fredart : blogbits

sketchbook: saeko brush pen sketch

fredrin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:09:29 +0000

I usually sketch in pencil, but sometimes i like to do broader sketches with brush pens. This one came out particularly nice. The problem i have with any kind of pen sketching is that the initial strokes are always way darker than i’d like to see at first. I like to put down light lines and build on them. This is kind of how i work with pencil, and my Cintiq and photoshop settings are such that i can do it digitally, and i can also do it with the COPIC markers… what i wish was that there was a PITT pen or something similar that was filled with a COPIC W1 or W2 color. To date, i have been unable to find one, and the COPIC SP pens are non custom fillable…

sketchbook: saeko brush pen sketch

coordinated gallery postings

fredrin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:38:44 +0000

One of the biggest problems with the net i think is that you can’t really just have one web page and expect people to come to you anymore. Given the scalability of the web and the world at large, it doesn’t really surprise me – wandering around outside of organized (if not protected) enclaves like Facebook can be rather daunting for new or less brused, bumped and crusted old internet users. There have been innumerable attempts at building communities like this since people learned words like “email” and “URL”. The ones that have risen to prominence have done so not because they get it right so much as enough people gathered under their flags to create a population base large enough to establish a kind of Gibsonian City-state.

I really resisted doing anything on MySpace, even when i was prompted to do so by a number of people. The main reason i never did was that I simply could not understand how MySpace worked. More accurately, The whole dynamic of how it worked just didn’t really appeal to me. I passed.

I started using Twitter pretty early on, mostly because of the micr0-blogging aspect. I didn’t really expect people to have twitter accounts themselves, i just had my posts on the MT page – amazing how things change over time (you can still see recent twits by mouse-overing the twitter tags on the MT in the META box) Facebook took me a little longer to warm up to, but i’m pretty well in the habit of keeping it updated now. Earlier this month Sarah and I put up an official Megatokyo page on Facebook, and the response to it has been better than i expected (yes, Sarah, you were right ).

You might be seeing a bit of a pattern here… writing rants, posting artwork to fredart, updating social networking outposts… yes, i’ve been a little too quiet over the past couple of years. I’m tired of trying to rethink how i am going to put all this together into some sort of cohesive, automated, slick and easy to operate website that doesn’t require me to use my brain to operate. Just gotta dive in and start using the stuff already in front of me, which is what i’m doing.

Updating the gallery section here on fredart *IS* a bit of a pain, but it works. I am also working on doing something i’ve been meaning to do for some time – cross posting some of my artwork to other websites, my Pixiv page in particular. It used to be that Tinami was the place to list your art website in japan, but Pixiv is far more the place to put stuff these days (not that any .jp users are ever gonna notice my stuff with the stuff they are used to seeing there >_<).

The other place i’m going to be co-posting art will be my Deviant Art page which i have had for a while but not really used until now. I like dA well enough, so why not

Finally, if you are *really* curious to follow and see the all the little tracks ive been making with all of my other little social-media things, you can visit my Contrails page, which is essentially an aggregator of all my feeds, inlcuding last.fm, del.icio.us, YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, etc. We’re experimenting with how to make this kind of thing the base of the fredart site, since that’s what this site should be – an aggregation site that collects all the dispersed and disconnected bits of my publicly viewable digital existence.

bakaquake – viol3(n)t shift

fredrin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:33:09 +0000

I have been scribbling at doing a reprise and redraw of the original ph33r the Cut3 Ones image b4k4.md4. While fiddling around with the rehashing of the linework to properly show Piroko and update the look of things (i’m amazed any of my old drawings hold up at all after all these years) i started tossing down some… alternate color looks. For some reason, this violet shifted version came across to me as pretty neat.

bakaquake – viol3(n)t shift

aggregat3 [prelim]

fredrin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:30:29 +0000

I have taken some of what i’ve learned from coloring with COPIC markers and applied it to my photoshopping efforts. The most notable thing you will see if you look is the layering of a variety of different colors in the hair in particular. All in all, this hasn’t come out too bad, though it does feel a little dark. It’s not done yet. When finished, this will be a new poster design i hope to have available in February.

view: aggregate3 [prelim] on fredart

wordpressing fredart

fredrin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:03:07 +0000

I know it’s been a long time since i posted here (hell, it’s been a long time since i posted a rant to the Megatokyo site ^^;;) but there has been a lot of little stabs at re-building this site from the ground up over the past year. When you consider that the engine that runs fredart here is as convoluted as it is, it needs the re-work badly. It’s way too hard to post things – which is why i rarely ever do it.

As you might expect, my ideas for the site are fairly complex and a little different (it involves making fredart here more of a hub of all the different things i do online rather than just a little used outpost). For now, however, we’ve decided to push ahead and try to an intermediary re-build within the structure of Wordpress itself. Wordpress is pretty flexible, and there are some plugins and other things that should work pretty well for re-hashing this site and making it both more usable and more easily updated.

I’ll talk more about it when we have a publically testable version working, till then… i really should post some new stuff. ^^;;

(actually, you might notice that there’s already a gallery plugin working to the right ^^;;)