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.

The Space Vixen Channel

Peggy
September 11, 2023

Sometimes you just gotta make your SO get on their knees and take a photograph of you waving a toy ray gun at them, so you can draw a promotional image for the SPACE VIXEN CHANNEL.

 

And then you end up having to spend an hour finally getting around to drawing a Fraser spiral because you need some Op art effects and the usual rayed ones just don’t feel like the right choice.

The SPACE VIXEN CHANNEL is not found on your TV set. It is found by getting high as fuck and pointing your pineal gland in the right direction. There is a lot of adult programming on it. (NSFW)

Source files for both this image and the separate file I built the Fraser spiral in are available on Patreon.

Pride flag brushes for Adobe Illustrator

Peggy
September 7, 2023

I needed this, and I couldn’t find it within five minutes of searching, so I went to Wikipedia’s list of LGBT pride flags and snagged all the SVGs and turned them into a bunch of Illustrator brushes. All of these files seem to be Creative Commons so this is, too.

Grab this and put it with the rest of your brush files: pride flags.ai – go forth, and draw the queerest fucking things you can think of! I sure needed it for some super-queer art.