August 2013 Archives

Sheet Music Sunday + Musical Monday: Korobeiniki

Posted on August 5, 2013 3 Comments

On Sundays/Mondays throughout the month I’ll be sharing my adventures in accordioning. The accordion is an awesome instrument capable of rich depths of harmony and melody. Unfortunately, I barely make any time to practice it, so what I share with you this month is going to sound rather choppy.

For the rest of the month I’m hoping to share accordion arrangements on Sundays, and recordings on Mondays. This week I’m a little behind, but that’s okay, because if you’ve followed my blog in the past you’ll have already heard the recording I’m going to share today. (I’m too lazy to record a more recent/fluent version)

That’s right, it’s Korobeiniki, a delightfully suggestive Russian folk song. It’s best known for its inclusion as the Tetris A music across a multitude of Tetris titles. A simple transcription of the song is below. (I haven’t done music theory in aaaaages, so apologies for errors. Let me know if I’ve notated things poorly and I’ll endeavour to fix them)

This is a pretty straightforward arrangement mostly comprising of alternating bass patterns. You start on the hatched E button in the top half of the keyboard and alternate with the E minor chord, then move to A -> Am. After that is the E Counterbass (G#, denoted by the underlined fingering) which alternates with the E Major chord.

There’s only one tricky bit in the arrangement, a little bass run through A A B C. It crawls from the upper half of the keyboard to the middle section, ending on the middle C button. I’ve put in some suggested fingering.

Then it’s a slow progression back up the bass through D minor. (I used to jump up to a different chord from the C, but my hop was just too unreliable)

I was going to add some little diagrams here but is anyone actually going to find them helpful? I’ll consider them for my next post if anyone is interested.

EDIT: Scribbled a thing in the end. Dunno how helpful it is.

Have fun with Korobeiniki! Don’t have an accordion? Try out my accordion simulator. You’ll be able to play most of the piece except for the G#s in the right hand. Just hum them or something.

Fan-Art Friday: Decrypting Rita

Posted on August 3, 2013 2 Comments

This month I’ll be featuring fan art for five different webcomics. The plan was to do inks on Friday and watercolour them on Wednesday, but I might end up using Wednesday for different arts.Anyway, there are a few themes for the characters featured this month. They’re all ladies. Many of them have layered personae or alternate identities.

The most complicated of these is Rita – or Ritas – from Egypt Urnash’s aptly named Decrypting Rita. The story revolves around the reality warping adventures of the various Ritas. Frequently told as multiple stories in one, the comic employs many clever visual tricks to keep the action moving across the four main realities.

I started the thumbnail for this one on Tuesday, when I realised that I wanted to substitute Rita in for one of the five characters I’d be featuring this month. The scribble quickly evolved and suddenly Rita went from being the week 5 post to being the first one of the month.

The thumbnail has been done over a couple of other scribbles – the figures in the middle right and in the top left are part of completely separate ideas. (One of them is a sketch of someone on the bus. The other is just a figure extrapolated from random lines on the page)

Here’s the picture transferred to watercolour paper and inked. I completely winged the fingers because I’d left the hands as mittens in my sketch. Mostly I think I got away with it except for Robot Rita’s right hand.

Three-Dee Thursday: AVCon Trophies

Posted on August 1, 2013 Leave a Comment

It’s time to kick off Blaugust again, the time of year that I can actually feel good about not updating my blog frequently, because it means that I have a bunch of content to throw up each day while other Blaugust participants have to create new content. Suckers.

Actually I think I’ll end up creating a fair bit of new stuff for this month anyway, so I don’t know when my older stuff will get to see the light of day. I guess I don’t have as much of a backlog as last year. My rough outline for this year’s Blaugust will be as follows:

Sheet-Music Sunday
Musical Monday
Watercolour Wednesday
Three-Dee Thursday
Fan-Art Friday

I also plan to do Strippin’ Saturday content, for which I intend to make comics, but that’s a bit uncertain. Tired Tuesday will be my day of rest, though if I’m feeling not-lazy I’ll find something to upload.

Anyway, today I’m showing off the trophies I made for AVCon this year, of which I’ve shared a couple of times on the Twitter machine.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the Adelaide Fab Lab lately, where I’ve been getting quite familiar with their laser cutter. My first project was to make approximately 300 tokens for us to give away to AVCon attendees. I was then inspired by some trophies on display in the Fab Lab and realised we could make some really cool customised trophies for AVCon.

Also thanks to the Fab Lab I’ve been getting back into 3D modeling, so the first thing I did was to mock up a 3D render of how the trophy might look.

Using Blender I was able to work out the geometry of the trophy and ensure that there weren’t any impossible intersections of the material. I was also able to use Blender to export out the correct alignment of the required cuts in the trophy base.

Initially I had wanted to use some kind of stained wood for the base, and I experimented with MDF. (You’ll notice the plaque has been enlarged here from the demo render, the result of some trial and error, AKA poor conversions)

However as it turned out, there was a ton of scrap red acrylic available at the Fab Lab, and lazy me also didn’t want to work out how to do attractive wood staining. The final draft used acrylic throughout the trophy, with some gold paper for the inside of the Invader.

I ended making up additional thank-you trophies for our special guests as well. Chris Cason took a really flattering photo his!

Next time I try this, I’m going to have a go at mounting some little LEDs along the sides of the Acrylic. Apparently the effect is very cool.