Year: 2008

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The end of the year.

So, It’s been a good year.  Overall… Though I’d say the first 7 months or so really…er.. sucked.. The last 5 have been absolutely spectacular.

The holiday’s are just about gone.  My christmas tree is still up and glorious and the presents are scattered around the house.  The remnants of nerf battles past lie scattered around in the corners.

The amazon wish list was a success Including an awesome score of a copy of Descent: journeys into the dark, Feersum Endjinn, a nice iPod alarm clock and other goodies!

But, it’s about time to start a pet project… and no time like the beginning of a fresh year to do so. Soo… I’ve cracked open some Ruby on Rails tutorials and am gearing up for the start of an actual development.  I need to crank out some milestones and a basic design guideline and then go from there.

But on the other hand… I did get some cool canvas boards that are just itching to get slathered with paint, not to mention my copy of painter has been doing good things.. so maybe that will distract me.. 

Boy, life is hard with too many hobbies… 🙂

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Playing with Painter (take 2)

OOPs deelted this accidentally earlier. Lets see if this works.

Finally got around to watching some of my painter tutorials and just getting comfortable with the basic tools of painter. Its way different from Adobe’s suite of tools but its finally starting to feel comfortable.

Eventually I took this into photoshop to do some final tweaky bits and immediately it was noticeable how much extra work it is to introduce the texture in painting with photoshop.

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More Playing Around Lots To Still Work On

Normally I’d have given up on this one by now.  But this last rework of the figure seems to have started something I can work with.  Vaugely inspired by War (of the 4 horsemen type) from Niel Gaimen’s Good Omens book. 

Gonna put it aside for a while and the the mind chew on it for a bit and mayb pick it up tonight or tomorrow.

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Playing Around With Painter

OOPs deelted this accidentally earlier.

Finally got around to watching some of my painter tutorials and just getting comfortable with the basic tools of painter.  Its way different from Adobe’s suite of tools but its finally starting to feel comfortable.  

Eventually I took this into photoshop to do some final tweaky bits and immediately it was noticeable how much extra work it is to introduce the texture in painting with photoshop.

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Turkey Time approaches.

Well the year sure went fast. 

Been playing with some basic python and pygame stuff.  Seems like a pretty easy to learn language and api, just havent gotten myself convinced for the need to learn yet another language… oh well Im sure I’ll think of something to use for an excuse.

But it probably wont be until Xmas.  Letting the brain relax and just enjoying some neglected games and movies and such.  blah blah blah blah..

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Productivity Paint & Pretty Lines

Soo it’s been a fairly productive beginning of November.  I’ve got the version 1.0 of the new http://www.beautifulbasics.com up and running.  Still need to put up some instructions etc etc.  But the core functionality is there and it works fine.

Yaay and It’s actually quite addictive, and embeddable into myspace/facebook etc etc.  I’ve got a whole list of secondary features to add to it and minor bugs to iron out.  

I’ve been playing with the acrylics again and starting to get a feel for it.  Maybe things actually get easier with practice…. nahh.  Anyway it was quite fun  to just glop paint around and see what emerged.  Can’t wait to do it again.

 

just messing around
just messing around

Oh well back to the salt mines.

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Happy accident.

It turns out that when you photograph the complete costume you get a reflection of your flash, for an unexpected happy accident bonus.  

Neat! 

Had a great halloween/birthday weekend.  Now back to work and then various other goodies. (fallout 3, fable 2, Warhammer, X3, farcry 2)… jeez come to think about it that’s a serious sequel overload.

Aaand I hope to have some actual painting pix in the next week or two. 

 

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Halloween part deux

And the work continues…

After some sanding the mask is given a nice even coat of grey primer.

 

Then the fun part, painting with acrylics,  something that I’ve been experimenting with more and more lately so its nice to get a chance to just go a little crazy.  I decided to go for more festive instead of dullish realistic colors.

After a bit more touch up and drybrushing workI grabbed some black ribbon and ran it through the holes and tried to figure out a way that would let me put it on myself, since holding the mask and tying 2 bows on the back of my head turned out to be… problematic.   I wound up just holding the mask in place and pulling all the ribbons tight and then taking it off and tying all 4 ribbons together a little closer in than I had been holding it.  This gave me a nice knot that i can grab on the back of my head and slide down to snap everything in place.  It actually feels quite comfortable, surprising considering its weight.  But it pulls tight against the forehead and rests on the frame of my glasses evenly.

Next up I got a small childrens black T-shirt and cut it in half and glued it to the bottom lining of the mask.Rinse and repeat for the other half of the shirt on the top part of the mask.

Put it together with a black shirt and the hooded robe and you get something like this. (Yeah its blurry I’ll get a better shot tomorrow) The glue still needs to cure and the fumes were burning my eyes a bit.

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Wheee Arts and Crafts!

So I decided to be cheap creative this year for halloween and make my own mask.  Something that will fit over my glasses.

So yesterday I made a thin sheet of Sculpey and placed it on som e foid which I then pressed me noggin into.  Wrap some wires around it so it holds its shape and peel it off and slip into the overn, and presto! 



Then put some foil on it.

 

Then Bulk it out 

And finally Detail it some more.

Now its in the oven baking.  then tomorrow some light sanding to smooth some bits and then some primer and painting.