Tag Archives: wacom tablet

Just Another Digital Mandala

Circles within circles...

Circles within circles…

Here’s your Friday mandala. My hand is a little stiff from filling in all those circles, or I probably would have filled in twice as many circles.

Also today I decorated the top of a disintegrating $10 Ikea table with $7 of patterned duct tape. It looks pretty good, all things considered. Will post a picture when the legs are done. It’s in the 110 degree range in Tucson, and there was also a chiltepin pepper plant to repot. I didn’t want to melt before that was taken care of. I actually wanted to draw a comic, but we had an impromptu pool party and I didn’t get to work until almost midnight.

 

The Perfect Passion Flower

This is Cthulhu's favorite flower.

This is Cthulhu’s favorite flower.

Wow! This design took forever! And it’s complete at last. In retrospect, maybe it didn’t need to be quite so complex; a lot of the detail gets lost at the resolution at which it will be viewed. It’s weirdly, uncomfortably humid here, which made it hard to focus on work. Maybe I could have finished this yesterday if it hadn’t been so sticky.  But here it is: the perfect passion flower.

You can acquire the perfect passion flower in my shop on T-shirts, tank tops, and more. There are even some totally new product types, including a pencil skirt, and a drawstring bag.

Working on this digital painting made me consider the 5 day a week publishing schedule. Obviously, I had nothing to post on Tuesday. I was so focused on trying to get through this piece that I didn’t even have a chance to scan and write about an old piece. And while I do enjoy doing the comic, I miss the opportunity to throw myself into larger projects. Is 3 a week the best option? Would 2 be better, or even 1? Still pondering. But this is what has occupied my attention for the last week or so.

 

 

Color Correction in Photoshop

I am not going to tell you how to color correct images in Photoshop, because my knowledge is insufficient for instruction purposes. Just starting out: I’m just feeling my way and going about it in a rather haphazard manner. A couple weeks back, my friend the Vampire Bat saw a picture I took of a hummingbird and color corrected it, and the difference is sort of amazing, so we talked for 30 seconds about it and I was inspired. I took a slightly less awesome hummingbird picture last week and decided to give it a shot. After I finished, I did a more subtle correction on a picture of an Arizona cardinal.

Brightening Birds in Adobe Photoshop

Brightening Birds in Adobe Photoshop; originals on left, color corrections on right.

To my eye, the hummingbird might be a bit too bright and the cardinal could be brighter, but they both definitely look better than the originals. I shifted everything blue-green in the first picture, but I only changed the color of the bird in the second.

I also enjoyed practicing that tiny bit of digital calligraphy, which I tried one time when I first got the tablet and then forgot all about as I struggled to figure out how Photoshop worked. Since most people use that program more for the color correction and less for drawing horrible webcomics, I was really feeling my way and probably not learning things in the same order as other people.

The Man also required some brightening.

The Man also required some brightening.

Here you can see some sort of over-the-top work I did for The Man, who wanted some professional head shots. I made a few mistakes, including causing the tree to look sort of unrealistic, but he liked it well enough to use it. It’s interesting to see what details pop out; I definitely have many sky photos that could use this treatment. Not sure what to do about his skin, though. For this image, I selected the sky first, played with that, then selected the inverse and worked with that section.

Anyway, like I said, I couldn’t exactly tell you what I did to achieve these results. It was sort of random button pushing, but I think I’m learning.

Sketchy Stuff

You didn't hear it either.

You didn’t hear it either.

Submitted for your approval: a few more degrees of weirdness from my fevered brow.

The idea of invisibility is a tempting one, but obviously, people don’t use it for anything other than breaking the law. Sure, some of us are Harry Potter and we’re just employing our ultimately power for the purpose of sneaking into the restricted section of the library, but, by and large, people want invisibility for the purpose of spying. By and large, people want invisibility for the purpose of spying on people in various states of undress. The Invisible Man is not, in fact, someone you’d invited into your home. Of course, if I were invisible I would totally Robin Hood it. Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor would be my calling in life. For real.

I like his leather boots and gloves, and his trench coat and empty scarf. He’s totally inconspicuous in that getup. No one would ever look twice.

Practice makes perfect

Practice makes perfect 

Here comes Tax Day. This year I swore that I would file early. I really have no idea what to expect. We have with withholding incorrectly since we got married and there’s a strong possibility that we’re going to owe the federal government some sum of money we do not actually have on hand. The worst part is that I hire someone to do my taxes every year, because it’s cheaper than spending 3 days crying about how much I hate doing taxes. And I’m still not ready to file, even though I brought him our 1099s and W2s in February. This is 97% my fault.

Anyway, this ballerina, with her oddly muscular arms and her surely uncomfortable thong leotard had to settle for her second choice career. Stay in school, kids!

Clearly, we're missing out on a lot of things that excite dogs.

Clearly, we’re missing out on a lot of things that excite dogs.

Fire hydrants are like newspapers for dogs; everyone knows that. They read smells. I think I read that a dog’s nose is 10,000 times more sensitive than a humans’. I guess this dog is maybe a dalmatian/beagle mix. A dalmeagle? Or a beaglematian? At any rate, he’s picked up on something, recalled that it’s something he’s picked up before, but decided to resmell it. You know, just like some people do with books.

The hot and the cold are both so intense, put 'em together it just makes sense!

The hot and the cold are both so intense, put ’em together it just makes sense!

See, the fire spirit is hitting on the ice cream cone. And the ice cream cone is interested, but ultimately knows how things will end between them. Better safe than sorry, ice cream cone.

Yep. I have like a million of these things. And it absolutely doesn’t matter if anyone else likes them, or even understands them.

Basically What It Looks Like in My Brain

Walking Eye: So I'm a walking eye Green Vegetal Forest Spirit: Forest spirit. And my friend's a forest spirit too.  Wee Glowing Forest Spirit: Hey

Walking Eye: So I’m a walking eye
Green Vegetal Forest Spirit: Forest spirit. And my friend’s a forest spirit too.
Wee Glowing Forest Spirit: Hey

For a while now I’ve been doing a lot of the same thing, and I’ve learned a lot doing it, but ordinarily, when I’m just drawing to draw, I don’t draw the same thing over and over. There are definite themes, and there are topics that I mine again and again, but when I draw, for instance, Little Red Riding Hood, today’s Little Red is a different Little Red than yesterday’s Little Red.

I can tell already we're going to be the best of friends!

Little Red Riding Hood: I can tell already we’re going to be the best of friends!
Wolf: ::slavers::

Although, there does tend to be a lot of sexual tension between the girl and wolf.

There are lots of birds and fish and flowers and stars. Animals and fruit come up as often as fairy tales, and the style tends to be fluid. My friend the Vampire Bat once remarked that my art doesn’t have a recognizable style–this changes from image to image, I guess because I’m still searching for my style, or rather, I’ve never been satisfied with the way I draw.

This is basically the way I draw when I’m not trying to draw like someone else.

Turtle: I could absolutely *murder* a strawberry right now. Strawberry: Oh, god, please, no! I'm too ripe to die

Turtle: I could absolutely *murder* a strawberry right now.
Strawberry: Oh, god, please, no! I’m too ripe to die

Dragon Comics are fun, but these are the kind of comics that I draw constantly, without thinking about it. They don’t take hours. They don’t always make sense, although usually that’s part of the humor. They sort of make sense to me. And they always amuse me, which is the standard, right?

A snail licking the rim of a margarita glass for some reason

A snail licking the rim of a margarita glass for some reason

Usually I scratch stuff like this out on the backs of junk mail envelopes, keep them around for a couple months, perhaps thinking that the designs could aspire to be something greater, and then, eventually throw them in recycling when I find them jammed under the leg of my desk covered in cat hair. I’ve got dozens of notebooks from high school and college, the margins filled with these little guys. I’ve been thinking I should do something with my favorite parts and recycle the rest of those notebooks, too.

When I first started with the tablet, little cartoons like these would come out very rough and basic. I sort of advance in fits and starts: learn a few things, get comfortable with them, get dependent on them, then suddenly realize that there’s more to learn. Then I pick up a couple more techniques. Probably it would be more efficient to read a book about Photoshop and the manual for the Wacom Tablet, but that’s just now how my mind works. I’ve got to figure it out myself.

A Digilicious Mandala

My soul isn't perfect; why should my mandalas be?

My soul isn’t perfect; why should my mandalas be?

One of the reasons that crayon mandalas became less prevalent in my day-to-day life is that I felt I was reaching the limits of the abstract form and beginning to repeat myself. The representative ones were still original, but those take a lot more forethought and don’t spill out in the same organic way as the purely geometric ones.

When I did last week’s mandala on the tablet, I had to start over again with the form in some ways. I had to let go, again, of the idea of perfection. Now I start to see more possibilities.

With crayon, what’s done is done. You can stack a little bit of color with Crayolas but not with great detail. You can’t really go past a certain level of detail in crayon, whereas the tablet lets you get down to the pixels, and, of course, to add layers, so that you can always get something on top of whatever you’ve done. So that’s what I’ve been exploring here, and I’m actually much happier with the result than I was with last week’s circles. Something about the dots and lines reminds me of various types of indigenous folk art. I think I can really start to get even more impressive results, and hopefully come up with something T-shirt worthy.

In the real world, I still have a few more days in the cold place, although it has been warming up. Crocuses and snowdrops and narcissus–the first flowers of spring–are just poking their heads through the soil, and everywhere you go, landscapers are trying to untangle the mess of this unreasonable winter. It’s increasingly difficult to function; sleep is elusive here, in a narrow bed, without The Man, without some of the comforts of home that help me sleep. It becomes debilitating very fast. Maybe tonight will be the night that I sleep for 8 hours without interruption.

Peacock Design at Long Last

Screen Shot 2015-03-16 at 11.58.27 PM

Vanity Has a Thousand Eyes

This work was a long time in coming, something I tinkered with sporadically for probably about 6 months. For a while I figured it would never be done, but tonight I just went at the last bits and got something I could live with. This design looks pretty boss on this smartphone case, and does its job just fine on a T-shirt. It also makes a particularly stunning throw pillow.

I actually don’t care too much for peacocks as living, breathing creatures. The summer before 7th grade, I went to camp at the Philadelphia Zoo. We had a lot of special privileges, including getting into the zoo 15 minutes before it opened and being allowed to go behind the scenes in a lot of exhibits. There were peacocks, everywhere, taunting me. Every kid there found a peacock feather that summer. Every kid but me.

Well, you say, that’s no reason to hate peacocks. OK. My second year in college I did an internship at an elementary school that kept peacocks on the grounds. For atmosphere, I guess. Peacocks were sort of their mascot. Part of my compensation was the use of a trailer on the school grounds. The compensation wasn’t all that great: besides the trailer I got $25 a week and leftover pizza on Fridays. And not only did I have to share the trailer with the principal’s 12-year-old son (apparently he was so obnoxious that the principal and his wife didn’t want him in the house either) but I had to share the roof of the trailer with a flock of peacocks.

I had a rough time getting to the school; there was an utter lack of communication on the school’s part concerning my arrival, compounded by the fact that I had sprained my ankle earlier in the week. When I finally got to my destintaion, many hours later than anticipated, and with my leg swollen to twice its normal size, I just wanted to sleep. The principal casually mentioned that I might hear some strange sounds in the night, as it was the birds’ mating season. He did not mention that the birds’ preferred mating ground was the roof of my trailer. At 4 o’clock in the morning. He further did not mention that the mating call of a peacock sounds eerily like a small child screaming for help while suffering excruciating pain and abject terror.

Ha ha. Peacocks. They’re terrible birds. The elementary school also kept a potbellied pig, a flock of chickens, and a sheep on the grounds, all of which would have made better mascots. When the peacocks laid their eggs and hatched their babies, the rat snakes ate all the chicks. Rat snakes would have made a better mascot.

Like many creatures, peacocks are successful in the modern world because they are nice to look at. Because if they weren’t, they would have gone the way of the passenger pigeon. Peacocks take irritating to the next level. I understand they were considered quite tasty in the medieval world.

I photographed this proud gent at the local zoo. The Girl and I had lingered after closing time and security had not yet found us to throw us out. I could tell the peacock thought we should leave, but I don’t like to be kicked around by birds, no matter how magnificent their tail feathers may be. If you, like me, enjoy looking at peacocks but would prefer not to experience them in person, consider purchasing “Vanity Has a Thousand Eyes,” now available on a variety of garments and household goods in my RedBubble store.

The Fabulous Blue Morpho Butterfly

The Blue Morpho Butterfly on the organic women's T.

The Blue Morpho Butterfly on the organic women’s T.

I do some of my best thinking in the butterfly and orchid house at the Tucson Botanical Gardens. It’s the same temperature year round, meaning it’s not only a nice place to hang out on a brisk (for here) 50 degree winter day, it’s also pretty comfortable during an average (for here) 110 degree summer day. Besides butterflies you can also spot tiny orange fish and vivid blue frogs under the foliage, and the hibiscus is always in bloom.

This digital painting took me about 3 weeks. It’s based on the same photograph I used as a reference to draw the butterfly in the comic, of course. I think it’s pretty stunning and would make a nice sticker as well. You can also get it on 2 style of coffee cup. I want to offer it as leggings but you can’t just slap a T-shirt design on a pair of pants, You have to adapt the image to a different kind of space. It’s time consuming. But it’s totally ready to read on your top half.

Get the Blue Morpho Butterfly T-shirt here!

Substance is what you make of it

Before the Wacom tablet, when I was just writing novels, an extra four hours a day working on the computer didn’t really affect my brain, because I touch type, fairly accurately, at around 70 words per minute, and didn’t have to actually look at the screen. When I first started learning digital painting, staring at the monitor for hours on end gave me constant headaches. Eventually, my eyes seemed to adjust to the strain (plus, as I improved my control over the stylus, I didn’t have to work on the pixel level with the screen 8 inches from my eyes.

I’m starting to wonder, though, if staying up all night on Photoshop is contributing to my insomnia. It’s been pretty bad for the last couple months.

That is my excuse for not having anything really pithy to say about art, beauty, creativity, or writing at this time.

I do however, have your weekly dose of mandala and fanciful dragon, all rolled into one!

This dragon looks like she would make a good friend.

Wyndolyn, a cheerful, airy dragon, looks like she would make a good friend. She would totally take you on magical rides to fantastic lands, or, if you were just looking for a sympathetic ear, would be willing to listen to all your problems. She would never even complain about the fact that she was born without arms or legs.

That is a good-looking dragon.

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This mandala was drawn for Rabbit, who, in addition to kale and organic carrots, is also fond of textiles and cottage industries associated with women. For example: quilt making. This design is based on common quilting designs. I have tried my hand at quilt making in the past, which resulted in 5 broken sewing needles and very lopsided, unsymmetrical blanket, which fell apart in a couple years. Rabbit made me a quilt once as a graduation present and the angles are brain-breakingly perfect. Some people just have talents and skills.

And that is a pretty mandala.

Honestly, I did have some pseudo-pithy words about art, but I put them all into next Monday’s comic, so no need for redundancy. All I need is regular sleep. Which I can’t have.