Life Drawing

Here's another pastel drawing I did in Life class. 50 mins on A2 sugar paper with Unison pastels (and a few Stabilo Carbothello Pastel pencils)

Life Drawing

Here's one of the images I did in Life Drawing this week:

45 mins - pastel on sugar paper

Life Drawing Pastels

I've been very busy of late, so have been amiss in putting anything new up. Here's some recent pastel drawings from some life drawing classes that I've just about been able to squeeze into my schedule.

This one was done over two 45 minute sessions


And this one was just 45 minutes:



I wish the poses were over a longer time.

Thinking of sketching reminds me of life drawing..

Thinking of sketching reminds me of life drawing and that I miss doing it. I was going to a life drawing session that got canned because the venue was closing. So then I tried to go to one that was further away, which was really good because it was longer and had two models... but it was late on Friday night's and very inconvenient to get to, so I stopped at the end of last year. I'd really like to get back into it.

Here's a pastel sketch from one of the last sessions. Because of the longer class length I was able to do colour work where previously I'd only been doing short pencil or charcoal sketches:



I've got most of my life drawing up on this thread HERE on the CGTalk website, if anyone's interested (obviously loads of nudity!)

Trying out ArtRage 2.5 with a Sketch

I thought it was about time I put up something else here. This is a made-up face I did to try out the ArtRage 2.5 paint program.... I did the above sketch using the Pencil brush on the face (well, plus the eraser!), and the chalk brush on the hair. I used the chalk brush because the pencil brush does not enlarge much and stays as a relatively small line.

I was testing out the Pencil brush because it was recommended by Frog as a very good sketch tool and I can't resist trying out paint programs.

I decided to purchase the full ArtRage (I already had the free version but never really used it) because the v2.5 looked a lot better. I have to say that I really like the pencil and chalk tools. Feels much more like using a real pencil as you can actually shade properly (can't do this very easily in any other program - you end up with a load of lines not proper pencil shading).

The only problem I found was that you have very limited control on texture the darker you get. Especially with the Chalk. You can adjust and change the paper texture which will affect the brush texture, but it's not particularly intuitive, and I would like a bit more control over the brushes themselves. However for roughly £15(incl vat)(US$25) I can't complain. It will be very useful for doodling out rough ideas.

I did find that exporting to .psd did make the image come out slightly darker (I was only using black and white), but exporting to .tiff did not affect the tone. However this could be easily corrected in Photoshop using levels.

There's some niffy stencil and ruler options and the ability to rotate the canvas is great.

However some of the functions are not obvious and hard to find.... ie if you want to permanently flip a layer you have to click on an arrow next to the selected layer, select 'Transform Layer Contents', then a tool bar will pop up, then you have to click on the side arrow and select flip horizontal or vertical. Admittedly, after you have selected 'Transform Layer Contents' you can just hit 'H' or 'V' but it's a bit longwinded. Hitting 'H' or 'V' in normal circumstances will flick your image either horizontally or vertically while you hold the key down, which is handy, but you can't draw on the flipped image. Plus there's no selection function, so you can't cut and paste parts of a layer, although you can rotate, scale or flip the entire layer through the 'Transform Layer Contents' function.

I'm less keen on the paint tools - bit too hit and miss for my tastes. I'll be sticking with Painter X there still. You can get rid of the impasto look on the paint by hitting the F5 key (PC), you loose the paper texture on the screen, but the pencil/chalk/crayon textures still work. I personally found the brushes cluncky when it comes to subtle blending and I still wanted to be able to tweek them more to my taste. So for sketching... yes, for painting (me personally)... no. Though it's a great introduction for anyone just starting into digital painting, without breaking the bank.

Inspired by Drawing Board Jam

This image was inspired by the Drawing Board Jam for May. I liked the models pose and thought I'd give it a go. Done in Painter X.

Thank Gawd for Google!

I build myself a new PC in the last few days, as my old system didn't have enough ooph anymore to cope with the large files I have. Everything went fairly smoothly apart from the old cut here and there from sharp parts (why do so many bits that go into a PC seem to have razorlike edges?!?) and a few swear words when screws didn't want to screw in properly... but it was up and running almost with no hitches or major crashes.

So after fiddling around with stuff and updating stuff I think to myself... well it's time to knuckle down and draw something. So, I try to boot up Painter X.... and up comes this error message

"This copy of painter has been damaged or illegally modified. Please reinstall from your original disks".

"What!?!? " I say to myself "oh oh"

So I try to repair it. I uninstall it. I reinstall it.

Still I get the same bloomin' message. I know this isn't the end of the world. Painter IX.5 still works fine.... but I HATE it when things don't work and I don't know why. And I'd only just bought the upgrade too....

So I Google it. And thank goodness there is one English response with exactly the same error message. It was on a Dealtime review here (basically search for and delete all registry entries called "Protexis" (I think it was about 2 entries), being carefully not to touch anything else in case you completely wreck your PC). Thank you theuerkorn who ever you are.... you saved my bacon! After doing what you said Painter X is now working fine!

Phew!


*****


Just thought I'd add a little update for anyone with this problem. I passed on the info on another forum board (TalkGraphics.com see thread HERE) and it seems you have to delete the Protexis files after installation, but before trying to open the program.

So after uninstalling and then reinstalling Painter, do START>>RUN>>typeREGEDIT Search for all PROTEXIS files [two of them] and DELETE (being careful that's all you delete - remember to backup the reg first just in case). And only then open the program.

Maybe that's what I did without remembering I did it. Ah well. ;o)

Princess Stencil Book

We'll here's a bit of shameless self promotion.... but what the hell.

Aimed at anyone with a girl child around the age of 7(ish) a bit of stencilling fun, illustrated by ME! Yes it is true... I do pink and purple with twinkly bits very well. ;o)

It's not available just yet (to be published in April 2007) but you can pre-order it.

Purchase on Amazon.co.uk
Purchase on Amazon.com

Well it's been a while since I've posted, so I thought I'd pop up the last picture I was able to do on the course at the CGSociety. I wouldn't call it finished but I thought I put it here anyway. I'm rushed off my feet at the moment so it was a struggle to finish anything. Ah well.

Monster With Four Legs

Well... it's a monster... with four legs (and a bit of hair) and that's about all I can say about this one. I admit I got bored with 'im after doing the face, so the rest was a bit of a struggle to finish. Sometimes you just run out of steam and inspiration takes a holiday. :-/

Stubby Monster

I have the flu this week. A delayed Xmas present from my Husband who had it first - how kind eh! So I'm not feeling brilliant, but onward and upward, as there is no rest for the wicked, as they say... tho who 'they' are, I've no idea.

Anyhow, last week I was too snowed under with freelance work to get any monsters done, but there was a little pause in the work flow last night so I did this monster to get it going again. I hope to get another one done quickly too.