Life is, as ever, superbusy. Being summertime, there's all kinds of things I want to go out and do, and Tom has been incredibly indulgent to my out-and-about whims lately. I dragged him out to the Charcoal Corral, where we had a quite nice afternoon (after he stopped being angry about my bad direction-giving...oops). Last week, I dragged him to the county fair, where I had wine ice cream (AMAZING) and bought some handmade glass necklace pendants. And there were mohair goats! They're the scruffliest looking things I have ever seen (Tom called them hobo-goats), but... well let's just say I was haaard-pressed to not go see what was going on at the hand-spinning booth. My yarn addiction is bad enough as it is, I do NOT need to let myself get into hand-dying and spinning and everything else.

The store is only now starting to slow down a bit, it's been the busiest summer there. Yesterday was the first day in probably two months I didn't have any printwork waiting for me when I got there. (So I cranked out like eight new banner template layouts - one of these days I need to post them here, because some are seriously awesome.)

Crocheting like a madwoman still: blanket for a (slightly belated) wedding gift, blanket for Tom's birthday, my half-finished skirt, and whatever random little bracelets necklaces hairthings caught my eye that day.

Cooking lots: Heidi's Marathon Cookies (anise and lemon and sesame seeds what?) are my current spazz. Also Mom visited me and brought a toooooon of spice-store goodies. I now have three different kinds of couscous! Awesome. I kind of hashed two recipes together to get a fantastic summer lunchfood, couscous with olive oil, lemon juice, lots of cucumber, and some mix of parsley and dill and things, that sort of thing. Keeps beautifully in the fridge for like a week. (I have learned that tomatoes, sadly, do not keep for crap once they've been cut up. boo.)

And! I have, randomly, been drawing! It's been ages. But there's now a big official super-thorough Lynda.com tutorial for Blender - which is the open-source (and FREE) 3D modeling program. Thus, Tom has been completely absorbed for close to a week, trying to learn this beast of a program. However, he wanted to try modeling something other than the examples included - which means he needed a drawing to work from.

...so I've learned loads already about the modeling process, and what exactly is needed in a t-pose sketch. It is FREAKING HARD, mainly because it involves a lot of things like lining things up straight, using grids, and making definite lines - y'know, all the kinds of things I'm usually awful at.

But while making myself a new shopping list notepad last week (I threw together some simple designs in Photoshop, picked up some pretty paper at work, printed, cut, glued, voila! adorable little notepad!), I drew the cutest little fairy in like ten, fifteen minutes.

Just a sketch, but despite how rough I kept it, she had a bit of personality. So, going off of that, I made up a character for Tom. That character is no longer a fairy, she's somewhere between an ancient Greek chick and a gypsy, but she's cute.

Tom, on seeing the character, was not as horrified as I'd feared. (She wasn't really what I'd had in mind to make him, but, she's what happened.) In giving me some pointers on what changes to make in future, telling me what would work best for him...I realized that what he was talking about was that he, like me, needed the girl's actual body, to layer the clothes onto, to make things work nicely. "Wait... I have that! Hang on, it's in one of these layers..."

The first couple of layers I did, my little chick was naked, so I could get proportions right and things. Being the layer psychopath that I am, they were still in there. A bit of clean-up work, and Tom had his sketches! (So I'll go back and refine the clothes when he's nearer to needing them.)

Teasers:
   
(I was focusing on the elements I figured Tom would need the most, and sketched in a few contour lines that I think might help. Also: it took me FOREVER to get that girl's profile right! ugh that was awful. I had to go search the interwebs for pictures, and then tweak the hell out of what I was looking at to fit the character I was trying to draw... but I'm REALLY psyched about the results.)

...it's a very strange, and somewhat amazing, thing, seeing what someone else does with what you've started. He's gotten as far as a semi-refined model of the body (not the head, I had to re-draw that in more detail today), and it is seriously freaking cool, recognizing the particular curves I drew in this grey stack of polygons.


Rambling aside! After putting in some more work on my girl's face, I decided to go back to my original rough little fairy sketch. Somehow or another, she got super-colorful (probably due to the style of the t-shirts I'm dying to buy)...and I am SO happy with the way the coloring worked out. I'm totally in love. It's very freeing, letting things keep some rough edges. And I actually think it adds a lot, I like this much better than the exacting sort of detailing I've done in the past, there's more motion to it, it's a lot lighter. (Also, I can actually FINISH a drawing, instead of letting it sit around half-finished because I'm too intimidated by it.)

No I have no idea why she's blue-green. I just liked the color. ;)

Full-drawing, and also a desktop-size cropped version.

   

Labels: art, cooking, crochet, drawing, printshop, work