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Tonight was unusual: we had two models. The lady who was scheduled to pose said her boyfriend was also interested in posing, and she asked if they could pose together. It was his first time. I was a little dubious at first – and especially, being a young couple, whether there might be any – er – side effects of them being nude together in close proximity – but any worry was quickly put to rest. They were excellent. They did fantastic poses, and held them well.
Of course, drawing two people at a time means you only have half as much time for each, so it’s that much more of a challenge when time is already too tight.
Gestures, then a 30 and two 40-minute poses.
Going somewhere French-speaking? Need to get your Foo doo fa fa on and kick 20 (yeek) years of rust off your once-passable French? Listen to some good French audiobooks and get the rhythm back into your head.
I recommend L’Affaire Lerouge, par Émile Gaboriau, read by Victoria in gloriously clean, non-rushed French. Download it here, read along with the mp3s here.
Tackling a PC repair for a friend – an old Gateway P4 machine that’s been gathering dust for a few years due to instability. Windows would screen-glitch up and freeze randomly.
There being nothing on it of value, and the goal being to restore it to a web-surfing and light-gaming box, I did my usual procedure: format the drive, run Spinrite on it to map out the bad blocks, reinstall Windows and get the service packs and patches up to date. Spinrite’s report of the drive looked like a shotgun blast – not quite, but many bad and unrecoverable sectors, but it did finish the job. The Windows update procedure kept getting interrupted by crashes; even in safe mode. I thought I might have worked my way out of it this morning and got all the way to XP service pack 3, but then it glitched again, and so I packed it up and brought it home.
I disconnected the HD and just ran Memtest86 for a while, and it glitched even within that. It looks like it might have reported an error before bombing, so I’m going to go on the assumption right now that it’s bad memory, not a Windows problem or anything related to the flaky hard drive. Those might cause other problems, but not this. And this is onboard video, no card, and Memtest86 certainly isn’t doing anything fancy with video.
The only thing that still makes me suspicious is that it did NOT glitch out when running Spinrite for many, many hours, whereas it was usually a matter of minutes before a glitch doing anything in Windows, or running Memtest86. My best guess at this point is that Spinrite runs pretty tightly in RAM and does most of its work on the disk, and that both Windows and Memtest are pushing into deeper areas of memory, and hitting something bad that Spinrite doesn’t push.
Anyway, next step is to find some more old RAM somewhere and see if that makes any difference. And dig up another drive for these poor people… a 20g drive full of surface holes isn’t going to lead to happiness along any path that doesn’t involve a hammer and extracting that awesome magnet for the fridge.
[update, next day] Yup, looks like it was bad RAM. Replaced, and fixed. I am mighty.
Another visit from last week’s model, in a very crowded classroom.
A 30-minute sitting pose, then a couple more feet just to annoy you, and the final 40-minute head study.
I need to learn more about planes.
Just got my new passport… the fourth of my life. The first, which I got around 17, was almost full when it expired… creased and worn like a rolled-up comic book in a kid’s pocket, stained and cracked from years of living in the back pocket of my jeans while I banged around on trains, bikes, and hitchhiking, jumping from youth hostel to youth hostel in the days when I could carry everything I owned in a small backpack. Good times.
The next one got less use, but still some… living in France for 6 months, popping over to London often enough that the UK customs officers began raising their eyebrows and saying “so how much time you do you want THIS time?”. The next one, my previous one, almost wasn’t worth having… ONE trip overseas in 10 years, the night before 9/11, as it happened, flying out of Boston (to London again) 12 hours before the hijackers left for New York. It all went down shortly after arriving in London. Not much of a vacation, to put mildly, and as I then was running servers for a living and couldn’t stray far, it was the last time I actually traveled outside the US. In fact, my passport expired in July and I didn’t even notice. First time I’d been without one since I was a teenager.
Enough of that. Life drains away with every passing day. Got my new RFID-enabled passport so I can be spied on everywhere I go. I’ve virtualized all the servers to Rackspace and am no longer responsible for moving parts. It’s time to travel again. Breaking this sucker in later this month with a trip to Montreal for the Waterhouse exhibit, and next summer, back to Europe. Haven’t been there since the Euro took over. Since before cell phones and GPSs. I was still using travelers checks. I hope it isn’t too different. But it’s time to find out.
Been far too long. Even just thinking about it feels good.
I’m as loyal to software companies as they are to me.
I’ve been a Parallels user since the beginning. Bought the first version the day it was released, upgraded every step of the way; when I upgraded the macbook pro to OSX 10.6, Parallels 3 no longer worked and needed to be upgraded to version 4. Being a satisfied customer, I purchased the full version of Parallels 4 rather than following the upgrade path from 3.
All well and good; and then BAM, they release version 5, a $50 upgrade from version 4. However, they have a special deal: people who upgraded to version 4 in late August were eligible for a $10 upgrade. I went to get it, and then was told I was not eligible because I had purchased my copy of 4, rather than upgrading to it (which was MORE expensive). The upgrade was, I was told, only for people who had upgraded from 3 to 4. I wrote their support explaining that I had gone out of my way to give them extra money by purchasing 4 new, rather than the cheaper upgrade from 3, and that I was an owner of both Parallels 3 and Parallels 4, and that I would appreciate it if they would treat me, a longstanding customer, the same way they’re treating people jumping on board just recently.
You don’t have to guess their response. I wouldn’t be writing this if they said OK, right? Nope, I could go ahead and drop my $50 if I wanted to upgrade, they told me.
Well, guess what, Parallels: no. $50 for an upgrade to something I just purchased at full price not three months ago is insane. Let’s see… version 2 of Fusion, the last release, is $29 on Amazon with a $30 rebate for Parallels owners. And the upgrade to version 3, the latest release, is free until the end of the year. Think this will be a hard decision?
As I’m typing this, VMware 3 is happily finishing up importing my Parallels disk image.
So thanks, Parallels. I treat you as well as you treat me. You are welcome to try to earn my business back, but I won’t hold my breath and I will always be suspicious of you from now on. In the meantime, Fusion looks like it’s going to work out just fine.
Good session tonight… another new model, first time we’ve drawn this guy.
The gestures were all feet, I’ll spare you those. First foot, around 30 minutes… he had a very pronounced peroneus muscle, visible both above and below the malleolus. In fact, it really made a crater above it, and I tried to get that whole swoosh feeling of it coming down over the abductor of the little toe. Veins, too, and that’s something I haven’t studied. I was having a little trouble seeing the individual toes… starting to wonder if my eyes are taking a turn for the worse. That would suck. Anyway.
Then some strong foreshortening… his elbow was about five feet from me in this pose, so it was heavily foreshortened. In fact, I even slightly played it down a little, but I hope it communicated a sense of proximity. I had fun with this one.
And a portrait for the last 40 minute pose. He was moving his face a lot, but I tried to stay on it. I would have liked to have 3 or 4 hours for this… but I’m still pretty happy with it given the constraints of time. I’ve done worse.
I have, um, 6 drawing projects going on simultaneously right now; 4 if you don’t count the exercises. 4 actual pieces I’m trying to bring to finish, one of which I haven’t even started yet and one which I haven’t touched in about 6 weeks.
Back to the foot cast, though. Far from done with this. Graydon worked my courage up when he was last here and tried to get me to be bolder about hatching in values; not trying to maintain a high level of finish throughout the process, but building it up slowly with what feels like rough lines, which will become smooth after they’ve been gone over many, many, many times. So tonight I started laying the white in – all of it, in fact, or at least a base – and now I need to start picking out the brightest shapes and start roughing those in too, on the front-facing planes, and then I’ll be merging the two in the dark halftone areas. Adding the white is making it pop a bit more, though, even in the early stages, and this makes me readier to work on it more.
So far to go on this. On all of them. Not enough hours in the day, or night. Same story as always. On we go.
In a busy day of chores, one of my goals was to fix a chair that had a cracked back. To repair this, I needed to drive a wood screw diagonally into the back of the chair, after gluing the crack where it was separating. I pre-drilled the hole and set in space for the screw head so it would be flush with the back, then laid the screw in and began pushing it. Halfway in, the drill tore the head off the screw, leaving about ½” of headless screw sticking out, and me stuck.
The screw was in far too tight for me to grab it with anything I had and try to back it back out. I don’t have any kind of equipment that would let me drill into the screw itself and set something in it that would allow me to reverse-thread it, as I’ve heard is possible. And I wasn’t strong enough to squeeze it with pliers and grip it tight enough to rotate. Leaving the screw there wasn’t an option, either… I had to get it out.
What ended up working was a rather brute-force method, pictured below, of clamping a pair of pliers on the screw, and then using a C-clamp and a lot of careful tightening to crank that grip up to Superman levels. This was very slippery business, and I had to use another pair of pliers to keep the heads of the clamp centered on the width of the pliers handles so they wouldn’t slip or pop off – possibly at very high speeds – and take my eyes out. It was tight enough that I thought the clamp might actually break the pliers. It took about half an hour to get this set correctly, but when I finally did, the whole thing was tight enough to be self-supporting:
Then it was a matter of some gentle playing back and forth to loosen things a little, and then I was able to make a half-turn counterclockwise and loosen it slightly before my pliers hit the back side of the chair and had to be reset. Another 15 minutes of putting it back on in a way that would allow me full rotation, and:
VICTORY WAS MINE
Physics is awesome.
This feels like a really good exercise, and I’m already mapping in some experience from other disciplines, like music and martial arts. Major change in round 2, here: slow down.
The first round was pretty ratty and raggedy, in part because I was trying (unconsciously) to mimic the speed and rhythms of the demonstrations on the DVD. I would bet that the person demonstrating the exercise there has done a lot of them. It’s better to do them well than to do them fast, of course, just like playing scales or practicing any kind of basics. The speed will come in time. But rushing through sloppiness gets you nowhere. These are better than the first round, but there’s still a ton of room for improvement, of course.
This exercise is eating up my pencils – one row above takes a sharp point down to a blunt nub. I’m going to need to order a bunch more. And I don’t really want to use my $1.50-a-sheet drawing paper for this if I can avoid it; this is ordinary parcel wrapping paper. I’m trying various methods to flatten the fibers down, including sanding with very fine paper… haven’t found a great method yet, but I’ll keep experimenting. Even if it has to stay like it is, I think it’s still good enough to be workable for this practice.
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