No, I’m not late or early. I am right on time.
I have been posting the weekly update on the weekends which is ok but not optimal. When I try to have a post up on the weekend it means that any stuff I get done during that
weekend waits until the next weekend before you get to read about it. That’s not fun. I also don’t want you to miss out on the post. I figure you are a bit like me and don’t get to follow up on article notices that come in on the weekend. I do that follow up during the week when I need a break. So my plan is to change the regular posting day to Monday or Tuesday. That way I get to include any weekend fun and you can have it for a weekday break.
On to the fun stuff, working on the guitar stippling piece.
I really focused on the guitar piece this week because I an on vacation from the day job next week. I wanted to get the rest of the basics inked in and the background
completed so I could let it sit for several days while I decide how much additional stippling it needs. I think letting it sit during the week before vacation is ideal because then I have all vacation I can work on it.
While I was working on the guitar piece I noticed something really interesting. As I was painting the background using the acrylic inks I made some mistakes and went a bit
into the guitar body. Needless to say I was quite annoyed. But I waited until I finished the background to fix it. This is where the interesting bit comes in. I had one spot where I had just lightly crossed the line and one spot where the ink went on much thicker. The lighter one was harder to cover to correct it than the heavy one. I suspect this is because the heavier inked area acts as a gesso for the paper so the corrective dots sit on top and don’t get absorbed by the paper. It never occurred to me to gesso or prime the paper. Now, I’m thinking it might be worth a try. Or at least an interesting experiment.
Here’s a photo of it so far.
I’ve been struggling a bit with the photos I take of the sketchbook pieces. Sometimes I take them with the phone and sometimes with a regular camera. Both the phone and the camera take good pictures in general but for some reason the camera ones seem to wash out the pencil where the phone ones don’t. So I have been using the phone for the
sketchbook pictures. There are a few reasons that I don’t find this the best way to handle this, only one of those reasons being the upload process. Time to figure something out. I checked with my friend Shan in Austin and she uses a DSLR and Photoshop, if needed. As I thought about why hers might work out better, aside from the obvious differences between her art and mine, I found one other big difference. The angle. The nature of her art pieces is such that her photos are taken with the piece upright like it would appear on a wall. I have been taking my photos with the sketchbook flat on a table and shooting straight down on them. I fight shadows quite a bit this way, and, it seems like I have been fighting glare from light bouncing off the graphite. This week, when I started to take the sketchbook photos I got out the table top easel I inherited from my Grandmother and used that. So far, it looks like it may solve my problem.
Though I focused mostly on the guitar piece this week, I did get to work on rigging Sticks some. It turned out to be a good thing that I only got a day or two to work on it as I’ve had to make some changes. The explanation of the changes and progress are a bit long for this post so I will be posting something about it, with pictures, soon. So for those of you interested in the digital 3D art and animation stuff, don’t fret, I have not abandoned it or forgotten you.
And now here are the sketchbook entries for the week. This was a slow starting week and I really didn’t find much inner inspiration to work from. My favorites are the little bird and the person in the Taekwondo uniform. I think the squirrel will be getting some attention in the future. I have plans for it.
That’s the week that was. I will be on holiday from the day job next week and I’m not traveling so there will still be posts and hopefully lots of project progress.
Remember to check back for that update on Sticks.