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I wanted to try something in pen and ink after reading all that Crumb… hoping to do some stuff maybe learning from his style. This was an abject failure in that regard – even as imprecise and loose as it is, it doesn’t have a shred of Crumb’s rich organic feel, but I decided to just let it go where it would. This is no work of great technical draftsmanship, I just wanted to see what kinds of shading I could do with basic patterns of straight lines. All done with Rapidograph pens. The ink severely warped the paper.
This was fun to do, but it doesn’t really have a style… if it’s going to be comic-booky, it needs to be a lot simpler, and if it’s going to be a technical drawing, it needs to be a LOT more precise. So it wallows in the middle ground, but it was an interesting exercise, and I need to get a lot braver about doing this kind of thing.
…if you send me mail addressed in a "faux handwriting" font, it’s going straight to the recycle bin.
I’ve been debating about whether I should post my latest drawing here, because it’s the first one that isn’t "family-friendly" and I know some people read this who might be offended by such things. I think what I’ll do is provide warnings in the summary and post the image itself in the extended copy, so you have to click "Elucidate" to see it.
And so here is the warning: THIS DRAWING CONTAINS BOOBS. Boobs occur in nature (although perhaps not as prodigiously as these, at least not very often). If boobs offend you, click no further. However, I thought it was a very good photograph, and I wanted to try it, and I’m actually fairly pleased with how it turned out.
Continue reading Yvonne
OK, here’s the proof: my scanner DID suck.
This is off a Canon CanoScan 8400F, default settings, scanned at 72dpi, no touching-up. THAT makes me want to actually scan things.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to test out the film scanning bit – can this thing really turn negatives into good pictures? I’ll believe that when I see it, but I’m already thrilled with the results here and I’m keeping it. $150 well spent.
(Wow, I’m pretty impressed that I can just paste a block of HTML straight in from my Amazon order page without any additional formatting.)
My Crumb kick continues – I need to study this man’s work more. While I’m at it, I’m adding to my Neal Stephenson collection – I heard "Zodiac" is a fun ride, and it takes place in Boston, so wtf – and although I’m not a fan of Scott McCloud’s ego, I read "Understanding Comics" from the library last year and it is actually very interesting and contains worthwhile scholarship, and now that I’m dabbling in art more and more I want to look at it again, so I’ll pony up fifteen bucks for a copy for the shelf.
Seems the "material items purge" I’ve been on for the past few years doesn’t apply to books. I feel OK about that, though.
I actually spent tonight hunched over three (!) other drawings I can’t seem to finish, but this one was done during a short break as a real quickie and I kind of like how it turned out. How come I like most of my quick toss-offs better than the ones I labor and sweat over?
Also, I am reminded every time I do this how badly my scanner blows goats. OK, this was a light pencil doodle, but for chrissake, is this really the best we can do with modern optical technology?
A friend of a friend, who I hope will forgive this effort if she ever learns of it. It’s the shirt, how could a geek resist?
Netflix has me in throttle mode after a couple of relatively carefree months. All of a sudden, my returns are mysteriously taking a few extra days to "show up" back at Netflix headquarters. Right.
I don’t mind that they’re trying to maintain their profitability, because it’s a cool service. I do mind that they’re bullshitting their customers with this "unlimited rentals" language. If the limit is 9 per month before artificial slowdowns are imposed on you, then fucking say so. Of course, if I up and quit, that doesn’t hurt them all because I’m costing them money. They’d be delighted to lose me as a customer.
Something is very wrong here, but I’m not sure what.
When you give me this message:
That’s pretty typical for me. *sigh*
I just watched Crumb.
Wow.
I didn’t know whether to think about it or draw first, so I did both.
Continue reading Crumb(s)
One of the nice things about Postie is that it lets me bypass the still-problematic editors in WordPress, which frankly are a pain in the ass sometimes. Posting of code segments like the bit below is really a headache in WP so far, because it will merge all of the lines into one long line; the only way to force it not to do that is to put blank lines between each line, which doesn’t readily lend itself to copying and pasting. I think it’s the editor taht tries to do some kind of cleanup before writing to the database, but it’s broken in ways I haven’t had time to investigate fixing yet.
So, as an example, here’s a quick code snippet that details the installation process for Postie, generic and simple. The code is wrapped in a <pre> tag.
wget http://www.economysizegeek.com/wp-filez/postie-0.9.9.2.tar.gz
tar xfz postie-0.9.9.2.tar.gz
cd public_html/
mkdir wp-filez wp-photos
chown nobody.nobody wp-filez wp-photos/
chmod 700 wp-filez wp-photos
mv ../../postie wp-content/plugins/
chown -R nobody.nobody wp-content/plugins/postie
The normal WordPress editing process would have mangled the shit out of that, but Postie pulls it straight in without any modifications, which is what I want. And this message itself is being typed into a plain text file with Emacs in a term window, no wrapping, and sent to the gateway like so:
mail -s "[comp] More Postie posting joy" address@obscured < foo.txt
Life is good. Thanks, Postie.
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