ArtCtrl

The end of August 2021 artwork. This is a combo of some of July 2021 artwork also - mostly DND inspired artwork, along with some recent comic panels I created with Krita.

Top view of ship in DND. We had to fight pirates, and it was tough.

Side view of ship in DND.

Testing brushes and strokes

Did a one shot in DND and I played a Forest Gnome. This is a sketch of him. In future main campaign I am planning on playing a deep gnome.

Giving the comic templates a go in krita - this is grayscale.

Line version of the headrect comic. Different zoom levels of areas - including the landscape was the focus.

Headstar comic grayscale.

Another Krita comic template sketch. Line version. A head with three spikes, and a landscape behind it, different zooms

The symbol / logo of mystra. Praise!

Praise Mystra! Mystra is the god that my character - Bril follows, along with the group that he travels with Jens and Friends. This is a portrait of her.

A smile character with a landscape.

Sorry for the lack of posts this month. Since WoW: Legion launched I’ve been at my Brothers focused on levelling both his toons and my own to 110. After the burst I am sick of playing it and need to get back into usual patterns.

It’s been weeks since I have attended Life Drawing Hamilton but plan on attending this Friday - so expect another post this weekend with life drawings.

I found out through ccanz that Authors Alliance was coming to Hamilton and I attended the talks. Here are the notes that I took during the session.

Start of the session. I made it to the session just in time. Michael Wolfe the Executive Director of Authors Alliance introduced himself and his organisation and the topics that would be talked about during the workshop.

Wolfe talked about Creative Commons and the licences. Majority of this material I knew but it’s always great and informative to get a fresh perspective on the licences. Gratis vs Libre was interesting as well. I had to bring up the CC Zero licence (it’s something that CC seem to keep quite hidden also). I forgot to mention CC Public Domain which is a licence you can attach to let people know that the content is in the public domain.

Moving on from CC into contracts which is something I have zero experience with - so great learning for me.

I ran out of power part way during the workshop and the other was charging at my Brothers so this was the last of the notes from the workshop.

I really like the idea of the requirement of renewing copyright. This allows works to fall into Public Domain early unless the Copyright holder really wants to extend it.

TPP notes. Interesting but some of it made me sad - especially of exporting of bad American laws such as DRM and extending copyright to life + 70 years. Would love to see Fair Use introduced here in New Zealand.

Drawing I did at Brothers - mostly WoW related references.

After the TPP talk I attend Hamilton Python User Group. Ian spoke about the Evolution of a Python Program, followed by Lawrances introduction to Python. I ended up drawing mostly.

Another sketch completed at Brothers.

I’ve now joined Authors Alliance and volunteered (in much the same way I do for ccanz). You should join also! Expect to see more posts in the future mentioning them.

so i have registered for wikieducator. It offers free elearning resources. I am enjoying editing and adding content. Areas that I was interested in
adding resources were tech, digital citizenship, art. Conferences and Events. I came across a course from Otago Polytechnic on Tourism and Travel. I felt I could contribute to the resources on conferences. It’s always safe to add links. I included a few links - to AV recording talk and to lanyrd - the site that lists conferences and events. I added some education resources on AV setups at conferences and expanded the section on goodie bags.

Here is the artwork that I have created

The beginning. In the right side Conference and Events is written in caps, with learning objectives under. Around the screen are scatted portraits and figures. A skull with drum sticks poking through. Characters with flower heads.

Continue with the flower head - now the figure has several. Border around the edge of lines and dots.

The goodie bag was one area I was able to expand on the education resources. This is a brainstorm of ideas behind a goodie bag.

Main resources page copy of content

Grayscale tonal painting. Makes a nice border!

Exploring ideas for conferences with the idea of tourist focused conference division. For those that do not want to attend the main conference, workshops, and seminars. Often ran as a family even. One parent attending conference, other and kids on tourist activities. Don’t want family stuck in hotel room when attending conference.

Artwork from The Cure concert, life drawing on Friday and even kiwijam.

Standing pose in the centre of the model holding a wine glass. I took the liberty and filled the glass with bubbles. Standing around with an empty glass is pointless.

In the pose where the model is lying down her shoulder blades are very dominate

• a spec of hair comes out the edge. It was quite cool. She lifted her legs up for this pose also - which helped to squeeze the figure in.

Final sitting pose for the day. Creating shapes on the model where the darker areas would be.

I attended Kiwijam in Hamilton. Last year I made it up to Auckland but this year I decided to stay behind. I spent the first few hours working further on the life drawing I had done that day - including a grayscale tonal layer of several of the poses.

Adalaide was the model. I had never drawn her before. This is the same pose from two different angles. I like how large her foot is in the left drawing. It’s really coming forward. Feet are something I often ignore so proud of myself whenever I am happy with them. On the right is a front view. I like how these two drawings merge into each other and the use of negative space - the blanket from the left drawing covers the drawing on the right.

Warmups. I arrived just on time and the group started a several minutes late. I was struggling with the line work but improved as the session developed.

On Thursday night I went to Auckland and watched The Cure with my sister. I had not seen a concert live for years. I did not know at the time how to reduce the brightness on the Pi and didn’t have my cellphone with me in order to look it up online. For the majority of the show I drew with the screen facing down. The lead to me having no idea to what I was drawing. Next time I will reduce the brightness on the Pi (didn’t know how to at the time and no internet).

This was drawn before the show started. We arrived 2 hours before the show started so I had plenty of time to draw.

At Kiwijam my group is making a game about building a wall around Trump. This is the colour layer I completed. Have yet to pass it onto the group yet - and it’s unlikely that they need it.

Grayscale tonal layer for the Trump Wall game. This was drawn today and given to the group. I look forward to seeing if they got much use out of it.

Trump Wall line layer. This was drawn Friday night but wasn’t given to the group until Saturday morning. Again, interested to see if/how this will be used in the game. It will likely have elements of it turned to vectors - but who knows.

The weather has been cold and I’ve been home in Hamilton. Other than a ecommerce business meetup I have not been to any. I have been playing a few too many games, but getting sick and bored of it. Hopefully I make it to life drawing this Friday as it has been awhile since I have made it.

Here are recent artworks. I have been using the Pi on my larger Samsung monitor.

Notes taken well watching pycon2016 videos. The talk was on writing an excellent programming blog. I am going to talk about the talk at the Hamilton Python User Group on Monday. I will take this artwork and turn it into slides.

The title page for the talk I will give. I drew a portrait of the speaker along with the logo of pycon2016

Grayscale tonal layer of the title page.

Along with pycon2016 videos I watched pydata London videos. These are notes I took with a statistic tutorial from the event. Pepper and Carrot draws and notes were started - Saffron Witchcraft.

Begin of concept art for EOW - water treatment plant.

In the past week I have completed 4 paintings. There is spose to be a 5th here but I forgot to export it and can’t be bothered to sort it now. I will include it in the next post.

The following art was created at Life Drawing Hamilton on Friday and Hamilton Computer Club on Thursday/Saturday. My life consists of meet ups.

This was started during Thursday night meeting of Hamilton Computer Club. Linda did a talk on editing photos with Google software. She also showed how to create ecards with the website 123greetings.com. I think I would rather do something original for an ecard. When I use to have Facebook I would draw/paint portraits of my friends for their birthday and post it to their wall.

The figure drawings are the next day - life drawing Hamilton. I had drawn the model once before. These are the warm up - 2 minute poses.

Longer 5 min poses. I found it hard to concentrate and went to the toilet and even walked outside and made a phone call. Sometimes I feel I attend just so that there is enough people. Of course this isn’t true and it’s best I just attend each week and have a positive attitude.

The final three poses for the day. These were longer 15/20 minute poses. I did move for the third one.

Started with a drawing of Maddie from a SIA video. When I got home from life drawing a bunch of Creative Commons pamphlets had arrived. This caused me to be inspired to work on ccanz stuff - including drawing of the pamphlets. In order for the page to not be too blank I filled the empty areas with a landscape.

On Thursday night I am attending The Cure concert and planning on bringing the Pi along and drawings. I won’t walk in with it but will set it up once I have my seat. Hopefully I get through security with it.

Middle of the month so due for a update. Spent the last two weeks in Hamilton. Been sick, had the flu. Not allot of drawing because of that. Still have yet to fix my monitor, been using the smaller one when walking.

Motivation has been hard, don’t know what conference I will attend next. Meet up groups have been dumb. Hopefully feel better after writing this post.

Looking through some of archive posts. This drawing was inspired from a pencil drawing I did in Auckland back in 2013. I drew elements of the old artwork and including the text written alongside.

Creative Commons in Schools drawing. This was created to inspire me to create slides for a talk I may give in the future on Creative Commons in schools. I started these slides when I was at Ruby Camp and have been working on them further recently… mostly adding images. There still needs to be some work - removing slides that repeat themselves. This artwork isn’t included in the slides but it should be - a good example of taking the CC kiwi and creating a derivative work from it.

Lana Del Rey and sheering a sheep. Derivative of an old aussy painting.

A full page of sketches. The only text being IS IT GOD? Creating multiply layers of line, something that is rare in my drawing.

Created during Writers Den Hamilton. The Jim was a sig that I copied. Banned is the theme for the next meeting. My idea. Communities just love to ban me.

Again looking back over archives. Took a painting I did of my Mother and redrew it.

Characters mostly. Spikes and the usual.

Drawing drink bottle and landscapes.

Portrait of someone. I have no idea.

I had a great weekend drawing at Kiwijam followed by the wlug meeting on Monday night. Here is a bunch of drawings created at kiwijam, my brothers, and wlug.

Created several cartoon portraits then filled the page with landscapes.

Focused on the circles. Small and tiny to build up an area. Landscape of water with a character at the bottom. Shapes rising up.

Continued with Trump theme. Characters standing on top of a wall. Water below.

Character in a square frame with spikes emerging out. Another character drawn on the bottom left, merging into the background.

Detail on the water. Normally don’t use such a small line for it.

These are all the same. What more can I say?

Recently I founded several groups on meetup.com that were already happening irl. These are Hamilton Computer Club and Life Drawing Hamilton.

I am likely to build scripts in the future that automates actions on meetup. This is the start - reverse engineer the concept of meetup.com and rebuild it as Nikola sites.

Had a break from the usual imagination landscapes. Or as Bill told me ‘doodles’. It doesn’t bother me, he teaches Microsoft focused Computer Science at a uni.

This was drawn from RedditGetsDrawn. wtvrmelon and hannahthepalindrome. Filled the negative space around the portraits with squares and squiggles.

Grayscale tonal layer of the following line work. Must of been getting sick of drawing the imagination line pieces and created a grayscale tonal layer.

I like the animal on the bottom left.

Towers, rectangles to build a wall. Landscape.

Idea to modify the bot to tweet images. Currently it is only tweeting random blog posts and would be easy enough to open those posts up and tweet the images/ content.

This was drawn at wlug. The topic was Wayland and Mir as replacements for X11. I packed up the Pi after the talk but Ian did an excellent demo of Endless OS which I didn’t get to take notes on.

I made it to Life Drawing on Friday. It had been quite a few weeks since I had last attending so it was great to be there. Will not make it the next two weeks due to being out of Hamilton.

The model was Laure a French girl who I had never drawn before. It was her first time modelling for the group - but she was experienced so easy to draw.

Warm up poses. These were all similar standing poses - which is no problem as I am able to fit them onto a single page. Tried to capture the whole body - which I managed to in in a couple.

Two poses. A sitting pose and a standing pose. Her hand is leaned against a chair which made it more interesting. Started drawing the tables in the background. Model wasn’t in the usual spot - was missing a heater so moved her closer to one of the wall heaters. This was fine for me as I had forgotten one of my battery packs so has to plug into the power of the venue.

A front on sitting pose and a back pose. Back poses are often hard as there is much less detail to capture - especially if the model is curled up in a ball. I’m happy with the front pose though - captured her whole body (except for cutting off her forehead).

The sitting pose was long so I had time to create a grayscale layer. Whenever I do this it causes me to look again at the model and notice all the mistakes that the line layer had. Always important to keep looking at the model!

Color layer. I believe this is the first time I’ve done a color layer along with the usual line and rare grayscale layer at Hamilton Life Drawing. The usual saved color palette - yellow for skin, slightly more black in the yellow for darker areas of the skin. Red for the hair, and blue for the background.

These were the final three poses. I like the standing pose on the left - although she looks short. Love the large head though.

Recovered from the flu and had a few late nights out this week. It’s nice to have a plan to have a few days at home - and planning on taking the dog (Patches) for a walk.

This art is a result from Writers Den Hamilton, Hamilton Book Club, and life drawing. That’s right - life drawing. 2013 was the last time I had done life drawing so great to get back into it.

Enjoy,

Joined a Hamilton book club on Meetup.com last year and finally made it to a meetup. I hadn’t read the book they discussed -
The Elusive Language of Ducks but I enjoyed the meetup anyway. These were the notes I drew during the meetup. These were the notes I took during the the meetup - others thoughts on the book.

I spent the day in Hamilton City on Thursday waiting for the book club so walked the river path, drawing the building across the river.

Life drawing. It had been years since I have drawn a nude model and it was great to get back into it. The model was Mia. These are four drawings of her, it was a long standing pose, I moved around the room several times and completed several shorter drawings of her.

Started with the eyes and worked out. The legs were certainly neglected.

The start. These were short two minute poses. Took sometime to adjust to drawing a model - certainly not use to it with the wacom.

Colour layer of the first twenty minute pose. It has been awhile since I’ve painted colour, choose a disgusting green colour rather than the normal yellow I usually use. Would of liked to add red to her eyebrows and hair.

During the break we were given a glass of wine. I displayed this drawing on the Pi and had several people ask me about my setup. Feels more complete than the line layer.

The line layer. Hands and feet were neglected. I had a grid guide on by accident and didn’t know how to get rid of it so have some strange straight lines on the right.

Drawn during writers Den Hamilton. I tend to get allot of sketching done during these meetups. It’s great, i can just draw and listen to people reading out their writing. They often have printed copies of their work which I scan but never focus on it (hard to read with my glasses on).