ArtCtrl

Artwork from the past few days. Attended Hamilton Writers Den, Hamilton Computer Club and life drawing. At all events I was able to draw, here are the results along with some art I created at home.

This was created at home with the new wireless dongle I got for the wacom tablet. I have had the wacom for years and never got one - until now. I am having some issues with the pressure sensitivity not working all the time with it - but I think it’s due to over loading the power supply (am getting the rainbow symbol in the top right of the pi letting me know that there isn’t enough power). I would like to get a battery pack that is 5v 3amp.

The majority of this drawing isn’t using the pressure sensitivity but some testing squiggles are working correctly - these were done at computer club when I was demoing the wireless wacom. The demo gods were favourable.

Life drawing grayscale layer. This was a sitting pose and the woman had her back to me. It was still interesting to draw and I didn’t need to move around the room. This is the only grayscale layer created.

Life drawing line layer. Missing a head! Drew the blanket the model was sitting on.

Reclining pose. I quite like this. Managed to capture the full figure - something I was struggling with at my other two life drawing sessions that I have attended in Hamilton. On the top right is a sitting pose - from behind. I always sit so I can see out to the Waikato river - started drawing branches and leaves from the view. No water was drawn.

Two standing poses - bother from behind (I’m getting plenty of behind views). Around the figures I doodled landscapes and shapes.

Warm up poses. When I made it to to the last life drawing I was late and missed out on the warm ups. It’s very important to warm up and since it’s only two hours (including the break) there is very little time to warm up. All the poses are squeezed into the one layer. There is often no time to create a new layer for a pose and it’s better to just overlap the drawings.

Continued with abandoned water purification plant, though here I’ve written water treatment plant. Same kind of idea. Drawing plenty of circles.

On Thursday evening I attended Writers Den Hamilton. This was the writing exercise we did during the meet up. We went around the room and spoke a word that we then used to turn into a story. My word was layers.

The drawings around the writing was created at Hamilton Computer Club. The speaker was two guys from PB Tech.

Artwork from the past week - I attended life drawing on Friday and GovtHack.

Drawn at govthack. The bear was reference from somewhere

Ideas for govthack. My first idea was to continue with the MoE jobs website. Other ideas included Creative Commons polices in schools. Schools that have vs not. This is something I started. I liked the idea of entering NZ Best Data Journalism. Another idea that is a bit different is to look at public library software management and analyse regional usage. I found this data online that covered public libraries in New Zealand.

Landscape that was drawn during govthack. Warming up…

Drawn on the Friday night at GovtHack. Was watching a doco about Muslims in London - that’s why the god is great statement is there.

I had considered to make a parody for govthack - taking inspiration from North Korea and Soviet Union. I guess that was why I was watching this doco - to generate some ideas for the site.

Hamilton E-Commerce Meetup. This was on Thursday night. 6 people showed which was good numbers. I drank a beer and drew this. Only notes I took was Magento - open source php software. I wrote under it Python Ecommerce libraries - I would rather use Python than a PHP library as I can integrate it into my current scripts easily.

My main project at GovtHack this year was to redo the Jobs.Govt.NZ site. This is ideas and notes for the About page.

The categories of jobs.

Front page. We have an important jobs for you! Then listing of all the categories.

This was done after govthack. Moving beyound jobs.govt.nz and looks at job bank - Ministry of Social Development. One idea was to merge the govt and non-govt job listings together.

This is tags for jobs. Areas and locations where the jobs are located. Below these tags is a landscape and the words: ‘work, work’. I wanted some illustration to add to the website since all I really had done up to now was notes. Illustrations for categories and tags would be neat.

Life Drawing which was completed before govthack. Several back poses. Her hair is always great to draw. Love the shapes it makes on her back.

Portrait of her face with arm coming into the foreground. I included the ghost tattoo she has. Her arm is floating on the river.

Standing poses. Side on portraits. Especially happy with arm on left. Captured tattoos. They always make drawing the figure more interesting.

Artwork from the past week. Had the Wacom drawing tablet connected to the Raspberry Pi 3 that is attached to a large television. Still have the portable Raspberry Pi with touch screen but it’s nice to work on a large monitor - especially for tonal and color layers.

Majority of this artwork is digitising pencil drawings from 2012/2013.

Working vertical. Line drawing reference included works from Levin, Wellington, Auckland and RedditGetsDrawn portraits.

Grayscale tonal layer of my old school in Levin. Unlike the previous artwork this is just one pencil drawing reference.

The line layer of Levin North School drawing. I added extras to the drawing including triangles and waves at the bottom of the artwork.

A Pepper and Carrot artwork. The reference was a pencil comic strip of Pepper and Carrot in the desert. I added legs to Pepper and remixed the logo. Pepper was drawn again from a pencil reference.

Montage of traced pencil enviorment drawings - Levin, Wellington, South Island, and Auckland. Two portraits (four people) from RedditGetsDrawn.

Drawings completed on my trip to Napier. Still using 7 inch tft with pi2b for these. Lost the screws for mounting the pi and touch screen. Brought some new but they were m3 and i needed m2.5. Instead of the 7inch I’ve switched back to an old 480px 320px touch screen. It has been hard to walk and draw with the 7inch so looking foward to walking with the 3inch and comparing the difference. Not drawing for some time also helps with motivation to draw well walking.

ArtCtrl figures and landscapes. Arms holding spears.

Some figures. Drawings of objects, bin, post.

creative commons words sketch.

Slitaz. The operating system for spiders. Was inspired to draw this after a comment on pepper&carrot over the operating system the spiders would be using.

Pepper&Carrot portrait on the right. Creative Commons icons - open access, culture and heritage etc.

Sitting on waterfront in Napier overlooking the ocean. Drawing of the struture leading out to water. Captured a figure standing in the distance.

Signs and trees around Napier. Tried to look for interesting objects to draw. Landscape in the distance studies.

Sitting in the square. Study of park bench surronded by plants. signposts with lights on top.

Sketch of the landscape. Took time with this to get the shape and curves of the hills. Group of trees in a bunch, with buildings and objects running along the coast. In the foreground a the object leading out to the water with someone sitting on it. A wavey line for the water - attempt to capture the direction on the waves.

Archway looking out to the hills, tree, and building. Scrubbery.

Pepper&Carrot sketches. Drawing a few different characters. Focus on smaller details - like plant in a cup.

Currently reading War & Peace. Halfway finished. Signs and frames in Napier.

The final ruby drawings that didn’t make it into the last post.

Fireplace with pots and jug. Trees and roofs. Chimley,

Writing out ideas when reading War and Peace.

Slight break between posts. I have been drawing though, but been travelling for the past week. I went down to Napier (where I mostly did reading since the weather was bad), and up to Auckland for a half day conference and got along to a bunch of meet ups at the same time. It’s been a great trip but happy to be home to rest. Here is the artwork created during the trip.

This was started before the trip. On the bottom left are two characters that were refered from Raspberry Pi artwork. The rest of the page has drawings of Matamata - a town I stopped by in for the day on the way to Napier. There is also the usual landscapes and spikes happening.

I had KFC for lunch in Matamata. It was a large lunch and I stayed there for sometime and drew - my coke container and bench. It was a cold day so needed to be inside.

EnterTheGungeon line drawing. The reference was a image on RedditGetsDrawn.

Grayscale layer of EnterTheGungeon. Slightly incomplete but it’s good enough.

My reason for going to Auckland was to attend Adobe MakeIt. I’m really not a user of Adobe products but I thought I would go anyway - for the experience. I don’t attend attended art/design conferences often so it certain was an experience.

At the registration desk they told me that there was a draw wall - an area setup with sharper markies to draw on. I couldn’t resist myself and got stuck into it before the conference and during the break. Often people are disturbed by my artwork so it was interested to see the reactions I got. Towards the end of the break I had a woman - Tui talk to me and asked me what I was drawing. I explained it’s just a character and a landscape in the background. Adobe were happy with my effort. Shout out to them for letting me attend and whoever idea it was for a draw wall. It helped me. Allot.

During the conference speakers I drew. It was mostly notes from the slides and what they were saying. These first notes were about the video features in Adobe products. There was some impressive features but I think I will just stick to OpenShot.

The final notes of the day. The best talk of the day was Mark G who is a astro photographer that talked about his trips to Kenya. His slides were full of photographs and videos and his comments were excellent. My sister would of liked the talk - she’s more of a photographer than I am.

I face-palmed several times during the conference, especially at comments such as open, free, alternative download and upload terms (sucking is a thing?). There was allot some good comedy which got a laugh from the crowd.

Would attend again.

Before attending Adobe MakeIt I went to a lunchtime Microsoft Azure meet up. The topic was b2c aka identity management. This is something of great interest of mine - I’ve played around in the past with python scripts to log users and passwords. Microsoft supplied an excellent lunch and I had a chance to chat to several people (mostly about my Pi setup). I need a pamphlet to hand to people that ask me about this!

The talk itself was good. It was presented by two people from Datacom. There were slides and a demo followed by questions. Security is a big part of Identity management so when they dropped the H bomb it was funny. It would be better if they used cracking or pwned. Makes more sense. Anyway, it gave me a chuckle.

This was the only drawing I did when was in Napier. The wealth was horrible the first two days so I stayed inside and did reading. Finished a bunch of books including War and Peace. Finally on the Sunday it cleared up somewhat and I headed to the city to draw. The waterfront was freezing so I didn’t stay for long. I sat outside Napier Public Library for 30 mins and drew.

Straight after Adobe MakeIt I attended Serverless Auckland. The speaker was Sam (@samkroom) who gave an overall of what serverless is. These are the notes I took during the meet up. Sorry for the lack of thick to thin. It was an excellent talk and I learnt allot about serverless.

Drawing before the trip.

Another drawing in Matamata. Focus on the buildings and trees. LOTR and Hobbit fans would love this town.

On the night I arrived to Auckland I attended WordPress Auckland (notice everymeetup I’ve attended I don’t really use the products and services). The people were great. There was no speaker instead they held a q&a. I enjoyed it and I was able to push Creative Commons (their site is WordPress) and GovHack.

Two portraits. The one on the left is katie_pornhub and on the right yummycakeface. These are both created using reference from RedditGetsDrawn.

That was a big post. No life drawing, but hoping to make it to a session tomorrow. Many thanks to all the organisers and sponsors of the events.

Attended Rails Camp NZ 2016. It was my first Ruby event. The location was Wellington, New Zealand. Hired out YMCA campgrounds on the weekend.

beer, cider, rum.

On the Saturday morning I went for a walk and drew horses.

The Saturday talks.

Talks were given in a unconference style. There was no official timetable but had a paper at the event with times where people could give talks. This was very similar to the DevMob even I went to last year.

The food and drinks were excellent. Nice to be in the shade, reading The Pillars of the Earth and drinking apple cider. Currently 70% through the book. Events progress the story.

Drawing the environment was fun. I focused mostly on trees as I had them on my mind due to The Great Tree in Pepper&Carrot.

The weekend was perfect and I would attend future camps or conferences in the future. There were five from Hamilton at the camp so worth looking at a ruby hamilton meetup.

I have just spend the weekend in Wellington. I attended the first OERSprint. On Saturday a group of people came together to create open education resources for teachers.

Here is the artwork that I created during the sprint and my time in Wellington:

A jazz band playing on Cuba Street. I drew this after the sprints finished on Saturday. They had attracted quite a crowd. It’s moments like this I miss living in Wellington - the arts feel very much alive and happening.

Brain storming ideas for oersprint. Was taking ideas from others in the room and getting them down. Allot of the time it was just doodling, away in my world.

The headless figure in the bottom left catches my attention.

It’s been a long time since I have done anything with the draft novel I wrote in November. This is some artwork for it. The four planets/moon arguing about being blown up.

Drawing of tables and bolts.

Landscape with figures.

Taking a page from wikieducator on OERu and illustrating it.

Drawn for ConceptArt - Panels of the week. Create a comic strip!

What is the OERu? Mostly writing out the text.

I spent Sunday walking around Wellington drawing various objects - sign posts, pillar, buildings.

Drawing of trees and pillars in Wellington.

I missed out on attending LCA2016 but was lucky enough to make it to OWASP - a one day security conference. Like all the recent conferences I have attended I took in my Raspberry Pi and painted. The Pi was of interest, getting questions when morning tea arrived.

The drawings from the day:

Leaving Hamilton early on the bus the majority of this was drawn on the trip to Auckland. It was a long bus trip - 3 hours. The traffic was bad but I arrived only ten minutes late.

Sitting up the back I noticed lots of people using Slack, which I was kind of surprised about. The first speaker - Dan Wallis talked about Credit Card Fraud. I drew him with a landscape in the background.

Crypto talk. This is interesting for me as I have played around with hashing passwords with Python a little. Something I would like to explore further. Not allot of drawing here - mostly sketching of words. Though I have drawn the company logo - bug.

FooBlog. Exploring vulnerabilities in a blog. OAUTH2

A talk on Kaltura (an open source video platform). This was drawn in the afternoon and I started to get too tired to do much at this point.

Full page of drawings. The mornings I always get lots drawn as I’m fresh. Laura Bell had a bunch of images on her slides that I was able to draw. I like it when speakers have images on the slides as it gives me something to draw. The only other stuff I can draw is the speaker or things around the room (AV equipment etc).

The final drawing of the day. I give up.

A talk on WebRTC. Speaker was very entertaining. Draw a portrait of him and took a bunch of notes.

Till next year OWASP…

Artwork from the past week. Taking old pencil street enviorments into GIMP along with life drawing on Friday.

Taking an old pencil sketch into GIMP. The location is Courtney Place in Wellington. Have been digitising lots of Pepper and Carrot sketches so it has been a natural process to take my own pencil drawings into GIMP.

Grayscale layer. Whenever I use to digitise pencil work I would always create a grayscale layer. My favourite area is the traffic lights and the courte sign.

Colour layer. Using more green than I use to and in different areas such as the figure. Yellow is used for the buildings roof and walls. The floor and sky - blue.

I partook in a Twitter chat last week - create lounge and have started listening to the podcast. This was my warm up drawing in life drawing on Friday - I was listening to an episode.

Hamilton line. Again digitising pencil drawing this time it’s at Garden Place. The structure is a stage. I added details such as triangles.

Hamilton grayscale. Attempted to keep details in areas such as the structures triangles.

Three drawings of Mia from life drawing on Friday. Included is a portrait of someone new I drew from the backgroup. Sometimes I wish we had multiply models!

Mia looking towards the right. Again in the background added portrait from someone in the class. Lots of white space that a landscape could of been added to.

Two drawings of Mia. The legs are extra large in the foreground and I am happy with the shape of the feet.

Four drawings of Mia.

Warm ups of Mia. Attempted to capture the whole body. Needed to make sure that the portrait was small enough to fit everything else in.

Grayscale Levin street drawings merge. Took 4 different pencil drawings I created this art montage.

The line layer of the Levin street drawings merge.

Shopping centre in Palmerston North. Final pencil drawing digitise for this post.

Palmy Pillar line. Traced over pencil sketch that was drawn in Palmerston North.

Created at my brothers place. Started as a portrait of Pepper and then let an imagination over. Landscapes, spikes, waves.

Currently in Levin. I am over 50% through The Pillars of the Earth. It is long but I am enjoying it.

Talk on Creative Commons in schools. Show the policy and how to get it into schools. Examples of Creative Commons in practice. ArtCtrl/ArtControl remixing Jem, Hicksville, Pepper&Carrot. Always on the lookout for free licensed artwork to remix.

I decided to add the four horsemen into the world of Pepper and Carrot.

In Good Omens they are featured and I wanted to write a novel about the characters. Mixing them into Pepper and Carrot is interested. Moulding them into current events - such as them being involved with The Great Tree.

Characters. This was drawn on the bus travelling from Hamilton to Levin. 1120 was the bus number, written on the piece of artwork.

The Great Tree. It’s black trunk leading up to it’s branches. It’s leaves swish in the heavy winds. Underneath are the residents buildings.

Mixing in ideas from reading The Pillars of The Earth.

Line version of the Pillars artwork.

The character Saffron whom I plan to make a main character in my pepper and carrot novel.

The next for Death in the Pepper and Carrot novel. Need to type out and edit the text. Using the wacom drawing tablet for a mixture of drawing and writing helps ideas.

Text for the Witch in Pepper and Carrot novel. Again type out and edit the text.