpress.com. Will it be less prone to dropping my posts on the floor than the app?

image.jpg

Here is a photo of the previous test post. Wow, it sure is hard to type stuff after it without rreplacing it instead.

 

Edit: Weird, the ‘publish’ button was ghosted on the phone. I poked at the draft via the web and it was available; when I looked at the phone again it was available there too. Strange.

I miss being able to natter out a thought too big for 140 characters on the phone. The WordPress iPhone app has an alarming tendency to drop posts if it fails to connect to the blog, which it constantly does for me. Which is especially punishing when you’ve been painstakingly pecking out a thought that size on the phone’s keyboard. Recently WordPress made a lot of noise about their new editors, so I figured I’d see if it would work better than that. And, well, it seems to have a better time connecting to my site at least, even if it’s kind of annoying because it’s stuck inside of Safari and tends to constantly be popping the keyboard up over itself…

 

(And wow, I like how there doesn’t seem to be any control over the size of the image I inserted.)

test post, please ignore

Peggy
December 30, 2015

testing the wordpress.com post interface from my computer

.053-cybelle-n-hellbot

here’s a test image.

 

edit. HUH. Posting this way also actually posted the image to Tumblr instead of posting it as an external image, which is a REAL IMPROVEMENT in general – the official WP Tumblr sharing plugin does not do this, which makes my image posts super boring on there unless I take the time to make them to Tumblr myself.

website refresh: ego test

Peggy
December 28, 2015

Thinking about a facelift for the website. I’d keep the same overall format, just refresh the imagery a bit. It’s been about three years since I built the current version, and about three years since the previous one, it kinda feels like it’s time.

I dunno, does this feel like I’m being too egotistical? Having the first thing you see on my site be this giant stylized sexy version of myself with a crown of vectors and a giant stylus, so large that it refuses to fit on your screen at one time unless you have a 24″ monitor in portrait mode? HI I’M PEGGY AND I’M THE AWESOME EVIL VECTOR QUEEN ALSO MY EGO IS THE SIZE OF JUPITER.

sun and the lack thereof

Peggy
December 22, 2015

An image bubbled up from memory: my father wearing nothing but shorts and a pair of dark goggles, sitting in front of a very bright light. I know it was something prescribed by a doctor; for what specifically, I don't recall.

Now that I'm older I suspect it was probably for seasonal depression.

Which leads to this thought: Half of my genes are from someone so solar powered that he suffered from seasonal depression in New Orleans. A mere ten hours of daylight was not enough. What the fuck am I doing up here in Seattle.

Well, at least yesterday was the solstice, and days will start getting longer from here.

a shading experiment

Peggy
December 21, 2015

abs-shading-solstice-experiment

I was thinking about other people’s processes that involve shading on a separate layer that’s been constrained by a mask of the shapes it’s shading, and knocked this out in about an hour.

It looks nice, but I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that it resulted in about three times as many layers as I’d normally use.

Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 12.44.26 PM

(All the ‘light’ and ‘shadow’ layers have an opacity mask of a duplicate of the layer they’re modifying; light layers are 100% screen, shadow layers are 100% multiply. Most paths in them are heavily gaussian blurred; all the shadow paths are a blue-purple gradient.)

And just to show how much some simple effects can add, here’s the same image with most of the blurs removed:

abs-shading-solstice-experiment-deblur

I may try experimenting with this on a few panels of Absinthe. Making myself separate “shading” from “drawing” is weird; I’m really used to considering them at the same time. I may also want to experiment with using this method for broader strokes of shading, and doing some of the subtler shading within the base layers the way I normally do. Dunno. My methods are a constant work in progress, and ultimately what matters most is a mix of working speed and how fast they feel – I’d rather do something that’s empirically a bit slower, but feels faster to my brain, because that’s more likely to keep me happily working for a longer stretch. Making sure everything works in silhouette and basic colors before going to shades probably won’t hurt, though.

 

yearsum

Peggy
December 18, 2015

Yearsum

Stuff I drew over the year. I gave preference to non-Rita stuff to create some variety; otherwise every month except for June, November and December would have something from that project in it.

I was working on the image finished in October for much of the year. I know I was working on it in May, when I sat in the hospital keeping my mother company for the last few weeks of her life.

Which rather explains the blank space in June.

50s style experiments

Peggy
December 16, 2015

Further Confusion is coming up soon, and I’ll be holding down a corner of a friend’s booth doing the odd badge on my new Tiny Printer. This year’s theme is “Cafe FC: A Classic American Diner”, which honestly does nothing for me, Happy Days is not my nostalgia. But. What was going on in cartoons back then? Jim Flora! Mary Blair! UPA! And all that other crazy semi-Cubist stuff. I can totally dig that.

So I googled up some inspiration, and started doodling.

Evernote Camera Roll 20151216 000644 Evernote Camera Roll 20151216 000644 Evernote Camera Roll 20151216 000644

(These aren’t actually on purple paper, I just photographed these under the colored lights in my living room. Rollerball pen with highlighter.)

I’m not sure I’ll go full 50s abstract. I like looking at that stuff but it’s not in my blood like it is for some of my animation school buddies. But there are definitely stylistic tricks I can use to give a distinct “fifties graphics” feel to my normal shapes. Pull a palette off of some Flora album covers, pick a few different brushes based on things I see in collections like this along with some fonts, and I’ll be ready.

I may also consider having a secondary theme of “your Fallout fursona” because that sure is fifties-flavored, and it’s pretty topical. Maybe just slip one of those into my sample badges. I don’t want to be drawing Your Vault-Tec Guy Fursona though.

(My other alternative theme idea was “50s sci-fi” but honestly I already did that when I did promo art for FC2013 whose theme was “Furbidden Planet”. Somebody on the FC concom must really love fifties retro, I guess.)

Next step: draw up a badge for myself, and for a few friends, as samples. If I go with the rough up there maybe I’ll just describe my take on the theme as “Space Age Bachelor Pad”; it’s a grown-up party let’s all get drunk until someone puts a lampshade on their head.