If you were interested in any deliciousness YOU CAN’T HAVE ANY.  It’s all in my belly.

Preparation requires a few bowls and some patience, but the difficulty level is approximately equal to cookies.

You’ll need:

-12 eggs

- Dijon mustard, 1 tablespoon

- 2 tablespoons mayonnaise

- 2 finely diced green onions

- 2-4 tablespoons pickle relish. Or in my case diced cucumber, red wine vinegar, black pepper and dill, totaling about half a cup. (I like pickles.)

- paprika

Hard boil the eggs. (If you haven’t done this before, put the eggs in a pot. Barely cover with water. Bring to a boil, and boil for ten minutes. Then pour out the hot water, and replace with cold. When this is warm, fill it up again. Repeat until the eggs are cool.) Peel the eggs, slice in half vertically, and pop the yolks into a bowl. Set the egg-boat whites to one side.

Add the mustard and mayonnaise to the yolks, and use a fork to beat into homogeneity. Add the green onions and ‘pickles’. Mix, then use a spoon to fill the little egg-boats. When this is done, dash paprika over the tops. Eat!

Side salad recommended, but optional. A lemon/olive oil vinaigrette goes nicely with the eggs.

Om nom nom.

If you follow this blog, you’ve probably figured out that I enjoy imaginary animals. Particularly those of the ‘stitched together’ variety.

But you may never have heard of this one: A lamassu (or alad, or shedu or aladlammu) is a guardian deity from the area we now call Iraq. Different cultures depict them with slightly different iconography and with slightly different purpose, but perhaps the best known version is the one of the Assyrians, who put huge carvings of them at the entrances of their cities.

It is a silly little picture that takes itself entirely too seriously, but I was so pleased with the wings and background that I thought it was worth sharing. Unfortunately I couldn’t manage to get the head/neck attachment right. I think if the beard were not a requirement I could work something out with the primary muscles of the neck, but with them obscured there’s just not much I can do about it.

Here is my spectacularly unsuccessful flyer from two years ago.

In order to make the redo, I needed to make two short lists based on the original poster: one of the necessary elements, and one of what’s wrong with the original poster.

Requirements: Header/Teaser, three informational statements, tear-off contact info, and what is hopefully a good graphic.

Fixes: Too low contrast. Everything has approximately the same visual emphasis, which defeats the whole ‘eyecatching’ requirement. In an effort to show as many drawings as possible, I’ve pretty much eliminated true white space, which doesn’t help with the contrast issue. Also, alignment? What alignment?

Much better. Still, there are a few things I think I could improve if I wanted to spend more time on it. The graphic is not my best work, I’d prefer to replace it with something a little more recent. And I’m not sure how to resolve the header. The zapfino font ‘d’ makes horizontally centering the header problematic. Also I’m pretty sure the alignment between the header and the three statements should be consistent, but that leaves the header looking like I meant it to be properly centered and didn’t succeed. Foo.

The original flyer is old, but the special is current! Valentine’s day is approaching rapidly, and now would be a good time to begin to panic… that is if someone weren’t to hypothetically offer you a totally affordable and unique gift option. Just sayin’.

I’ve already done two color studies of this character, but while Sylvannas in her Undead Queen persona turned out really well, the younger Ranger General Sylvannas was, um, bad. (For one thing, I misread my reference picture and made her hair blue. In my defense I was playing a blue-haired elf at the time, so it didn’t seem weird at all.) So when I needed a subject for my adventures in painting faster and with less useless detail, I thought I might give her another chance.

The bones of this painting come from an old sketch that had never been finished, in part because there were some underlying proportion issues that I just couldn’t seem to resolve.

We’ll start with an unadulterated scan of the real world sketch, which formed the first layer of my Photoshop file. Problems that need solving: Head too big. Torso too long. Anterior pelvic tilt over-exaggerated. And, y’know, no feet.

Problems fixed using copy, paste, scale and rotate. Not too hard, right?

With a little increase in contrast, I can select everything close to white and delete it. This leaves me with something vaguely like lines. Then I need to add more lines to finish the form.

Referring to the lines throughout the process is useful, but once the color is well established I try to use them as little as possible. I paint under the lines, and use them as a guide for now. First a broad underpainting just to lay the colors down in approximately the right place, and then a bit of refinement on another layer. (Note the palette in the corner. Start with limited colors, complicate them later) Also I need to put in an estimated placement for the background.

Now she needs some background. Given that she is primarily blue, I wanted something in the orange family, for the pleasant complimentary relationship. I wanted to imply ground and foliage without going into too much detail, so I used a large brush and just tried to lay out a tree-like structure.

Now the hair is a problem. The color is sticking out in the bad way. Using a low opacity brown I need to bring it down to a strawberry rather than a true blond. It’s also now time to trim the colors to the body shape, and complicate the colors by using a brush at about 50% opacity, then selecting colors from areas that have already been painted to continue.

Time for some details. All the metal bits, and a little refinement of her face and hair.

Finally, copy all active layers into a single layer and drop the brightness way down. Then go in with the erase tool set at 25%, and create highlights. (Depending on the picture you can also create a ‘bright’ layer and erase away the shadows. The layer on top tends to be dominant, so it just depends how dark you want the final piece to be.)

When you’re happy with that, you may want to run a filter or two to help break up it up. In this case I used watercolor and film grain.

Also her eyes need to glow.

And here’s my final. There are still things that need doing (the front boot cuff has blue where there shouldn’t be any, her near eyebrow has a squiggle in it, and I’m not sure I like how the ‘frame’ around the background looks with highlighted bits in it) but at some point you have to just say ‘good enough’ and move on.

Zeetha!

I’ve mentioned Girl Genius before, so I’ll just point in that direction and say read it. Zeetha is an awesome character but while I like her, I’m not totally invested in her, which is probably why I felt comfortable taking her quite tight character design and flubbing it as part of my learning process.

This is the ‘go faster and be looser’ part of that process. Again. The process is a cyclical sort of thing. On the bright side, there has been some clear progress. This one took about three hours total, and there were no outlines at any point in the coloring process.

Now, I implied there was news.  I’ve been spreading my branchy little dendrites over the internet.

Ever wanted to buy any of my drawings? I am now a member of a little artist’s association called Paper Ribbons, where you can buy both already made pieces and commission things based on a style choice and a short statement. Paper Ribbons is aiming to make art buying make a little more accessible. Pricing is based on size, so it takes some of the uncertainty out of trying to assess artistic value. (They make it my job, rather than yours.) My Paper Ribbons page.

If you’re more into my jewelry, I also now have a facebook page. Mostly because two people in one week gasped in horror when they wanted to ‘friend’ me and found out that I didn’t have one of those buttons. (They don’t actually issue them at birth. Surprisingly.)

And there’s always my etsy, which has been updating lately. Which reminds me, I’ve got some new pieces I need to take pictures of. Boo pictures. Hooray updates!

But hey, 200th post! And I have something very pretty to show for it.

I wanted to do something similar to an old piece I was very proud of at the time, both to try to do something awesome again, and to see how far I’ve come. You guys remember the first post-apocalyptic lady? This is like that, but more awesome. In part because this time the set up is better. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with your basic near-futuristic world weary lady warrior, but I think the idea of a private school punk who learned to survive after the bombs fell to be a lot better of a story. I mean, the husk of a dead city? The gattling gun/shillelagh dual wield? The ratty plaid skirt? This is a moment in a narrative, not just a moody girl in armor. (Not to insult the long and occasionally glorious tradition in illustration of brooding females with accouterments of implied violence.)

It’s also just flat better stylistically. Last time, I couldn’t build anything non-organic from scratch, I didn’t have a great grasp of texture, and an extremely simple angle for the lighting. This time? The only time I really needed to have reference in front of me constantly while I was making it was for the gattling gun. I made the scree field by hand, and I’m much better with texture. Still not totally happy with my texture technique though- Mr Donkey looks a little sandblasted rather than furry, but I was getting testy by that point and it was time to be done.

I am a lucky person. In addition to occasionally donating his computer skills when I need them, my webmonkey also brews beer.

Beer.  Which I get to drink for the low low price of occasionally helping him put proto-beer in bottles.

I felt like I needed to even the scales a bit, and my recent illustrator kick gave me a lovely excuse to do so. I knew I’d need some sort of iconic figure to be the visual focus, so I borrowed the goat I’d made for him previously.  Then I determined what words needed to be on the label, and built from there.

The label is perfectly passable as-is, but I am most pleased about how I made it: the right way. It will be very easy for me to go back and change the colors and the text in the banner to make new labels for each different kind of beer he makes, without having to re-invent anything.

Postscript: We are rapidly approaching my 200th post. I’d like to spend it answering questions about process, photoshoppery, chainmail, or anything else that’s on your mind! Leave me a quick comment, and I’ll respond in my anniversary post next week.

This is a copying exercise, which is a long standing and honorable learning technique that makes everyone a little nervous in the day and age of twitchily litigious copyright law. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain gives the classic ‘copy this great work in order to learn how it was done’ assignment a little… twist.

Yes. You are supposed to look at the image upside down, and copy it as-is. No turning it over before you’re done.

That tiny screaming sound in your head? That’s your left brain going ‘Nooooooooo!’ Which is the point. You want your left brain to get so frustrated with the task that it fucks off to go get coffee and lets your right brain do the job.

Edwards suggests that you make a conscious effort not to recognize any parts of the drawing as you are copying them. (No ‘okay, finished the collar, time for the head’. Just adjacent lines.) She also recommends that you begin at one edge and work your way across, rather than outlining and filling in.

Here’s my attempt.

Though I tried, I did not entirely succeed in telling my left brain to sit down and shut up. Occasionally I could not help but know the parts as I was drawing them. (Part of the skill I have developed as an artist is to recognize familiar shapes regardless of their orientation, so a noob would probably find this exercise easier than I did.)

Interestingly, when I did flip both pictures over, the best parts were the ones that I copied ‘on faith’, with no idea of what I was describing. Which I suppose proves Edward’s point.

Just for comparison, here’s the original and mine in a more easily analyzed orientation.

The art is A Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, by Pablo Picasso. But really any reasonably complex line drawing will work if you’d like to try the exercise with something different.

When I first decided to do a blog, I promised myself that I would write it for me: If people read it, great, but that wouldn’t be the point.

For the most part I’ve managed to keep that promise. Which means that when my blog brings me something awesome, it is awesomeness + the delightful surprise that someone actually reads this thing.

I received an email not too long ago. Lauren and Mark Goodman are opening a village pub in Hertford Heath (in England guys. That means they’re classy.) on December first, called The Goat. Lauren had been poking around the internet looking for logo ideas, had found my goat post, and was wondering if I would be willing to develop one of them into a logo for her.

Um, YES. (Lauren’s offer of an ale on the house should I ever get out to England wasn’t the primary factor in my decision to take the job, but… English ale. And home cooked pub grub. These are not things one dismisses lightly.)

It’d been a while since I’d done a proper logo design, so I had to dust off my Illustrator skills. Although it was more like a long neglected outdoor grill than a misplaced tchotchkie… steel wool and a respirator, not a feather duster.

I hadn’t used Illustrator since I got my tablet, and that makes for a very different user interface. Mostly a much less frustrating one. Since this turned out so well, (and with a minimum of pulling my own hair out) I am suddenly I am getting ideas for projects that should be done in Illustrator.

I feel an artistic tangent coming on.

You’ve probably seen the Vase/Face illusion before. It’s also a reliable reference for non-artists on how to switch between perceiving negative space and positive space. If you see a vase, you are paying attention to positive space. If you see two faces, you’re seeing negative space.

Exercise two was to draw your own Vase/Face, with some very specific instructions:

-If you are right-handed, draw the face on the left side of the paper first. If you are left-handed, draw the face on the right side first.

-Draw the straight lines across, and copy the face you just drew in mirror image.

-While drawing, think strongly about naming the parts: This is the forehead, then the nose, etc.

This exercise is meant to teach an awareness of R-mode, by making the baton-passing from one hemisphere to the other more difficult and therefore more noticeable. Edwards reports that most people in her classes experience a moment of hesitation or even paralysis when copying the second face, because their right brain (looking at line, tracing form, balancing space) is trying to work on the same task at the same time as their left brain. (That’s the nose. Draw a nose. What are the characteristics of a nose?)

Because I am so used to shifting into R-mode¹ I didn’t experience any paralysis, but the feeling of difficulty was there. Usually my response to difficulty is frustration followed by chucking the whole thing out a window, but to my surprise I was mainly amused. It was the type of amusement you get from a three legged race, a ‘well this is a really sort of silly way to run a race isn’t it?’ kind of thing.

I’m really, really interested in that emotional response, because it was so different from how I usually experience a difficult task. I typically feel blocked, vexed, and inadequate. The absence of frustration in this case was conspicuous.

One conclusion of neurology is that humans do not have one brain, we have two. Consequently, we do not have one personality. Like most people in a literate society, I spend most of my day in L-mode. This silly little exercise has left me with the interesting conclusion that frustration when faced with a difficulty may not be something intrinsic to me, so much as something intrinsic to my left hemisphere.

¹(Okay, I’m just going to come out and say I hate that term. But it is the term Edwards uses. It is brief, comprehensible, and has no obvious substitute. Any suggestions?)