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I Bought This for Nine Dollars
Jan. 18th, 2003 05:21 amI've also been all about the worldbuilding neuroses lately. This is almost entirely because I've been doing a lot of worldbuilding and am neurotic. I haven't been publically neurotic about much else because I haven't been doing many other things about which I am neurotic.
My computer is pretty much working again, and....
Hold on a second. ( I have to share. )
Anyway, my computer is pretty much working again, thanks to Keeps, who gave me Spiderman candy. (These are not related thoughts, I'm just very amused.) I'm still waiting on some replacements, and I'm still acclimating to WinXP Pro, but at least it's less annoying than Home, and it's NT-based, which means I get to use some software I couldn't before. So I get to exercise all those artistic urges that have been hammering loudly on the inside of my head for the last couple of months, since my natural media supplies are ... uh ... they're still in the store, let's put it that way.
Up 'til now, I have not ... been known ... for my backgrounds. So when I woke up yesterday (it's still Friday) with a profound urge to paint an improbably-colored sky with clouds in, I had no fucking idea what I was doing. Actually, that's not true. I knew I was looking for photo reference. I painted the sky while I pillaged Corbis for photos of clouds. Then I went to bed, came back to it, and painted the sky again, because it wasn't working. That wasn't so bad, actually; I enjoy blending to an unseemly degree. Does that make me a sociopath?
Sketching the clouds was tricky, because did I mention I didn't know what I was doing?. Shading them was basically all blending, so I got a great, I might go so far as to say inappropriately so, deal of pleasure from it. I was going for realism, but I found myself getting a sort of storybook surrealist quality instead, and went with that. Or maybe I just can't paint clouds. I don't know. You tell me.
I started on the left and got, I think, perceptibly better towards the right — that cloud on the bottom right is my favorite, despite the tendency of the one above it to look like soft-serve ice cream. Some of the edges are way too sharp — what can I say? They looked softer at four times this resolution. Too much contrast in places, too. Ruins the mood. Don't say 'What mood?'. I'm going to scrap these and start over from the sky tomorrow, because the scale is all wrong, but I don't feel nearly as discouraged by the prospect as I probably should.
That's it for me. Bed.
My computer is pretty much working again, and....
Hold on a second. ( I have to share. )
Anyway, my computer is pretty much working again, thanks to Keeps, who gave me Spiderman candy. (These are not related thoughts, I'm just very amused.) I'm still waiting on some replacements, and I'm still acclimating to WinXP Pro, but at least it's less annoying than Home, and it's NT-based, which means I get to use some software I couldn't before. So I get to exercise all those artistic urges that have been hammering loudly on the inside of my head for the last couple of months, since my natural media supplies are ... uh ... they're still in the store, let's put it that way.
Up 'til now, I have not ... been known ... for my backgrounds. So when I woke up yesterday (it's still Friday) with a profound urge to paint an improbably-colored sky with clouds in, I had no fucking idea what I was doing. Actually, that's not true. I knew I was looking for photo reference. I painted the sky while I pillaged Corbis for photos of clouds. Then I went to bed, came back to it, and painted the sky again, because it wasn't working. That wasn't so bad, actually; I enjoy blending to an unseemly degree. Does that make me a sociopath?
Sketching the clouds was tricky, because did I mention I didn't know what I was doing?. Shading them was basically all blending, so I got a great, I might go so far as to say inappropriately so, deal of pleasure from it. I was going for realism, but I found myself getting a sort of storybook surrealist quality instead, and went with that. Or maybe I just can't paint clouds. I don't know. You tell me.
I started on the left and got, I think, perceptibly better towards the right — that cloud on the bottom right is my favorite, despite the tendency of the one above it to look like soft-serve ice cream. Some of the edges are way too sharp — what can I say? They looked softer at four times this resolution. Too much contrast in places, too. Ruins the mood. Don't say 'What mood?'. I'm going to scrap these and start over from the sky tomorrow, because the scale is all wrong, but I don't feel nearly as discouraged by the prospect as I probably should.
That's it for me. Bed.
