Taking a break from coding or writing, I did do this little piece for my daughter Alice for her to colour in. It came out especially nice I think, so much so if I get the time I will do my own colouring. Alice’s take on the colours is not yet complete, but I might put it up here (or maybe on facebook) for a bit of fun.
Flower Fairy (in ink)
Also, a few weeks back, my wife bought me a new light box. A nice big one too. I love it, but I don’t have the desk space for it. I have to unpack it before I can use it and then put it away again before we can use the kitchen table for dinner! However, I did go back to the two projects that I had left over when my original light box broke.
I first tackled my “Britney” Satyr and used markers to add tone, planning to use the computer to chose colours.
"Britney" Satyr (colour attempt #1)
While I like the image, I was dissatisfied with it. So I ended up leaving it at this stage. I then dug out my water colours and tackled my Freyja concept (warning nudity):
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What a great weekend for TV: a Dr. Who special and three brand Red Dwarf episodes!
Dr. Who was enjoyable and fun, but I was much more excited about the Red Dwarf specials. I can’t wait till Dr. Who starts proper (I think that’s penned in for next year), but the Dr. Who special filled in the gap for the time being. At least we’ll have Torchwood in April (I think).
The Red Dwarf specials were fun and they left it open, possible, for a new series? I live in hope. There were lots of great nods to previous episodes, the fans, and Bladerunner. Loved it. If I had the box set of Red Dwarf, I think I would be watching it from the beginning again right now.
I have to say so far this year has been great telly wise. “Being Human” on BBC3 was, IMHO, by far the best fantasy I’ve seen this year on either side of the Atlantic. Pity it’s already over, but I have my fingers crossed for a second season. For those who don’t know, it’s about a ghost, werewolf and vampire living together trying to be “human”. Sort of a “situational drama” rather than the typical mystery-action or horror-action. There was some great episodes in there and I really recommend people try to watch it if they can.
Even the current “volume” of Heroes is markedly better than the previous season and other “volumes”. I don’t know if it’s enough to get people back into Heroes because you need to watch the previous half of season 3 to get the context and that was diabolically bad. The plot is much tighter and makes more sense, characters aren’t been added and dropped for no reason, and old forgotten characters are being remembered and used. There was even one particularly poignant episode with the death of two of the more recent characters.
And then Fringe just re-started there. Thoroughly enjoying it. The last few episodes before the break have really made it interesting, and, like recent Heroes, I want to see wants going to happen.
Still watching Dollhouse too. Episode six seemed to mark a huge improvement in the show, though I’m still not overwhelmed by it yet. The most recent episode, they seem to be “evolving” the show quite quickly with some of the characters. My wife suggested a good theory: it’s been written as a one season show, so if (or rather when) it gets cancelled, it’ll have come to some sort of conclusion. For the moment I’m still watching and I’ll see how it goes.
And then there is the excellent new seasons of Criminal Minds and Medium! So much to watch.
Of course, you can’t have it all ways and, though I’m late to say it, I’m sorry to see Pushing Daisies canned.
Now that I’ve declared my love of TV, it’s time to resume normally services! 
There is an interesting discussion going on right now over on the igaming mailing list (and cross-posted to LiveJournal), but one I’ve consciously chosen not to comment on. The people involved have much bigger stakes in it than I ever have and I’ve had my share of being on the virtual battleground but I have little to add on this.
So I guess I’m doing it here. If you take the time, read the original post. It’s roughly about now in the year that some argument occurs (though the last few years have been quiet). The discussion is about how scenarios, or rather TableTop RPGs, are run at Irish Conventions. Apparently we do it differently to everyone else and one of the “old hands” in the scene has strongly suggested that cons change the way they do things.
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And before I say anything else, let me say: I enjoyed it.
However the movie is crap. Of course when I say movie, I mean something that stands alone from the graphic novel. If you’re not familiar with Watchmen as a comic, I cannot phantom how you’d enjoy the movie. The pacing is awful, the music is particularly jarring in places (and seemed a little out of era but I may be incorrect on that), plot is all over the shop and a little unbelievable and there seems to be a lot of random stuff that’s just there because (but makes sense if you’ve read the book). So much is lost translating to screen that you must be a fan of the book to understand it, IMHO.
As a fan of the book, there are good things and bad things about the movie. Things added, things left out, nods to the fans here and there and so on. In some places, I think they actually improved on the book, the ending, in my humble opinion, is better and makes more sense to me than the book. The action sequences are actually quite cool, I thought they’d bug me because they’d be out of place with the book when I saw snippets on the trailer, but they didn’t. Rorschach’s mask rocked too. Rorschach was the most interesting character on screen for me. The Comedian’s break-down also seemed to make more sense watching it on screen.
One of the things that bugged me big time though was the Mars sequence, the conversation between Laurie and Dr. Manhattan. In my memory of the book and I may have to re-read it now to check, but Dr. Manhattan didn’t use the term “miracle” (did he?) and he didn’t go back because he still loved Laurie. I remember it was because Laurie showed him that humans have as much more depth than a rock, essentially, and therefore worth saving. The movie version made it feel it was about the “miracle” of human life and “god” was mysteriously involved - religion replacing science. Don’t like that. Did anyone else get that?
And the sex felt… comical, in the funny sense, not the comic-book sense. Richard Nixon’s nose was funny, I had to suppress a snigger when he was on screen. Was his nose that big? And the music was annoying. It felt like they didn’t get the era too right, sure all the TVs were old, but it felt modern day and then they’d make allusions to the 70s but play music that was definitively 80s hits. The use of the German version of 99 red balloons was particularly jarring.
I think Alan Moore was right, you can’t make a movie from the Watchmen and this movie proved. Still, I enjoyed it and thats all that counts right?
It seems so much easier to blog about my drawings than anything else, it’s certainly not for lack of topics to write about. Probably because I have something tangible to show and talk about. So I picked up my pencils and started doing some work on Sunday. I started drawing this female Satyr, based on a signature character from Lost Heroes RPG. This is my second attempt, but it’s not perfect. The character I imagined is older and more womanly, but I like it and planned to colour it using the technique I was practising in my last post. My wife described it as a “Britney Satyr”! However, as I was taking my pencil sketch and colouring it using markers, my light box gave out all I’ve got right now is the ink image, which loses a lot of the detail.
Female Satyr (in ink)
Once the lightbox broke, I then reverted it to pencil and started attacking a subject I’d like to take on. It’s the story of Freyja and the Brisingman necklace. Because I’m knee deep in Norse mythology at the moment writing for Lost Heroes, I’m thinking a lot about the Norse gods and Freyja, Goddess of love and to a much greater extent than the Greek Goddess of Love Aphrodite, she is also the Goddess of lust. I’m going to try it in watercolours, just because I have the itching to do so.
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It’s only being shown over here tomorrow night!
That is all. Thank you.
- Note 1: “Here” = Ireland, watching on Sky 1 (so also includes the UK)
- Note 2: “Tomorrow” = Tuesday night/24th March 2009
- Note 3. Yes I could download via torrent or Usenet, but despite the grey legal issues of downloading TV episodes before they are shown locally, I can also watch it on my TV when its being shown here, only one week later (I can wait), without having to get my hands dirty.
Satyr Colourtest #1
So I’ve been playing with some new techniques and some new equipment. The above image is the first colour image I’ve done in a while and it was coloured very quick. I used a “lightbox” to trace the original pencil sketch (which you can see below), then used a selection of toned coptic markers to give it shadow and depth. And finally, using gimp’s hand-drawn selection and “colorify” I was able to colour it in less than 30 minutes. I’m not sure I’m going to continue the image first, it was more for a test of techniques and equipment but I certainly like it. There are lots of little computer tricks I could have applied and I really didn’t go into depth in my choice of colours.
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So I’m finally getting over being poorly last week, but I’m finding I’m not up to full speed yet. I’m quite tired from the run of antibiotics. Last night, after the kids were in bed, I planned to do some writing (on Lost Heroes) and some painting (bought some new watercolours) but instead, all I could do was zombie out in front of the TV for half an hour before I crawled up to bed.
Today has turned out to be a frustrating one. Work was going fine till after lunch, when my PC started to act weird. It’s a new PC that I’ve just got up to spec with all the software I need and have been using fine for two weeks. So I reboot and it won’t start - can’t find “boot device”. As it turns out my hard drive is fecked. So the whole afternoon is lost, I couldn’t even go and do something else. I’ve lost some stuff, nothing critical, but I have lost some work on TDO Mini Forms which I hadn’t been backing up.
Anyway, chin up. I’ll get a new harddrive tomorrow, spend the rest of the day re-installing all the software I need and trying to recover as much data as I can and just getting on with it. 
I don’t particularly won’t to post to complain about being sick. I’m not bad or in a dangerous condition, but I’ve been hit by a continual stream of colds, flus and infections this winter. I’m genuinely frustrated by it and it’s been the whole family, not just me. This recent one I got from my young son and the two of us have been at home all week till today and last week was certainly no picnic.
So if I haven’t responded to comments or emails, please understand. I will get through the backlog in time.
I haven’t been able to do much work on any of my projects including TDO Mini Forms and Lost Heroes, my drawings, gaming or even spend time just reading. I have been just about keeping up on my TV watching (for another post I think). So apologise for my invisibility over the last week. I’m hoping, with the sun showing in the clouds more and more, I’ll be able to get back into things quickly.
Best of health to everyone!
I had fun with this. I’ve known about Inkscape for a while, but I never used it. I know SVG is much better “image” format for DTP (Desktop Publishing) so I should have looked at it sooner. Particularly because Inkscape is also open-source. SVG basically allows you export your image at any size without a loss in quality that you might get by resizing a jpeg. As it turns out, inkscape is a doddle to use. So easy to start doing stuff, it looks like it’s going to be my default diagramming tool from now! I’ve already converted my lost heroes logo into SVG.
I set myself a little project, to create a “Family Tree” of the Olympian Gods that I’ve mentioned in Lost Heroes. My plan was to make this part of the setting text. I want to do something similar for the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Aesir when I finish that. I have idea about something for the Angels as well. Now don’t go thinking this is a complete family tree of all the Olympian Gods, thats just something I don’t have time for and someone body has already done that. This is instead, just the Gods and other characters mentioned as part of the Olympian God pantheon in Lost Heroes RPG.
Family Tree of the Olympian Gods from Lost Heroes RPG
It’s missing a “legend”, though I’m not sure it needs one. It looks pretty cool, because Inkscape simply rocks!
