I Got A Book On Artistic Printing A While Back And It Really Spoke To Me, Especially The Slightly Bizarre

I did some fun holiday-appropriate stuff last week (dark harbor @ the queen mary) but didn't do anything on actual halloween because I was

dead tired

http://widgets.ign.com/video/embed/content.html?url=http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/04/23/ratchet-and-clank-movie-teaser

YES.

I started using the internets to teach myself hobby electronics a little less than two years ago and struggling with whatever random 101 sites, blogs, tutorials, and instructables I could find. Slowly piecing together info that is never presented in an incremental-increase-of-difficulty way because its not class... It's always a continuous struggle to find information that is at your level when it is pretty much always going to be something you've already sort of learned, and therefore less useful, or something way too advanced and HOW do you fill in the gap, its always there at every level as you learn more things

I think it's useful to point out that I'm not really a self-taught artist. So while there is a TON of stuff I taught myself (particularly digital art/photoshop/coloring), I had the benefit of classes in the fundamentals (lifedrawing, construction drawing, figure drawing, etc) and that makes it SO much easier to expand from a solid knowledge base. So I'm sayin it is not the case here, while I learn to make gadgets and it is taking FOR EVER and driving me up all of the walls. But I want it so badly.

Then Adafruit put up their revised learning system site and I s2g every time I have a neat idea for a project but not sure how I'd make it, they put up a relevant tutorial basically the next freakin day. This has been happening without fail for SEVERAL MONTHS! I LOVE ADAFRUIT AND ADAFRUIT LOVES ME BACK

I always have a cosplay/props/gadgets wishlist that is miles long and an ever-expanding list of ways to make things blinky, beepy, and/or animatronic and going NUTS because I don't yet have the skills to accomplish what I want to do (which is everything), learning a skill is HARD, harder still if there are parts of it that are not interesting but sort of a necessary evil- which for me is programming, I hate it so much, its so painful, ughhg uugghhh it hurts, I have not studied this hard to learn something I dislike so much EVER but there is a blog I like called HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT and that has stuck with me all this time. It's how to get what I want and I'm not gonna let my hatred of programming actually stop me from typing up terrible buggy code and uploading it to a microcontroller to make leds blink and animate and change colors because I love lights and I love COLORS. Join me!

LETS PUT LEDS IN THINGS

grabendolch said: Hey there, what’s that second tool panel just next to your taskbar? it looks like it’s from some art program but not a part of SAI

It's called Paint Dock, it's for slate PCs (samsung series 7 & asus eee slate) to make drawing programs actually useable. I have spent... a while... since getting my eee slate trying to basically work as something where I can be a couch potato digital artist :p WHICH REMINDS ME I did intend to properly review the computer. At least a little :p

Downside is that the harddrive is seriously 64GB. I bought a 120GB to replace it with but I'm not quite ready to bust open a $1k machine yet!! I did get a 128GB sd card for it though (yes they totally make those now!) which is enough to cram all my art-related stuff on so I'm good. The other downside is that the drivers are REALLY fussy and it took ages for me to get pressure sensitivity working properly and across different programs. I got it working in SAI and Photoshop, I haven't got it to work with Inkscape though I don't want to mess with it anymore. A few times I lost pressure sensitivity at the drop of a hat and the last time I spent FOUR HOURS uninstalling and reinstalling drivers to get it working again UGH. I was able to carefully write down all the steps I took this time so hopefully that will do the trick. The pressure curve utility makes it good enough for painting, it only has 250 levels of sensitivity compared to 2000+ on the intuous tablets but so far it's been good enough for me. My hand gets crampy a little more often due to having to press a bit harder (less sensitive means its harder to get really really light strokes) but I think with tweaking the settings a bit further I can get that a little better too!

The other other downside is that the MSRP is $1000 but for the most part it's only available for $1400, I got super lucky and it was $1k at the microsoft store but it's not anymore last I checked (plus getting it thru them it came with win7 ultimate and no bloatware!). It's definitely worth it at that price... at the higher price ehhhh, I'D still have bought it but that is what being a couch potato digital artist is worth to me XD becase it's basically a laptop w/o a keyboard it is a TRUE digital sketchbook that is fast enough to run photoshop! So yeah. it's awesome.

got infected by marvel brainworm for le reasons obvious. Everyone's got their character they want to see join the Avengers next, mine is Monica Rambeau/Photon which is never gonna happen. Its not like she led the Avengers or anything. BUT still I wanted to imagine her fitting into Earth-199999 continuity, costume redesign, fiddling with origin story etc. I aped her sexy detective look off Lisa Bonet's character in the US Life on Mars cos I loved her, don't judge me.

It's just that UGH she's such a cool character and her powers are AWESOME and because I am a huge nerd who's been reading a book about quantum mechanics (I'm not as smart as I think I am but I don't let that stop me) it did occur to me that using the powers to their greatest creative potential would require extensive working knowledge of quantum electrodynamics and radio physics. Thankfully she has help from resident radiation expert Bruce Banner :3 I can also imagine her tapping into Tony's uplink with J.A.R.V.I.S and asking him to calculate the best wavelengths to cause maximum damage and it would drive Tony so, so crazy. I just can't help but imagine him being a little possessive of his butler supercomputer :p

Ohhh my gosh I love your art KEYBOARD MASH MASH MASH do you ever think you'll do commissions again?

I am IN FACT taking commissions at this current juncture in space-time! $33 icons, $66 portraits, $88 3/4 body pinups! 30 dolla up front for latter two, paypal only, email aysha.shehim at gmail dot com. Please provide a staggering wall of text description and ref images if possible.

Feel free to help me be a slightly-less-starving artist. It's slightly less cliche! D:

ww!

tyuran answered your question: Are there any beloved stories/series you’ve read/watched that have heavily influenced the feel or content of any of your own ideas?

Definitely Dinotopia... and DEFINITELY everything Myst. Oh dear god Myst, Riven, URU, even the novels (tho I wasn't impressed with the... quality of writing... just the world itself is so so so so so so so wonderful). I replay all the games every few years because they are just so much everything I love. EVERYTHING. I loved it when I learned the D'ni civilization was in a cave in New Mexico, I love all the damn soundtracks, I love that the ten thousand year political history of the entire civilization is plotted out, I love the beautiful language, the base5 number system (which I will admit I did NOT solve in Riven on my own), and of course all the wonderful wonderful art that has gone into creating the cultures and the Ages. Nfffhfhfhhfhahajdfhkas. MYST.

I like em fuzzy.

ww!

pooryorickdraw answered your question: I know AEM takes place in a sort-of magical Ottoman Empire, but does that mean other “real” countries exist in the setting?

Yeah... other than having my story take place in a tiny kingdom that splits off from the Ottomans, not much is different politically, mainly because it's outside the scope of the story. If I had it spanning more countries I'd definitely consider what might be different. I know WWI happened a lot sooner, and technology would advance faster with the ability to harness a really powerful versatile energy source (MAGIC). Steampunk is based on the idea that there was an energy revolution in technology and analog/mechanical tech, instead of what happened in our reality where there was a digital/information revolution. I figure there's still roughly a British Empire, Austro-Hungarian, Spanish, etc. But yeah other than having rough ideas of where different characters come from and whether or not its plot relevant, there's a bit of geography gap in that area. One that... kinda makes me want to work on it...