Instead of having endless fun with the day job challenges this week, all my fun was had in moving websites. Fun might be a bit of an exageration. It was somewhat of a challenge. And now it’s done. I’ll tell you more about it in a bit.
It turns out the website move took a considerable amount of my time for a couple of days and that ate into my 3d modeling and sculpting time as well as my regular art time. So I don’t have as much exciting stuff to show and tell about artistically. I did get some things worked on though. I would show you what I’ve done on my Alien in 3ds Max except I don’t really feel like there is much to show on it for now. I have most of the head and face put together and I’m about to start adding the body part. Maybe there will me something more interesting on that next weekend.
I also got a chance to work on the stippling piece I started of the guitar, or part of a guitar. It’s coming along nicely. I have a friend in Austin who does these awesome paintings of cars, or parts of them, and she has said that chrome is really hard to paint. I think I agree, especially when it comes to trying to render it in stippling. Tricky. Still here’s how it is as of today.
I think I might have the base chrome color worked out and I should be able to build from there. As you can see, half the page is blank, this is intentional and it will be the “background” so to speak. I’m planning on it being a deep dark blue but I have one real dilemma. I can’t decide if I am going to do the background in colored pencil or in ink and stippling as well.
Monday morning came way too early as it always does. So this is what showed up in the sketchbook.
Tuesday was a little better. I was looking at a magazine the night before and I was looking at the article about either sci-fi or fantasy landscapes. One of the pictures was a house on stilts. And I got to thinking about a sci-fi house on stilts and having a hover vehicle parked underneath. Then I decided my hover vehicle should be a little like a Segway, at least for steering. So this is the Hover 5000.
One of the premium cable services has started showing the movie “Big Hero 6” which I happen to really like for a whole bunch of reasons. I watched all or part of it at least 4 times last week, and I own it on blu-ray so I could have watched it more. Anyway, with that much viewing Baymax was sort of stuck in my head. So I decided to do my best rendition of him. I was really happy with it until I figured out that I left off his hands. Sorry, Baymax. By the way the copyright on the image is for my rendering, not for the subject matter the copyright for the subject belongs to Disney and Marvel Studios.
About mid-week I decided to try to tackle moving my websites. Before I get to that whole process, I should explain a little of what it is I was actually doing, and maybe a little of why. So have had my web hosting account for 10 years or so and it was on old technology. I noticed that the sites were a little slower to load than I like. So when GoDaddy called about all my stuff and to see if they could help I decided it was time to see about making some improvements, so I upgraded, I think. What that meant was that I needed to get my websites moved from the original hosting account and platform and to the new one. There turned out to be some pitfalls with that. I was able to move this sight fairly easily. I tested my other site by moving a copy of it down to my laptop. When I did that I learned a bunch of things not to do and a few things to do. It would have all been great and gone really much smoother if I had moved this site first. I didn’t. I tried to move the other site first. 
This turns out to have been a not so good an idea as it was also the name of the hosting account for the old hosting and it sort of blew things up. So I put it all back, basically, and moved this site. I did break it at least once. But after I had it up and going I decided to move the other site and then figure out what to do about the hosting account. Once both sites were up I took a break. When I returned to finish things up, the sites weren’t showing up. Panic. I called GoDaddy tech support and they verified I did everything right and assured me it would be ok, it would take 24 to 48 hours for the IP address change to populate through the internet. All this to tell you that this sketch was inspired by that adventure. It’s a lot like what it felt like, a chemical experiment in a beaker that was bubbling and smoking and had the potential to completely blow up. The fact that I can post this and you can read it is proof that it did not explode spectacularly, though it felt like it was about to at the time.
By the end of the week I had solved most of my website issues, both sites had been moved and were up. This seemed like a good time for something lighter and sort of cheery. I
didn’t really have the time to finish it out the way I would have like. I suppose I will revisit the subject a time or two and maybe one of those times I will get it finished out nicely.
I have this stick figure character that I’ve been working on, mostly in my mind. I want to animate him in 3d. Finding a good way to do that has not been easy. I really liked the lose lines of the pencil sketch and wanted to carry that over into the model but I couldn’t figure out how to do that. Not easily anyway, and certainly not elegantly. I worked on that idea some weeks ago and decided to take a break from it. This week I revisited it again, a lot because of that website move work I was doing. Anyway, I got to thinking about it and wondered if it would look ok if it was made out of solid 3d pieces and to not worry about the outline look, so I sketched it out a bit and I think it’s going to work. Once I get it ready I’ll post something. Though, for now, I’ve still got to get the idea into the computer. If it works like I want, it should be fun.
That’s the way things went this week. If you tried to visit the site Wednesday or Thursday and had trouble, I apologize. Either the IP address was still populating or you hit it while I was trying to get something to work which was causing the site to run really slow. I will try not to do that again. And with a little luck, this next week will go a bit smoother and there will be more to see soon.
So I decided to go to the art supply store to maybe find a book or ask questions and perhaps purchase a few supplies. It was a very good trip. I found the information I needed, met a very interesting person that gave me some great information and ultimately spurred me to start my next stippling art piece. If you happened to catch my Instagram or Twitter this morning you might have seen it. If not here’s a different shot of it.
I’m really pleased that in spite of the day job trying to take over my week, I managed to get some modeling started. I hope to get a bit more worked on this weekend. I also
instead. And the idea of a jack o’lantern with a witch’s hat came to mind and I sat down to sketch it out to see how it might look. However, I was enjoying the results of the jack o’lantern so much that I just sketched it and left of the hat since I wan’t sure how I wanted to put it on the jack o’lantern and didn’t want to overwrite or mess up what I had. So I just did the jack o’lantern. I did find a scrap piece of paper later to futz around with the idea with the hat and my go with that. Just not sure yet. But here’s the jack o’lantern.
accommodate it. That was not a terribly easy task and though I previously created a rough model of my office and all the furniture in it for the sake of being able to move things around and see how things would look, I did not use that. I, instead, chose to wing it and just move things and figure it out as I went. So it took a while, but it’s done. And so far, I’ve got most of the software I need installed. The Autodesk software was pretty easy and so was the Adobe software. I’ve just got to figure out how to get the ZBrush, ZBrush to Keyshot bridge, and Keyshot moved over. For now though, it can at least start to get back to some work. Well, after today’s game.
