The Terrible Secret Of Age

Peggy
October 26, 2021

in ad 2001

meme was beginning

“cats” set us up the laughs

you have become old; treasure your time.

Earlier this month, there was a post on Hacker News where someone showed off their attempts to start writing some game engines in a language named “Zig”. My joke that they should consider using these engines to write an actual game – say, a port of “Zero Wing” – fell completely flat.

This past week I found myself looking at an animation of crude redraws of the characters from the intro to the 1991 Genesis port of that largely-forgettable 1989 arcade game singing their poorly-translated dialogue to the tune of Queen’s 1975 song “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

And I felt old. I felt indescribably old. Nobody got my joke because there are tons of people who are fully functional young adults who have no idea what this is because they were five when it was the talk of the Internet.

So I decided to draw Stella dressed up as “CATS”. Or, rather, dressed up as the horrible realization that if you recognize who she’s dressed as, you are also probably getting old.

Anyway. Illustrator source is on Patreon; prints/shirts/clocks are on Redbubble.

Total Peganthyrus Vortex

Peggy
October 13, 2021

that moment when the drugs kick in and you realize that there is absolutely nothing in the universe except you and your infinite reflections

So one of the things I do to put off getting work done is to go to the Illustrator subreddit and answer people’s “how do I do this” questions. Yesterday there was someone asking how to do this:

to which I replied

draw a thing, select the thing
object>distortion mesh>make with mesh, just make it 1×1
mesh tool, click on the edge of the mesh around where you want to make stuff wavy, zoom in close and click slightly above this place so that there are now two mesh lines very close to each other
select the top two points of the mesh and the upper of the two mesh lines you just created, drag upwards
make a couple more mesh lines in this space you’ve opened up, move ’em around
also play with the settings in object>envelope distort>envelope options, a low setting on the “fidelity” slider can make some really interesting glitches.

(You could also go old-school on this and find a photocopier; moving stuff around on the glass as the scan head is moving creates similar effects. Do a dozen or so tries until you find one you like, then scan it, and autotrace/work over it in AI.)

And today someone asked how to do this:
…where I suggested

Draw one vertical line of arches. Make it into a pattern brush. Draw a circle using this brush. Duplicate the circle and rotate it a little and change its color; play with opacity masks.

Making the varying blur/sharp parts is something I’d have to think about for a while in front of Illustrator, offhand I’d probably do it by drawing three arches with a green stroke at 0%, 100%, and 0% opacity, blending them, then duplicating the blends to make the line of arches to use in the pattern brush. Might have to expand the blends before making them into a brush.

I’d verified that the warp effect worked by doing it to a copy of the picture I drew yesterday, which is where the “play with the distortion effect settings” part came from – I liked how a low fidelity made a total mess of things.

So after spending about fifteen minutes fooling around with those circular patterns this morning to see if my idea worked…

…I realized that I could very quickly use this as a tool to make something akin to Escher’s “Circle Limit” images with a lot less work than he had to put into those. So I fooled around a while and this was the result.

Here’s the outline view, with the distortion mesh on and off – stuff you put inside a distortion mesh goes to a weird netherland, and vanishes from the main canvas unless you say “swap the dmesh for the stuff inside it so I can edit that”.

The two dragons at the corners are repeated by use of the Transform effect; getting the right settings was made a ton easier by using Astute’s “Stylism” tool, which provides nice interactive on-canvas controls for this effect and several others instead of Adobe’s modal dialogue boxes full of numeric fields.

If you wanna see the source, it’s up on Patreon. If you want a print of this, it’s on Redbubble.

Pedantia

Peggy
October 13, 2021

A couple of days ago, my friend Dana posted a picture of her ponysona.

“This is cute and I should draw this,” I thought to myself. So the next day, I did. She liked it and made a closeup of it her Twitter icon, so I’m happy.

It is unlikely I will draw Pedantia again any time soon but as always, I’m ready to do so quickly since I followed my usual habit of making a bunch of Graphic Styles with sensible names. This slightly sped up doing this drawing, and if I need to draw her again then I can just grab those styles out of this file and very quickly start making shapes.

I am especially happy with the “freckle” style. It’s a starfield scatter brush I made ages ago, with the parameters drastically altered to stay close to the path I draw, then some effects applied to make the perfect little circles into slightly-blotchy shapes that mimic both the look of “dots created by Dana tapping her stylus on her drawing tablet” and of “small irregular spots of increased melanin”.

Overall this took about an hour’s work in Illustrator.

skellington repair

Peggy
October 4, 2021

A few days ago, someone broke the goofy smiling skeleton-on-a-bike windcatcher we’ve had in the front lawn since around Halloween 2019 – we put him up and just never took him down, because this is the kind of town where you can just be the Spooky House On The Block.

Today I took a look at the damage; there was a plastic rod that went up inside to keep the flat, printed skeleton erect, and that was snapped off at the base. Someone definitely whacked it, and took the supporting rod out from inside.

I looked around the house a while, and ended up taking a leftover part from this skeleton’s installation; this is the second time this has happened, the last time everything vanished except for the lower part of the rod that goes into the ground. So I had a spare one of those, which I was able to slip inside the skeleton , and duct tape to the bicycle.

I felt so damn domestic, somehow, standing out there rigging this repair to a piece of absurd lawn decor.

Ride safe, Mr. Skellington. Perhaps we should add a skeletal flamingo, or another cyclist, or something.

Research (IV)

Peggy
October 1, 2021

Illustrator, 7h.

This started with just Kellyn perched atop the shelves (from me recalling how I kid me used to like to climb on top of the dresser in my room, or the shed in the back yard, and read), but ended up also including my SO’s character Alba in the couch. And a few of the cats who live under the house.

Today feels weird and flat and empty; I have nothing much else to say about this drawing. It feels like I may be done with the urge to draw these cozy library scenes for a while.

High res and AI source on Patreon.

Shirts/prints/etc on Redbubble.

Research (III)

Peggy
September 27, 2021

I am still into “my fursonas sitting around lavish libraries”. This one was started back in 2016, and left at a pretty rough stage because I just really did not feel like drawing all those books at that time; now I’ve got a pretty good workflow for this, so when I remembered it existed, I pulled it out and spent about six and a half hours finishing it.

The unicorn on the ceiling is Noelle and the dragon is November-4; the dragons on the bottom are Enmerkar (seated) and Peganthyrus (sleeping). Noelle and Enmerkar are my spouse’s; originally this was just a picture of Peggy visiting Enmerkar at his home in the Library of Babel, but the way I drew the books above the arches made me decide to make it clear that space is a bit broken in there, and put someone on the ceiling.

High res and AI source are on Patreon; prints are on Redbubble.

Research (II)

Peggy
September 24, 2021

It’s just been that kind of a month. I think I am probably still recovering from Hurricane Ida. And maybe from some old Katrina PTSD that Ida dredged up, as well. I feel like I have at least one more “my characters sitting in a big library reading” drawing in me. Possibly also because we got some new bookshelves this week, and I’ve been working on finally getting all my books out of boxes and onto shelves.

This one’s a bit of an experiment; I have a commission at the sketch stage that I think will be well-served by evoking a Japanese woodblock print feeling. Sometimes when I want to explore stuff like that I will make room in the price range for the commission to fuck up and redo from scratch; this time I felt like exploring it in some personal work.

I tried four different ways to get an outline happening:

my initial shitty rough

Astute’s Dynamic Sketch tool

just some simple, monoweight lines

trying to make Illustrator automatically add an extra, thick outline to everything

illustrator’s Blob Brush

The blob brush looked the best, but I kind of hate the blob brush because it feels like working in Flash. And it still felt kind of really sloppy no matter what I did. So I just did a slight variant of my usual methods: I drew some solid-filled shapes, and had an outline on them. I had to be a little more careful about certain aspects of how I overlapped the shapes to make sure the outlines looked good, but it was only slightly slower than my normal methods, and felt a lot less insane than trying to nail the whole thing down as a composition in the line stage, then decide how to best flood-fill everything. Probably by using Live Paint.

Which, yes, is a thing most artists do all the goddamn time, I know. I haven’t been working lines-first since about 2000 and it really just breaks a lot of my workflow to do that.

My original sketch had her kind of flopping coils onto the shelves, but it didn’t feel right. So I looked at some pictures of snakes climbing up sheer walls and ladders and trees, cloned the body layer, and drew something new on the original layer.I liked the results so I deleted the copy.

And then I had to fill some more bookshelves. I drew new book-spine brushes instead of using the ones from the previous picture, and thought a bit about ways to quickly shuffle around the brushes and colors on them. Astute’s Super Marquee is already a tool that’s found a place in my workflow, and its ability to select a randomized subset of the paths in the area it’s selecting was super useful here. I threw together the above image to share it this process on the Astute chat; I could maybe add some more details to how it’s done, but that’s for some other time.

Overall this took about seven hours to do. Which feels like a while for me for a single character drawing, but I spent a couple hours on things like “testing four different approaches to creating a fake ‘ink line’ look”, “making the pattern on her clothes via some tools that let me make symmetry groups that Illustrator’s native pattern tools can’t handle”, and “figuring out why the rug pattern that I generated with the source of a Twitter bot is coming in as black-on-black”.

Anyway. Patreon supporters can get the AI file over here if they want to pick it apart; if you have a blank space on your wall, in your cupboard, or on your body that you think this image would fill nicely, you can get it printed on a bunch of stuff over on Redbubble.

meat

Peggy
September 23, 2021

do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and say to yourself, why hello Chauncey, we seem to have woken up in a piece of meat again, look at its memories, what a strange journey this meat has had from its mother’s womb to this point in time, and then your nose starts running because evidently the locus of consciousness currently sitting in your body riffling through your memories is moderately allergic to being meat but it will just have to deal with it until you can go back to sleep and hopefully wake up with a different locus of consciousness that is okay with this whole “meat” thing, but it’s hard to do this when you keep on having to blow your nose instead of lying there in bed and turning your attention inward, away from waking life?

Research

Peggy
September 18, 2021

Earlier this week I woke up and felt like what I needed to be working on was a picture of Stella sitting in a library, reading. This may be a sign that I need to do some research before doing the next few pages of her grimoire; I’m feeling the kind of resistance to working on them that usually means “something needs to be nailed down more before I get into drawing”.

There’s a lot of stuff going on in these bookcases. Firstly, the books are just simple straight lines drawn in various colors with an assortment of art brushes I made:

They’re all drawn flat, then warped into goofy cartoon perspective with a distortion mesh. Which is the weird shape highlighted in red in the above screenshot.

You may also notice that a lot of the sets of books are just a couple of lines in the outline view above; that’s done with a blend between two lines. And a little randomness is added by putting the Transform effect on each of those two lines, with a small vertical transformation, and the Random box checked:

And finally, I use Astute’s Block Shadow effect (in the Stylism plugin) to give some depth to the books by extruding them:

Each shelf has different angles to create a vague sense of perspective. It’s kind of sloppy, but all the lighting effects hide that. If I wanted them to be clearer I’d spend some time thinking about a way to get the edge of a page block in there between the covers. Good enough for now, though. And it took a ton less time to give the books depth with the Block Shadow plugin than it would’ve taken to do it manually.

The whole thing took about five hours, spread out over three days. I shudder to imagine how long it would have taken if I’d had to individually draw every book by hand. I think it was like an hour and a half of work from “I have empty shelves placed where I want them in the composition” to “I have shelves full of books and a few knick-knacks”, thanks to thoughtful use of art brushes and the block shadow effect.

The AI2021 source file is available over on Patreon, if you wanna poke around. It may be weird if you don’t have the Astute plugins. And if you want this on a shirt or a laptop cover or a mug or something, you can get that over on Redbubble.

a hurrication

Peggy
August 30, 2021

This week, my husband went off to visit their parents in Ohio. I figured I was gonna have a little bachelorette time. Maybe I’d get Psychonauts 2 and play it.

But Hurricane Ida had other plans. A couple days later I was frantically getting all the boxes of stuff off the floor and packing bags of the absolute bare minimum of stuff I could take out, and leaving lots of food for the cats who live under the house. And then Saturday I was hooking up with some friends and putting those bags in their car, and spending four hours to drive two hours to Hattiesburg, MS because of highways clogged with other New Orleanians fleeing. The traffic would have been worse if we’d hugged the coast like most of them, even worse if we’d gone west. And then Sunday we were pressing on to Birmingham, AL, where we ended up glued to the internet as the storm passed over the city.

The predictions kept on wavering between a Category 3, 4, and 5. It hit the land, and the city, as a 4, on the sixteenth anniversary of Katrina devastating the place. We were all there for Katrina so we were all kind of feeling a lot of PTSD rising up.

And… our worst fears weren’t realized. The levees held. The whole city lost power, but the Sewage & Water Board’s generators kept running – they had barely enough of them up to keep the pumps going, got one more up the same morning that Ida was coming, and ended up with one shutting down once the worst of the storm had passed. Those people are fucking heros and they really need to be paid a lot better. So far there has been all of one hour officially reported, though more are probably coming.

This morning, we saw this absolute wonderful unit on CNN. And I had to draw him.

Twice, because the first time was from memory while waiting for lunch, and I knew I could do better. I could probably do even better if I tried a couple more times, I was being lazy in some ways the second time too.

At present I dunno when I’ll get back. The mayor’s asking evacuees to please stay out. The power’s probably gonna be off for at least a week. I do want to get back soon and see what the state of my home is, and also start feeding the poor kitties under the house. We have a possible sighting of one of them from some acquaintances who dropped off some food, and they probably would have mentioned it if the house was obviously missing a chunk of roof, but I can’t know for sure until I’ve been inside. If the place is screwed then we have at least one spare bedroom we can stay in for a while. I’m gonna go to the REI here in Birmingham before we leave and buy like a dozen solar chargers for myself and whoever I know who wants them, FEMA’s promised to pick up the bill for evac expenses and help with rebuilding too.

All the friends I’ve been in contact with through the storm are okay too. The friend with an incredible library of early American newspaper comics in his house still has it. The city’s sustained damage but nothing like Katrina.

And unlike Katrina, Biden declared a goddamn state of emergency before the storm even hit. Have I mentioned how much I hate Dubya for his bungling of that? Because he sure did fuck that shit up and he can rot in hell for that.

Anyway. I turned on the computer thinking I was gonna work on this drawing:

…and decided to make an update on my status for Patreon because my last one from before leaving was pretty damn bleak, and I figured I’d say something here as well.