A digital painting of the activities…

Something warm and tropical one would think, but I decided on snow.  Here’s the WonderDog goofing around.

Snow Bandit

In the meantime, while waiting for Christmas (always a kid) I bought a new drawing tablet for my computer, because my old one was starting to skip.  Then I found a cool painting program called ArtRage that simulates real paint (well as close as you can get, with a computer anyway)

Here’s one of my humble attempts in the digital method – sorry FaceBookers – don’t know how this will show up there, you might have to click away from Facebook for a moment… (oh no! … Gasp! what if I can’t get back? AaaRGGH! what should I do? click on the view original post thing in Facebook)

Amy on the Rocks

So this is my digital painting.  If you click on the picture, you should get a bigger version.  (I think – I upgraded this blog software a while ago, and everything doesn’t work how I want it to just yet.  Another days project I guess.

In the coming days and/or weeks I hope to add some real paint stuff here too.

And for all you FaceBookers, here’s a link back to the farm. Yes, I’m poking a bit of fun at you.  Probably ’cause I just don’t get it – guess I’m just not quite into the 21s t century yet.

Like going through all of my digital photos and arranging them in folders by year, month, date, camera model, original and re-touched. Obsessive. Compulsive.

I’m straying from the subject from this post, though.

Determined as I am to get a few drawings to resemble anime – manga I have one to post here of my granddaughter, Natasha. It’s not completely original, I admit, ’cause it’s a manga – nized version of a photo taken at Christmas time last year. But I’m still learning the basics, so I get to cheat a little bit.

It only took one compulsive all nighter to get my first anime drawing,  Not bad at all.

Manga, literally translated, means “whimsical pictures”. The word first came into common usage in the late 18th century. (from Wikipedia) Most people think of manga as comic books drawn in the Japanese style. The fact is, they pictures are usually whimsical, even when they depict something as gory as decapitation – a subject that could well be the theme of a manga illustration.

Of course, being somewhat compulsive and obsessive, once a thought strikes me, it consumes me. My life will not have any meaning until I have completed at least one picture.

And it’s a lot harder than it looks.

I don’t want to just “copy” a picture. I want to make one of my own. My first idea was to draw it on the computer. That didn’t turn out so well. The lines were too jerky, and it just didn’t feel like drawing. Then I decided to use pencil and paper. Too many eraser marks and smudges, probably because I don’t know what I’m doing, and because I haven’t done that type of thing for some time. I scanned a couple of pencil drawings and tried touching them up on the computer. That didn’t work as well as I hoped.

So, I sent my feeble attempts to my son (ain’t the internet wonderful?) to ask his opinion and advice.

He pointed out a few areas that might help me out. He suggested I should work work on the eyes and shape of the head, the facial expressions, nose, mouth, body, legs, arms and hands. The hair was a little out, and the clothes weren’t quite right, and I should really consider attaching feet to the legs. And, last but not least, the boobs on the girl were too small.

I realized from this critique, that I was actually pretty close to having it perfect.

So, after deleting all of the old files and shredding all of the paper, I managed to come up with this:

This attempt was drawn from scratch using the computer, and my trusty old Wacom drawing tablet. I’m not a big Photoshop user, so I used the Gimp as the drawing program.

And yes, I know theres no boobs, arms, legs, body, hands, feet or clothes. I’ll get to them eventually.