Chipmunks and Warm Macbooks

I'm happy to report that Ernie and the Violets are still alive despite my loving care. I'm worried about scaring Ernie to death, so I only tend to approach his fish bowl to give him his two pellets in the morning, two in the afternoon. As a result, Ernie gets VERY excited whenever I visit him, enthusiastically hurling himself at the surface of the water (upside-down, of course), gulping in gustatorial anticipation.

Illustration above: Yes, I know Ernie is supposed to be upside-down. But it's the first time I've attempted to draw a goldfish, and I figure I need to learn to draw them rightside-up first.

I tried the woodcut effect in an Inkygirl cartoon but wasn't too crazy about it:



Still, it was worth a shot. I love experimenting in Corel Painter. I know I should pick a style and stick with it, but I'm having too much fun!

Only a week to go until FilKONtario! I'm also very much looking forward to a visit from my friend Sibylle from Germany before the convention:



And of course there will be hordes of Brits in town for the convention! I've already taken a chunk of time off this month (unlike those with day jobs, we freelancers don't get paid when we take time off :-)) else I'd want to be trailing after you all, pointing out interesting places to see and interesting things to eat in Toronto.

Feel free to bug me before or at the convention with any questions you may have about the downtown area, esp. bookstores. I may not be able to answer all of them them, but I'm willing to give it a shot. If you post your questions in Livejournal, I'm sure other Torontonians will help as well.

Links O' The Day

Chipmunks and Warm Macbooks: sooooooooooooo cute! Thanks to Ray for the link.

Full Bloom Tea: SO gorgeous. A tad too expensive to indulge in myself, but I can admire, can't I? (thanks to Ray)

Kinetic Sculpture: A BMW commercial, but it also happens to be a very interesting supershort documentary about a cool kinetic sculpture as well. :-) (thanks to Jim B.)




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Photos, comics and artstuff

I created the image above in Corel Painter 9.5; I've been experimenting with a woodcut look. I basically just create the initial drawing with thick black lines in a layer separate from the background colour, then etched away some of the black with background colour. Brushes used: Smooth Ink Pen, varying sizes (I changed it as I worked, using the square bracket keys).

I notice that Corel Painter has come out with a new version.

Hm.
*drool*



Will Write For Chocolate has been updated. Click the image above for a bigger version.




Dave Clement was visiting with Beckett and Paul out in California before Consonance. During his visit, he played some music for both Casey's and Riley's classes at school. The photo above was taken by Beckett, who is one of the best photographers of people that I know; she gave me permission to re-post it here. Check out the photos she took of Joey Shoji, Kristoph Klover, and Dave Clement, for instance. Beckett's main focus, however, is illustration...so do visit her online sketchbook!



Above: I cropped and tweaked a photo that Tony Fabris took with my camera in California. Wow! Women on Writing is interviewing me for an upcoming issue, and wanted a photo of both me and Jeff. Jeff is not the most...er...enthusiastic model for photographs :-), especially couple photographs, so I was pretty pleased with how this came out. Thanks, Tony!

By the way, I'm also going to be a guest blogger for Sessions Online School Of Design in early April. This is the first time I've been asked to blog about ILLUSTRATION rather than writing! I'll post a link in Blatherings when my blog entries appear.



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MOO MiniCards, Blood Ties and Seanan's CD

My MOO Minicards arrived while we were in California! I ordered them on February 19th and they landed in my mailbox around Wed. Mar. 7th (my sister was checking my mailbox up to then), which is nearly 2.5 weeks. During that time, I received an automated e-mail message saying that there had been a printing problem, and that my cards were being reprinted.



Though I was disappointed not to get the cards before I left for California, I'm glad there was some kind of quality check going on. Apparently some people are having problems with their MOO cards. When I was in California, Beckett showed me some of her cards which had a blank strip at the bottom despite her careful cropping. Mine turned out fine, though.

I was very pleased with the quality of my cards. Nice satiny finish, thick cardstock, and the colours turned out well. I chose 20 different illustrations, which meant 5 cards of each (100 total). The designs with bright colours and simple lines turned out the best, in my opinion.

This is what the back of each card looks like:





My only real beef is that I wish I could have chosen a higher-res version of my Flickr user icon (which was from a photo by illustrator/photographer Beckett Gladney). The low-res fuzziness is pretty obvious. Hopefully this will be a future MOO option!

Instead of using the cropping tool on MOO, I created a template and did my cropping first, storing my images in a separate Flickr set. That way I could take my time in choosing and cropping, then just load the set when I was ready and move the already-cropped images over (instead of having to do all my cropping in one session on the MOO site). For tips on how to get accurate cropping on your MOO MiniCards and image sizes, see this FAQ. I basically created a template that could be shrunk to a 692x1600 pixel image, making sure to account for about 2mm "bleed area" around the edges.

After you place an order, you can re-order the same set if you want. I'd like to re-order certain images but want to swap around other cards -- another advantage of doing my cropping offline; I just have to readjust my MOO Flickr set and then load the images I want without having to do any re-cropping.



I posted in Inkygirl, asking if anyone else was using their MOO Minicards for promotional purposes. Screenwriter Jurgen Wolff wrote: "I love moo cards too--have attached a scan of my set of minimoos, with one of the back as well. Only problem is they're too expensive to use for my guerrilla action--slipping into every writing-related book in every bookshop I come across... I am thinking of getting 2-sided business cards printed up with these kinds of designs/slogans, they're cheaper." The Web site URL mentioned below, by the way, doesn't go live until April:



All in all, I'm very happy with my MOO cards and plan to do another print run when my current cards are running low. If you see me in person, feel free to ask for one! Or let me know if you'd like to swap MOO cards by mail.

You can find out more about MOO MiniCards at MOO.com.



I remember when I first received the portable CD player on the right. It looked SO small (compared to a full-blown CD player) and slick at the time. At the Apple store in California, Jeff bought me one of the new iPod Shuffles. Holy cow, is it TINY. And it holds 1 GB of audio! My old CD player looks like a dinosaur in comparison.

And now I'm wondering what this iPod Shuffle will look like to my nieces when they're my age.

Links O' The Day

Tanya Huff's Blood Ties blog! For those that don't know, Blood Ties (based on Tanya's Blood books) is now airing on Lifetime at 10 pm ET/PT on Sundays.

Suicide squirrels driving utilities nuts: Thanks to Dave Weingart for the link.

A while back, I mentioned that I had recorded some flute for Seanan McGuire's new CD. Seanan is now taking pre-orders for Stars Fall Home. "Featuring fifteen tracks of pure goodness, with performances by artists from all around the world (represented countries include the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany), this is truly going to be an album not to be missed." The CD will be released in late June. And do check out the very cool cartoon that Seanan drew of me on her Featured Artists page!





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Cocooning

The above illustration was created for Illustration Friday. This week's topic: "Communication."

We've had a couple of relatively quiet weekends, which has been wonderful. I've done lots of reading and writing. My novel revision is turning into more of a rewrite than I expected (surprise surprise) so is taking me longer, but I'm very happy with the results so far.

I've been slipping into hermit mode lately; I'm sure it has something to do with the winter. All I want to do is burrow away into my office-cave, cocoon, and write. If I gave in to this tendency, of course, I'd end up as an anemic semi-comatose balloon, so I've been forcing myself to go outside at least once every day. Once I'm at the gym or out on a walk, I'm glad I'm doing it. The challenge is getting myself out the door! But I seem to be succeeding at overcoming my slothful inclinations; I've managed to get to the gym or other cardio-workout at least 4-5 times a week for the past few weeks.

I've gotten hooked on steel-cut oats in the morning lately. Quick-cooking oatmeal is tasteless mush in comparison! Dear lord. The only problem with steel-cut oats is that they take so long to cook, and I'm not the patient type. I've gotten into the habit of soaking them in water overnight, which vastly shortens the cooking time, but this means I have to remember to DO this the night before. It's worth it, though. Any other oatmeal fans out there?

Very much looking forward to our California trip. I'm bringing my laptop so I can do some writing every day, but also plan to do a lot of just hanging out with people. After the convention, Jeff and I be staying with friends (the Bohnhoffs, then Andrew and Jenny). We're also hoping to get together with some other friends (from university days) whom we haven't seen in a while as well. Unfortunately we could only take a week off; we have so many friends on the West coast with whom we would have enjoyed spending more time.

Also looking forward to California weather! It doesn't sound as if it's going to be HUGELY warmer than Toronto, but at least there won't be snow. I love snow, but it's always around this time of year I start getting tired of it. :-)

Link O' The Day

The squirrels in California are getting nastier! Thanks to Bruce for the link! (Bruce is one of the friends we're going to be seeing in California, yay)



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deviantART delivery and print quality

As I mentioned before, so far I'm going with deviantART as an online prints service. They offer a wide variety of prints with a choice in finishes. I ordered some sample prints about two weeks ago, which arrived yesterday, and I was pretty pleased with how they turned out. Each print came protected in a cardboard sleeve, and the colours seemed fine to me. I ordered the "matte" finish, and I've also ordered one in "lustre" finish (should arrive in about a week) to compare.

I'm still going to do more investigating before I start "officially" publicizing my print shop but if you're curious, you can see what prints I have available now. And thanks so much to those who have already purchased prints! I haven't figured out if there's a way of finding out who has made purchases, but I do know what prints have been bought. I've decided to remove the small white margin from the print shown in the photo above, by the way, to make it consistent with the other Little Nightmare pics. The change(s) should go through once my newly uploaded images are approved.

I recently discovered Imagekind, which is apparently a Seattle-based startup in acquisition discussions with Amazon. Imagekind has a more professional-looking site, and also sells frames for your prints. There are tiered levels of services for artists. I've signed up for the free account (200 MB bandwith/storage, up to 24 images) and am going to check it out.

I realize that I could probably get much higher print quality by taking the files to a pro print shop but unfortunately I lack the time and motivation. A growing number of people have been asking about buying prints so I figured I could do this by using an online service that did pretty much EVERYTHING for me, even if it meant I'd get a smaller cut. Anyway, I'm using my deviantART print store for now, but will continue investigating.

Thanks to those who answered my Morning vs Night people survey in Inkygirl yesterday! I've posted the results today.

Will Write For Chocolate has been updated! Accompanying blog topic: Useful software For Writers (Part 2). I also posted a survey for writers about what question THEY tend to dread. :-) Please feel free to post your answer in Will Write For Chocolate. Click on the image below for a bigger version.

Links O' The Day

Body painting: Incredible examples of body painting by Guido Daniele. Amaaaaazing! Be sure to click on the hand painting section (the one with the hand painted like a cheetah).

Pooktre Tree Shapers: The site could use some design help, but the shaped trees are impressive...they look like a younger cousin of the Ents. :-)

RiverStyx.com: I limited myself to only exploring a little bit of this site because I could tell it was a potential time vampire. At first glance, it looks sort of Myst-like, sort of educational. I'd be interested in feedback from any of you who are brave enough to explore further.




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