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January 31, 2005

Drawings for January

Well, it's the end of January and I'm going to move onto another drawing genre. I hope to make another post later tonight that has all of my latest cartoons for January.

Then, it's onto solid objects, robots, and spaceships. Oh yeh, and a refresher coarse in perspective drawing!

Whee.

Old signature

I found this on the Google Groups archive. My college e-mail signature:

 ###    ## ##  ######  _________________________________________________________
#####  ## ## ##       Nicholas     BITNET: nic%sun.acsu.buffalo....@ubvm.bitnet
##  ##### ## ##       Codignotto             INTERNET: nic@sun.acsu.buffalo.edu
##    ### ##  ######  State University of New York at Buffalo  Computer Science 
 

 

January 30, 2005

Max's Maddnes: Dude, where is my car?

This is awesome! Of course, I would have called the towing company myself.

Max's Maddnes: Dude, where is my car?

January 26, 2005

More on Picasa

After using Picasa 2 for a few more days, I feel that I am well equipped to make some suggestions on how it can be improved. On the positive side, I have discovered a few new features and I should probably talk about those as well.

Let’s first talk about the improvements.

  • The program seems to crash when I play a video and I hit the back button on my mouse or the “Back to Library” button. The problem doesn’t seem to happen if I pause the video first. It’s always good to have a workaround.
  • I wish Picasa would support more image types. I’m pretty sure this will happen naturally from version to version. I should probably engage Google and see if I can make some kind of product suggestion. In particular, I wish they supported Adobe Illustrator files and layed Photoshop files.
  • Assigning labels is way too onerous. The drag and drop is nice, but it should be even faster. I think most people will typically assign labels based on family member names like “Marco”, “Antonio” and “Giovanni”. It would be great if I could assign hot keys like Alt+1 to a label, like “Giovanni”.

Now for the new features. These features were there all along, I simply didn’t invoke them when I wrote my last review.

  • The image backup feature is cool. I’m testing it now with some of my DVD-RW media. It can easily span DVD’s and this is handy since my image collection is about 8.4GB.
  • Background jobs are handled with a cool status window that sits on top of your desktop (and all windows for that matter). It looks like this:

Backup

  • Labels. I’m starting to use them but before I got sucked into an all-night job of labeling thousands of photos, I stopped myself. I do wish I could filter on “unlabeled” photos so I can make a few passes efficiently. I think Adobe Album shows a small label icon on top of images that have labels. In Picasa, there is nothing.

More to come as I learn more…

Now playing: Coverville - Coverville-050120

January 25, 2005

My Back!

My back is killing me!

I imagine it’s the shoveling that I did over the weekend. I was fine yesterday, but today I can barely walk.

January 23, 2005

Picasa 2

I am shocked and amazed.

I didn’t expect much from Picasa 2 from Google when I checked it out last night. I already tried their previous version and wasn’t that impressed. The new version has

You can take Picasa’s own tour if you like, but I thought I’d give you the Nick version.

Setup and Search

Picasa’s setup program weighs in at a mere 3MB and installs in a flash. It immediately asked me if I wanted to search my entire computer or just “My Pictures”, “Desktop”, and “Shared Documents” (I’m not so sure on that last one). What I really wanted it to do was allow me to pick a folder since I store all of my digital images in D:\Photo Library. I don’t think this will be a problem for most people, just for me. As luck would have it, though, you can tweak the search process with the Folder Manager. This screenshot is self-explanatory.

Picasa_folder_manager

You’ll probably want to tweak this since some very strange image files get sucked into your library if you don’t. For instance, Dell installed a directory called C:\Dell on my system and it has some cooky bitmap files dated 1995 that pollute my timeline (more on that later).

The Program at 20,000 feet

The library manager itself has some key features which make the program a dream to work with. First, scrolling is fine tuned and smooth. They use a dampening function to slow down the scroll gently when you stop moving your mouse wheel. Second, when you double-click on an image or invoke any secondary detail screen (such as a slideshow), your mouse’s “back” button (or t he backspace) will bring you back to the library browser. Third, all such screen transitions crossfade so the program has a silky feel to it.

Picasa_library_manager

There’s lots to do on the main screen.

First, you can see a list of folders or “albums” on the left. What I like about Picasa is that it uses my regular directory structure to construct albums, so I can work in Windows Explorer or Picasa and I’ll never get out of sync.

If you noticed in the Folder Manager, there are three attributes that you can assign to a directory. You can ignore it, scan it once, or monitor it.

Second, notice the picture tray. There are a few ways you can get images into the tray but once they’re in there, you can print, e-mail, create a collage, order prints online, post to your blogger blog, and more. The picture tray is basically a way to select disparate photos, simulate an ad-hoc clipboard, or whatever.

Importing Pictures

I used to always access my photos via the removable drive letter and manually move them to my desktop and later my Photo Album directory. Not any more. I’ve been converted!

I’ve tried a few other photo organizing programs before. Most notably Snapfish’s and Adobe Album (or whatever it’s called). These programs never nailed it. I’m not sure what it is and since Picasa is so good, I won’t spend the energy to re-evaluate those solutions. All I can say is that I’m happy with how the import process works. Simple folders are the mechanism used and this works perfectly into my workflow.

I do like to organize my photos into a top-level directory structure by year. By default, Picasa creates a folder directly under the album root (wghich is settable).

Folder

However, I can quickly open an album in Windows explorer and then move the new folder into my year folder in seconds. Not bad.

Folder2

Image Enhancements

You can enhance images one at a time or in batch. The results are pretty good, but I think I’ll stick to Photoshop for any heavy lifting. Here is some of the UI for fixing images:

Fix1

and

Fix2

and finally,

Fix3

Timeline

One of the most useful features that most of these programs have is a timeline view. Somewhat annoyingly, Picasa switches to a low-resolution video mode when rendering the timeline and I couldn’t grab a screenshot without resorting to tricky methods. So, I didn’t bother.

Searching

Searching is quick. I noticed that Photoshop Album is beavily tag-oriented. This is a lot of work and something  that I don’t know if I’ll ever take advantage of. I think Picasa calls these “labels” but they are certainly not the forefront of the UI design. Anyway, I name my directories pretty well and  this has so far proven to be good enough for me right now. Sure, it would be nice to type in “Giovanni” and see all of the pictures of my son, but for now I scan things by hand to find just the right image for a slideshow or DVD.

Other neat things

You can do a few other neat things with Picasa. You can create a screensaver, generate movie files (including full res avi movies). The movies files generate movies in kind of a “Photo Story Lite” fashion.  There is a strange zooming effect thatkind of zigs from one direction to another during the zoom. Strange, but not a bad effect. There is no customization so I’m not sure how m uch I can use that. Thirdly, you can create photo grids and collages. Here is a collage I made in seconds from a bunch of pictures in my picture tray.

Picasabackground

You can save this to a file or set it as your background.

Conclusion

My dinner party is nigh so I can’t finish this like I was hoping to. So far so good. If I get disappointed with Picasa at any point, I’ll be sure to note it here. for now, I’m liking it alot.

Snow

Lots of snow this year, as everyone knows. Here is a picture of some drift in my backyard:

DSC00048

However, I think it less than we got in February of 2003 as shown here:

IMG_0490

I shoveled for two hours and I’m thoroughly drained. I smell a nice dish of sausage and peppers cooking in the oven and I have a basement refrigerator filled with Belgium-style beer calling my name.

 

January 21, 2005

Python and SPE

Someone at work sent me a link to what appears to be a new Python IDE. I thought that it couldn’t hurt to mess around with it.

The installation was easy, but a few things bothered me. First, the installer didn’t have an icon. So, I immediately thought that my download was corrupted.

Spe_no_icon

But I’m just being picky. Once installed I was all excited at first but got confused when I tried to locate the launch icon. It seems like there is no launch icon.

I then started hunting around my hard disk for something which started with “spe”. Found nothing in C:\Program Files. I then looked into C:\Python23 and I found spe.py in C:\Python23\Lib\site-packages\_spe. What the fuck is that?

I ran it and some error message about wx package not found happily popped out of my command line. I figured that I needed to install wxPython a Window toolkit. That did the trick. I got a bunch of output that looked like this:

Spe_output

What the hell is Blender, I thought to myself. It seems to be an integrated suite of tools enabling the creation of a broad range of 3D content. It offers full functionality for modelling, rendering, animation, post-production, creation and playback of interactive 3D content with the singular benefits of cross-platform operability and a download file size of less than 2.5MB. Not sure what kind of support the IDE could have for this but I’m certainly intrigued!

Anyway, I waited 10 or so seconds, I got this IDE screen.

Spe_ide

I thought that I’d load one of my simpler Python programs into it. It’s a calendar program that displays a calendar year in my imaginary world of Primordia.

I immediately switched the IDE from Courier New to Lucida Console. It boggles my mind why anyone would code in Courier, but I’m probably just being picky.

The code coloring is turned out to be very attractive. The statement completion, or Intellisense, or whatever, worked perfectly. Here is a snapshot of what my code window looked like once I downloaded the source for my calendar program:

Spe_code

You can see from the screen shot that the “Shell” tab toward the bottom is showing some output from the program. I had to code the go() function on the fly since the original version output HTML via cgi. No fancy Python http servers here. Raw output all the way.

In the shell, I got statement completion when I invoked go(), which was pretty cool.

Also notice that there are tons of other tabs available. Oh yeh, Blender is a 3D modeler:

Spe_blender

Looks like someone used Blender to create this:

SPE also has a cool regular expression tester. You can enter any arbitrary text and write Regexp against it. Here is a sample session where my text buffer had “This is a test” and my Regex was “.*test.*:

Spe_regex

In a nutshell, if you’re doing Python than I couldn’t imagine why you’d use Pythonwin when something like SPE is available for free.

Get real Pythonwin fanatics!

On a side note, I’m listening to a fantastic episode of Coverville, a Podcast by Brian Ibbott.

Now playing: Coverville - Coverville-050118

January 20, 2005

Winter in Long Island: Ominous

Since my buddy Martin wrote a similarly titled post, I thought I would comment on how winter is doing by me.

It’s cold, but it was colder last year. There have been some good dustings this week, but nothing to write home about.

The snow that’s anticipated this weekend is scaring the hell out of more than a few of my friends. One of by D&D buddies all but canceled our Sunday night gaming session… all before a even a single snowflake has fallen. My biggest concern is my son’s birthday party on Saturday at our Tae Kwon Do dojang. I don’t know what I’d say to him if he asked me why no one showed up.

I did a little work earlier over our company VPN and now I’m organizing some files and catching up on some of my Podcasts. I aimed to catch up on my blogs, but I keep getting sidetracked.

Now playing: Dave Winer and Andy Affleck - Skype Interview with Dave Winer

Quick drawing for January 20, 2004

I actually sketched this a few nights ago and inked it tonight. I brought it into Photshop for the fancy coloring. It’s a Lilo and Stitch experiment that was “designed” with a flash game called Jumba’s Lab.

Experiment

Tonight, I also made a DVD of the kids fighting like dinosaurs and set the mayhem to the title track to Jurassic Park.

Now playing: John Williams - Incident At Isla Nublar

Photoblogging Software

My brother would like to do a blog, but isn’t impressed with Movable Type since he wants to focus on photos and slideshows.

So, off to Google in search of a tool that might be worth of his priase… and use.

JAlbum

My first hit was a tool called JAlbum. My first guess is that it’s written in Java. I think prefixing “J” to your Java program name is pretty lame. But no more lame than appending .NET to your .NET program. But it’s trendy so who am I to judge?

The installer uses InstallAnywhere by ZeroG. It too must be written in Java because the UI sucks ass. Take a look at the laughable directory selection dialog:

Crappy_file_select_dialog

Oh man. That shit gives me a headache. I don’t understand how Sun has survived this long producing that kind of crap. Anyway, the album isn’t so bad. Check out this default album I created:

http://www.primordia.com/blog/archive/jalbum/album/index.html

That’s one skin of many. Lord knows why they chose to emulate the Windows XP explorer. The next album was created using the “CameraGeek” skin. Notice the yellow text, that’s a comment I was able to add.

http://www.primordia.com/blog/archive/jalbum/album2/index.html

Jalbum_customize

Notice in the screenshot above that you get an option to “Write to Image”. That got me thinking. Can I add comments to JPEG files? When I clicked on it, though, the image didn’t get any comments. I verified this by looking at the “Summary” properties for both the source JPEG image and the copy that was created for the album.

However, Windows Explorer allowed me to modify the comment as you can see in this screenshot:

Jpeg_comments

Holy EXIF Batman! Now I can add tags via explorer and perhaps wrote an app that reads the tags and organizes my photos. My current organization scheme is by directory name only.

In this screen shot, you can see how JAlbum allows you to FTP your files to a website if you have one. Too bad they don’t support WebDAV.

Ftp_screen

In a nutshell, JAlbum is ideal for people who are satisfied with generating static slideshows. It even works on a Mac, and Linux for that matter. The slideshows are pretty nice and are a definite improvement over the slideshows generated by Photoshop. Perhaps my brother would like to check this out.

Personally, I still prefer a more blog-like tool. I’m still pretty happy with my Flickr and Movable Type combo.

It’s late now but I’ll try and continue my reviews of photo album and photblogging software soon.

Now playing: Tripping Daisy - Prick

January 19, 2005

Tonight's activities

I spending the evening listening to music from GarageBand.com.

Garagebandui

I’ve listened to  Letting Go by retrograde  (pictured),  Headphones by retrograde ,  Throwing Stones by Tourist ,  Release by Intangible,  Orange and Gray by Sky Walker,  Halfway (rock) by Trip2Go, Newradio by Tourist, Leave it all behind by Underwhelmed, and more!

All of these were from the "Modern Rock" category. The track I'm listening to right now is called Something Beautiful by From Within and it's providing a nice background for my work.

I’m also going through my del.icio.us toread items.

First up is a new installer technology called inno setup. I was introduced to Nullsoft’s Installer (NSIS) at work and I quickly adapted it to a few small .NET programs I wrote. What’s nice about NSIS is that it’s free and it can run in batch mode.

Inno Setup has these same features but provides a minimal IDE that offers syntax highlighting and integrated debugging. Unfortunately, the IDE doesn’t support any kind of auto-completion so I still have to dig through the docs or look at sample code to see what’s possible.

Anyway, I thought I’d build an installer for a program I wrote and see how easy things were. Here is a shot of the IDE and a minimal script:

Innosetup1

As you can see, there’s not much to it. What did this generate when I compiled it? It generated modern-looking installer that copied all of these files to C:\Program Files\My Program (giving me the choice to change this default). It also generated an uninstaller with no more work. From what I know of NSIS, it doesn’t automatically undo files you install. Of course, this isn’t always desired. I’m sure there is a way to control this more specifically.

The number of options that you have when configuring the installer is impressive. Here is a sampling of the more interesting options that you have:

  • Compression (zip, zip/1–zip/9, bzip, lzma, lzma/fast/normal/max/ultra, etc.)
  • DiskClusterSize / DiskSlideSize / DiskSpanning (to optimally fill floppies to DVD’s)
  • Encryption using ARCFOUR 128–bit encryption
  • MergeDuplicateFiles
  • OutputBaseFilename
  • OutputDir
  • ReserveBytes (leave room for my Readme!)
  • SolidCompression (one compression table instead of one table per file, better overall crunching)

and the list goes on!

  • AllowCancelDuringInstall
  • AllowNoIcons
  • AllowRootDirectory
  • AllowUNCPath
  • AlwaysRestart
  • AlwaysShowComponentsList
  • AlwaysShowDirOnReadyPage
  • AlwaysShowGroupOnReadyPage
  • AlwaysUsePersonalGroup
  • AppendDefaultDirName
  • AppendDefaultGroupName
  • AppComments
  • AppContact
  • AppId
  • AppModifyPath
  • AppMutex
  • AppName 
  • AppPublisher
  • AppPublisherURL
  • AppReadmeFile
  • AppSupportURL
  • AppUpdatesURL
  • AppVersion
  • AppVerName 
  • ChangesAssociations
  • ChangesEnvironment
  • CreateAppDir
  • CreateUninstallRegKey
  • DefaultDirName 
  • DefaultGroupName
  • DefaultUserInfoName
  • DefaultUserInfoOrg
  • DefaultUserInfoSerial
  • DirExistsWarning
  • DisableDirPage
  • DisableFinishedPage
  • DisableProgramGroupPage
  • DisableReadyMemo
  • DisableReadyPage
  • DisableStartupPrompt
  • EnableDirDoesntExistWarning
  • ExtraDiskSpaceRequired
  • InfoAfterFile
  • InfoBeforeFile
  • LanguageDetectionMethod
  • LicenseFile
  • MinVersion
  • OnlyBelowVersion
  • Password
  • PrivilegesRequired
  • RestartIfNeededByRun
  • ShowLanguageDialog
  • TimeStampRounding
  • TimeStampsInUTC
  • TouchDate
  • TouchTime
  • Uninstallable
  • UninstallDisplayIcon
  • UninstallDisplayName
  • UninstallFilesDir
  • UninstallLogMode
  • UninstallRestartComputer
  • UpdateUninstallLogAppName
  • UsePreviousAppDir
  • UsePreviousGroup
  • UsePreviousSetupType
  • UsePreviousTasks
  • UsePreviousUserInfo
  • UserInfoPage

That’s all for now.

January 18, 2005

Virtual PC and Trialware

Thought of the day: It seems to me that Virtual PC could be used to circumvent Trialware. Every time your trial expires, you trash the virtual machine and install again.

Now playing: Jon Gordon - Future Tense

January 17, 2005

Drawings for January 17, 2005

Today’s topic is the Iron Giant, a Brad Bird film and probably one of my all-time favorite animated movies. First off is a bust shot of the Iron Giant. I’m still not on my own, having had a sketch as reference:

Irongiant_bust

Next is a profile shot found in the movie. You can see a hint of the next image here. This is one of the reasons why I only draw on one side of a page in my sketch book. I didn’t want to enhance the image too much to remove the ghost, though. I feel you lose some of the texture and novice features of my illustrations.

Irongiant_face2

Finally, the Iron Giant facing forward:

Irongiant_face1

This final image is a little lopsided. I wonder how much care I should take to correcting this kind of thing. Should I use a french curve to make things look perfect?

In high school, I had a lot of drafting experience. If I wanted to make the drawing very technical I could do it. I’m not sure if I want to dig up those brain cells right now. I feel like I have to much more to learn about drawing freehand before I begin to delve into combining freehand drawing anc technical drawing.

I think I’ll concentrate on cartoon drawing for the rest of the month. I’m thinking in February I’ll attack comic-book style superheroes (another passion when I was younger). In March, my initial thought is to try my hand in drawing robots and synthetic shapes. We’ll see how the plan goes…

 

 

January 16, 2005

Where Balloons Come From


Where Balloons Come From
Originally uploaded by Green Destiny.

I saw this over at the flickr blog. Rather than SPAM my friends with this via email, I thought I would subject my readers to this.

Plus, it demonstrates how I'm blogging on someone else's flickr photo. Typically, I've blogged about my own flickr photos only.

January 14, 2005

Huygens lands on Titan

This is the most distant landing of a spacecraft in the history of mankind as reported by the Astronomy Picture of the Day. The probe didn’t know if it would land on a liquid or solid surface but it wound up landing on a solid surface and transmitted the following picture:

Titan

I have been closely watching the Cassini (Photo Essay) spacecraft on it’s way to Saturn for years and this is a very exciting event for me, and probably for a lot of people.

Whoo hoo!

Even if you "make it" you might miss

Lesson: do not “drop” your yogurt into your garbage.

DSCF0048

How to keep your coffee warm with a laptop

First, get a laptop with a side exhaust. Second, load up a nice CPU intensive program. I like using the command-line version of SETI@Home since it operates at idle priority yet still cranks your CPU up to 100%.

Ah, feel the heat.

Place your coffee right next to the exhaust, like so:

DSCF0051

January 13, 2005

Reflections on Programming: Keeping you reading list in del.icio.us

This is insanely cool.

Reflections on Programming: Keeping you reading list in del.icio.us

The speed is the main attractive feature to me. del.icio.us can sometimes be slow and the format they use when listing items is too verbose. Using LiveBookmarks, I can see dozens more links to choose from when I have time to work through these.

Drawings for January 13, 2005

I’ll try and standardize on a subject for blog posts that have drawings in them. I also have bit the bullet and have reduced  the quality of the scans to jpg at about 75% quality. I usually save jpg files at their highest sampling rate, which yields excellent results at the expense of file size.

Anyway, I started studying Calvin and Hobbes. Here is a drawing of Calvin and Hobbes hiding behind a tree from the dreaded two-headed snow thing (I omitted the two-headed snow thing).

Snow_beast

Here are a bunch of drawings of Calvin. I scanned the entire pad. The first image has been “filtered” by enhancing the contrast and midtones to get rid of the paper surface details picked up by the scanner:

Calvin_filtered

Here is the original scan. Which do you like better? Post a comment.

Calvin_unfiltered

Off to bed. I’ll do a few more drawings before I sleep and try and post them tomorrow. At some point I’ll make a post of drawings I do without a reference. I’m getting familiar enough with Calvin to draw him on my own.

Now playing: Dave Slusher @ Evil Genius Chronicles - Jan 11, 2005 - "Small Bidness"

del.icio.us toread

For the first time since I started using del.icio.us and marking items that I want to read with the “toread” tag, I’m actually going through these links and reading them.

Once I do that, I’m deleting the entries which potentially might not be the right thing to do. Perhaps I should simply remove the toread tag and put a more meaningful tag in there.

In any case, del.icio.us facilitates my workflow since I get an option to “delete this post” when I click “post” again for a link already posted.

Now playing: Northwest Noise - NWN-2005-01-12

 

January 11, 2005

More on Feedburner

As you may know, I switched over to Feedburner which chops up my RSS and distributes it via my Feedburner RSS 2.0 feed. Since doing this a few weeks ago, I’d had some time to gather statistics. This blog entry is best viewed when your browser is maximized.

First, you get a histogram which shows estimated circulation per day:

Feedburner1_0111204

As you can see, it looks like I have 11 readers which seems more than I would have expected there to be.

Second, you get to see which entries are most popular. My “Learning to Draw” items seemed to have been one to two clicks more popular than my “Kidney Stone” entry.

Feedburner2_0111204

Next up is a nice pie chart which tells you how people are pulling in your feed. Pretty, but not that useful unless I’m somehow concerned with the readers people are using. Interesting to see that someone used IceRocket Web search to find me. I never heard of it until now.

Feedburner3_0111204

The last prominent statistic is a daily summary of click-throughs, hits, and circulation numbers. I sure wish they would put the day of the week in there so I can get my bearings quickly.

Feedburner4_0111204

Feel free to send me feedback.

January 9, 2005

Public E-mail

I put a link to my e-mail address if you want to contact me. I’m curious to see how much spam I’ll get and how soon.

Now playing: Led Zeppelin - Song Remains The Same

January 8, 2005

More on Stitch

I decided that the version of Stitch that I posted earlier today wasn’t quite right. The colored pencil combined with the textured paper have Stitch a look that was somehow off. So, I decided to bring in my original sketch into Photoshop  (I scanned the inking before I colored it) and use Photoshop to add the color.

I learned a lot while doing this! Here are a few quick tips for myself:

  • My mouse hand is good at shaking back and forth at an angle that sometimes requires me to rotate the image so I can get the right stroke. That just sounds bad, but I hope you get my real meaning.
  • My initial coloring efforts were very faulty and I wound up doing a ton of touch-ups at the edges. From now on, I’ll be able to fill in much nicer.
  • My shading efforts got better as I moved up. Stitch’s bottom is kind of sloppy.
  • The thumbnail looks much nicer than the full-size image, since most of the defects fall away.

Stitch_hand_color

Now playing: Dave Winer - MCN 1/8/05

Firefox Exploit

Robert McLaws FunWithCoding.NET has nice commentary on the Firefox exploit.

The lesson for me, of course, is that vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities and they exist or don't exist and the type of software (Open Source or "closed-source") is largely irrelevant.

Yes, Windows applications requiring Admin access to run is wrong. Yes, IE and Windows itself has been traditionally a very vulnerable platform. Yes, yes, yes.

However, I am definitely amused by the ignorance of the Open Source supporters quoted in that commentary. I’m a Firefox user but I realize that it’s just software and it’s made by humans and it’s still vulnerable.

 

Learning to Draw

One of my New Year projects is to learn how to draw. I’ve always been intensely interested in drawing but I never had the raw talent needed to produce the types of things that I wanted to draw. Well, I decided to hell with having no talent. I’m sure I can improve and I could at least try and find out how good I can get.

When I was growing up, I had a deep-rooted desire to draw but I was never really any good. To compensate, I drew simple things. I even invented my own little creatures which were insanely easy to draw. I called them Fluffs. I have no idea why I picked such a stupid name.

Anyway, Fluffs are little black spherical eye-ball guys that can fly and shoot powerful energy beams from their eyes. I typically set them in 2D battles in mountainous terrains. Below is something I drew recently to illustrate the concept. I’ll try and dig up some of my childhood renditions (they are not much different!):

Fluffs

A friend at work lent me a great book called Drawing with the Right Side of Your Brain. The premise of the book is that people tend to draw what they think something looks like instead of what it actually looks like. One of the classic exercises of the book is to draw something upside-down. I suppose this exercise forces you to really look at what you are illustrating rather than come up with a concept of it in your mind as your pen hits the paper.

I didn’t finish the book, but the first few chapters definitely got me thinking.

So, over the past few months, I’ve been restocking on art supplies. For the holidays, a few family members wondered what they could get me and I was quick to answer, “A drawing pad!” or “Some colored pencils!” or “Some ink pens!”

Since my kids love to draw and color, I thought I would start joining them. Today, we had a great time with Lilo and Stitch characters.

I basically searched the web for a picture of Stitch and found one with Lilo, Stitch, and experiment 221, Sparky. Here is the original image:

Stitch3_1024

First, I drew Sparky and colored him in with colored pencils.

Sparky

The graphite pencil and the colored pencils don’t go so good together. Or, at least I don’t know how to make them look good. In my next illustration of Stitch, I inked the outlines.

Stitch

The ink definitely helps. Plus, this was my second try and I learned a few things.

One of the first things I learned, which is specific to copying artwork, is that you shouldn’t draw along one edge for too long. If you do, you are likely not going to “meet up” right with the rest of the illustration (at least if you have my problems). It seems like you need to somehow proportion everything out with rough outlines and add the detail later.

Copying artwork is pretty important to learning, I think. When drawing figures, there are a lot of basic shapes and conventions that I need to learn how to draw on my own. However, I think the only way to get there is to copy, copy, copy until I know these shapes by heart.

I hope to post more illustrations in the coming weeks.

January 4, 2005

Astronomy Picture of the Day meets RSS

Finally, a good RSS feed for APOD. I was subscribing to another one that didn’t include the explanation text, so it’s usefulness was very limited. The new feed has the complete explanation text and the entry shows up great in Bloglines.

Before RSS I, gasp, went to the site each and every day. What a waste of time.

Enjoy!

Now playing: Kenny Burrell - Breadwinner [#][*]

Kidney stone

I think I have a Kidney stone. I had one last year and it felt a lot like this. Earlier tonight, as the pain got worse (and since I can’t sleep), I went onto the net and read a bit about it. One recommendation was to drink a lot of water. First as a treatment method and also as a preventative measure… depending on the type of stone you have (there are a few types). So, I drank about two quarts of water.

Last year, the pain was debilitating. Not knowing what was going on, I went to the hospital because I thought I was going to die. Really. This time, the pain is almost gone now (and it’s 2:30am). I might go to bed and see how things go. Wish me luck!

Now playing: Jon Udell - Open Source Audio

January 1, 2005

Happy New Year!

A future post that's (hopefully) right on time. May peace find you and keep you in 2005.