Drawing

I put a shocking amount of effort in making sure this didn’t look overly polished. Seriously. Got to “nearly finished” a few times, and scrapped it because it looked too mechanical.

Okay sure. I’m drawing a science fiction cityscape on my phone. Doesn’t mean it has to look like blueprints.

Testing some code changes to my site publishing workflow. But let’s make it at least a little interesting with a manual symmetry drawing I finished a little bit ago.

Screaming frog? Angry Pac-Man? No idea.

At least it’s a break from symmetry doodles.

I was going to make this a coloring thing but I accidentally did my own colors on the wrong layer. Too bad Infinite Painter doesn’t have infinite undo.

Kev Quirk asks:

Why do you blog?

I usually answer Why are you like that questions — which I get asked with some frequency, for good or ill — with “I can’t help it. It’s in my nature.” The constant puttering, interspersed with oversharing that ranges from instructive to awkward? That’s just me. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t do that.

But this came across my RSS feed, and it works too.

“It seems stupid I would put out an album,” says Fiona Apple, of her terrific new record, Fetch the Bolt Cutters. “But this is what I know how to do.”

I love that: “This is what I know how to do.”

That’s true too. There are ways to putter and rant besides blogging. I could have a YouTube channel. But this is what I know how to do.

Thank goodness.

Found this in my image folder the other day. It’s from working through Mark Kistler’s book You can Draw in 30 Days last year. I like it. Sure I kinda already know I can draw. But it’s good to refresh yourself every so often.

Oh, and I used Max Ulichney’s MaxPack brush sets for Procreate. The Gouache pack for sure, and probably others.

Lots of folks stuck at home.

Feel like coloring something? I decided to share the linework for this drawing.

• sepia-sunburst-linework.png
• image/png
• 3082 pixels wide, 3082 pixels high
• Licensed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Print it. Import it into your favorite coloring / sketch app. Whatever. Have fun!

And you don’t have to show me what you do with it, but I’d love it if you did!

$ inv note --title='inv note'

Don’t mind me. I’m just trying an experiment with using Invoke for my site workflow instead of Make.

$ inv serve
SHOW_INFO=1 hugo server --buildDrafts --bind 0.0.0.0 --navigateToChanged
...
Press Ctrl+C to stop

But that’s boring on its own. Here. Have a drawing.

I’ll probably make a proper blog post about Invoke later. Meanwhile, checkout the docs on Getting started.

$ inv publish

A paraphrased conversation:

Me

“What do you want for your birthday?”

She

“Oh, nothing. A card, maybe.”

Me

“I can do that.”

That’s one of her drawings superimposed over one of my drawings.

She loved it.

I spent forty hours over the last month or so drawing this.

Couldn’t decide which aspect I liked best. Line work? Color? Values? So I went with all three.

On another note, I kinda want to study more about image formats. JPEG clearly has some issues with the red. PNG is unacceptably large thanks to all the detail work.