October Done

Posted on November 7, 2021 by SusanG

October is over and we are into November. If I were sticking with the Inktober/Drawtober thing I’d be done and showing you all the results. As you know, I decided to go further. I’m filling the sketchbook. Though, there was one page that got unintentionally left blank and I wasn’t inclined to go back and fill it in. It would mess up the continuity. With 50 pages to fill, I am still working on my sketchbook project. I’ll share a few more pictures from it in this post.

drawing of a mushroom
Not from the sketchbook, just a fun drawing in Fresco

It has been conference season again. I discussed this last year around this time. This year there has been some over-lapping that I don’t recall from last year. The Zbrush Summit ran into Adobe Max, and that ran into Spark Animation Festival. There might have been others, those are just some I have an interest in.

I didn’t spend much time with the Zbrush Summit this year. I watched some of the first day of presentations and then got caught up in doing chores. I haven’t been using the software as much lately so learning about all the new features and techniques isn’t relevant for me right now. I do keep the software updated and I keep thinking I will get in and get comfortable with it. I’m just not there yet.

pencil drawing of a quokka face
Quokka!

Adobe Max along with the Spark Animation Festival are the two events I was most excited about this year. I thought last year’s Adobe Max was great. I really enjoyed it and got a lot of inspiration out of it. That was equally true this year. This year, instead of just hanging out at the main stage presentations I tried some of the breakout sessions. There were a couple that were super helpful and interesting. Learning about all the different ways you can draw in Illustrator was very helpful. Seeing animation in Fresco was great. It was what finally prompted me to learn how to create a small animation that I have been wanting and needing to make for some years now, though using Illustrator and Photoshop instead of Fresco.

As with last year, I am so very glad that Adobe Max was all online this year. It gave me a chance to attend again, something I would not have been able to do had it all been in person. And I would have missed out on a lot of great information and inspiration. At the point they return to a pay to attend, in person or live Max, I will likely make an effort to attend, I found it that valuable. Yes, even enough to pay to attend. I just need to find out when it is going to be, early enough in the year to put in for time off from the day job.

colored pencil drawing of a frog
Frog

Spark Animation Festival is over, or just about, I struggled to make the time to watch some of the great animations and different presentations. Unlike Adobe Max, where the videos are still available for registered participants after the event, with Spark Animation Festival, access to the videos ends at the end of the festival. Fortunately, though I didn’t manage to watch all the Legends & Landmarks presentations, I was able to watch all of both animation tickets I ordered.

The tickets are groups of animations that fit into particular categories. The tickets I ordered were Mothers of a Medium and Messages of Change. Both were good selections last year, and again this year. Two of my favorite animations were ‘End of the Line’ from Denmark and ‘Mr. & Mrs. Mantis’ from South Africa.

pencil drawing of a screaming cassowary
Cassowary

I really liked the look of ‘Mr. & Mrs. Mantis’, it was very artistic and polished and really had the old detective, noir feel down, even, or maybe because of the limited color pallet. ‘End of the Line’ was probably the shortest animation I saw. It was all of 44 seconds and it was great. It depicts a single use plastic cup factory, and you watch a cup being made. At the end you find it is an exhibit in a museum. As it zooms out you seen a sign saying something to the effect of ‘single use plastic cup factory’ followed by on screen text that says, “Obsolete ideas belong in a museum”. I thought this was the best animation. I loved the way it was done, its succinctness, and its message.  

With that, I will get back to making art to share with the world, working on that animation I’ve been needing to create, as well as, the website it will live on, and I mustn’t forget my daily drawing for the sketchbook. Cheers!

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October Sketchbook Project

Posted on October 30, 2021 by SusanG

For several years I have seen posts for Inktober on Twitter. And each of those years I have thought that that would be cool to do, one year, sometime. This year as October approached, I decided I would participate in Inktober. I was all set to do this, I had pictures for ideas laid out, and chose a sketchbook that was empty to use just for this.  I did my first ink drawing for day one and then, I saw something indicating there was some sort of controversy about Inktober and instead people are doing Drawtober.

I don’t know if there is a formal format for Drawtober. It appears that for Inktober there is a list of prompts for the topic for each day. So, if you are doing Inktober you are supposed to follow that format or plan. As I understand it. I’m not 100% certain because, I haven’t bothered to actually look any of this up. And, again, I’m not sure about Drawtober, either.

Day 10 drawing

What prompted me to decide to try one of these activities? I liked the idea that for every day I would do a drawing, or some might call it a sketch. I liked the idea of a short period of time that I had to be disciplined and draw every day. I felt this would be a good way to exercise my drawing skills. And hopefully, get back into the habit of drawing. For me that is important because when I finish a bigger, or more involved piece, like the Leaf I did recently, I tend to get stuck trying to decide what to work on next and then I don’t do anything. So, to keep me drawing and making art, I am doing my version of Drawtober. For every day this month I have been doing a small drawing of something.

Things started out a little rough and tentative. I didn’t know what to draw. I started with ink because at first, I was doing Inktober. I quickly switched to pencil, my preferred medium when I decided I would do Drawtober. I started out trying to create drawings of things from memory or imagination. A couple of things came out reasonably good. A couple of things didn’t. And then one night I decided I wanted to draw a Puffin but, since I didn’t have a good memory of the details, I pulled up a reference photo. As you might expect, it made a big difference.

Day 13 drawing – the revolutionary Puffin

And even though I had set aside some reference pictures for ideas of things to draw it wasn’t until then that it really occurred to me that I didn’t have to do just sketchy work, or sort of wonky work, or even just stuff from my imagination for this. I could use references and make nicer, and more accurate pieces, even if they were quick and small. The sketchbook I’m using is 5.5 inches by 8.5 inches. Which for me is small. My favorite size sketchbook is 9 inches by 9 inches.  

Once I latched onto the idea of using reference photos, I started looking for more things to draw from. I found a couple of photos in my collection that I felt comfortable using for this project. And then I had to go digging for more pictures. A key to what I draw for this is that I want it to be not too involved or complicated. I want to be able to finish it in one evening, and preferrable within about an hour. So far, I only have one, maybe two that might have taken a little longer than an hour.

I have a couple of books that have turned out to be great reference for this project. One is on frogs. I purchased it a few years ago for something I was going to do, but I don’t remember what that was. The other is a book gifted to me decades ago by my friend in Australia. It is a book on the birds of Australia. As a result, I’ve been drawing a lot of frogs and birds. I’ve gotten better at both. And I’ve gotten better at proportion and placement of details on both. Which seems to be translating to other species. I’ve done a few of the birds and frogs in color. The color can be fun as well as challenging. I’m using colored pencil and while I do get close most of the time, and even good results most of the time, some things I don’t get quite right. It is great practice regardless.

I have included a few of the drawings for your enjoyment.

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The Leaf

Posted on October 5, 2021 by SusanG

Every so often I come across something that strikes me and compels me to create a piece of art from it. It might be a scene, or a picture, or just an idea that I then go looking for reference photos so I can make it. Such was the case with the Leaf.

I took the reference picture last fall. I was out on my balcony, watering plants, when this one leaf on my avocado tree caught my attention. It struck me because of its shape and color, and in the particular sunlight, its veins. So, I took a picture with my phone. I could digress about how cool it is to have such a high-powered digital camera in my pocket, but I’ll leave it at that. It is quite convenient.  

Not long after taking the photo, I started my first attempt at creating the art piece that I was hoping to make from the Leaf photo. I got a little off track with it and went more down the path of creating a realistic setting. Which was irrelevant to what I wanted to create. It had nothing to do with what I saw that made me want to create that piece of art.

Since, it didn’t work out as I had intended in pastel, I made a few attempts in digital. One of which is passable even in its incompleteness. Still not satisfied, I put it aside. But it wouldn’t leave me be. It kept nagging me to create it, to have it tell the story I saw. So, I tried again.

A few weeks ago, I finished a new pastel painting of the Leaf, and now it tells, much better, the story I saw. What I saw, and see, in the Leaf is a lung. Environmentalists with tell you that the Amazon Rainforest are the lungs of the planet. And I understand that on a global scale. But, particularly because of the shape, and the veins, this Leaf made it very apparent that the leaves of the trees, and plants, are the lungs of the planet. How can they not be when the structure of both look so similar. I would still like to create the Leaf digitally, but for now, with the pastel painting created, it has allowed me some time to rest. And figure out how best to tell its story in digital.

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Experimenting With The Heat

Posted on August 25, 2021 by SusanG
drawing of a leaf

One of the side effects of feeling better is that there are some things that, though I cared about them before, now, I care about doing something, or what I can, about them. Some of them are environmental, as in climate, pollution, energy usage, among other things, and some of them are more personal.

One of the things I’ve begun to take notice of and try to do my part on is my energy consumption, or at least the heat generation in my home office. The room that I use for my home office, is also the room I use for my art. It has always been the warmest room in my home, but I’ve never thought that much about it. Until this summer. I started noticing that it would get quite warm by mid-morning to the early afternoon. It would be very noticeable. You could walk into the room and feel the heat difference, and you could walk out of the room and feel the temperature drop as you moved into the rest of the home. This became really important to address after I decided to increase the temperature on my a/c one degree warmer.

In this room is my work laptop, with two monitors, and its port replicator. The room also houses my personal desktop computer with a monitor and a Wacom Cintiq. When I started on this project, I would have all these items on during the day. And sometimes well into the evening. The room also sticks out from the building a little so that it is more exposed to the sun than many of the other rooms. I had already been trying to keep the blinds and curtains closed during the day to keep that heat down. And while it made a difference, the issue persisted.

So where did I start? I started by turning off the Cintiq on the personal computer and trying to work with just one monitor again. It made the most sense because I am not usually using the touch screen function of it, and I can turn it on if I need it. That didn’t make a significant difference. Next, I tried turning down the brightness on the work monitors. That helped some. So, I turned down the brightness on the personal monitor. I was working along like this for a week or two when I discovered something that turned out to be particularly interesting.

I noticed that if I had a lot of applications open on my personal computer, and especially something with heavy graphics, the fan on my computer would spin up and run quite hard. I’ve since learned something else interesting about this, I’ll get to that in a moment. Anyway, with that heavy fan usage I realized the computer was working pretty hot. I decided to try to limit the applications that I had open at the same time. I didn’t stick with that for long. Instead, I decided to update my personal laptop and try using it in place of the desktop to find out if that would make a difference. It does.

I discussed this with a colleague who has built a few machines and done some gaming and things like that that are in line with the type of desktop computer I have. He made the point that with a desktop graphics card geared towards gaming, as mine is because that type of graphics card is also good for rendering graphics for art and 3D art, these type of graphics cards have fans built in and the desktop computers have more fans in the cases so there is little concern for heat mitigation. And as I started the testing with the laptop, which also has a gaming style graphics card, though it is a few years older, I have noticed that it doesn’t run near as hot. Until…

I was working with two browsers open on the laptop, Chrome because it works well with my Gmail, and Edge because it works well with my Microsoft account and training. I had the CNN site open in Edge and Gmail in Chrome. I had not been on the CNN site for long when I noticed the fan on the laptop starting to spin up to cool it off. I closed Edge and the fan quieted. I tried the same site again and it started up again. I did some testing back and forth between the sites and browser combinations and what I found is that CNN in Edge causes some strain on the graphics card, it doesn’t do it in Firefox. And I haven’t noticed any other sites that do that, at least not yet.

There has been discussion as to how the different browser makers implement the different code bases that are being used or made standard. This seems to be a good example of how there is a difference and why, even today, people who create websites need to test them in a variety of browsers, particularly all the most popular ones. That allows them to understand if their site is going be consistent in appearance regardless of the browser being used. For the most part. And, it would seem that they also need to test their site for the performance impact the site has in the different browsers. Though, to be fair, one thing they might not be able to test is the impact any advertisements that might run on the site will have.

And that is a whole other topic. For years there have been issues with the behavior of ads on web sites. I’m not going to go into that here. I just know it has been a problem. So maybe that contributes.

Here are a few more tidbits to keep you thinking.

I received some sort of communication from my power company that included ways to save energy. One of the things they suggested was turning down the brightness on the TV to cut power consumption. Sounds like what I did with my monitors.

Several years ago, Google did an experiment with their website. They made their website with a black background for a day in solidarity with some event or cause. What we found out from that is that it takes more energy to display a black website than their white one.

A coder discovered that the way many websites are coded actually increases the power necessary to run or display said websites. He set out to clean up his code and cut the amount of energy that was needed to run the sites and code he developed.

Here’s where I’m at with this interesting heat and power issue now. I’ve been working from the personal laptop for about a week, maybe a little more and I have noticed a big improvement in the temperature in my office. I have a little more information regarding things to keep an eye on when I decide to move back to the desktop. And I still keep the blinds and curtains closed as much as possible. I have learned several interesting things along the way and remembered a few things as well.

I know a lot of this may seem small and irrelevant to many. What impact can it really have. In my case it has an impact on my comfort for working. It will also have an impact on my electricity bill. In light of the recent climate report from the IPCC, I think these things are worth thinking about. I may be one person, making just a few small changes that are a very small drop in the bucket to fix the problem we are facing on the planet, but my very small drop added to many more very small drops can eventually be a flood. To be sure, it will take political and economic will to do the big stuff that will really make a difference, that doesn’t mean I can’t do my part.

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Feeling Better

Posted on August 12, 2021 by SusanG

I didn’t know I didn’t feel good. Yes, I put on a few pounds during the COVID lock downs and stay home orders during 2020. I have heard that a lot of people did. I have finally gotten rid of that weight. It was in the process of starting to shed that weight that I figured out, I hadn’t realized I didn’t feel good until I started to feel so much better.

The process of shedding the weight has been multifaceted, as it should be. What I discovered, and to be fair the process of gaining the weight started well before 2020. What I discovered, or, realized was that I had slipped into bad habits in several areas of my life. For this story the reasons don’t really matter. What matters is that I had let my habits regarding feeding myself become convenience, not what was nourishing. While I continued my Taekwondo, it really was my primary exercise and just not enough for what my body needs. But I didn’t start to make progress in dropping the weight and getting things straightened out on my own, though I tried.

Earlier this year I got an email to join a program that was being funded by my insurance. (I guess insurance companies have finally figured out it is more profitable to keep us healthy than to pay for all the chronic illnesses that come with being sedentary.) I ended up signing up before I realized what I had done. And then, because I felt I’d been duped, I resented signing up for a while. But I got a new scale which was incredibly helpful as I was soon to discover, the one I had was no longer working right.

I will say two things regards the program and working with it. Like some other programs, the biggest part is accountability. When I record what I ate, do I really want to say I had a whole bag of cookies or M&Ms for lunch. And having a “coach” to help look for patterns has helped. I/we figured out I wasn’t feeding myself properly, I wasn’t staying properly hydrated, and I wasn’t getting near the movement my body needed. That high hamstring issue is from sitting too much and was a clue I was missing.

So I’ve been getting much more activity, staying better hydrated, and eating better for a few months now. And one day I was marveling in my head about how much better I feel. And that’s when it hit me that I had so slowly fallen into not feeling that good that I didn’t even know I didn’t feel good. It’s like the story of the frog in the pot of water. If you raise the heat gradually it doesn’t register it is in danger of boiling to death.

It turns out there are side effects of feeling better. Not the ones you might expect. Yes, I have clothes I can wear again and some things aren’t as hard as they once seemed. Those side effects I expected, or at least hoped for. There are things that I didn’t expect to be impacted. I’ll try to share some of that in a future post. And I’ll work on getting a picture or two for the next post.

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