god I’m old

Peggy
September 3, 2015

This morning, I was asked “…how long have you been drawing and using Ai?”

To which I replied:

I’d say I’ve been drawing since, oh, somewhere in the mid-70s when I was coordinated enough to hold a crayon. The oldest sketchbook I have around is from about 1982, though I know I was carrying one around and using it regularly several years before that. I wasn’t drawing at a pro level until after I went to animation school in 1995. Started using Illustrator in 2000.
tl;dr: I’m an old lady who’s been drawing since before ‘home computers’ existed.

I refrained from mentioning that there was a not insignificant chance that I have a pencil case older than the person asking this question. Which I still occasionally use. (This was on Reddit, whose median age seems to be in the mid-twenties. That pencil case is about nineteen years old now. It’s not likely but it will be in a few more years.)

How did I get here what happened what a long strange life it’s been, geeze.

best praise in weeks

Peggy
September 3, 2015

So I’ve been slowly developing that to-do app with a friend. They’re doing all of the programming, because they’re looking for portfolio projects to find iOS dev gigs with.

I’d just grabbed the latest version off the repository and gotten it running on my own phone. The core features are starting to come together and I may be able to start using it soon, which is kind of exciting. While discussing this version, the following ensued:

Friend: Do you think you could commit the iOS8 version as a separate branch? Or did you even have to make any modifications?

me: All I had to do was to go into the project’s settings and change ‘deployment target’ to 8.1. And I had to change the bundle identifier a bit because we haven’t set up a team yet, and different individual users can’t use the same bundle identifier.
me: We’ll fix the latter when it gets close to the point where we’re ready to put it on the store, I figure. Tweaking that’s not a hassle at all. And the former is also a thing we’d be constantly changing back and forth to test on our own devices.

Friend: I’m really glad to work with you. You are very coherent and understand real laziness.

A trans moment.

Peggy
September 3, 2015

In the past year, I've had to stop sleeping on my stomach. Because my breasts are now big enough that it hurts to sleep on them.

Thank you for these fabulous titty genes, Mom.

Armchair Sorceress

Peggy
September 1, 2015

So way back in 2011, I was hanging around at Erin’s place and tried out her Cintiq. I did the rough sketch of this, and I think set the palette and did some of the basic shapes of the figure.

Then it got brought home and forgotten in my working files directory. Until today, when I looked at the Illustrator subreddit and saw a ‘monthly challenge’: draw a piece with no strokes and flat fills, no patterns or gradients or whatnot. I went digging and found this and finished it.

What looks like a pattern fill on the wall is actually a pair of ‘transform’ effects stacked in the appearance palette, and what looks like gradients in the wainscoting and the far edge of the floor are actually blends. Which, once upon a time, before I was actually using Illustrator, was the only way you had available to do what you mostly use gradients for now.

Her anatomy is a little weird here and there. Hey, 2011. And here’s me too lazy to fix it. I might fix some of the worst bits tomorrow morning. I dunno.

A public calendar of cartoonist celebrations.

Peggy
August 28, 2015

Today is Jack Kirby’s birthday. Or, as some prefer to call it, Speak Like Thou Wert Ye Odinson Day. Lots of people drew stuff for it. And this is cool.

I got to thinking. I’d kinda like to remember that beforehand and maybe do it the evening before. And do the same for a few other master cartoonists whose work is important to me. So I did some googling and put together a calendar of Mostly Dead Master Cartoonist Birthdays. And gave them all silly names while I was at it.

If you want to subscribe to it, it’s <a href=”webcal://p01-calendars.icloud.com/published/2/82-teDvzQEdo9hc3VEoU4zjtRuCDJOL6l3EIbpyiK-XH3l46bwf_Gj72Kchx9voZlNE_vqWNk8cMhzXlrd1zpRx6FVD5tXCS9ZMi2EOlt6U”>here</a>.

If you have subscribe to it and have suggestions for other days, let me know and maybe I’ll add them. Nobody born before 1965 or so, I think.

pondering Nick/SPX show pitches, the second

Peggy
August 28, 2015

I think I just found an idea for an ongoing kid SF show I think I could get behind.

So: Imagine Star Trek from the perspective of an away team. A starship on a several-year mission of discovery and propaganda into unclaimed territory, spreading the good word about the United Federation of Planets.

But every other episode is another show. About an away team on a Klingon starship on a several-year mission of discovery and propaganda into unclaimed territory, spreading the good word about the Glorious Klingon Empire.

They’re not actually the Klingons and the Federation, of course. I’ll come up with good names eventually. For now it’s enough to know that one of them will be quietly “leftist” while the other will be quietly “rightist”. Neither will ever make a big deal of this.

Sometimes they have their own separate adventures. Find a planet with a problem, help them out with their problem, another win for Their Side, whichever one that is.

Sometimes they run into each other. At first always as adversaries. Who see each other as nasty caricatures. But as the show goes on, they occasionally find each other thrown together in a situation where they have to put their mutual hatred aside to survive in the face of some kind of Outside Context Problem, ranging from the small (on from each side stuck on an inhospitable planet with each other) to the large (oh shit we accidentally woke up the Creepy Ancient Anti-Life Robots and now we have to stop them from destroying both homeworlds).

So on a basic level we have “woo, spaceships, explosions, aliens, friendship, whee!”. But underneath that there is a serious attempt to get people to sympathize with the other side of the cultural conflict that’s going on in America nowadays. Not to necessarily agree with each other on everything. But to spend some time maybe rooting for the other side, and see a caricature of themselves through their eyes. Ideally I would get some right-wing people on the show’s staff to help make that side more believable, and to make the caricature of the lefties a bit sharper.

I feel like if I’m going to attempt to put together something aimed at kids, it behooves me to think about what I want to say to them. Now that I have this worked out, I think I can bullshit enough details to make a worthwhile pitch in the time between now and SPX, while also making a serious dent in the end of Rita.

upcoming cons

Peggy
August 27, 2015

I’ll be at SPX in Bethesda, Maryland for the first time this September. If you’re around there you should come say hi. Maybe give me money for a book or a Tarot deck, maybe just tell me you love my stuff.

The next weekend I’ll be showing up for a day at Rainfurrest, to do my usual panel on How I Illustrator, and a team-up panel with Dana Simpson about makin’ webcomics. Then I will probably hit the dance for a while and go back home the next morning. Because next weekend…

I’ll be at APE in San Jose. Sorry, no map this time; they haven’t given me a table assignment yet. I’ll have the same stuff I’ll have at SPX, unless I run out of Tarot decks there – I’ve got about a dozen left, and haven’t heard back from the US distributor on getting more yet.

And then the weekend after that, because I am apparently a glutton for punishment, I’ll probably be sharing a table at Geek Girl Con here in Seattle.

The four weeks spanning the end of October and the beginning of September are going to be pretty damn busy. Especially given that somewhere around there I’ll probably be done drawing Rita, and starting to set up the volume 3 Kickstarter…

One of those moments of loving my tools.

Peggy
August 26, 2015

“It’ll be great,” I told myself. “An endless plain of black eggs, stretching off into infinity. An awesome image to open the last chapter of Rita with.”

Yeah, sounds great. Until I have to draw them all. Or cut and paste them. Eh, screw that. I made a scatter brush (sorry, no video of that, I did this a while back), drew a couple of lines, and blended between them. Instant egg-field.

I faffed around for another twenty minutes or so after recording this video, and have a nice horizon line of egg-piles developing, with some aerial perspective as well. It’s mostly done. I’ll probably spend like another hour finessing it before I’m really happy with it.

I am so glad I don’t draw comics by hand. Making this happen in traditional media would take forever.

Table upgrade time.

Peggy
August 24, 2015

I’ve been meaning to upgrade my sign for a while. I really felt the lack of my awesome quotes on the sign while I was at Worldcon. So instead of lying in the living room playing video games all day, I fixed this.

I mean, those are some pretty good quotes right there. I’d be a fool to not use them. I’d put them on revised price signs for the books, but they’re kind of tiny and won’t pull you in from the aisle.

And while I was at it I decided to put together a second sign for me. Having two signs will mean I can hide more of whatever’s behind me at an artist alley table.

These should both be very useful next month, when I have two or three cons coming up. (APE, SPX, and maybe sharing a table at Geek Girl Con.) I’m going to actually order them tomorrow; Nick is here and we’re going to watch some video and get me properly petted.

Florence Unfortunate Nostrils

Peggy
August 23, 2015

I’ve been spending this weekend sharing a Worldcon table with Dana, selling our stuff. At one point she mentioned that there is a character in the strip who is a disheveled unicorn who sneezes spiders. And I was all like “oh I have to draw her”. So I did.

The spider is probably named something like Cleopatra Golden Spinner.