Saturday Art - Summoned and Bound

There's something very naughty and very pretty over at my erotica blog today. It's a bit of artwork I did yesterday, a male nude. You can find it here. Enjoy!

Artsy Fartsy Thursday - Knitting!

This is a semi-regular post that I do intend to do, as I have a huge love for all things crafty, and finally may have some time to do some crafty things. My most recent venture into the world of the Artsy Fartsy has been in the field of knitting. A friend of mine, Mich, got me started in late June. I had been bemoaning the fact that Princess' teacher told me she didn't concentrate as well as she should in school, and Mich offered to teach Princess to knit. She thought it might help Princess learn to focus on a complex task, and give her something fun to do with her hands.

Well, you know if Princess is going to learn how to knit, I was going to have to learn too. Otherwise, how else was I going to help her out when she got stuck? My mom sent Princess a knitting kit, complete with a set of needles, yarn, and basic instruction book. I went out to the local craft store and picked up some needles and yarn of my own. The end result of this is that I have since created a pot holder, a belt,, a dish cloth (with a skull knitted into it!), and now a pair of wrist warmers. I'm most proud of this last accomplishment. The wrist warmers are the first knitted thing I've made for myself, and they won't be the last.

I love that I can make clothing items for myself. I'm very particular about how I dress, though you might not guess it from looking at me. But I flatter myself to think I cultivate a certain sort of goth/punk mommy aura with my tattered jeans and fitted t-shirts, and I like my accessories to reflect that. The wrist warmers will look perfect this winter, giving me a certain radical chic while all the other mama-jamas stand around the bus stop wearing boring old gloves.

Seriously, though, I liked how these turned out, and they got made very quickly, which is also a plus. I'm hoping to make a matching scarf and maybe even a hat for myself as well. I've never really had a winter hat that I liked, so this would be a first.

The pattern for the wrist warmers, if you're interested, comes from Teach Yourself Visually: Knitting, available on Amazon.com. You can also get it here from Barnes and Noble.

Ephemera 01 - I Am a Baaaaaaad Cartoonist

I did not quit cartooning. Seriously. And no, my artistic inspiration didn't shrivel up and die. I have simply been too dang busy for words. Honestly. Right now, I'm trying to finish edits on my next book, get the cover artwork done for said book, get my podcast out the door, prep to participate in TEN panels at a science fiction convention coming up this weekend, and put together a workshop outline on podcasting for EPICon 2009 (Vegas, March, be there, baby!). Not to mention trying to recover the house from the holidays, recover the kids from the holidays, and oh, I've been sick the last week and a half.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Whine, whine, whine. Quit being such a big cry-baby, Helen, and get with the cartoons already! Well, I don't have a Cynical Woman cartoon done right now (although I already have the next few episodes scripted out and they will be funny, I promise!). What I do have is this…

I know, it's freaky, but this comes from my current sketchbook, which I carry around with me and doodle in whenever I get a free moment (free time? Ha! What's that?). This was mostly done in the dojo our family attends, during Princess' karate classes. The Saturday morning classes, that is, when Saint Michael the Magnificent takes Pixie shopping so I don't have to keep an eye on that hyperactive little busybody who gets into everything.

So, every now and then, when I get a sketch done (or as I find a few old ones I've got lying around), I'll scan it in and present it here. These will be called 'Ephemera' and they will be a nice little bonus to the usual comics. Or they will be a way for me to buy some time when my sorry ass gets behind in my work again.

Homemade Holidays

I've had a lousy week do to work issues, and I'm so fed up and frustrated that I can't seem to stop snapping at my kids. I hate being the Grinch, so I decided to take a little time off from my obsessing about stuff that I can do absolutely nothing to fix and spend an evening just enjoying my girls instead. Cassie needed to make a Christmas ornament for her bus driver and Sam was in a pissy mood because Cass has all the good play jewelry and she wanted something new. So I broke out all my old beading stuff and this is what we made.

Cassie's holiday ornament. She did most of this herself. I helped by bending the wires after she beaded them and then finishing things off by making the final loop for the hook. Otherwise, everything else is all her work.

Sam's new necklace. I used memory wire, which holds its shape forever. That way I didn't have to add a clasp to the ends or tie anything off. She can just slip it around her neck, but it still has an opening so the necklace will come off if it gets caught on anything. Sam picked out the beads and handed them to me. I did the stringing and finished off the ends with some needlenose pliers.

There was a lot of fussing and fighting over beads and who got Mommy's help when, but all of that taught me a very important lesson. Doing any sort of craft thing with kids can be frustrating and stressful, but not nearly as frustrating and stressful as what some adults (who should know better) do to others. I'll take my girls over most adults any day of the week.

Artwork For Writing Website

I have to put together a writing website now that I've sold a book. Here's a sample of the artwork I've been putting together. This is going to be the side bar. The red roses will be the navigation buttons, with pop up text explaining what each one is for.

Book Babe Day 3 & 4

I gave up on inking this drawing in Corel Photopaint. I thought I could get away with doing it, but when I hit the long lines in the dress, I had to quit. The digital tablet just isn't steady enough to handle that kind of line work, at least not in my hands. Here's as far as I got in Corel Photopaint.



The Book Babe, Day 3


This morning I brought the sketch (originally done in Corel Photopaint) into Macromedia Flash and started inking it there. The process is a little different, but the lines come out much smoother and I can do the accents better. Here's the results so far.



The Book Babe, Day 4

You won't really be able to see the difference until I've got the inking done and I delete the digital pencil layer.

Book Babe Day 2

More work on this image in Corel Photopaint. I took the pencil sketch layer, changed it to blue and began digitially inking over it with Corel's felt tip pen setting for the paint brush. So far, so good.

Book Babe

This is a rough sketch of something I'm working on right now. The cool thing about this is that it wasn't done with pencil and paper, but done digitally in Corel Photopaint instead. I'm starting to figure out how to get Photopaint to work as a sketching program, which will go a long way towards helping me do more digital artwork.



The Book Babe

Experiements In Digital Inking

I'm trying to figure out a way to digitally ink my pencil drawings. I could do them by hand, but am wondering if I could get better results with one of my graphics programs instead. I've obsessed about this for three days now and the answer is 'no.' I'm better off doing it by hand, although I might consider investing in a light table to make this particular chore a little easier. My preferred inking style does not always lend itself to the projects I want to do, and I'd like to avoid a lot of drawing and retracing to make a clean copy of my artwork. Anyway, here are the results of digital inking from two different programs - Flash 5 and ArtRage 1.



Flash 5 inking experiment



ArtRage 1 inking experiment

ZBrush Tree

Here I am, back with the program I love to hate. Between sick kids, a broken car, and other schedule screw ups, I haven't been able to put paper to pencil lately, so I'm reverting to some digital work to fulfill my daily art requirements (even then, I've still missed a couple of days recently; that's got to stop!). The above may not look like much, but it's a work in progress. ZBrush has a nifty little tool that allows you to easily build branching objects, including trees, people, anything with legs and arms that go off in different directions. This is my first pass at a tree. It's got a long way to go before it reaches it's final form.

Happy Birthday, Mary!

I can't remember how old she is (last I recalled, she was a year younger than me, I think), nor can I remember the exact date of her birthday (hell, I can't remember the exact date of MY birthday), but I do know it's sometime this month, and she's still alive and kicking, so happy birthday, Mary! Here's to not dropping dead from sheer frustration.

The Happy Flower

I decided to play around with ZBrush today, a program I love to hate. This is about the level of success I can get with this program. I just can't wrap my brain around how it works, and frequently when I try to do things, the program crashes and I lose all my work. But sometimes I can do simple little things like this.