fredart : blogbits

I posted a new sketch of Saeko last night, not a fantastic sketch by any means, but not too bad. It’s one of many sketches (mostly bad) that are part of me re-addressing warmth, the story and it’s characters. The body and the pose is kind of plain, really, but there are some things of note in the drawing.

One of the problems with warmth is the fact that the initial character designs were developed a long time ago. I may not be very good, but i’m certainly better than i was back then. When i was working on warmth two years ago, i was finding that i was having some particular problems with the characters, Saeko in particular. There was something nebulous about her design that just wasn’t cutting it, and was making her hard to reproduce on a regular basis. For example, the highly angular eye shape, the bangs, her forelocks and how long they were, the way her hair fell down her back, shape of her face… many of my drawings from back then did a good job of capturing something of what i wanted in her, but drawing her these days was leaving me thinking that i needed some better control nodes on her design to work with.

So, with that in mind, i’ve been working on subtle tweaks and changes - and these things have to get by me before i have to worry about what anyone else would think. I have been tweaking her bangs, the facial shape, the eyes (these still aren’t right yet) her forelocks in particular, shape of the hair… its all part of a larger process that i’m just starting to get my teeth into.

- pirotunes: Chimaira - Severed -

First off, i want to thank everyone for all the useful comments and pointers about Firefox and things i might be able to do to get it up to acceptable performance for me. I’ll have to try doing a totally fresh install, getting rid of old files as mentioned. For now i’ll probably use Safari for a while. I need to revamp my bookmarks anyway.

One thing i might spend some time on today is just that - better organizing my bookmark folders and how i manage them. My current categories and organization is kinda poor - i’m constantly trying to organize bookmarks that don’t fit in any category that i’ve created, or worse, fit into multiple places and i can never find them again. I still have the bad habit of dragging bookmarks to the desktop where things can get cluttered pretty easy. I’ll use this switch as a chance to go thru and clean things up. Moving back to firefox from safari isn’t that big a deal, really. I’m getting used to moving bookmarks around. what i wish i could do is somehow coordinate bookmarks between my laptop and my main computer (without having to friggin subscribe to .mac. that’s just bullshit - another Apple money grab. synching bookmarks between computers on the same local network should be simple (my laptop comes here and gets plugged in because i keep my dev files on the laptop so they are always with me))

Anyways, i’ve got that and a ton of other things to do today. Oh, and if you are wondering why i am closing commenting on old posts, that’s an effort to prevent or at least manage content spam (i actually had some crop up in old posts, i had to go thru and delete a bunch of things and close comments). Thankfully, the latest version of ecto allows you to open and close comments without having to go into the movable type control panel. yay.

- pirotunes: Dilate - Nemo’s Chord -

I’m taking a small break from scripting to write this because my head is feeling fuzzy. I’ve had this low grade cold for about two weeks now and it’s starting to get on my nerves. I’m seriously thinking of just getting a bag of oranges and sucking on them at the office.

Anyways, i have a bit of a quandary right now, and i’ve decided to make a switch I’m not really 100% happy about. If you aren’t a mac user, none of this will mean much, but it has to do with browsers.

When i first got my mac the Safari browser hadn’t been released yet. The ’standard’ browser was the rather horrid Internet Explorer for Mac (you know, the one they eventually abandoned development on?) Terrible, terrible browser. I knew apple was working on a new browser, but for the time being there were a few options to consider, even though some of them getting a little long in the tooth. I settled for a while on the Camio / Camino / NameThisBrowser browser, a great little mozilla project browser that unfortunately never really got the development attention it deserved (it is the most mac-native of the mozilla projects). I tried many others, including icab, omniweb, mozilla, etc… but Camio was the one i stuck with for the longest time.

When Safari came out, i did end up making the switch to using it, at least when they finally implemented tabbed browsing. There are some things about Safari i don’t like (brushed metal - bleah (and no, i don’t want to use a utility to change it :)), but overall the performance of the browser is quite nice. While using Safari, development on the Firefox browser was really starting to take off. It was getting better and better with every release (as with the windows version) until by .8 I was liking it enough to switch to it. I’ve been using it since, and have been really liking it.

From what i understand, the windows release of firefox is almost dead on perfect. The mac release, i feel, still has some unresolved problems, some of which i’ve never seen addressed. First is the fact that very often GIF files are not rendered properly, esp. animated gifs. Often they are fractured, have holes in them, or just look really off. Not always, but when they do, it can be annoying (and sometimes problematic, when navigation buttons are fractured like that). It behaves this way on all my macs and has since 0.9, but i never hear anyone complain about it. I don’t know why.

Another problem is performance. While its well known that Safari does have a faster rendering engine than Firefox and generally performs a little better, for me this difference has finally grown to be enough that i had to switch back to Safari. When i mouseover bookmark folders with japanese in them, the rotating beachball of death will rotate for a long period of time before it parses the drop down (this can be really annoying) and lately (esp on my laptop) the browser is so slooooooow… there are huge pauses between switching tabs, scrolling, going back to the browser from another program… Bad enough that i decided i can’t deal with it anymore. Safari works fine and doesn’t hang and irritate the hell out of me, so even tho i don’t like it’s interface as much, i’m gonna switch back for a while.

I really like Firefox. I mean, i really do. I dislike the idea of using all apple products (i think there is something a little creepy about apple’s desire to control everything you run on your mac, but maybe that’s just me) I figure that if my laptop had a bit more memory maybe it’d be fine, but i can’t use two different browsers on my two machines. Maybe its me, but the browser you use is the window thru which you interface with much of the web, and when it is getting in your way and not helping you, it’s hindering you. If Firefox ever manages to fix this gif problem, the way it deals with JP text, and and maybe i get more memory for my laptop, i’ll switch back (i hate the fact that you can’t command click on bookmarks in your menu to open a new tab, i HATE that) but for now i’ll just get used to hitting command-T first. In the end its faster than waiting for Firefox to catch up.

ok, back to work on the comic

- pirotunes: Stars Of The Lid - A Love Song (For Cubs) Part 1 -

My main task today, i think, is going to be making several runs to the post office to send off more international orders. It’s not nice and easy like the UPS guy who comes and picks up stuff every day. The post office would pick up stuff too, if we used them for our main shipping stuff (we don’t because with UPS we can have tracking on the packages, pretty important, really). The problem with international orders is that you have to take them to the post office - they won’t pick them up. No big deal if you wanna send out one package. Got a whole bug bunch? Ugh.

Speaking of going postal, i got this really fantastic fan art of miho and ping from the very talented (and much demented) hands of Dan Kim over at Clone Army. I’ve been reading Clone Army stuff for ages, and i was surprised to hear from Dan a few months back about wanting to maybe advertise on Megatokyo. Given the, uh, nature of most of his stuff (please don’t go to his site if you are under 18 or if you are, uh, easily offended or dont handle being greatly disturbed very well ^^;;) i couldn’t let him advertise on the site, but do think he deserves some good linkage. Paper Eleven is fascinating peice - dark, moody, spooky and disturbing. His more light hearted works, Tomoyo42’s room and Nana’s Every Day Life, are no less disturbing, just… in a different kinda way. ^^;;

Hawk over at applegeeks linked him the other day and melted his website, so, uh… i figure a link here might not be too bad, at least for now. Please don’t hammer his site too hard

- pirotunes: Trivium - Like Light To The Flies -

Ugh. Today was quite the day. First i rolled out here to t3h factory as quick as i could this morning to finish off the comic. It didn’t come out too bad, i was able to get all the artwork done last night pretty handily, just needed to breeze up a natural conversation between two self deprecating individuals that would make at least one of them want to hide under the counter. I have lots of experience with that, so it sorta comes naturally.

I spent a good chunk of the day filling out paperwork for international orders. Y’know, a few international ordere here and there is no problem. Even a bunch is not a problem, Sarah and i can handle it. Opening things up after six months of pent up demand? Ya, that was dumb International orders area a LOT more work than in state orders, and so many at once… but i figure once we get past this everyone will be happy and folks outside the states can order at their leisure without giving us headaches.

I also took some time out today to play with Painter IX. Like i mentioned in a recent blog, i am considering getting not only a new tablet, but some software too. Years ago i used to use Painter (in fact, the Manami and Kurumi images i did were done in painter). While i have learned how to do lots of things in Photoshop, i do miss some of the natural media abilities Painter has. I really think i need to experiment with my coloring methods a bit. Lets be honest, the coloring techniques i use today are pretty flat and lifeless. Don’t say they aren’t — i don’t get a sense of life and texture from coloring my work the way i do sketching it. This is why i haven’t done much of it in recent years.

Last year i picked up Painter 8 to try working with that. Great program… sort of. The only problem was, even with my not-wimpy G4 tower, Painter 8 was slooooow. So slow, that you had to wait for the canvas to keep up with your strokes. Attempting to paint with it was so frustrating i ended up not using it. Supposedly, with Painter 9, not only have they vastly improved the interface, but the speed. All the reviews i’ve read talk about the fact that the program is now finally, at last, useful.

Is it? Oh yeah. After tweaking my tablet settings a bit to get the pressure sensitivity down right, i found i was actually doing some creative fiddling with it, and even (gasp) drawing in the program itself. I’m stubborn, i will probably never fully adopt drawing this way, but the fact that i can, and it works, is gratifying.

It’s not a cheap program, but i have to say im really impressed with the new version and seriously considering getting it again. Corel really stepped up and vastly improved the program, something they inherited (purchased) from Fractal Design and Meta Creations. Yes, i remember the days when i used to use CorelDraw for everything heck, i even remember when Painter came in a real paint can… Kudos to Corel.

The only thing wrong with Painter IX is the icon. That 9 fingered hand is just creepy.

- pirotunes: Mark Rushton - Swimming Under Stars -

Bleah. I can feel it today. I can feel it and i haven’t even tried to poke it to see how bad it is. Writers block. Ah, hell. It’s probably not as bad as it feels right at the moment, sometimes on days when i feel writers block pretty bad are days when i come up with particularly decent ideas. I hope today ends up like that.

I think i’m finally back into the zone of writing rants for MT again. I had a friend tell me that by reading the rants of the past two years, you get a fairly bleak impression of my moods and attitudes, and i think he was right. I have been tending to rant only when i was worked up about something, or had news to pass on. It’s been rare that i’ve ranted about the good stuff. The fact that i haven’t ranted much positively in recent years is something you might be able to look at and make certain conclusions, but right now i can say that i have a lot of stuff to write about, and i’m going to try to maintain it better this year.

- pirotunes: Harold Budd - The Place Of Dead Roads -

Yknow, considering how snow being part of my happy place is almost an in-joke these days, with the amount of the white stuff that we’ve been getting for the past two months you’d think i’d be in heaven. In fact, it is peaceful, in the moments when i really get to enjoy it. I just wish life would slow down a little so i could. I miss the more contemplative nature my life used to have. Well, i’ve been trying to wind things around so i can get back to that. Its part of my long range plan

Considering that there is almost 8 inches of snow out there, its a good day to stay home if we can. I might have to run to the store around the corner today, but i dont think i want to go much farther than that. Watched Air ep 2 this morning, finally Beautiful stuff, i know this my fave show in a while (like thats a surprise)

- pirotunes: 水たまり from AIR ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK (DISC-1)” -

The one thing i need to do today, and i will do it, by god, tonight, is finish watching ep 2 of AIR. A lot of anime and manga has little edges of things i like, but this show really is doing a good job of really capturing some of the subtle things i like about Key games. Once i finish watching that, i’m gonna write a review for it. Fact is, i’d love to write more reviews. Of course, i’d like to watch more anime too One can dream, i guess. Gonna help sarah out with stuff today, maybe we’ll get a chance to crash early tonight

- pirotunes: Max Graham presents Shine on Proton Radio(01-21-05) -

Hard to believe, but it’s been two years since i got my Dual 1.25 Ghz Powermac G4 and 23″ cinema display. I’ve been real happy with it, and i find i really do like the OS X environment a lot. I don’t know if its better than other operating systems, but i like it. That’s all that matters, really (nothing is more irritating to me than people who feel that what they like is better just because they like it). I’ve been using it for two years, and i don’t think it’s feeling it’s age yet. This is odd, because i am used to PC want cycles (system is great for 6 months, ok for 6 months, then all you think about is getting a new one Based on personal experience, I think it’s easier to live with a slightly older mac than it is with a less cutting edge PC. I don’t feel a need to upgrade this thing. At least, i didn’t until last month.

Now, of course, i’ll have to avoid going back into the local Comp USA again (seeing the 23″ Cinema Display there is part of what got me into this in the first place). They have a high end G5 sitting there with a 30″ Apple Cinema Display that i can, uh, look at and… no, i don’t need it. I’m happy with my still very large 23″ ACD. And my G4 with its plastic case is still very cute. I don’t need a new Dual 2.5 Ghz G5 powermac….

Not needing of course doesn’t mean i don’t WANT one. I just don’t NEED it. The fact is, a new system with the specs i’d want is over $7000. Uhm, yeah. Stuff like that requires a certain amount of ‘need’ to get it past the budget department (Seraphim). That and my own conscience… oh wait, that’s her too.

Anyways, i’m not planning any upgrades of that nature, but i am thinking of upgrading my intous 2 tablet to a new Intous 3, upgrading from Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 to the CS versions, maybe even getting Painter 9 … those are some serious enough investments ^^;;; Anyways, i seriously want to produce more color work this year, and upgrades are always nice. Still need to get it past the budget department, of course

- pirotunes: Subradial - Bioloophorm 1 Part 3 -

It’s always fun to draw ping, but for some reason i really liked this sketch of ping (note that i added it to the Fredart sketch section Anyways, i’m really REALLY tired today. The weekend sorta drained me out, and so did yesterday’s comic. Working on and almost finished with the little Kimiko spinning heart design for a girls shirt (wah, they don’t make girls hoodies like that, we looked and looked Dealing with some MT book 3 stuff (they are gonna run a contest at Dark Horse to promote the release)… uhyaaa… so much to do.

Anyways, i gotta start scanning more stuff and get busy posting it here. It’s not that hard, i just gotta take the half hour to do it occasionally.

- pirotunes: 05 Puddle -Hirune fuumi- from “Airness - Best Sound of Game Music Library Special - Blue Disc” -