ringing

Peggy
December 17, 2022

current status: looking stonedly at my current desktop image and completely losing interest in Twilight Sparkle’s Goatse Impression to note that, wow, there’s some really terrible jpeg artifacts on the hot magenta of her cutie mark and the stripe in her hair.

Going from a 24″ monitor to a 27″ has been really interesting, I am noticing a lot more of these kinds of things in the endless rotation of my FA favorites through my desktop. I have also noticed that the menu bar is just too far away now. It’s not even any physically further away from what I’m doing, it’s the same place on the drawing tablet, but I find myself using a lot of windows that don’t completely fill up the screen and that extra distance is breaking something in my head a little.

This may also be coming from the fact that this monitor has a super-tiny bezel and the Mardi Gras beads I had hanging over the edge of the old monitor are now hanging over the left edge of the screen. I dunno. Maybe I need a frame for this thing so that everything displayed upon it immediately becomes Art, in the same way the ornate frame surrounding the projector’s image on the living room wall turns every game I play on the ps4 into Art. And which I can also hang these beads over.

(And because I know someone is gonna ask: here is the original image, it is by professional pony porn provider Bakuhaku, and it is fabulously NSFW.)

full moon promises

Peggy
December 12, 2022

This just kind of happened when one of the Gateway files came up on iTunes one spring day when I was baked. It’s been sitting around marked as “in progress” ever since; every now and then I’d open it up, fiddle around with it, and decide it wasn’t done yet. Sometimes I’d add stuff, sometimes I’d take stuff away and add something else.

Today I opened it up and decided the only thing to add was my signature. Time Sink says I’ve spent a total of about an hour with this file open.

It’s on Redbubble if you want a print or a poster or a sticker or a t-shirt or an apron or whatever.

Illustrator source and a high-res copy are on Patreon.

RE.BAL

Peggy
November 30, 2022

So a few days ago, I got crossfaded, and a little horny, and decided to lay down on the couch with my copies of the Gateway audio files. These are a series of recordings from the 70s designed, essentially, to try and teach you how to psychic. And to astral travel.

I have not reached that point with them but I sure did get some interesting imagery this time. I scribbled down something in my Magical Notebook; the next day, I started turning it into a full piece in Illustrator.

4.5 hours, lots of use of Astute’s plugins. Source on Patreon.

a moment of sonic nostalgia

Peggy
November 22, 2022

Every now and then something reconnects in my brain and I remember being eighteen and sticking a pirated copy of Shufflepuck Cafe into my Amiga and hearing its weird, wonderful opening music fill my bedroom.

The game itself was a decent conversion of a Mac game from the year before, simulating a tournament of air hocky with an assortment of goofy aliens. But what was really memorable about it was that opening music. Go on. Hit play if you haven’t already.

It’s exemplary of a lot of music found on the Amiga around this time. A little bit off-key and atonal (and a lot harder to listen to because of that now that I’m an adult), but chock full of weirdness for its own sake, and reveling in being on the first home computer to have a sound chip that was based entirely on playing back wavetables instead of producing simple bleeps. This one especially stands out because it was really trying to sell the idea that you were standing outside a bar on some alien planet; are the weird blurbles that come and go part of the music, or part of the ambient noise? What does alien music even sound like? It also sticks out because it tries to cram so much into so little space; it lurches drunkenly from one riff to another over the course of its four minutes, refusing to ever commit to a groove for more than a few measures. It’s a raw, jagged artifact of technology people were just beginning to get a handle on. Unpolished, chaotic, and anarchic.

the future is weird

Peggy
October 7, 2022

Today I got a new iPad Mini to replace the old one, which had suffered a few drops and had a lot of tape holding it together. The new one arrived a few minutes ago; the poor bastard delivering it had to submit a couple of photos via an app on his phone… which couldn’t get any reception on my front porch. He tried running out on the sidewalk and waving the phone at the sky, to no avail. Ultimately I had him hand me the phone so I could type in the password for my own internet. Which I had to do twice because I botched it the first time.

Then I got to experience the current iThing data transfer process. It’s pretty crazy now; the new device setup routine starts pinging all the other iThings nearby via Bluetooth, and then it starts displaying this crazy moving dot pattern that you have to scan with the camera of the device you’re transferring from. The new one downloaded an operating system update, and went from “preparing for transfer” with a little pinwheel for a few minutes, to a new screen showing up on both Minis with a half-filled progress bar promising to be done in about nine minutes.

Protected: The Very NSFW Adventures of Twyla Viridatis: The Scoundrel’s Endowment

Peggy
September 15, 2022

Greetings from Sunny Yetzirah!

Peggy
September 2, 2022

Illustrator, 4.5h.

So there I was minding my own business when suddenly my magicsona kinda poked her head into reality and was all, hey, remember me? we were kinda doing a thing and then we lost contact? wanna try again?

Seriously it was weird, there is this thing Illustrator does where I hit the Appearance palette’s button to bring up a tiny version of the Swatch palette and it decides to flip over to another desktop to bring it up; the preview window stays on the desktop I just left so I get an eyefull of whatever’s on the new desktop. Which is often an endless cycle of the furry porn I’ve favorited on Furaffinity. Last Tuesday this happened repeatedly and had me looking at an extreme up-shot of a horny jackal lady; when I paused to think about this I got a brief sense of incense, and it started to feel Signifying. So I sketched this out and spend the last few days painting it.

Maybe it’s time for me to start doing that daily ritual again.

Also if you are wondering why Stella’s Guide stopped abruptly this is basically why. It felt like it was kinda coming from somewhere else and then suddenly the drive to work on it just… stopped. Magic is weird.

I did some experimentation with baking a lot of the basic shading into some Graphic Styles; I can draw one quick shape and it’ll have a vague shadow applied to it, and have a nice misty, volumetric shadow trailing off of it thanks to Astute’s Block Shadow effect. The shadow even changes direction based on where I draw/move the shape, since it’s calculated based on a vanishing point lurking somewhere above Stella’s head.

Also I am very happy with the cloudscape I drew. I really feel like I’ve been drawing much more realistic and interesting clouds ever since I moved to New Orleans, where we have spectacular sunsets on a regular basis.

You can get the Illustrator source on Patreon, if you want to look at how this all works. You’ll need the Astute suite for a few things – the aforementioned shadows, as well as some of the stuff going on in the “upstairs” half of the image.

And if you want this on your wall or your clothes or something, you can make that happen over here.

generation dust

Peggy
August 25, 2022

Today I learnt that the new term for “the tail end of the disputed territory between Generation X and Millennials” is “geriatric millennials”. At first I thought it was maybe just a new term for GenX? Nope. Just for the latter half of the transitional zone that’s mostly known as “the Oregon Trail generation”.

“Geriatric Millennials” are at least nine years younger than I am. And of course searching for info on this new term leads to discussions of generations that mention every living generation except X. If the tail end of my generation is “geriatric” then what the hell does that make me?

Nothing. Emptiness. Dust.

I am of the void. I am the mystery. I am generation meh, who gives a shit about them?

I am free of attempts to define me by marketers and pundits. The moment my cohort stopped being young adults with disposable income and not enough sense to try to ignore advertising, we stopped existing.

I am the X-factor, I am the mutant lost and forgotten. I am a mystery. I am nobody.

I am nothing, and I am free.

I have revised my infographic of generation dates accordingly.

A Superman

Peggy
July 9, 2022

Illustrator, 30min.

So someone I follow posted the results of asking an AI to do some Superman costume redesigns

and I saw some pretty good shapes in there and decided to play around with them.

Now I kinda want an excuse to draw an 8-pager with this version of him.

I think it would be neat to get as many S/lightning bolt visual themes into this as possible, I was already feeling that some with the design of the S on his chest. Like say a follow-up drawing to this one with the same angle but now the red swoop is a big S because he’s turned and is coming down to the camera.

I did not have any real intention with the skin color beyond “is there really any particular reason a Space God should manifest as a white dude” and “this brown looks good against the rest of the colors” but there is probably a lot of delicate ground for a white lady to tread in drawing a story about a Black Superman. The American Way hasn’t been about Truth and Justice for anyone who doesn’t qualify as “white” for its entire existence, and ignoring that’s risky. If I can figure out how to navigate that then maybe I’ll do something short, this guy’s shapes are a ton of fun to draw!

utena but hors

Peggy
June 21, 2022

Client: “Peggy can I give you some money to draw the heck out of ‘the Utena intro except they are hors’.”

Me: “very the yes, I love my fuckin’ job so much”

I was really glad Illustrator finally added canvas rotation the year before I did this. It’s really kind of embarrassing how ling it took them to add it. It’s still a minimum viable hack, there’s a bunch of stuff that’s annoyingly aligned to the canvas instead of the screen, like shift-constraining things, or dragging out a friggin’ selection marquee. But it works a lot better than “drawing stuff right side up, flipping it upside down to see how it works, then either trying to work on it further upside down, or flipping it around again to edit it”.

Here’s a closeup of our heroines. I giggled like a maniac when I decided to use the Sword of Dios for Anthy’s horn. Presumably this implies that she pulls it off and hands it to Utena when it’s time for a duel. Which is fucked up but feels less fucked up than pulling it out of her heart like she does in the show.

Also here’s the cloud layers by themselves. I made heavy use of a few variants of the cloud appearance stack I wrote about a few years ago. It’s pretty neat to swoop in a vague blob and have Illustrator turn it into a bumpy, fiddly cloud complete with its own rimlighting (gradient fills across strokes are super useful for that), then switch to the highlight or shadow cloud appearance and whip in some shading. I can knock out cloudscapes like this absurdly fast now.

you can click on this for a closeup if you can’t read all the little lists of effects