Tried using the building’s stairs for some quick cardio exercise. I jogged? walked quickly? ran slowly? from the 2nd floor up to the roof (nominal 5th floor), then down to the lobby, then back up to the 2nd. I could probably have gone another floor or two if I’d had to to save my life or something.
So that’s up 3 floors, down 4, then up 1.
I started out drawing something else entirely, and wound up with this.
The screen tone is a scan, applied in Photoshop. I think it’s been well over a decade since I touched a piece of actual tone film.
I’m tempted to do a whole sex-reversed Cerebus cast. Not sure what I’d do when I got to Lord Julius, though.
(Leaving aside the issue of whether a female version of Cerebus is actually sex-reversed.)
So, the most recent chapter of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality went up, and it has this bit in it:
Harry was wiping sweat from his forehead. “Because things have changed between then and now! Listen, Draco, three hundred years ago you could find great scientists, as great as Salazar in their own way, who would have told you that some other Muggles were inferior because of their skin color—”
“Skin color?” said Draco.
“I know, skin color instead of anything important like blood purity, isn’t it ridiculous? But then something in the world changed, and now you can’t find any great scientists who still think skin color should matter, only loser people like the ones I described to you.
…and I can’t help but wonder if he’s just lost Eric Raymond’s endorsement.
Back on the art horse. Straight copy from this portrait I found on someone’s Flickr account. There’s a bigger image behind the cut tag.
( Scary-looking old dude, at 600x600 pixels! )
This is pretty much all Pitt black and grayscale artist markers; initially the new “big” size, and then the old smaller size for details. I seem to just be using the three “warm” grays, mostly because the lightest gray in their range is one of the warms. But comparing them, there’s a pretty big leap in value between the light and middle warm grays, so I may have to start sticking the lightest cool gray in there to moderate things. Or maybe start working with ink wash.
For the whiskers, I tried using some Liquitex titanium white acrylic ink (or “ink!” — the label actually has the exclamation mark) and a dip pen (Speedball Hunt 56), but that came out all thin and watery. Maybe next time I’ll try dipping deeper into the bottle. But anyway, instead, I tried my trusty Sakura Gelly Roll white pen, and it performed like a champ. Seriously, I got a much more opaque white than I’m used to getting with this pen.
The paper is a page from a Flexi-Sketch sketchbook, the 6-by-8-inch one. These are made (or at least distributed) by Global Art, the same people who do those great hand•book travel journals.
Man, this art stuff is hard.
I want to do a bunch of watercolors of various TV celebrities, and figured I’d start with Jon Hamm as Don Draper, and oof, my skills are rusty. Though actually, I don’t think I’ve ever really drawn a celebrity likeness that satisfied me.
Complicating matters is a new artistic technique I wanted to try out: Shaving bits of color off my Inktense pencils into a palette cup, adding water, and using a dip pen. This works, sorta, but I’m having a hard time getting the color density that I want. Also, my collection of pen nibs has vanished. I picked up some Japanese G-pen nibs at Books Kinokuniya yesterday, and they’re OK, but they only had the Tachikawa nibs in stock. I hear the Zebra nibs are a lot more flexible, and that’s what I need to get a thick, juicy line. (Just realizing now how much my tastes have changed since I was a kid, and I was all about the thin, controlled line.)
Anyway, Jon Hamm has some remarkably thick eyebrows on ’im.
( Four views of Don Draper )Is anyone else out there having trouble with Typekit and Safari?
What was happening: I’d try to load a page that uses Typekit fonts, and I’d get an eternal rainbow beachball which froze up the whole program, until I eventually had to Force Quit Safari.
Temporary work-around: I added 127.0.0.1 use.typekit.com to my /etc/hosts file, to block that whole subdomain on my laptop.
Solution: Turns out the problem was caused by SafariBlock, a Safari port of AdBlock! Since AdBlock has been made a Safari extension, I have no need for SafariBlock anymore, so I deactivated it (in Safari’s preferences panel), and then deleted it (the folder’s in /Library/InputManagers). I’ve removed that line from my /etc/hosts, and I get to see fancy Typekit fonts now. Yay!
Yeah, so Ryan Sohmer and Lar DeSouza crapped this out.
So Barry Deutsch did this.
Leading me to do…
( ...this. )
(If anyone else is interested in matching the fonts, they’re ACME Secret Agent at 12 points and Anime Ace italic at 15 points, both free from Blambot. Because what’s the point of parody if you can’t match the fonts?)
Remember last year, when my Linksys wifi router just suddenly stopped working for no discernible reason, and I went out and bought a Belkin wifi router as a replacement? Yesterday, the Belkin wifi router stopped working, for no discernible reason.
Unlike the Linksys (which turned itself off entirely), the Belkin still works as a router, but it no longer acts as a wifi hotspot. I’ve currently got net through an Ethernet cable plugged into the router. If we had a second cable to spare, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bugsybanana could surf at the same time, but we don’t, so we’ve been switching back and forth with need. Just like old times!
And it’s 102°F (“feels like 107°”, WeatherDock tells me), so I don’t really feel like going outside right now. Maybe in two or three hours it’ll have cooled off back into the double digits. I do have to do some shopping, though. We’re almost out of bagels, and we need Brillo pads to clean off the pan I used last night to make pasta sauce. Here’s the sort of thing a lack of Brillo pads leads to:
Me: <looking in cabinet under sink> I don’t see any Brillo pads.
BB: They probably all rusted.
Me: Rust never sleeps.
BB: Colorless green ideas do that for it. But they aren’t happy about it.
One thing I really like about the show King of the Hill is the clever use of names. For example, the massive, oppressive Walmart equivalent on the show is the Mega Lo Mart. This works both at the character level — you can imagine the owners talking about how their prices are not just low, but mega-low — and also at the audience level, by evoking megalomania. (Are there technical names for those two levels?)
The other day, Adult Swim re-ran one of my favorite episodes, “A Beer Can Named Desire”, in which the B plot is a Tennessee Williams pastiche involving Hank’s friend and neighbor, perennial loser Bill Dauterive, visiting his family in Louisiana.
What I just now realized is that the name of the Dauterive estate — Chateau D’Haute Rive — while being a plausible source for the name Dauterive (and literally meaning “house on the high river”), also evokes the words cat, hot, and roof.
An idea that came to me in a thread on Story Games about card-game design: Fate’s Aspects could be reworked using cards.
I figure each player gets a deck of Aspect cards, with each of that PC’s Aspects written on one card. At the start of the session you shuffle your deck, place it face down, and draw (say) five cards. These are the Aspects you have available to invoke in that scene.
To invoke, you take an Aspect card from your hand, and play it face-up on the table in front of you. (No need to spend a Fate point; this system replaces Fate points.) You then get the usual stuff you get by invoking an Aspect — +2, re-roll, or declare something. But you can’t invoke that Aspect again until it comes back into your hand. Aspects on the table are available for compels. When someone compels your Aspect, you take that card and put it back in your deck. At some point you’d shuffle and redraw, but I don’t have any good ideas about that yet.
In a typical game of Diaspora or Spirit of the Century you’d have ten cards for your ten Aspects. I think maybe in a Dresden Files game, where you only have seven aspects, you’d make three extra copies of your High Concept (or maybe two of your High Concept and one extra of your Trouble?), giving you ten cards.
For tagging environmental and other character’s Aspects, I think you’d get a few extra cards in your deck, saying “Environment” or “Opponent”. Play those to tag those Aspects. When someone uses an Opponent card to tag or compel one of your Aspects, you get to pick up one of your tabled Aspect card and put it in your deck. (This part seems a bit awkward.)
Y’know those Inktense pencils I was talking about the other day? Derwent has expanded the line to 72 colors. Actually 70 colors, since one of them is the outliner, and another is Antique White which is pretty much useless. You can order them from Dick Blick, and the Dick Blick store on Bond Street carries the individual pencils. I picked up Golden Yellow and Carmine Pink to swap out for Antique White and the outliner in my 24-set.
Places that did not have the full range include: DaVinci Art Supply on 23rd St, AI Friedman on 18th St, Utrecht Art Supply on Fourth Ave, and New York Central Art Supply on Third Ave.
While checking NY Central, I discovered that Faber-Castell now makes a “superfine” (or “XS”) black Pitt marker.
Yeah, looks like coloring over the grayscale markers (Faber-Castell Pitt brush markers) sucks the vibrancy out of the color. I managed to get some of it back by layering on color from the pan watercolors. But I think the best results will come from using the Inktense pencils for establishing the underlying tonal drawing.
©2010 Avram Grumer
This isn’t all from today; some of these are months old.
I’ve been fiddling around with Derwent Inktense pencils and traditional pan watercolors, trying to get some rich color-mixing going on. It’s harder than I thought it’d be. Especially the (caucasian) flesh tones. Damn white people, such complicated skin!
All this stuff is ©2010 Avram Grumer.
( Lots more behind the cut! )There’s this crazy sparrow, been bashing itself against our study window for the past few days. This is the fire escape window, so there’s a metal mesh inside, a clearly visible barrier even if the bird doesn’t see the glass there. But every day since Thursday, at some point in the afternoon, I can hear that sparrow knocking against that window.
Yesterday there was a pigeon strutting around outside on the air conditioner in our bedroom window.
Just moments ago I heard the sparrow at the study window again. There’s now a second sparrow out there, watching the first one.
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