Day 220

Day 220: Oh, my penguinians, how I have missed you so!  I've been very, very, very ill, and haven't been updating, but now we're back in the swing of things, and I thought I'd catch you up on our adventures!

First of all, I'm participating over at www.reddit.com in the "subreddit" called "SketchDaily" (you can find this at www.reddit.com/r/sketchdaily).  I don't quite post every day, but I'm trying to!  Each day someone posts a theme, and everyone posts a sketch created that day on that theme.  Today's theme is "Gone Fishing", and I had a lot of fun with this:

"...SEEMS LEGIT."
Digital, 1/28/2013

You can find the full-sized painting here.

R has been pushing me to do more with color, and this is a cautious step in that direction.  That bass-ish thing is not really colored the way a bass is, but he's mostly anatomically correct, and I had fun doing the mottled colors and highlights.  I started with a base of color, then did the blackline sketch over that, then did the highlights and accents over that.  It was a lot of fun, and I'm learning more and more what I can do with this whole digital painting thing.  It's a very strange feeling to see an idea pop out of my head and onto the actual digital canvas; the process is MUCH faster than traditional painting, and it's a lot easier to clean up mistakes, or even to scratch a bad idea and start over from scratch.

This past weekend R and I journeyed up to see "Hansel and Gretl", which is the worst movie I'm allowed to see this year.  ("Movie 43" is right out).  Jeremy Renner does his level best, but it's just a bad movie, with not much in the way of plot that is interesting.  Cool special effects, though now that I've spent some time studying the actual technology and art behind special effects, I find that I spend most of my time thinking through how I would do the effect myself rather than enjoying the spectacle of it. 

I keep saying that a fun weekend project would be to recreate all of the effects of "Chronicle", just to prove to myself that I could do it.  In point of fact, G of E&G fame is also interested in this stuff, and, you know, having two people focused on the task can only help!

Tonight, E&G, MH, R, and CJ and my noble self placed third, or possibly fifth, at trivia!  In any event, we won some nice little glasses, and were able to correctly identify such diverse entities as famous hockey players, the color of Monica Lewinski's infamous dress, and the Frenchman for whom the unit of electrical charge is named.  In the last instance, MH noted that I was simply FURIOUS when they revealed that the "unit of charge" question was going to be simplified to be multiple choice, but I was happy that, even so, most people thought it was Ampere or Joule.  Oh, how we laughed.

I've neglected nearly ALL OF YOU over the holidays, so let me take this moment to say that I hope you are all well and happy, and have an absolutely wonderful new year!  I'll post pics of the New Years Eve madness shortly.

Oh!  Also, the Official Birthday Scavenger Hunt is coming up, on Feb 8-10.  This is mostly you taking pictures of yourselves and sending them to me, but, you know, near a tiger, or whatever.  We're still working to recover LAST year's pictures from a hard drive which is currently missing a power supply, but I  WILL get those up before the 2013 Hunt begins!!

I'll keep posting up images, and relating our adventures, and do please feel free to comment! 

Tomorrow, ADVENTURE!! :)