The Open Roooooaaad

experimental boot painting with purple/gold chameleon pigment from paintwithpearl mixed into leather studio clear gloss. Im sure much better results could be achieved with airbrush but I dont feel like it! I think Ill goose the effect a bit with interference orange on top...

Spent months on this wig... made from a 24" blonde ebay lacefront, three packs of 35" weft extensions from epic cosplay (two platinum blonde and one peach blonde), and some wefts handmade from kanekalon braiding hair. Between work and school and burning out over and over all of my projects take a long time and most don't get completed :( BUT I'm almost done with this baby and I'm wearing him to dragoncon yay I made a highlight on my profile of my (mis)adventures in dyeing it for anyone curious about the custom colors. I airbrushed the ends with a little bit of pink and purple, which I am happy with for small areas. I wouldn't airbrush a full wig because it changes the texture of the hair and I plan on wearing a white shirt with this because I'm a crazy person. Dye isn't 100% transfer proof but it's close and keeps the hair washable. Nitpicking the hairline right now (needs more sideburns) and then I plan to make a ponytail as fluffy and massive as I can muster! The fun part is almost heeeere!!!!

tomorrowland was all of the things i love!!!!! retrofuturism! saving the world thru SCIENCE! athena's wendy dress (seriously LOOK AT THIS DRESS)! Antique interdimensional rocketships! Hugh Laurie dressed like a crotchety mayor of the emerald city of Oz! murderous yet quirky robot people! directed by brad bird!!! this review sums up how I feel pretty well. I really needed this movie xD

Today I joined the ranks of that illustrious class of people who've performed a smartphone baptism by toilet.

grabendolch said: Hey there, what’s that second tool panel just next to your taskbar? it looks like it’s from some art program but not a part of SAI

It's called Paint Dock, it's for slate PCs (samsung series 7 & asus eee slate) to make drawing programs actually useable. I have spent... a while... since getting my eee slate trying to basically work as something where I can be a couch potato digital artist :p WHICH REMINDS ME I did intend to properly review the computer. At least a little :p

Downside is that the harddrive is seriously 64GB. I bought a 120GB to replace it with but I'm not quite ready to bust open a $1k machine yet!! I did get a 128GB sd card for it though (yes they totally make those now!) which is enough to cram all my art-related stuff on so I'm good. The other downside is that the drivers are REALLY fussy and it took ages for me to get pressure sensitivity working properly and across different programs. I got it working in SAI and Photoshop, I haven't got it to work with Inkscape though I don't want to mess with it anymore. A few times I lost pressure sensitivity at the drop of a hat and the last time I spent FOUR HOURS uninstalling and reinstalling drivers to get it working again UGH. I was able to carefully write down all the steps I took this time so hopefully that will do the trick. The pressure curve utility makes it good enough for painting, it only has 250 levels of sensitivity compared to 2000+ on the intuous tablets but so far it's been good enough for me. My hand gets crampy a little more often due to having to press a bit harder (less sensitive means its harder to get really really light strokes) but I think with tweaking the settings a bit further I can get that a little better too!

The other other downside is that the MSRP is $1000 but for the most part it's only available for $1400, I got super lucky and it was $1k at the microsoft store but it's not anymore last I checked (plus getting it thru them it came with win7 ultimate and no bloatware!). It's definitely worth it at that price... at the higher price ehhhh, I'D still have bought it but that is what being a couch potato digital artist is worth to me XD becase it's basically a laptop w/o a keyboard it is a TRUE digital sketchbook that is fast enough to run photoshop! So yeah. it's awesome.

This drawing is old!  I feel like sharing it cos I still love it and is stupidly still one of my favorite portraits I've ever done, because real people are so firetrucking hard to draw. Hng. Plus Bob and Harry (from the Dresden Files) made the most adorable odd couple on tv (more than the actual original one /blasphemy). I'm a horrible person who actually preferred the tv show to the books, even though I love both, but honestly I think Paul Blackthorne's Harry is so much more likeable and it just took me FOREVER to get over book Harry's long black trenchcoat, being one of the things that makes it really impossible for me to like urban fantasy very much LOL

Plus I mean HELLO Terrence Mann, the tv writers giving Bob an awesome human backstory, making him fussy and English, FTW. Also since I'm already opening myself up for some flames I might as well add that Jim Butcher's potrayal of female characters is kind of... gross. THERE I SAID IT

Oh god I'm really rambling here.

Stuff like this is pretty livejournal but whateverrr. This is an art tumblr and if I'm not gonna post art I might as well complain about it WOO

I thought about it a lot more and realized that I AM shy. Not in general, I don't really have any social anxiety IRL, though sometimes people think I am shy (or a huge snob) because I'm super quiet or whatever. I am TOTALLY freakin shy about my art tho omg. I remember telling my mom that if I ever had my own gallery show I wouldn't be able to actually be there, ohmygod, a room full of people looking at my art with me THERE? NOPE I'm one of those assholes who won't let people look in my sketchbook. Its not like its a diary or anything but nope. nope.

I wasn't like this at ALL when I was small but when you're a hypersensitive hyperemotional weird kid you either learn to grow a thick skin (which everyone in the damn world insists sensitive people do, guess what, it's not always possible, this is how I am MADE) or you just make a container for youself deep inside and you don't share it with anybody. I am made almost entirely out of secrets. A two dimensional holographic projection, only one side visible. I feel like there is pressure to share my creative self on one hand and then on the other hand I'm supposed to just let the downsides of getting attention just slide off my back? When that stuff hits me way harder than it has any right to? I've been doing this long enough to have figured out what I can and can't handle. And YEAH it's honestly not much! I don't WANT to be this way but I've spent over 10 years trying to change and it didn't work so why should I feel ashamed anymore. Maybe someday things will change and I'll be in a safer place for all this. I'd like that because I believe I have a LOT to offer, everyone wants to make their mark in the world I guess. I have some ideas and plans for my life but I dunno if that'll be what makes the difference. MAYBE SOMEDAY I'll just be this unstoppable fountain of awesome creative works.

I'll keep striving to make that happen. It just hasn't yet. SHRUG.

Taken with Instagram

When designing characters (especially costumes--I'm thinking specifically of the organic-nanotech Iron Man) do you find yourself doing a lot of research specifically for that project, or does it tend to grow more often out of subjects you've already taken an interest in/have knowledge of? Are there any particular resources you find yourself using frequently for that kind of research?

-tyuran

Gosh. WELL. I read. A lot. Like when I go on a research tear I read so much it freaks out people around me 8| Super easy to read lots because I own a kindle. I just get obsessed with things and I have to learn everything I can so I tend to start with wikipedia and then move on to books, and lurk on discussion forums about the topic. (example, I am obsessed with jeeps, I am a member of the cult of Wrangler we have a secret wave and everything and I want to turn mine into a zombie apocalypse response vehicle someday :p and now it is super easy for me to talk about cars with all the dudebros I work with ffff)

Specifically with biotech Ironman tho? I was majoring in biology before I had to quit school for the final time due to uh, poverty. I love SCIENCE so when I nerd out over sci/fi I get tons of ideas for story and character design. It makes me a huge snob tho, like seriously people need to stop giving JJ Abrams all these sci/fi franchises he can't science fiction at ALL. UGH. Like sci/fi is exciting cos science is exciting dammit, and looking toward what's really possible. I saw that the Daily Show has a new segment called Neil Degrasse Tyson: BUZZKILL OF SCIENCE lol that man is my hero.

SO YEAH. Character design I do lots of research on... everything. And if I have a new character who does something I don't know anything about (like, my character Shae is a pilot so I spent some time studying seaplanes and helicopters while I developed her), then it's pretty exciting to learn a new thing! I've actually redesigned my character Edie (she's a giant robot mechanic lol) a bit recently because I've been working with industrial mechanics at my dayjob and have learned a lot about work clothing/industrial safety gear that I didn't find out thru reading. It's like that writer's thing where you just call all your life experiences "research" lol so that's pretty cool.

I noticed that this raised some questions, lol. I did waffle on it for a while but yeah there was some reasoning behind it (no really)

a. rubber bullets.

b. she is a cop (detective NOPD anti-gang, coast guard reservist instead of full time) and feels naked without it /stereotype

c. she has great aim with firearms, not so much with powers.

d. edited her abilities so she has to switch her entire mass to energy form to use her power, no laser hand-blasts.

e. this version of Monica is when she is very new and doesn't have precise control over her ability, her resting energy state is basically a glowy white-light energy being that is diffused over a fairly wide area so she doesnt risk incinerating everything/one around her. When she concentrates it she can tap into the cosmic background radiation to boost her intensity but its like opening power floodgates. This is great for battle against superbeings and giant monsters, not so much against humans. She CAN manifest at more midrange intensities but no matter what area of the spectrum she's at this would be either very annoying to downright dangerous (disrupting radio communications, internet and wifi, being too blindingly bright. Or uh giving everyone around her radiation poisoning/cancer... not really an acceptable form of collateral damage. Everyone tends to draw the line at weaponized throwing cars)

f. IN CONCLUSION, her two current settings are essentially "light show" and "atom bomb". 

/nerd

PS- later on she learns to reign it in enough to work as an Active Denial System though :p but takes a level of precision she doesn't initially have and would just microwave everything.