Monthly Archives: April 2010

by Wombatilim

X Marks the Spot

I started recording chapter 4 of Alice, but my brain was not allowing the words to form quickly and I gave up. I tried recording a quick video to explain this, but my room is not so much an ideal place for filming anything.  So here, have a close-up picture of my keyboard with some Photoshop filters on it.

by Wombatilim

Lemur!

I’d originally planned on recording another chapter of Alice tonight, but I got distracted by the lemurs.

I learned several things about myself while working on this, including:

  1. Part of the problem I always had on paper is I have the bad habit of drawing the right shape with the wrong rotation (yay layers & Photoshop)
  2. I’m never really satisfied with the outcome when I attempt to draw appendages.
  3. My coloring is more thorough if I turn the background off… even if the background’s white.

Also, lemurs always seem to look so surprised.  I think it’s part of their charm.

by Wombatilim

Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 3

I’ve recorded Chapter 3 and here it is for your enjoyment.

I’ve also modified the tagging a bit and added some album art, and have adjusted the files for chapters 1 and 2 accordingly.  Re-download, or just re-tag; up to you.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Chapter 3

And here’s your One-Stop-Alice-Shop for all of your Alice in Wonderland audio and artwork needs.

by Wombatilim

Happy Easter!

I’d wanted to draw a Zombie Jesus for today, but not having the Wacom tablet available left me drawing something on my phone, and I just don’t have the fine control on the phone to really even attempt something like that.  At least not without much more practice.

I’ve already shown that I can draw a bunny, though.

by Wombatilim

sleepy kitty

I don’t appear to have a category for “things that probably could have been done more easily if I’d set out to do it that way from the beginning.”  Yet.

This began from a desire to draw a picture of a sleeping cat.  I realized I would probably never be happy with such an image if I tried to draw it freehand without reference, at least not without a lot more practice, so I figured I’d look through pictures of my cat for a reference photo.  Then I figured, what the hell, I’ll just trace one.

Then it got silly.

After tracing the picture and then dropping the background out, I decided it didn’t look right without color.  So I started to color it, only my cat is black, you see.  You kind of lose the detail that way.  Then I decided to color sample the fur from the original photo (because black cats are really very dark brown), and that looked too flat.  So I wound up just pattern cloning the original photo.

This means that what I was left with was, basically, the original picture outlined.  I did a little more pattern cloning to, say, remove the playstation controller that was covering up part of one of her paws in the original, and remove her tag from the picture.  I did also add a comfy-looking background that was not from the original picture, and was instead a photograph I had taken on another occasion of a different object entirely.

There’s something to be said for a good old-fashioned erase tool.