Presenter
Inspired by the news reader on tonight’s ABC news.
portrait
Through Mists
I spent the night trying to get my scanner to work with my laptop. Since upgrading past OSX Snow Leopard (quite a few years ago now), the Epson-provided scanner software stopped working for me. Epson provided drivers to work with the inbuilt Image Capture software, but I discovered that the RGB channels would be misaligned. Finding this unsatisfactory, I experimented with different drivers and software, and somehow broke the Image Capture compatibility – although the software recognised the scanner it would sit indefinitely waiting for the scanner to respond.
A few days ago I noticed Epson had released new drivers so I was hopeful that they would work. Unfortunately, that proved not to be the case. I dug through all the old driver files, manually deleted as much as I could find, reset all printer/scanner settings (that’s quite sad actually as I have a bunch of printer presets lost now), reinstalled the full 2GB bundle of drivers for all Epson products, purged VueScan from my system, turned my computer off and on again and finally, somehow, the scanner is back to mostly working in the buggy way it did three years ago.
Having to fix the channels in Photoshop is less inconvenient than having to boot up an entirely separate machine just to scan documents, so I guess I’ll live with it for now. Not being able to easily scan documents is one of the reasons why I’ve been less prolific outside of Facebook/Twitter, where I’ve been taking photos of my finished pieces with some “artfully” thrown in paintbrushes and pencils to embellish the scene. So hopefully with an easier access to scanning I can share a bit more art here.
Anyway I can’t go another blog post without posting a bit of art, so here’s a painting inspired by a photo of a friend. The original photo included a lot of fog and interesting lighting effects, in the end this painting kind of took its own path.
Shown above is a photo of the WIP, taken just before I started painting. I initially struggled to draw this as a realistic rendering, but ultimately decided to just draw a figure posed the same as the reference photo instead.
When it came time to painting it I was almost going to go for full colour but early into the painting process the pink started to emerge as a highlight colour throughout the piece so I refrained from including other colours.
Simulacrum Sunday #3
So I was lazy and I spent most of the day playing Dominion but I did work on what was probably going to be my post on Thursday, but I didn’t get a change to draw any Diplomats in Hats but I do have some old from-life sketches I can use to cheat my way through today’s required post.
Here is my buddy Connell (you may remember him from his series of guest posts that he provided in Blaugust 2011). Although largely a Nintendo Fanboy I managed to capture evidence of him enjoying his new Sony Vita. I sketched him while we were at a house-warming party. I think pizza must have arrived before I was able to finish drawing his left arm.
No progress made on Megas. Might wake up early and work on them while watching the VGC finals.
Simulacrum Sunday #1
simulacrum
sɪmjʊˈleɪkrəm
noun
noun: simulacrum; plural noun: simulacra; plural noun: simulacrums
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an image or representation of someone or something.“a small-scale simulacrum of a skyscraper”
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an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute.“a bland simulacrum of American soul music”
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Yup, it’s Simulacrum Sunday, which means I’m posting art based on real things. People, still lifes and landscapes, I guess! Hopefully my representations are more satisfactory than, uh, un[satisfactory].
We’ll start the series with some Reddit Gets Drawn paintings I did when procrastinating from AVCon stuff a few months ago. I had a short burst where I forced myself to draw each day and heading over to Reddit to find models to paint was very convenient.
I tried not to spend too long on each painting. These are a couple of my more successful attempts!
Self-Portrait
A self-portrait done in Painter
(Untitled)
I bought Painter a while ago but since swapping computers I haven’t been using it. Last night I decided to do a manic experiment with colour!
Reference from the gorgeous stock art of Lockstock.
Simple Self Portrait
I was inspired after attending the ACSA’s 2010 graduate exhibition. Today was the last day of the exhibition so I was glad to catch the show before it ended.
Since I’ve been dabbling in watercolours lately, the watercolour portraits by Ruby Chew were really awesome to see. When I’d caught glimpses of the graduates putting up their work I had no idea that there would be her 52 marvellous mini portraits included alongside her large canvas paintings.
With Ruby’s works fresh in my mind I thought about restricting my palette to just the three primary colours to depict myself. I’m no master in watercolours or portraiture, but this was a fun exercise that I’ll probably try out some more over the weekend.
