ArtCtrl

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.

I have a new touch screen for my Raspberry Pi. It’s still the same size - 480px by 320px but it is no longer cracked. The touch works! I still have my old touch screen and would like to find a use for it. Attaching it to somewhere that is useful - streaming cat gifs.

Here are some recent artworks created with GIMP:

It doesn’t happen often but here is a grayscale tonal painting of PulpFictionDiction from getsdrawn. I like painting the text. I have croped this as the rest of the painting was blank.

On the top left is the line layer of the previous painting. The rest of the image is sketches of robots and landscapes. Typical.

This is sizeways as I had the Raspberry Pi hanging from my bed well I drew. Some of the image is up the correct way - the landscape in the bottom left looks correct. The text is not.

This was drawn at the Hamilton Computer Club. It was the Feb 2016 Thursday meeting. Sadly the meeting was spent sorting ‘rules’. I guess it needed to be sorted but I’m looking forward to speakers later on in the year.

This was drawn during the Hamilton Python User Group. Again this was the Feb 2016 meeting. Lorance did a talk on IPython/Jupyter Notebook. There was also much discussion regarding next months meeting. Next month I will do a talk on Nikola.

I have been watching Linux Conf Aus videos on my laptop and painting them as I watch them. It is certainly not the experience of being there, but the talk talks are informative.

No text, just drawing. Monsters, robots, and landscapes.

I use to be a big fan of the website conceptart.org especially during my time at The Learning Connextion. It had been awhile since I had visited the site so I took a look. Enviortments on the week was always my favourite. The theme was Palace of Time. I need to visit the site regularly as it is great inspirion for drawing.

several portraits draw from getsdrawn. isnipor and tklfota.

Illustation of my setup and a self portrait.

writers den notes during the meeting. I got there late but got quite a bit of drawing completed.

The theme for the next Writers Den Hamilton is romance. It was my idea. I am not going to be at the next meeting but I’ve been thinking about the theme and have ideas.

This was drawn at the Sunday Den meeting, it was mostly sketching ideas for the romance theme.

Short story I started during the Wednesday Den meeting. The words on the left of the page are prompts given by each member. We were given ten minutes to come up with a story with the words. A points system was used but it didn’t really work. Who’s counting?

Another week, another conference. This week I got along to WCELfest. It’s an digital elearning conference held at Waikato University.

Here are the paintings that I created during the event:

Drawing and note taking of the beginning of the conference including the keynote speaker - Terry Anderson. It was an excellent keynote. I especially enjoyed him talking about copyright and open access. There was no mention of Creative Commons, but I was actively tweeting with mentions of Creative Commons.

This was the final image of the day. I had grown tired after lunch with productivity dropping. Maybe I should of switched. I am use to going to conferences and sticking to the same room all week. Maybe they could of given the streams topic names?

One of the streams was workshop based which I wasn’t interested in. The third stream looked like they had some interesting stuff. But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. I enjoyed myself and looking forward to watching the talks online that I missed.

CYBER is hilarious. lulz when I heard the phase CYBER BULLY. Drinks a shot. CYBER was brought up again by the law dean as CYBER LAW. He was on a roll and rapped off a bunch of CYBER terms. Kiwicon would of been proud. Finishes the bottle.

Digital Badge. When I saw the title of this talk I got excited, thinking they were referring to LED based name tags but instead it was achievement points in a education course.

Welsh fella - Glyndwr Jones or JONES did a talk on blended classes. He was quite the character and funny. The painting lacks much drawing - only a sad cat due to parking charges at Waikato University.

This was an interesting talk as the speakers talked about SCRUM development being used for course development. It’s normally used in software development and great to see it’s crossing areas.

More recent drawings from the Raspberry Pi.

One of the images I missed from the recent KiwiCon post. Includes some notes on wireshark and such.

Drawn in Hamilton waiting for the bud. Redrew their logo and phone number.

Creative Commons ideas for a new website with bonus kiwicon9 sketches at the bottom - red team, born to shell.

Drawn watching DefCon videos and GetsDrawn drawing of ajawosogba.

Start of sketching digital nz stuff.

This was drawn in Levin when watching a video on the tor network. The lamp is outside the library.

GetsDrawn. Full page of sketches. Mostly robotic characters and landscape and water.

Levin Cyber Unit.

This was originally a pencil drawing I did at Waikato Uni a few years ago. I took the original pencil sketch and traced over it - same technique I use to always do with my pencil drawings (only this time there is no grayscale and colour layers).

This was created at WritersDenHamilton. The theme was to draw a place, time, or setting and have others guess. This was the first thing I have written since the NanoWriMo in November. I wrote about a messy house.

Script that generates collection of gif images from input. Ideas for gif script.

First Person. Put your arms up. wcm ideas.

Drawn during WritersDenHamilton. Had a focus on author A.S. Byatt. I would like to read one of her books - Possession: A Romance was the recommended book. Need to get that ebook reader! I like the idea of writing what is true.

Happy New Year! First post to the year. This selection of digital painting was mostly created at KiwiCon9. It was held in Wellington back in Decembers. It was the first time I attended and was a great experience. I went with my Raspberry Pi and Wacom drawing tablet. People were interested in it, from what I saw I was the only one walking around with a portable Raspberry Pi - and definitely the only one with a Wacom Drawing Tablet.

Here we go. As always I will talk about each piece above:

Aussy Military. They had someone talk about the aus military and how it relates to security.

Fear and Loathing on your Desk: BadUSB, and what you should do about it. Robery Fisk talked about the dangers of usb devices. I was lucky enough to meet Fisk the night before his talk at the VIP/speakers party.

I had meet one of his work mates at DevMob the week before and hanged out with her during KiwiCon9.

An older work of sketching Raspberry Pi ideas.

Cyber Viking Cafe. Colour version. Not much words, mostly drawings of creatures and landscape.

The black and white version of Cyber Viking Cafe image. The colour version always help define areas in the work.

Digital Painting from GetsDrawn of IsWhat.

Selection of days back in November of painting - mostly novel based sketches.

Keynote notes from KiwiCon. They had an event of the NSA swooping in and arressting the speaker who was talking about xkeyscore.

Thursday after morning tea. Kate Pearce did a talk - stuff I mostly didn’t understand.

Wayne did a talk about red teaming which I found very entertaining and informative. It was one of my favorite talks of the conference.

More notes on Waynes red teaming talk. The more interesting the talk is, the more notes I write.

BORN TO SHELL

Kiwicon 9. CyberWar. Theate of War. Robotic sketches before the event started.

This was the result of leaving my Pi setup on a talk at the VIP/Speaker event at KiwiCon9. Had requests to change the colour to ‘hot pink’. Several people had a go with the Wacom Drawing tablet. Gives me a break from it!

That’s a decent post for the start of the year. It is my goal this year to keep this site more up to date with my artwork. I have the Raspberry Pi portable device that I can use to make digital painting wherever I go and write the blog posts using nano and then build the site with Nikola.

I have a Raspberry Pi setup for portable digital painting. It’s a Raspberry Pi 2b with a 480x320px monitor attached to the GPIO slots. It’s powered by a battery pack. A Wacom tablet is plugged into the USB on the Pi. GIMP is used for the painting and it has the same settings as I had on the desktop. Now I can paint anywhere, no power needed! Here’s a collection of artwork that I have painted

Ideas for the Raspberry Pi internet cafe.

Colour logo for BroBeur CyberCafe. I added the line over the colour as it looked better than without it.

Grayscale BroBeur CyberCafe. Felt it didn’t need the line layer. Sorry, no line image.

Signinlca notes. Mostly writing but some drawing on the top left.

More character sketch ideas.

I went to a bar on the evening of my birthday and painted this there. I found a corner and stayed in it. It was fun.

Creative Commons ideas mixed with NaNoWriMo stuff.

KiwiCon2015. This was created shortly before the kiwicon conference that I attended this year.

This was from Day12 of my NaNoWriMo sketching. During November I wrote a 50,000 word novel and would carry my Pi with me sketching ideas and notes for the book.

Day 20 of NaNoWriMo. This was more of a summery of the book so far.

Writers Den Hamilton mixed with Creative Commons and Open Education Resources Sprints 2016. This is an event happening at the end of April that involves creating education resources.

Another one from early this year. There are several drawings from local Levin kids. They enjoy having a go with the drawing tablet - usually signing their name and creating basic drawings.

This is my spot. Some life drawing of the street - light pole and building behind it.

DevMob2015 Creative Commons sketches. Ideas for logos, but got carried away with characters.

Golden Cloud. This was from early in the year.

Grayscale painting of a girl with a cool hat.

Line layer of the girl with a hat. Quite basic really.

NanoWriMo Final.