Well I never finished that Land Raider so I guess there hasn’t been much to write about here.
I moved all my modeling stuff back out to the dining room table so it will be constantly in my face reminding me that it exists and wants to be finished.
Also I recently picked up a very cool new model.
That’s pretty much all I’ve been doing lately. Which is good, I suppose, since I certainly still need much practice.
That’s my 3rd and best attempt at a face in ZBrush recently.
The first attempt looked a bit like a squashed ball with features stuck on it. Like a Mr. Potato Head, but with a smaller potato. Okay, so it wasn’t that bad. But it was pretty awful, even for something that I had intended to be orcish.
No pictures yet. I’ve been heavy on the starting and light on the finishing when it comes to new projects.
Tried making an evil, angry demon-cat-thing in Zbrush (head only) and while it looks reasonably like a demon-cat-thing, it’s not remotely close to looking evil and angry. I think the word that best describes it’s expression is “cheerful”. Definitely not what I was going for…
Messing around with ZBrush today and ended up with something I thought was interesting. Just a random “practice head” but it’s different from what I normally tend towards.
I’ve imported it into Photoshop (as a document) and I’m trying out a new technique (for me) with it. So far I’m liking the result. If it turns out as well as I hope, I’ll post a picture of it soon.
On the drumming side of things, I purchased a Beatnik RA1200p last week. It’s essentially a high-tech practice pad. Not only does it have a built-in metronome, but it can give you a ton of feedback to let you know how well you are doing.
Today I got a second monitor so I can run my computer in dual monitor mode with an extended desktop. It took a bit to get it working. Monitor 2 was just going black when I extended the desktop to it. I did a few web searches and some other trouble shooting. In the end all I had to do was update the video card drivers.
That kind of surprised me since I had just updated them less than three weeks ago. Normally it would be the first thing I tried, but since I knew I had just recently updated them I was certain that wasn’t the problem.
Of course I only got the new monitor because my old one was going black when I extended the desktop to it. I had never run dual monitors before and I had assumed at the time it was because it could not support the same resolution of my primary monitor.
Lesson learned.. and it only cost me a couple hundred bucks!
For the record though, so far I am very happy with my new Dell E2009W monitor so far.
A few weeks ago I did a test of Windows Live Writer. It’s a desktop blog publishing application. There is nothing really spectacular about it. I’m sure there are other apps out there just like it.
But it is clean, and easy to use and, for whatever reason the Write-Login-Publish workflow I find to be less of a hassle than the Login-Write-Publish one. And because of this I (so far) have been writing more.
We’ll see how long this lasts….
Most days I like to consider myself an artist. Lately, though, I’ve had to face the fact that I’m an artist who has skimped badly on building her foundation.
What I’m referring to specifically is perspective. Oh, sure, I can draw your basic box in simple 1, 2 or even 3 point perspective, but a circle? curve? complex object?
While I do love my abstracts, it’s only half of what I want to do. As an artist it’s very frustrating to not be able to draw an image when it pops into my head. So I’ve decided to go back and study perspective until I “get it”… and then practice it frequently so I don’t lose it.
I think my problem all along has been that I’ve always seen the issue of perspective as a problem to be overcome for whichever project I was working on at the time. I’ve always managed to muck through it and come up with a solution for the problem. But somehow I’ve always managed to come away from each problem without having learned anything.
I’ve decided that my entire approach is wrong. It’s a tool to be used, not a problem to be overcome. Once I have a firm understanding of it, once it’s second nature to me, it wont be a problem. It’s only a problem now because, hey, I just wanted to draw cool stuff, not work with boring lines and vanishing points and junk.
In retrospect it was a bit like trying to write a book without first learning the alphabet…
