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.

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.

A Young Lady’s Illustration Primer, or, Peggy buys a Surface.

Peggy
June 9, 2016

This Sunday, I suddenly found myself thinking “I want to be able to work in Illustrator on a tablet badly enough to deal with Windows”.

Continue reading →

A Perfectly Legit Business Transaction

Peggy
June 5, 2016

Click for fullsize. NSFW.

A long-delayed commission from RF2014. I am a slacker.

a model sheet

Peggy
June 3, 2016

(click for fullsize, because boobs)

I felt an urge to do a model sheet of my cobra character Kalinda. Who is also occasionally an archaeopteryx, and was probably a raccoon in her backstory; it’s complicated, and she’s not really a reliable narrator.

She does wear clothes. Just not in this model sheet.

I really should organize all my character model sheets in one place sometime for when I want to get other people to draw them.

air travel is so romantic

Peggy
May 16, 2016

So a while back I decided to apply for TSA Pre-Check to skip the lines when I fly. I do it enough that it feels like a luxury I won't waste.

I went down to a little office near the Seattle airport, forked over $90 and my fingerprints. A little while later, I got e-mail and snailmail welcoming me to the program, and giving me my Known Traveller Number, which is the ID for the thing.

This weekend, I went down to the airport for my first trip with my brand new shiny Known Traveller Number. I'd entered it in the form when I booked the ticket, and was expecting a little Pre-Check note to show up when the ticket got printed so I could go through the fast line.

It didn't.

I went to customer service and we tried looking for my name in the database. It wasn't there. I tried looking it up on the Pre-Check website (whose name of course has nothing to do with “Pre-Check” or “TSA”) but the wireless in the terminal was garbage, time was short, and I was stressed.

I gave up, and went through the long line with all the other schlubs. Went off and did my trip, had a good time, I'll be posting something about that soon.

Now I'm sitting in a bar in the airport, on my way home. There was a Pre-Check application office in the unsecured zone of the airport; I asked about my problem and all they could do was to give me a card with a number to call. I checked on the website and there it was, the exact same KTN that I had written down in Evernote.

I called the number. I get to the start of a hold queue, then it says “Goodbye” and disconnects.

It did this on multiple tries. Once I actually got into the hold queue for a while, then managed to hit the wrong button while trying to turn up the earphones, and hung up instead.

I would probably be pretty frustrated if I wasn't sipping a Mai Tai right now. I'm still frustrated enough to decide its best to give up on this before I get pissed enough to throw the phone through a wall or something.

Five Lips

Peggy
May 11, 2016

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:

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.

Applied Xenoarchaeology

Peggy
May 11, 2016

Commission. And an experiment with pixelization brushes.

some pointillism

Peggy
May 9, 2016

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.)

darude – sandstorm

Peggy
May 7, 2016

There I am, walking down fraternity row on my way to the rail station at the far corner of the UW. One house has a lawn full of shirtless fratboys in great shape, throwing sand or dirt around with shovels. Maybe they had a beach party last night, I dunno. I slow down to enjoy the view.

The music they’re blasting as they work ends, and another track begins. One voice rings out, full of possibly-drunken enthusiasm: “DUDE! This song is AWESOME!”.

It’s Sandstorm.

I can’t stop giggling until I’m out of earshot.