d354 120715 Misuzu Kamio 2012

[120714]

Another post, another redraw painting. We are going further back in time now; the original here is from 2006. This redraw was actually completed at the start of June, but stuff happened, and it just didn’t get posted ’til now. Like Fate 2012, Misuzu 2012 is drawn with ink, and colored primarily with cell-shading, though the shadow in the background is done with “traditional” painting. Next painting will be another semi-experimental (though it may be forever before it gets posted)

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d344 120102 Akemi Homura 2011 R2, Love Hina sketches

[111220 – 120102]

The first illustration in today’s update was actually done before the last picture in the last update, but everything in the last update flowed together better, so I didn’t include this.

This is basically a remake of what I consider the crappiest painting as of late, the Akemi Homura 2011 painting. While this colored pencil piece is obviously somewhat less polished than its digital counterpart I think its also a lot closer to what I originally wanted. In part due to the immaturity of my colored pencil process, the lighting here is also fairly ambiguous.

There’s a less-than-interesting process photo I took a little more than halfway through too. A little bit of color testing on the side; for whatever reason it was significantly harder to settle on Akemi’s colors than it was to settle on Inori’s colors. You can also see that there’s actually a lot of “junk” lines that the colored pencil covered up really well. Overall, fairly satisfied, though. Satisfied enough that I wouldn’t attempt another in the near future.

d337 110904 Tales 2011 Painting

[110829]

The third “official” painting of the year (seventh if you consider the character sketches) is my now called Tales 2011 painting. It used to be that all the characters got their own paintings, but obviously times have changed. The last time I had a painting with a comparable or greater figure count was 2007.

I’ve actually been meaning to do a painting in this style since the first character sketch a couple months ago. I just didn’t have a vision of what it should be until more recently (about a week ago), so it obviously didn’t happen ’til then. I think in general the figures are okay and the painting is okay, but I think the tree is pretty good considering it’s the first time I’ve tried to paint a tree at this resolution since basically the year NW started (and that painting was rubbish). I think the ground and the colors turned out pretty nice as well. I don’t usually use yellow as a master color.

There’s a little bit of cheating here and there: J always asks me how I stay in the lines on single-layer paintings like this one, and part of the answer is that I don’t. In some cases here, neighboring, discrete colors across a “hard” divider blend into the same shade of yellow, so I just merge the two colors instead of stay “in” the line. The other part of the answer is just “be pro”. Obviously. The other notable shirk is the fade-to-white background. It’s not that I didn’t want to paint anything in there, it’s just that nothing I put there, whether it be hills or simply a curved horizon line, seemed to give the same suggestion of space on paper so I just blanked the whole thing out.

And of course, since the lineart is basically a sketch in and of itself, it stands alone pretty well:

This painting would have been posted earlier, but I got distracted by one of my occasional urges to move stuff around.

dcomic 528

[091215]

Well, J got his update in more or less on time, so I suppose I should follow suit. I find it interesting that J took the approach that he did… because I’m actually doing a painting right now, and I think we started heading down the same path at the same time. At any rate, mine’s taking forever as well, so maybe next week.

I feel like I’d rather be working on said illustration, than writing this entry, but I feel obliged to write a little bit after not having written shit for the past three weeks. I should probably go on with the codification of the BKS stuff, but I think I’ll leave that for those times where I don’t have anything else to say.

About a week ago, in a spontaneous burst of OCD, I decided to redo the wiring in my room. It’s kind of hard to explain exactly how things changed here without some sort of diagram (that I don’t feel like drawing), but it’s a ton more symmetric now (what, I reorganized just for that? Of course!) and I can move my large, custom table without disconnecting a ton of shit (just one twist tie and one plug now). So yeah. It’s better. I promise (myself).

So I don’t get much use out of that nice Samsung display I mentioned about picking up in d253 in my dorm, and it occurred to me that it would make much more sense to have it as my main monitor at home, attached to Motoko. It’s matte, it’s bigger than my Sony, it’s got a higher resolution, it’s 4:3 and it rotates. I can’t really ask for much more from a display – it pushes more pixels than my dad’s 22″ Dell monitors.

And since I’m going to be home for 2 out of 3 holiday weeks, I might as well keep my Sony monitor around for the time being… and get some proper dual-screen action.

It occurred to me that I love to do these kind of progression comparisons with like art and computers and whatnot, but I’d never done it with my room computer setup before, so I thought I’d give it a go. I dug around in my archives and I actually found at least one picture for every year between now and 2006 – maybe 2005. It’s kind of interesting (at least for me) to see.

So this is my “official” picture for 2009, since it’s more in the middle of the year (and I think most of the others are kind of in the middle of their years). Really, the only difference between this and now are the the multiple monitors and the wiring. Colette and Motoko are pretty much the same, as are the rest of the fleet.

Pushing back to early 2008 (yeah, I know it says 2007; my camera was behind a year for about a year – I was just too lazy to reset it), and things are fairly drastically different. Motoko’s more or less “new” at this time, and I don’t have my TC4200 yet, nor my table, nor my Model M. That Dell tower Flonne is ten years old this year and still getting fairly consistent use in my dad’s office, while Colette is actually running “open bench” to the right, out of the picture.

2007 is so damn long ago that the boxes on the shelves on the right aren’t even arranged the same way. This must be like the earlier half of 2007, as I still have the clear acrylic tower (that I was going to try to mod into a display case) under a cloth on the side. I still have that chunkyass Maxtor external HDD and the Plextor external ODD, which I felt like I sold oh so long ago now.

2006 and I’m still in high school, and I still have my Lego layout set up. I was using the old CpT C as a secondary machine down here when one of the hinges broke, and not being familiar with eBay and all, I wasn’t equipped to fix it. That’s why I’ve got that clunkyass CRT on the table, probably hooked up to the old Dell tower, and a ton of chunkyass periphery to go with it. I bet I actually played Tales of the Abyss on this setup… it may have already been rolled over from 2005.

At this point I kind of run out of pictures for which I know the date on which they were taken. There are pictures, but they’re considered to beof my Lego, and not of the room, so it’s a bit harder to deduce what’s going on.

Here you can just make out the computer on the left, and maybe a couple small details on the room if you squint… This and this show a slightly earlier layout – this must actually be the first layout I set up in the room – it’s actually dated (or at least, implied to be dated) late 2004! The first picture here actually seems to be a “lost” layout – one that I don’t seem to have any pictures of.

What? I can push back further? I can push back to when none of the current furniture existed? Oh, yes, I can. These are actually shots of this room from when I first moved down (holy shit, more than five years ago now!) and started sifting through the mess that was my Lego collection at the time. This was also when I suddenly because a neat-freak and started doing my work early as well. What really triggered this shift, I don’t really know, but we’re going OT; there’s one more set of pictures here, and it’s of the room in which I lived with my brother before NW started.

It’s pretty much a wreck.

Ok, done for today.

dcomic 443

[071110]

So I don’t have a terribly large room (at home; my dorm is miniscule compared to my native abode), it’s somewhat larger than J’s (But J’s room is still spacious compared to my dorm), but J gets to keep his stuff around his house. Luckily or not, I don’t have that luxury. And as you may or may not have deduced, I’m quite the kleptomaniac and have built up quite the collection of… stuff over my 18 years in the world. A very large portion of this stuff is Lego (Probably even 50% by volume), but large things like old computers and electronics are starting to take up significant space.

So it’s a never ending battle to keep making more space out of a set amount of space and I do routine re-organizations of my… stuff in the name of opening up space for more… stuff. Currently I have about 5-6 file boxes worth of “raw” space (one file box is maybe 2-3 cubic feet of space) and maybe another 10 file boxes worth of “dead” space (space that’s impractically shaped [for now] for general storage, or filled by empty boxes). Raw space is just empty space that’s practical to use. On the other hand, a good example of dead space is a tower of space about 6 file boxes high where you don’t really want to put heavy file boxes as it’s hard to get one out and there’s a good chance of killing the ones on the bottom under a heavy load. Hence, most of the “dead” space in my room is filled with empty boxes. And of course there’s like unaccounted for space which is just the odd cracks here and there that I can’t fill. Like the space under the celing but above my height. That kinda thing.

Now I bring this up because I actually won a major victory in the battle for space today, freeing up approximately 4-5 file boxes of space (generally by filling up “unaccounted” space and moving “dead space” around; this is why I’m good at Tetris).

I have an old PC monitor, a ViewSonic CRT (frankly the best CRT I’ve ever used; it might not have a terribly large screen, but it’s relatively compact… and the screen is FLAT!), and it takes up about one and a half file boxes of space (from now I’m going to abbreviate file box as fb. So that CRT is about 1.5fb) and prior to today, it’s been sitting on the ground. My original intent was to simply make room such that I could put this thing on a shelf, but I ended up freeing up more space than I originally intended.

The big breakthrough came when I replaced a beam being used to hang clothes with one half the length, as more than 4/5 of that length was not being used at all. That gave me about 2.5 fd of space, to which I relocated 2 actual boxes of stuff. (Here you can see the dowel that was taking up unnecessary space; this is an old picture, though [100613: Dead link]). In the space at the very top of my closet which had originally been filled with a mix of boxes I dedicated solely to file boxes of stuff, which used up the space more effectively. Finally, a similar consolidation was done with Lego boxes elsewhere. I would have consolidated the Lego much earlier, but I was worried about stacking older boxes more than 4-5 high. Oh well.

Anyways, here are some pictures before and after today’s reorganization [100613: Two dead links].

PS. Today’s comic is not retexted. I am not happy with the text of the comic but I do not know how I want to go about fixing it. That’s why it’s later than usual and un-retexted.