Drawing 2016

Started the new year off right with an intense bout of sketching. On Friday I spent ~8 hours in front of the Cintiq and Saturday I followed up with a couple more.

Drawing that much in one continuos flow felt great. The pictures themselves I don't know, but the feeling was fantastic. If I could draw like that more often I'm pretty sure I'd actually get better. Last night I had a vivid dream that I was still sketching, woke up partially and continued to feel it. "Gotta' make sure I save..." I remember thinking. This amuses me because it's the same sort of sleep processing feeling I get when I'm coming up to speed on a new programming language.

The main resolution last year that I completely bombed was "learn to draw landscapes" and it's definitely one I still want to try to tackle this year. And by landscapes I mostly just mean backgrounds, even the faintest of hints, for my sketches....

Using Clip Studio Paint as my primary sketching app & then doing colors/fill in Photoshop is working out quite well. I'm in love with the smoothing CSP does to the lines and I love the sensitivity options on the Pen & Pencil tools. I'm often jumping to the Marquee tool to reposition/resize my sketching as I go and often toggle back to the Pen tool by accident for a couple of strokes when I actually wanted the Pencil tool (both toggle on the P key). This has given an interesting sort of pacing/cadence to the the line sketching. Light feathery lines (Pencil), correction (Marquee), a few bold strokes (Pen), repeat.

Still feeling quite restrained in what I'm drawing though. Only used a pinch of photo references for the non-human elements but all subjects/scenes were from gaming sessions. Descriptions I heard or read. None of the crazy emo feeling sketches that spill out from my pen when I reach down inside and try to personify what the fuck is going on in there. Maybe next time.

Worken' on things

If I try hard, I might be able to finish this quilt before Thanksgiving, keeping it under a year of work. Am excited to try the idea of laying down masking tape as guide lines when I get to the actual quilting portion.

Been seeing a lot of people lately, doing a lot of things. This is good. Behind me is pizza, soap making, pretzel making, dinner cooking, and gaming. Ahead of me is archery, gaming, and hopefully more dinner cooking. I have finally cooked a meal with meat, I feel so proud of myself. Want to try it again. Thanks, Hannibal, for showing me the way!

Got a lot of things going on at work. I hope this is a good thing. Learning more things. Working a bit on things that I actually use daily in my not-work life. Trying to be a good person and actually follow through with quality documentation and faster email responses. It's hard. Being lazy is way easier. Shout-out to my awesome manager who leads via good example on those fronts.

One of the problems about work going well though is that it makes side code projects hard to do. I've been really wanting to work with WebGL but can't seem to find the energy after a day of work-- and weekends are meant to be spent entirely outside, in my opinion. I got a Cardboard headset from unofficialcardboard.com and haven't yet made something for it.

So instead of coding I've been finding myself drawing a lot. The morning doodles have decreased in number due to poor sleep... but on the other hand, when I do doodle half the time I've got crazy dream inspiration. Drawing while on a flight remains solid as well-- I made some progress trying to draw the character Hayley on a recent short flight. Dr Sketchy's this month also went quite well.

The 4th Terminus game has been going quite well. Playing Monster Hearts was interesting. Winning at Tigris & Euphrates and losing at Glass Road was fun and makes me sad that we don't play more board games.

Dreams

Nobody really want's to hear someone else's dream recollection. But I drew some pictures for mine! So maybe that makes this blog post ever so slightly less horrible...

I've been having several bad dreams recently. Cannibalism, not cool. Anyway, this one starts off and I'm somewhere and I notice there's these little creatures. They're almost cute, but a touch too disturbing. They're made up of a normal animal and where that animal's head should be, there's the torso of another animal. Not a graceful gryphon like transition... sort of a cut off & this other thing stuck on look.

In particular there's a rat with a rabbit top and a rabbit with a tiny adorable black kitten top.

The kitten is hungry. There's this... deer thing laying there. It's basically a deer but has a long chicken like neck that's mostly plucked. I try and convince the kitten to eat it-- it tentatively takes a bite of the animal's neck-- but it's a no go. I understand that if the deer-thing was dead the cute kitten would be able to eat it.

I go out looking for knives to kill the deer-thing with. Nothing I find is large enough or sharp enough to do the deed. I start to get squeamish. I contemplate looking up online where one cuts a deer's throat. Is it up high? At the base? In the end I acknowledge the fact that even if I had a knife, I probably wouldn't kill the deer-thing. Also, I think the deer thing has a human face now (curse you, Midwinter!).

I contemplate never eating red meat again.

I wake up

A couple more sketches can be found over on my Tumblr...

Season of Dreams...

Not sure why, but every night this week I've had vivid, odd dreams. This, after several months of nothing particularly striking.... I blame the changing temperature.

The second dream:

My co-workers and I were super heroes, themed after different sandwiches. Someone was a ham sandwich hero, I think I was egg salad or peanut butter & jelly. I wake up. I tell one of my coworkers about this dream. I wake up.

After telling the same worker about the dream and the dream within the dream, I did not (sadly?) find out I was still dreaming. I'm happy that this dream did not leave me sad/scared/worried.

The first dream:

I'm somewhere near a river, in which I find a goat being slowly washed down stream. I retrieve the goat and decide to keep it as a pet. Time passes and I go somewhere else. I realize I forgot my goat and call my aunt Laurie to see if I left it at her place. Sadly, she doesn't know where it is. I am sad to have lost my pet goat, but on the other hand kind of relieved... Apparently adopting a goat would cost $250 and it occured to me that the backyard at our house doesn't really have any grass and I start to imagine the damage the goat would cause in the basement if we kept it indoors. None the less, I spend the rest of the dream frantically searching for my goat. I do not find it.

Despite the above sketch, the goat in my dream was very clearly a Anglo-Nubian goat. This dream left me very sad/worried.

I have not yet sketched the third dream.

In totally unrelated news I went to the San Francisco Superhero Street Fair and had a great time. It's not an epic event, but one I would casually recommend. Fun dancing time. I wore a sparkly mask, glow sticks, and a skimpy outfit. Someone asked if wearing a mask made dancing easier. It didn't make dancing easier (that went just fine) but it made going out in public in one's underwear a lot easier.

Have been playing with the NVD3 graph library at work (which sits atop D3) and been having a good time of that. I can't really chew on numbers with any sort of statistical skill, but I can make a mean graph. Sadly our hackday that was planned for tomorrow has been moved.... to some time in the future. Alas.

Related to work, I've really been enjoying this song for some reason:

Adam has been playing GTA V and I've really enjoyed watching him do so. I <3 Trevor (just like everyone else, I'm sure)

Dream night of May 23rd

A very vivid dream last night. There were multiple stages.

I was flying a plane. A little biplane. I believe other people were with me, flying their own planes. I kept going up too quickly and stalled out my plane a number of times.

A some point my father went missing.

It was nighttime. While I was in my plane, or perhaps atop the roof of my parents house, I looked out and in the distance I saw destruction. There was a large... tripod like monster/robot. Very tall. Much taller then in my sketch. Very War of the Worlds. It was sweeping the land in the distance, burning everything.

I was with my youngest sister. We were going through a city, gathering supplies. The tripods were coming and we needed to hide. We came across a coworker of mine who has a leg brace and I was concerned he wouldn't be able to escape in time. As we were parting ways Lindsey fell down an embankment and hurt her leg and I knew we weren't going to be able to get back home in time.

I went and ran around, looking for somewhere safe to go. Somewhere below ground. Where I was searching was this open boardwalk space with lots of outdoor restaurants and hedges. I went down a narrow brick staircase and found a tiny room and... an astronomer? living there. He said we could stay the night (which is when I knew the tripods would reach us). We piled down into the tiny space.

Before night fell I realized the world would be burned to ashes when the tripods passed-- or at least our immediate area. We would need supplies if we were to last more then another day. I ran up above ground and began to gather greens. There were lots of pea pods and vines which I started tearing down can piling in my arms. In the back of my mind, I knew that this would not be enough to survive. I uprooted some plans with the thought of replanting them the next day in the ashes but... I knew that they would be unlikely to live.

I returned, arms full of greens. Eventually the tripods came, which we could tell by the immense heat and great shaking and sounds. They had passed and things quieted. A worry rose within me- how deep did the burn go? Had our stairwell been filled in? Were we trapped by ash? If so, we could probably dig ourselves out and would eventually die if we didn't.

The dream ended with me convincing everyone in the bunker to go back to sleep, that we would investigate in the morning. I didn't say it, but I thought that if we were blocked in by ash we probably would be better off dead, dying peacefully in our sleep, then struggling to survive in the remaining baren world.

Thoughts:

• Again I start a dream flying, but doing so poorly
• Again my father goes missing
• Again witnessing a destructive & horrible thing behind my parent's home
• Again in the company of my family
• The bleakness towards the end is... uncharacteristic of me. I'm a fan of post-apocalyptic stories, but mostly to embrase the spirit of survival and hope from starting anew. This had a feeling of The Road, which I found horribly depressing.
• I do not wish for more dreams like this. Would much rather get back to my classic dream themes- rescuing children, hiding, searching, etc. Stressful, but not nearly so... devastating.

Dr Sketchy's : Girls on Bikes

Dr. Sketchy's this week was awesome. There were bikes. There were girls. There were girls on bikes. Not only was there some fantastic sketching to be had, but it was also a fundraiser for the AIDs Lifecycle ride one of our branch's founders is partaking in. A good cause and finally a chance to combine the joy of eating and sketching at the same time. Fresh grilled cheese! Yes!

I was rocken the short poses but my mojo ran out for the 10 minute ones.

Didn't win the contest but felt good about my entry. I never have a enough time to finish my coloring though, damn! Upcoming themes are apparently "Circus" and "Desert Princesses"?



I'm not sketching as much as I'd like (when am I ever?) but I do a little here and there. It helps to have material and/or motivation. Haven't had vivid dreams for a while, but this week they've popped up again. Vivid, and frequently unpleasant. I think it has something to do with high temperatures... anyway- dream from the start of this week.

I was a jetpack rental place. I had visited it at some point earlier and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was renting a pack for a brief period of time before the start of work one day, taking it up above a hill and looking over a forest. It was so lovely... There was a sunset/sunrise with purple clouds. I wanted to take a panorama photo of what I saw with my cellphone, so I fumbled with my phone. Every time I took my hand off the left controller to take a photo I started to fall from the sky. I'd switch back to the controller and rise back up, and then fall back down to the ground again when I again went for a photo. Eventually I ran out of fuel and slowly sank back to the ground... ...it was sad