Plaidophile

So about a year ago I bought a bunch of different Wacom stylus nibs: some more of the standard acrylic ones, some of the spring-loaded "stroke" ones, and some of the compressed felt ones. By now I've actually used all three kinds regularly, so I'd might as well share some thoughts.

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As an experiment, I've uploaded some of my better photos to my deviantART account and enrolled them (as well as some of my drawings) in the prints program. Are there any other no-effort artwork-selling things I should use as well? How is Flickr's "make stuff" thing for that? Should I even bother?

Oh, and uh, any specific other things I should make available as prints?

Okay, I learned that Pixelmator will have tablet support VERY SOON (on their Twitter page they announced that they finished implementing it about 11 hours ago, so of course the next release will really have it like they sorta-promised on their forums). So I decided to give it another shot, bearing in mind that tablet support would be coming.

It's pretty close to decent, though I still have a few complaints with it. Nothing that'll prevent me from buying it when 1.1 comes out, but there are many things I'd like to see them fix in the (preferably near) future:

So, for the last several years I've been using Photoshop 7 to draw my comics. Unfortunately, I've read that Photoshop 7 doesn't run under OSX 10.5 (which I really want to upgrade to), but I'm not going to spend the $oodles to upgrade to CS3 (the price seems to go up every week... it's $1000 now!). I'm having a hell of a time finding a drawing app which fits my needs without being an expensive high-end photo-editing suite, though. And yes, I've tried a lot of them.

So, the new Olympic Sculpture Park is now open, and being an outdoor gallery, they are having problems with people touching the art. But is that really a problem?

This artwork is outside, and is supposed to be corroded and weathered by the (somewhat unpredictable) environment. Shouldn't the environment also include the people who are viewing it?

This is also what I hate about MoMA. Modern art was all about new frontiers and interactivity and a dialog between the artist and the viewer, but sometime in the past 10 years it's all been put behind a hermetic seal.

I may have played a bit too much Paper Mario recently.

A couple of doodles I did at work today (decided to do a little bit of line of action). These might be the last things I draw for a while — tomorrow I'm finally getting tested for how severe my carpal tunnel syndrome is and find out what treatment is necessary and how royally screwed I am.

So, uh, enjoy.

So, I've been reading John K's weblog for a while and have finally decided that even though he warned that after the age of 24 it's too late to try learning how to draw right, it's time I learned how to draw right.

Tonight I did a few quick pencil sketches, some based directly on his lesson pictures and some based on the lessons learned from trying to emulate the lessons.

Seeing as how I went and made my site easier to manage, I decided to get around to something I'd been putting off: posting my photography.

Just recent stuff for now; when I go back to my parents' house for the holidays I'll try to remember to get all my negatives from when I was in high school.

Yesterday I heard from my mom that Reginald Gammon died. He was a very important artist in the 1960s civil rights movement, an amazing portrait painter and printmaker whose work has been in museums and galleries around the world with chapters written about hiim in art history textbooks, and most importantly, he was a very close friend of my family, and a great guy. The few times I got to talk with him were great experiences, and we will all miss him.

I feel like I'm drawing to a black hole.

Hey, cool, I just noticed that a one-minute vacation I recorded a while ago got posted this week. I guess my philosophical rambling was acceptable. :)

A photo journey of the transubstantiation of the useless to the functional:

Only four days until the world knows what the buzz is all about...

Calibrate your monitor, so you can see how dark most webpages are.

Damnit. It's really hard to want to make sure everything of mine fits a standard if it means having to put up with everyone else's stuff being really dark. (Though I'm not the first to notice this.)

I think the sRGB group made a horrible choice in going with γ=2.2 (they decided to go with 2.2 because "that's what NTSC uses," and IMO they should have stuck to somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8), specifically because most of the content out there appears to be designed for a gamma somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8; a standard gamma of 2.2 means everyone who wants to adhere to the standard really has their work cut out for them.

When I first put it up, I was calibrating everything to a linear color space for pedantic reasons, but I've modified it to work with gamma of 1.8 or 2.2, with an explanation of why those two gammas (specifically 2.2), and a bit of a thing complaining about that being the "standard." I also fixed the printer/scanner stuff, and cleaned up my wording to try to make it more consistent and accurate.

So, if you haven't looked already, check it out, especially if you're going to be posting images on the web. I'm also going through the site and color-correcting everything I can for sRGB, since sRGB images still look reasonable on non-sRGB displays but the converse is definitely not true. It was foolish of me to do all my prior work with a gamma of 1.2... so if you ever looked at my artwork and thought, "God damn that's dark and shadowy," go back and look again. :)