Insomnia Zombie

Biked today from Rockwood, PA to Meyersdale (and back, of course) with my hubby and two of our friends. The Salisbury Viaduct is a killer for people like me who inherited the fear-of-heights gene. Absolutely beautiful day for a ride!

Went to State College today to pick up two pieces I had in the Images 2007 show. One of them won the William D. Davis award in drawing (!). The winners are posted here.

So if you’ve checked back here at all lately, you’ve probably noticed I haven’t been around. So true. I’ve been (happily) busy working on a book which I finished a couple weeks ago. Amazon has it up for preorder here. I felt like I was grinding my wheels for so long before I got that phone call. But the people at Lark Books are great to work with which made up for the lull in action. Thanks Celia and Robin! When Celia called she said, “I’ve been collecting your postcards.” What a fantastic feeling. Anyway, here’s the image from the latest postcard.

I was asked to illustrate a story about one tech’s experiences with technologically-challenged people who call in for support, and this is what I came up with. He had dealt with people who thought they had to physically aim the mouse toward the screen, and in one of the calls he took, the caller’s computer wasn’t even plugged in.

My mother used to tell a story about riding on the handlebars of her sister’s bike, dredging up memories of braking and pavement; the “Aunt Emma incident”. Although not verbatim, this image was inspired by my mother and her sister during the happier seconds before Aunt Emma ever became involved.

I’m so sick of spam you have no idea. At the end of January, someone decided it would be a great idea to use my studio domain name to send out spam emails. They didn’t use my actual email address, they made up their own but used my domain name for the rest. I only know this because I have my email account set up to accept anything that comes in using my domain name regardless of the rest of the address, just in case somebody types something wrong or doesn’t know the exact email. So I got about 250 emails in my “IN” box being returned to “sender” that I had to sift through to find the legitimate ones. I’ve also gotten emails from some of the people who have received the spam telling me they didn’t want me to spam them anymore. I changed some settings on my server that hopefully will fix the problem of someone else using my domain name, but it’s Feb. 24 and I’m still getting the returned spam! What kind of illegitimate business would try to sell something (they were pushing Adobe software products) by spam marketing? This stuff had to be illegal.

My second gripe about spam is filters. If someone spends the time setting up their email to filter out the nasty stuff they don’t want in their “IN” box, does somebody else really think that the recipient will change their minds and open the spam when the subject line uses “@#^*” in the middle of words to bypass the filters?

Am I the only one here?

So I’ve been asked whether Photoshop or Painter is the right call…Well, it really depends on what you want to do. Both have advantages and disadvantages, and to work around these, I actually use both.

Photoshop does all the photo stuff great, such as color correcting or dodge and burn, and it can make intricate selections in many useful ways. The healing brush and patch tool are also nothing to sneeze at. Photoshop also has the advantage of being the popular kid on the playground, so there are brushes and filters you can add from third-party vendors.

Painter, on the other hand, is definitely made with the artist in mind. This is a fantastic tool when you need a piece of analog-looking artwork without the mess (and with multiple levels of undo). You can paint in watercolor, oil and acrylic, or draw with pencils, crayons or pen & ink, just to name a few. And the great part is, it actually looks like you’ve painted in watercolor, oil and acrylic, etc. I also like being able to rotate my canvas as I work, just as I would be able to had I actually been drawing on real paper.

Here’s how I’ve been working lately:
I’ll draw my sketch by hand (on real paper with a real pencil), and scan the sketch into Photoshop. In Photoshop, I’ll make any rearranging/resizing changes that may be necessary, and save the changes as a .PSD file. Next, I’ll open the file in Painter and do whatever painting or drawing I’m planning on doing, and save the file in all its layers as a native .RIF as I go. After I’ve finished in Painter, I’ll drop all the layers (like flattening in Photoshop), save the file as a .PSD, and open it in Photoshop. There I can correct any colors, or convert to whatever color profile I need to. I’ve also started using grunge brushes in my work which I’ll apply at this point (please see http://www.the-rots.blogspot.com for some grunge edge examples — all of the color and pen & ink has been added in Painter). From Photoshop, I can save the file however I need to (there are about 16 different types of files Photoshop can save as) or use the nifty “Save for Web” feature.

Photoshop or Painter? It depends where you want to go with it.

Okay. So I’m noticing a pattern here. Illustration Friday seems to be the only time I take the time to blog. Maybe after the semester’s over things will calm down a bit. Hoping so!

How about this poor little guy? For IF, thinking about how clear a pane of glass can be. If humans would just leave the dirt on the windows…

This one was for an article about secondhand smoke and kids. You can see the original article in the paper here (they still have it up!). It’s really hard to tell what’s going on in the smaller version, but if you click on it, you can see it biggie-sized. When it ran originally, it spread across the full six-column format of the paper, so size wasn’t a problem.

How about a weather vane? Even though I grew up on a farm, we never had one. But really, is anyone actually certain of the agricultural value of knowing which direction the wind is blowing anyway? Even so, I still think they’re pretty neat to look at.