I just put a street food vendor’s dried squid cart into the background “crowd” portion of the painting that might possibly be put on the cover of Across a Jade Sea Volume 3: Fealty’s Shore. This made me happy. I guess I get excited over some pretty strange things.
Fun News
Look what I made!
This is the CGI “Treasure Box” that was my latest project for Across a Jade Sea.
Beside it is my two projects ago CGI creation: an origami fold. (Yes, okay, maybe it’s a bit odd to be making virtual origami folds… I made some out of real paper first.) Both the box and the fold have plot significance in Across a Jade Sea. Now onto the next project: the sixth and final map for the series.
Jewelwyrms on Display
Random Jewelwyrm Image Utility. Posted to my blog so I can find it again when I want it.
I haven’t been paying as much attention to the rest of the world (outside my family) as I probably should recently, because I’ve been absorbed with a project. I’ve been coding an online electronic pet breeding game (and creating the artwork for it), where you breed finger-sized dragons (called jewelwyrms) for color and pattern, much as people breed koi. (Except that my jewelwyrms are way prettier than koi.)
I was explaining the game concept to my girls, and when I got to the bit with the mutations, they sat up and said, “that’s new!” So my breeding game is special because it has mutating color genes. (I didn’t do the game because my concept was new or different, I did it because I got the idea, and then somehow it took over all my brain-space, and I couldn’t seem to push it out of the way, so I finally just said, ‘alright, already!’ and made the game. Now, hopefully, I have that idea mostly exorcized and will be able to think about something else again.
Ialfa Horoscopes
I am one step closer to having the fancy artwork I’ve been wanting for the Ialfa Horoscopes page. I now have images for each of the constellations. Like so:
Where did the breadcrumbs go?
Yesterday I was doing something on my website.
And while I was working I realized that only half of the links on my A Writer’s Sketchbook page actually led somewhere, and so I started to fix that. And while I was fixing that, I realized that I had created a link to a Sketchbook page for “Ink” and I didn’t actually have any artwork done in ink on my website anywhere to be displayed on that page. So I went and added some “Ink” art to the website. And since I don’t have a lot of ink art, most of it ended up being the line drawings of the Borgim signs of the Zodiac, that I had inked and scanned, but never incorporated in the site in any way. (I was actually hoping to use the inks as the starting point for something much fancier done in Photoshop, which would end up on the Get Your Personalized Borgim Horoscope page, but that’s going to have to wait a bit longer.)
Because it seemed silly to have art that only showed up on the sketchbook page (which nobody in their right mind would ever look at anyway), in addition to putting them up on the server, and getting them into the database, I also added the drawings to the page that lists the signs and their major meanings. And I created an Art Gallery Page that would show images from the entire site all together, instead of only being able to see the ones from each different world.
Finally I went back and finished fixing the Writer’s Sketchbook (I hope!).
But I can’t remember what I was doing BEFORE that. Which means I can’t go back and finish it. Which means that in order to fix one half-done page before I forgot again, I have probably created another! Waahhh!
My website plays cards.
I spent the last few days teaching my website to play a new card game. Now I need to put in some links to it so that visitors to my site (I keep hoping I’ll get some someday) can find it.
Latest Wesnoth Art
A few representative sprites from the set I just finished…
Musical Addition
I added an area for my songs to my main website, instead of having them on some other website altogether.
It’s mostly old material, although I think this particular recording of me singing “They Say” (the Black Flag closing credits song) a capella, has never been posted to the web before.
One of my Clever Ideas actually Works!
One of the things that slowed my progress on Scent of Spring was that I’d moved on to editing, and suddenly needed to do a lot of tracing. I have mostly been working on this project while chauffeuring my kids about, and I needed a tracing technique that was simple, inexpensive and highly portable.
So, I have created for myself a portable light table.
I have a clear plastic clipboard, which fits into the large clipboard/carry-case that holds the pages I am working on and my pencils, pens, etc. And I also have a clip-on reading light, which can be coiled up and tucked away in one of the carry-case compartments when I’m not using it. When I want to do some tracing, I clip the light on upside-down, and adjust it so that it shines up from underneath the clipboard, through whatever part of the drawing I’m trying to trace. Tah-dah!