ArtCtrl

Collab piece with mr3. His lines are thin and straight. Focusing on the centre of the image.

Playing with shapes. Repeating usual patterns. Long horizontal rectangle filled with circles.

Ideas from Fall Of Copy. Novel started in November 2016. Currently editing the rough draft. Cut.

gst-switch. Software based system for interactive live mixing of incoming video streams, designed for needs of conference recording. Sketched when watching Linux Conf Aus 2017 videos. Do go check the talks out.

HDMI2USB. Open video capture hardware + firmware. Sketched diagram of setup. Artistic twist.

Issac Grayscale. Grayscale layer of the life drawing. Cut off forehead. Black circles are beard. Darker area on arm is tattoos.

Issac Line. Line layer of the life drawing. Detail on the fake tattoos. No background. Arm resting on nothing.

Novel idea after watching season 2 of The Man in The High Tower. Oceanic.

More novel ideas and sketches of objects connected.

Tims Videos Streaming System. Sketch of the board. Some areas missing and unclear.

Color layer of the toy car and looney tunes character. Didn’t cover the whole page but just key areas. Matched up colors of the car with the paint color.

grayscale layer of toy car and looney tunes character.

line layer of toy car and looney tunes character. I asked someone for a request to draw and they gave me a childs car toy to draw. It was fun - something different that I usually would never draw. I love requests. Included also is a Loony Tunes character - this was drawn from a reference image.

dns line. Random doodles as usual.

hello. can you hear me.

zalando content that I forgot to include in the previous post.

grayscale layer of the Zalando content. Focus on key and important areas.

Zalando line layer.

I have been working on the Zalando API. Have been looking for a Fashion API for sometime and very happy with this. This artwork was creating in between breaks of writing code.

grayscale layer. Portrait on the left and building out from there. Didn’t finish everything

Line layer. Connecting circles with rectangles

landscape along the top left. Continue with pipe and square ideas

Zalando ideas. Been improving the api and went further with sketching ideas and brainstorming. Text is from their website

Continue Zalando brainstorm. Menu, script, item ideas.

zalando written in top left. Robots and landscapes

Goals of the api. Landscapes. Water is everywhere.

line. water in lower area. figure on the right.

Stamp of a brush created. A grayscale portrait. It’s scaled down so unable to notice it. Portraits and squiggles in background.

Several empty areas - lower left.

Grayscale tonal layer of the churchhill line drawing. Church darkest area and mid tones surrounding.

Line layer of churchhill. Church building on the left. This was created when watching season three of American Horror Story. A character figure on the right.

A full page of line. Focusing on circles - adding a X to the centre of the circles.

EOW Datacentre. For conceptart.org. I like to look at the prompts but do not submit. Maybe it’s something that I should do.

Character in top left with guitar. Portrait and figure on the right

Portrait on the top left.

Portrait in lower left. Legs on the top right. Legs are something that I need to draw more often.

Line layer. Landscape in the background with all the usual elements.

Asked for a request. Was given the prompt Nachos. Lots of triangles.

Just a warmup portrait. Glasses. Tentacles coming out of the face.

very minimal portrait. star on the bottom left.

spikes. spikes everywhere

Color version of the WellyFigure from the previous post. Yellow for skin. Pink for clothing. Green for water. Green for objects in background. Blue for the sky.

The first update in months. I have not attended life drawing since September. In November my Raspberry Pi 7 inch TFT broke along with losing the pen. I have recently replaced the pen but not the TFT. Instead I am using the old 3.5 inch broken screen. It’s not as easy to use as the larger offical screen - but better than nothing. I have also been using the Pi connected to a normal monitor - though this is not portable.

Here are several pieces of artwork that I have created since I got a new pen.

This was drawn when I was working on the NBA api. I wrote a script that downloaded gifs for each NBA team. If I was to go back and extend it further I would merge gifs with player names.

ConceptArt Environment of the Week. Interior or exterior of a market vendor selling weapons in the middle ages. I didn’t end up drawing anything but it’s a good warmup.

Landscape and shapes, portrait and house on a hill. Alien like create standing on a rock in the water.

Friends children portrait. Photo was taken in the middle of December. Like usual I made them look much older than they really are.

Grayscale tonal layer. Issues with their ears and who goes in fron of who. In the end - made the boy in front with the girl slightly behind. Light backgground with no detail.

Colour tonal layer. Yellow for the skin, red for the hair and mouth. Red was used for the darker areas of the nose but it should be a darker yellow. Blue for the background. Green for the boys tshirt, and pink for the girls.

Landscape. Creature to the left. Waves leading into the foreground.

Grayscale tonal. Light for the sky in the distance. Mid dark for everything else.

Girl holding a mic. Usual background

Grayscale tonal. Standing on a darker area.

Line layer overtop of the mic girl grayscale tonal layer. Replaced the girl with a spike creature.

Reference was a old wellington painting - one of my favorites. Replaced the figure with a new figure.

Grayscale tonal layer of the Wellington figure.

Blog has been fixed. Moved everything to artctrl.me and redirected artcontrol.me. You can browse posts from 2011 and the images will be displayed correctly. I have also added a .gitignore with the github repo. This isn’t part of master yet. Merge will be done.

Writing a new novel. I start to edit the novel I wrote in November (NanoWriMo). It was frustrating to edit and decided to start something fresh instead.

In April Camp NanoWriMo is happening so I have set a goal to write a children fantasy novel based on the web comic [Pepper and Carrot](http://peppercarrot.com]. Despite starting in April I have gone ahead and started something now. The Pepper and Carrot wiki has been helpful, along with the artwork that I have created.

I have been reading - mostly fantasy. Since my last post I finished The Never Ending Story, Good Omens, Paper Money, and started The Pillars of the Earth. Reading is great for my writing and puts me in an excellent mood.

Recent artwork, majority of it focused on Pepper and Carrot and idea generation for the novel.

Focused on writing idea generation for the novel in this piece. I want to intrude a dog character, based on Patches (dog I take for regular walks). Drew areas of this when I was talking him for a walk. Includes a sketch of Carrot and my toes.

Pepper&Carrot characters and creates. Need to develop a protagonist.

Grayscale layer! Had fun with the castle.

Large portrait of Pepper. Theme for next WritersDenHamilton: Why am I not famous? Thought was to write a short story with Death (was reading Good Omens).

Tree city in Pepper&Carrot web comic. Drew this when I was at Computer Club today. It was a successfully Saturday workshop. For once I didn’t get into an argument.

Character sketches. Attempted to bring ‘witch’ elements into the characters with their pointy hats.

This was drawn when I was at WritersDenHamilton. My setup is great that it allows me to just draw when I am in meetings so that I don’t get bored. Couldn’t be better!

I went on a search for artists that licence their work under a free creative commons licence. Through the site DeviantArt (which needs a CC licence search filter) I found Pepper and Carrot. Not only is it a very high quality professional web comic, it is licensed under the super awesome CC BY.

I used the web comic as reference and redrew it in my own style, along with a few extra doodles thrown in there.

Enjoy -

Creative Commons icons redrawn with excellent round circles.

I have been reading the NeverEndingStory. I had seen the movie. The book is excellent. These sketches were created when I was reading the book. Almost finished it so need to decide on the next book - considering a Terry Pratchet Discworld novel that contains witches since that will work well with the recent Pepper and Carrot drawings.

The first Pepper and Carrot sketch. One of the most appealing elements about the web comic is the focus on environment - something I am passionate about.

I had to switch some things around - such as the mailbox and didn’t include the birds. I’ve also gone my own way with clouds and trees behind the house.

The first sketch of the characters. Didn’t include any background, only the characters and the book that Pepper is drawing in. The text is written in caps.

Including the characters and elements of the room. I love the high angle!

Sketch of other two witches. Fire is smoking.

Pepper rushing off. I liked the blur movement effects in the original. Mine has this with the foot being redrawn. I don’t erase, only draw.

Pepper and Carrot on the broomstick. Had fun drawing the pillars. Should of left space in the sky for the text which I ended up cramming in.

I didn’t end up finishing redrawing the whole comic. There was nothing in the rest that really made me want to draw it. Had lots of fun with this though.

For NanoWriMo this year I might write a novel based on Pepper and Carrot.

Started drawing elements from another Pepper and Carrot comic - where the two are on a beach. I liked the monster and the change in enviorments.

I redrew a comic from mooselakecartoons Just something simple.

Drew this at Waikato Uni. Mostly environment from imagination but a observational drawing on the top right.

I am writing this from my new Raspberry Pi 3. I am using the built in wifi, which is awesome. It is faster than the pi2 which makes web browsing great as the pi2 will slightly sluggish when web browsing. I have yet to switch to a pi3 for my portable digital painting. I think I am going to keep with the pi2 for now since the power usage on pi3 is quite high. I will use the pi3 as a desktop computer with the plan to get a touch screen for it in the future.

Here is recent artwork. I have been remixing works from jemsshed, hicksville and xkcd.

About page I sketched. This is for my Nikola talk that will be happening on 14th March. If you are in the Waikato come along!

I finished Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. It was excellent. I think I enjoyed it more than American Gods as I was more engaged. The story was excellent.

This was drawn at Writers Den Chartwell. It was only their 2nd meeting. There was an excellent turnout, including 4 children. People talked about good writing, and bad writing, showing examples of both. They also shared pieces of their writing based on the theme animals. The theme for next time is Mystery. I don’t think I will make the next meeting as I am attending Ruby Camp.

This was remixed from hicksvillecomics. I found this artist thanks to a list of artists on the Creative Commons website.

GetsDrawn portrait with sketches on the left. Included is a bottle of my brothers hot sauce. This was drawn when I was at my brothers.

Another piece remixed from Hicksville.

Sketching my Nikola talk. This will be taken into Inkscape and converted into a vector file. Areas will be split into a series of slides.

I have continued to remix Jemsshed artwork. This was inspired from her comic Rain. I did my own sketches for the rain, not using her rain illustrations as reference

Another referece from Jemsshed this was of a rabbit and girl cuddling. Cute.

Next panel of Rain. Merged several panels of Jems into one.

I got bored and switched to xkcd reference. Lawrance was spose to do a talk on Git at the next wlug meeting. I am going to talk about the Raspberry Pi 3, not sure if he still is going to talk on Git.

A talk on licences would be great at wlug, something a bit difference. Creative Commons licences could be covererd. Would be great to get someone in to talk about it.

Final sketch. This was completed at Writers Den Chartwell. Notes at the bottom from discussion.

One of the kids at writers den mentioned they have a list of jail words in their class - words that they are not allowed to use. I am looking forward to seeing this list. It makes me what to write something that includes these words. Similar to the xkcd book What If?

Art created with my new Raspberry Pi touch screen and Wacom tablet. It is awesome but slightly annoying to carry around. I need a 3d printer to print a case for it that would allow me to attach both the Wacom and Pi/Screen to my body (perhaps my right arm).

Some interesting reactions on the street to the setup. As I was crossing a Hamilton bridge a young Maori woman walked past, saw my setup and spoke ‘wtf is that’ to her friend. It’s no different to an iPhone - it’s only a computer at the end of the day.

Here’s the art:

Matt made a post about the future of nzcommons so I was inspired to work on my fork of the site. It’s a mess as I was working on a computer that was having issues with dependencies of Python. I need to work on it on my main laptop (Dell) which has no issues with dependencies.

I remixed elements of the cc in schools, including the Kiwi illustration. Comic started in the bottom left with the Kiwi speaking, ‘Policies for Schools’.

These are notes on a lecture that I attended for an Engineering paper.

FreezingOverHell getsdrawn portrait on the left and a remix of one of Jems comics. This was from a panel of her Sunshine comic. Hot.

Drawn walking around Hamilton. Just sketches of landscapes.

Three portraits from getsdrawn. This of course breaks the ‘don’t draw multi people on the same page’ rule, but I’m an expert at breaking getsdrawn rules.

WritersDenHamilton. I am happy with the current logo but maybe something with an illustration would be nice. Used the writers den Hamilton logo that the library uses to promote the group. They don’t use my logo that I made for the group.

xkcd banned from conference. I have yet to be banned from a conference but it’s something that could happen. Exciting. The original comic that I remixed from is xkcd: TED TALKS

I have a new monitor - the official 7 inch Raspberry Pi touchscreen. It’s a large upgrade - 480, 320px to 800, 480px. It is easier to work in with the larger screen. Everything fits. This has allowed me to work on grayscale paintings easier. When I was working on the small screen I was only producing line drawings. I am happy.

I have just spent a week down in Levin where I spent the majority of my time reading or painting. I have downloaded a bunch of artwork from artist Jem Yoshioka and have been remixing it. You can find her work at jemshed

I have also been reading a bunch of novels, this is thanks to the Kindle that I am borrowing from my brother. American Gods… Enjoy…

This was drawn after I finished reading American Gods. Reading the book gave me flashes of images that I was then able to paint. Of course my paintings look nothing like how I imagined.

This is the grayscale version and painted with the new 7 inch touch screen. Expect to see more grayscale layer and perhaps colour in the future.

The line layer. The reference I used for this was a illustration of Jems for the bird. Everything else is imagination.

A portrait on the right and attempts on creature of the week. This is my Hello World with the new monitor.

More sketches inspired by Jems artwork. On Tuesday I visited my friend Justin and drew this. I had the reference on my old small monitor/pi. Having two portable touchscreen pis is handy but I need another two power packs. Currently I carry around two battery packs. This allows me to switch between the two packs, and keep them both charged up at night. MORE POWER basically.

I love the unicorns.

I loved Jems painting of the girl looking out over the city rooftops.
This grayscale layer took elements of her original. Areas have been re-imagined such as the horizon line (something I like to make up and just doodle away with).

The line layer. There were areas that I didn’t complete in the grayscale layer, such as the comic strip of the cracks in the earth (top right) and the face/ body of the Japanese woman.

This was a remix I did of Jems City comic strip. It’s mostly all done by tracing over - cheating compared to using the artwork as reference like I did on previous pieces. This stops me from remixing the piece so much, though I am tempted to redo these with more of a remix.

I love trees.

I stripped the borders off. The white space makes a nice border.

Where have I seen this before? That’s right, Creative Commons ANZ used a remix of this for their book. Go read it A Quiet Revolution: Growing Creative Commons in Aotearoa New Zealand

I have started reading Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman so expect more artwork influenced by it.