King of the Mountains

Posted on

Every time I read “Go, Dog. Go!” to G, I want to make some art. Every time I see a bit of a Tour de France stage, I want to make some art. So here is Thomas Voeckler* wearing the Polka-dot Jersey on a road that doubtless leads to a big party in a tree.

I doodled this using MyPaint, a really nice, focused “natural-media” painting program, on a Thinkpad X61T (which I bought used in order to have the pressure-sensitive Wacom digitizer). It’s so much fun! I learned a lot about MyPaint doing this. I wanted to try Krita as well, but there’s a huge lag and 100% CPU usage on this aging machine. MyPaint is apparently much less demanding.

I can’t wait for something with a form factor like an Android tablet or iPad (and, importantly, no fan), with a good pressure-sensitive stylus.

*I feel a bit silly linking to Wikipedia so often, but it’s usually the easiest summary for a thing. Probably a better link for the Tour than the official page too. Also: “le Chou-Chou?” really? Heehee

Two things from my life today

Posted on

When I was a kid I pushed the graphical capabilities of the available computers to their limits. I coveted the Commodore Amiga for its powerful graphics performance. I did black and white drawings pixel by pixel on an Apple Macintosh and printed them on a dot-matrix printer.

At some point we had a PC and a Mustek hand scanner (you rolled it across the page you were scanning and if you rolled too fast the image was squished). When we had enough RAM to scan an ink drawing and colour it, I was in there, rolling scans, stitching them together, and waiting while bucket tool did its job. The capability to do a gradient fill felt like real progress.

My three-year-old made this (aside from me writing my name in it at her request) tonight with the GIMP.

3 year old scribbles in GIMP

And now for something completely different. F made dinner tonight:

Steak on a plate

The presentation struck me as a bit Magritte-ish. I made him go get a pack of sugar snap peas from the fridge.