The librarian's tangents.

I’ve had a beard so long that:

a: neither of my children have seen me without a beard.

b: my wife can only just remember me without a beard.

c: most of my students believe I was born with a beard…

and so on…

So, if you were ever wondering, this is an abstract representation of me, with and without.

Barely informative but hey ho, it’s been that sort of a year…

Click for larger version.

In other news: we’re gearing up for the latest wave of redundancies a my workplace, a yearly event for me over the past three years. I’m safe in one role but unsafe in the other which may well leave me with very few teaching hours. No idea where that leaves me to be honest although this and next year are and have been moderately stressful so a change may very well be as good as a rest in some ways. We’ll see… But just spent a coffee break with some of the ones affected and it’s left me less eager to get up and get back to classes

Not getting anywhere at the moment. So much to do and yet every step seems mired in clay and up a slippery slope to boot. Tricksome. I’m suffering from serious data overwhelm at the moment and the right course of action is  a scary one (ask to reduce hours which may see the recipient of the news reducing them to 0. Still mulling over that one…)

Did draw/doodle/paint this in Photoshop on a very dodgy college Dell PC. It struggled but tbh I wasn’t after the speed of processing so much (which was good, come to that), just pressed a button, did some work, pressed another button, did some more work and then whaled into what was left during my lunch hour and after work itself. Not 100% finished (I intend to fade the hat out, make the mouth less obvious etc but as a pic that came together with no plan nor initial outcome it’s alright… My favourite self portrait and, though it hasn’t had many comments on the forum I post work on or on Flickr – hint – the comments were nice and Adobe tweeted that they liked it). Hey ho. Only did the pic to keep myself sane, as a self portrait it probably shows how well that task is progressing…

(click image for larger version)…

(click image for larger version)…

More self centred moaning about work after this short break ((I did have a very pleasant day off today helping my niece take her CV around shops now that she’s finished college and bought my daughter a teepee to boot so it’s not all bad. Completely forgot to pick up Tap magazine though, but as a day it was theraputic…))

A while ago I did a couple of abstract pictures (a blog post on which can be found here…), one of which was a part of the Advanced Photoshop magazine competition. ‘Twas very pleased to see I was the runner up yay me.

Still flailing around, artistically, in as much as I know what I want to do as a creation but haven’t got the energy to start it… Hence doodling around and trying to find a moment of something or other.

This came out of a three hour stint invidulating an exam. There’s only so much watching students work silently before you can start doodling so I drew this through the exam and coloured it through my lunch hour which I managed to take between 3.45 and 4.30. It’s not exactly my thing: the character or the style (I was apeing a much better and well known comic book artist called Mitch Breitweiser and one of his pictures (to be found at www.comictwart.com, a site of which I could be better described as stalker as much as fan). Anyhow, not bad for a couple of hours work. Didn’t open a door of decision for me or anything and I’m still not really ready to start the project in my mind, but a welcome distraction from looking at the back of people’s heads in a quiet room if nothing else…

Still loving the iPad 2/iPod Brushes combo but also had a couple of disappointments in that area over the past month or so so have gone back to a little bit of Photoshop playfulness. These are all variations of a workflow theme that I keep meaning to get into for some sort of linked series… (As ever: we’ll see).

Fun to do though, hence sharing.

((larger versions on my flickr feed here…))

Twas speaking with a friend who’s going for a job interview next week and chatting through possible lesson plans. Something sprung to mind and this came out of that twenty minutes later. I’ll come back to it at some point to finish it off (I’ve got an idea where it’s going) but thought I’d post it up as a progressy type thing.

Had an on again off again email chat with someone last night (who sounded like he had the most bizarre roller coastery day ever) and textured the meteor image and drew out a colour version of the big book draw book. Pics of the colour BBD to come but the textured meteor looks a little like this. I do think I’ll end up texturing the whole of the Wombat if time allows… We’ll see.

It’s a little bit of added Photoshop and a little bit of Pixelmator (with screensnapz at the end to grab the moment). I love Pixelmator to pieces – it’s a very groovy image editor as I’ve mentioned in the past – but it does struggle a little bit with multi layer 300 dpi images so Photoshop had to be dusted off to do a little bit of the placement.

Been sick as a sick pig past couple of days which hasn’t stopped me doing the occasional doodle. I’d been working on this image for a cover competition for the past few days so finished it up between hot lemon and whisky drinks and coughing fits.

Who knows. May win, may not. There is, as I imagine a Highlander might say, no second place. But Twas good to doodle with a definite aim and objective in mind.

Now, back to sleep methinks. Next week requires more energy than I currently feel I have.

OK so work is calling but I NEED to do something unrelated, if only for a few minutes. Today was great, teaching wise, as all of the students seemed to come out of the lesson with a good image bar a couple of students who understood why it didn’t work for them (didn’t follow the steps in the correct order which, in itself is a valuable lesson to learn)…

Also pleasant was the fact that as I was going through the lesson I was showing the steps piece by piece and that image came out pleasantly so uploaded it is and then off to a meeting that’s gonna last for hours…

Apparently V 1.5 of my favourite photo editing package (Pixelmator if you needed to ask) is out in a few short weeks time and it, and a small slanging match online, made me think of things I would like to see in the update: layer styles, brush palette coverflow and folders, layer groups, text rotation and manipulation in vector, nested palettes, mask to layer transform, wave filter, filter on filter deformation, CMYK and so on.

Which is actually a long list. Ironically 1.5 seems to be about web graphic manipulation so my little list isn’t likely to be looked at I would have thought, but hey, I am unusual. (The small slanging match was to do with a sadness I expressed that every review of Pixelmator dwells and overdwells on what’s missing, not what’s there. Despite this list – and this is a little like life, kids, there’s loads that Pixelmator does amazingly well and that’s what I judge it by not what it’s yet to be. That was described as irritating complaining but hey ho).

Ahem. /sermon.

Anyhow, the other thing it made me think about was that two of my other favourite art packages are coming towards a refresh also and, in one case, a major update apparently: Blender hits 1.5 (doh! well spotted – 2.5 indeed) and Expression Design hits V3. Blender, we’re told, will have a completely upgraded user interface (which, I hate to say it, is long overdue. It’s intelligent but a little overwhelming and offputting) and Microsoft’s Expression Design…

Hmmm…. Well, we’ll see. ED2 (and 1 as well) are, in ways, a step back from the prior versions of the software (which reached their peak in Expresion 3.3 which is still available as a free download from Microsoft if you’re interested in a try out). I’d love to see ED become the de facto vector tool of choice for designers but there are a good few niggles and that’s a shame. I love it to pieces though, but there’s a fair few things that were taken out for no discernible reason (fill fringes? Effect lines? Fill softening? Variable stroke width?) and a good few things that I’d love to see in there: stroke mixing and blurring, layer transitions (by which I mean strokes moving from one layer into another giving the user a pseudo 3d effect, layer shadows with perspective depth and a better way to look at fill colours, vectors and bitmaps. And also, while we’re on the subject, a flipping Mac version.

Did read a review of Painter 11 which I’d love to play with and Photoshop CS4 needs to have more of a playthrough when I have the time. Good times for art software It’s turning into a heck of a year for AAA art software

Just wish I had more time to play with the software and create more doodles