I've been playing around with the pieces I made for the Modular Park renders back in 2016, adding some stuff, editing some others, and trying to just build up a collection of parts to make more pleasant places with. I made this test render today just to see how things are shaping up.
Still some work to do, but I do enjoy making cozy little outdoor spaces with these parts. 🙂
A while ago I tried making a post here with an emoji in it, because WordPress supports that now, and the characters always came up blank after I submitted the form.
Investigating why this was happening sent me down a WordPress rabbit hole. The cause I arrived at is that, because my WordPress install has some long roots, the underlying database didn't support the character set required by emojis. The solution was to update the database, which isn't something WordPress can do by itself.
Being a DIY guy (when it comes to tech, anyway) I read a little more about what was involved, backed everything up, and dove headfirst into the database. Not long after, I resurfaced from my edits, made a post with an emoji, and basked in its glory. I checked a few other posts to make sure the rest of my database was still intact, and satisfied with the results, left things at that.
You can guess where this is going: unseen problems were afoot. Technically, they still are, I suppose.
Not long after the update, I noticed that one of my main pages was almost entirely blank. WordPress couldn't recover it, so I loaded up my backup and dug through the SQL code to find the post and restore it. It took some time to sort everything out (this particular page had a lot of formatting), but it was fixed.
Curious, I started looking through other posts/pages. Most were okay, but the further back into my blog's history, the more missing pages I encountered. Many of these posts contained characters that didn't survive the database edits, and they got cut off at random points.
So now I'm aware of this problem, and I've been slowly combing through the dusty, cobwebbed corners of the site, cleaning things up and restoring lost posts when necessary. Most of it isn't really worth preserving, honestly. But I feel bad leaving it in such a rough state - and I've been mildly enjoying following my own path as I read things I wrote 15 years ago.
Good grief, I'm feeling old! 👴
About a week ago, I had to tear down my office and put my computer in the corner of my bedroom while we had some work done on our house.
It wasn't a bad week using my iPad Pro as my sole connection to work/games, but I'm happy to finally have the desktop set up again. That was a long week!
I was looking through my photos the other day, searching for some paint color images, and I found a picture I took of an alley that I thought might be fun to do as an illustration. So I made this!
This is partly just some general illustration practice, and partly practice for an acrylic painting I want to do later this year. That painting won't be the same subject, but it's good to practice colors and form.
As with other recent illustrations, I used Procreate to make this. Sketched with the Procreate Pencil brush and painted with the Inka brush.
Here's a time-lapse, if you'd like to see how it all came together:
A little late to get this out, but I played the Overwatch 2 tech beta while it was available and it's surprising how similar and different it feels all at once.
Obviously these are early days, and I'm sure we'll see a lot more changes come before the game officially launches, but it does seem like it could've just been an update to the original game.
I get why they're doing it that way - Overwatch has been out for year now, and patches don't bring new players in like a launch does. And despite how hasn't changed, the game does feel quite different with the various balance changes and new 5v5 format.
If Overwatch 2's launch isn't a great one though, I wonder how many players will stick around once it's out, since that will signal the coming end of support for the original game.
We shall see how it goes!
Yesterday, Twitter was bought out by a private investor - or at least, it's in the process of being bought out right now - and I'm outta there so fast I'm leaving a Marty-shaped hole in the wall.
I've never really liked Twitter, honestly. It's not a bad platform, from a feature perspective, but I have never liked the short-form text format for expressing thoughts.
I can't have been the only one because over the years, Twitter expanded its Tweet size from the original 140 characters (designed for texting in a pre-smartphone era) to 280. Eventually, they added the ability to link together/post multiple Tweets at once, so you could more easily write something much longer. But the platform still encouraged you to distill your thoughts down to something bite-sized, and I just don't think that's good for having real, interesting interactions with people. I never have.
Ads became a more prevalent part of the experience over time as well, with every Nth Tweet a promotional message. Then a bunch of grifting losers flooded the platform trying to hawk bad products, bad people, etc. The scourge of NFT clowns and lying, political hacks twisted Twitter from a sometimes interesting and intimate experience to something rotten and awful.
I had a few fun moments connecting with people I already knew in person and from other platforms, and I saw (and shared!) lots of cool art there. But engagement with people I care about really fell off a cliff over the last few years, and watching the company be acquired by someone who doesn't seem to have any interest in the things that made old Twitter fun and useful is enough for me.
I played through Tunic, which came to Xbox Game Pass recently, and it's a pretty neat game - marred a bit, unfortunately, by its difficulty.
The game is gorgeous, and I had a great time exploring the game's world, discovering secrets, and leveling up my hero. I beat a few bosses, and collected a good deal of the key items. There always seems to be a hidden prize around the next corner or a secret passage nearby. I really like the way you uncover pages of the game's "manual" - which looks something like an old NES game's instruction book mixed a strategy guide - and the cryptic way it helps you get to know the game's world.
But after a few boss fights that started tough, and got tougher as I went on, I got to one that I just couldn't beat. My reflexes aren't great, and I'm not very good at anticipating boss movements in games, but even with a ton of extra items on hand, I just couldn't power through it. I must have tried 30 times.
Tunic has a "no fail" mode that keeps your health from depleting (and still lets you earn achievements), and I reluctantly turned it on to continue. But it felt bad to do this after spending so much time without it, and I just wish the game wasn't so difficult. I turned this feature off again after that fight, but had to use it again later for another boss fight that was just outrageously, impossibly difficult.
Maybe games like this aren't for me, and I appreciate "no fail" mode, but I feel like this game in particular would be so much better if the difficulty were just scaled down a bit. It didn't need to be this brutally difficult.
It's a shame because otherwise I really love this game. It's excellent in so many ways, but it will always be somewhat inaccessible to many players because of its difficulty (and many peoples' reluctance to use helper modes to bypass tough fights).
Just kidding - not doing another month-long drawing project again just yet! 😆
I did have fun doing Drawrch though, and so I thought I'd write a little about it, as sort of a post-mortem of the project.
Drawrch was all about drawing faces, which is something I sort of skirt around the edges of, being someone who draws a lot of cartoons. Cartoons have faces, and exaggerated expressions and such, but in my case, not a lot of detail usually - so I felt like doing a project where I would be forced to draw faces in a variety of styles might help me practice. And it did!
One thing that I learned to appreciate more when I moved most of my drawing to digital is to make a sketch before you "ink". Drawing with traditional materials, I almost always go straight from pen to paper, with no underlying sketch. Occasionally I will sketch things out to the side on another piece of paper, but that's about it. When I draw digitally, it's much easier to draw over and dispose of the sketch later, and so I've become pretty accustomed to that process.
So throughout Drawrch I sketched out what I would draw first, and one thing that surprised me was how well some of them turned out. I expected to struggle more - and for a few I did! - but by and large, the sketches turned out pretty well and I was happy to get started coloring them in once they were finished.
Another surprise I had was when I started experimenting more with Procreate's Syrup brush, which relies on pen pressure for thickness. Normally I go with a uniformly sized brush because I haven't practiced much with pen pressure techniques. Once I got comfortable with it though, I was amazed at how much I liked it. There's so much expression in a line with variable width! Of course, I knew this already - but I had a lot of fun playing with that as I drew, and I didn't expect that.
I also really liked using a rough brush (in this case, it was the Inka brush) to color and do details. It created a lot of interesting texture on the illustrations I created with it, and let me get away from the precision that comes with cleaner lines. I definitely want to practice more soon.
There were a few duds in the project, but that's just part of the process. Outside of a few sketches that I abandoned and either re-drew or switched entirely, I never did a piece that didn't get done and added to the body of work, even if I wasn't super happy with it at the end. They all taught me something about what to do and what not to do, and so it was all good practice in the end. I like to have the failures mixed in with the successes.
One part of the process that most people aren't really privy to is my day-to-day mood about the project. Did it feel like a burden? Was I struggling to come up with an idea for the day? Was I looking forward to the whole thing being over with? Would I miss it when it was?
My wife puts up with a lot of complaints during these projects, especially when I have work that needs to get done in addition to spending an hour or two on a new illustration each night. For this project, I made a (mostly) conscious effort to curb the complaints, and things did end up feeling more positive. I still occasionally had some anxiety trying to get it all done, and I did have a few drawings that were cop-outs. But overall it felt a lot better (for me, and my wife) and I will try to continue this in the future.
I'm really happy that I spent my time making these drawing for March - there's a lot of cool work in there that I'm proud of. I guess that's the main takeaway from all this: that it was fun, and I'm glad for the practice. I'm glad I get to share my work with others so easily too.
If you're interested in seeing all the finished illustrations for Drawrch, check them out here.
You can watch them all get drawn as time-lapses at my Youtube channel, too.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll be along with me for the next illustration project! 🙂
Here's my thirty-first illustration for Drawrch - the last in the series, and fittingly, a very tired-looking me in a self-portrait. It's not my best work, but it's what I did tonight.
For this one I used the Procreate Pencil brush to sketch, and the soft Airbrush for some fades here and there.
I really enjoyed this project, and I learned a lot of stuff. I'll probably write up a blog post about all that tomorrow. Now, it's time for a break!
Here's my thirtieth illustration for Drawrch - only one more to go!
I wanted to spend some more time playing with a rough brush, so once again I've used Procreate's Inka brush for most of the work. I used the Procreate Pencil brush for the sketch, and the soft Airbrush for the background.
Based on a reference photo from SketchDaily, though I had to improvise on the lighting/shadows a bit. The limited color palette made the more complicated shadows of the photo quite hard to reproduce properly. You can see my struggles with it (and how I eventually resolved things) in the time-lapse below!