I had my post all typed up with my opening paragraph being about how today is election day in the United States and as historic as it is, how happy I will be when it is over. And then I read the notice from Adobe that my Creative Cloud applications have all been
updated to 2017 versions. Of course that meant that when I logged on my computer my Creative Cloud applet was notifying me of the same thing. That made me realize that all of my Autodesk software is also ready to be update to 2017 versions. That seems a lot
more relevant to what I generally post about than my soap-boxing about this election. Elections are important. If you are eligible I think you should vote. I prefer you be rational and informed when you vote. But that’s not what this is about so we’ll get back to
updating and art-ing.
The updates to my Autodesk software (3DS Max, Maya, and Mudbox) have been out a while. I have been holding off on updating them until I finished my card. It occurred to me when I saw the Adobe email that since I have finished the Halloween card I can update
all my software. I think that goes on this week’s “to do” list. I have a little bit of research I want to do first.
I have updated all the Adobe software I have installed and I added a piece of software. It’s still in beta but it looks cool. I read about it in an article on how the TV show the Simpsons or maybe it was another show I don’t remember. But they were able to use Character Animator to be able to animate the characters in almost, real time so that it could be as if you were really interacting with the animated character. When I first read about it I checked my Creative Cloud right away to see if it was available. It wasn’t. So when I started updating my Adobe software to 2017 I checked to see if it was there and what else there might be that is new. Sure enough Character Animator is there, and marked Beta. So that’s exciting.
With all that updating to do I guess it’s a good thing that I haven’t gotten back to computer art since I finished the Halloween Card and got it posted. Instead I worked on the Ovation guitar painting and got some of the projects around my home taken care of.
On the home project front, my Dad was kind enough to help me move some furniture around and change a somewhat annoying light bulb and a couple of other, fairly small but important projects. It’s like I told him, I could do them by myself, and would have if he
weren’t available, but every one of them was easier and went a bit faster, thanks to his help. I’ve still got the big projects to tackle, and we might get to them this coming weekend, but getting all those small ones out of the way has made a big difference for
me.
And as I said, I did get back to the Ovation Guitar painting. I’m to a point that many of the areas I want to work on next require I mix the color. I’ve got 5 different colors of brown wood to figure out and the ivory look for the binding and the color for the strings, that I know will require some mixing. And I’m not done with the body either. The finish on the body is more of a quilted look and I am going to try to render that with the ink.
So to get back to working on the Ovation painting requires I either mix colors or get to the really challenging part. I chose to mix colors. I started with one of the wood colors for the leaves around the sound holes. The first attempt did not go well and ended up as a weird sort of grey. The second try worked. Initially I did two passes of that color and then found I really needed to do three. Because of the color mixing I’m trying to get to a finished dot density with each color before moving on. I think it will be easier than trying to mix the right color multiple times. And there is the added bonus that it shows where I need to go back and make a segment or color even denser. Here are a few of the in progress pictures from this week. You can see the difference of the density of the browns and then compared to say the black of the holes and the lines in the leaves.
For this next week I’ll probably get more done on the Ovation painting. I’m feeling like I’m on a little roll with that and think I’ll keep it going. I might get back to the computer art, but first I think I’ll do some updating. I do have those two bigger home projects to get finished up. They could take up a good bit of the weekend so, most of what I get done may be whatever I do during the week.