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Drawings

A middle-aged outburst from the dying embers of my creativity has produced some devastatingly inept scrawls. I weep for having caused them to impinge upon your consciousness.

Self Portrait: Radlands<br/>Sketched while looking at my reflection in the mirror. I picked up on a hint of the frazzled Radlands look and decided to lean into it. 2024-06

A second start at Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. 2024-06

Commander Apples<br/>My 10yo. kiddo asked me to draw his "Keelback" spaceship in the videogame Elite:Dangerous. We've been flying around the galaxy in there together, sometimes taking on the blue-collar work of mining asteroids for platinum by the metric ton. One of us does the actual mining, while the other acts as security escort, fending off the pirates. The kiddo was so proud on his first day in the security role, defending my mining operation with this freshly painted purple Keelback, backed up by his ship-launched-fighters. I used this pic as an excuse to learn about IbisPaintX's "layers". There are 11 here, from the background nebula, to the airbrushed glows over light sources. In particular, the purple paint-job layer is a completely flat color, and a separate "shading" layer adds levels of darkness to each surface. This allows me to change the paint-job color with a single five second swirl of a huge alpha-locked pen across the whole ship. Or I can modify the transparency of the shading layer, which adjusts the shading contrast, as if the ship were lit by more directional (or more even) lighting.<br/>Drawn using <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=keelback+spaceship&iax=images&ia=images">a few reference images</a>, but none from quite this angle. IbisPaintX on an 8" Android tab & S-pen, 11 layers. 2023-03-22.

Nebula Survey<br/>Linework by Ailantd Sikowsky <a href="https://mastodon.art/@Ailantd/109718674616559226">here</a>, colors by me. The spaceship coloring book I didn't realize I have always been yearning for.<br/>IbisPaintX on an 8" Android tab & S-pen, 4 layers. 2023

Emerald Chunker<br/>Spaceship! 🧑‍🚀. This is so bad it's painful to look at. I'm <i>so</i> sorry. I don't mind the chunky brick-like shape, nor the paint-job, they have their charms. But choosing to draw it straight-on to the viewer hides much of the interesting geometry that might otherwise be on display. And those bars on the air intakes, well, they just dont work. Maybe they are too spaced apart, or too unevenly drawn, or have too much of a jarring contrast with the style of the rest of the drawing? Or are just too badly drawn. Whatever it is, they don't work. I like the yellow patches though. That's something I ought to try doing more of. Oh, and originally the sky was blue, but I accidentally flipped it to a brown color when messing with layer blending effects, and it looks <i>much</i> better this way.<br/>IbisPaintX on an 8" Android tab & S-pen, 2 layers. 2023 Mar

Self Portrait 3<br/>Still awful, obviously, but marginally better than <i>self portrait 1</i>. Drawn from memory.<br/>IbisPaintX on an 8" Android tab & S-pen. 2023 Feb 5

Self Portrait 2<br/>I can't take much credit for this one, since I resolved to cheat in every way my imagination could bring to bear. I essentially traced it from a photo. Although the goal was lofty enough, to educate me on how my face <i>ought</i> to be drawn, and then try a third time after this, to see whether I might have learned anything along the way.<br/>IbisPaintX on an 8" Android tab & S-pen. 2023 Feb 4

Self Portrait 1<br/>Awful, obviously. Drawn from memory, and with no experience or talent either. :-)<br/>IbisPaintX on an 8" Android tab & S-pen. 2023 Feb 2

Sailboats.<br/>I got an 8" tab a little while ago, which came with an S-pen doohickey. I was intrigued by the idea of drawing something on it. I wondered what the easiest possible picture to draw might be, suitable for an artistic dullard such as myself. Inspired by the masterful watercolors of English painter Richard Thorn, I landed on this. 'tis after all just two shades of blue, one plain, one scattered with wiggles, and tiny scraps of color along the edge between them. How hard could it be?<br/>Lessons learned - I started out with <i>much</i> too low a resolution, although perhaps that was a happy accident after all, that I shouldn't inflict too many of my pixels on the world. The horizon is tilted - I should have taken care to get the right from the outset. I drew it all on one layer, and many times throughout wished I had done otherwise. And, most important, I remembered that drawing engenders a ferocious glee, which I resolved to unleash more often.<br/>IbisPaintX on an 8" Android tab & S-pen. 2022 Apr 17

I had to extend the top and bottom of this image in order to fit the caption. Dec 2022

The original photo of Zander was extremely blue, due to the light saber he's holding, so this is entirely recolored. Circa 2020

Idle doodling on Zoom calls for work. GIMP, laptop, with a mouse. Circa Jan 2016

My Left Hand (2008)<br/>A first start at Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Pencil. September 2006.

Melancholy<br/>Vaguely inspired by Dave Gibbons' Dan Dreiberg, as he slumps on a bench after Rorschach leaves his basement, midway through Chapter 1. But I lost patience by the time I got to his hair. Drawn in GIMP, on a desktop PC, with a mouse. Circa 2000.