It was lots of fun. Quick over-view of how I did it:
1. Sprayed with fast-dry sand-able gray auto-primer (auto-zone $2.50)
2. Painted with acrylic paint and the smallest brush I had (I had some left over acrylic from a beginning painting class I took in college. You can use the same acrylic as you use on canvas).
For the sword and chain mail I bought some metallic paint from The Game Preserve. Don’t buy your primer there though, they wanted to charge me $17 for primer (which is why I just went to autozone instead)
Last thing I need to do is spray it with some varnish to keep the paint from getting smudged/ruined from touching it.
For my first time, I don’t think I did half bad. The next one will be much better though…
Several lessons learned:
1. Get a very very small brush. (mine was way too big and it shows)
2. Make sure the model is thoroughly coated with primer (do one coat standing and two coats with it laying down. I didn’t get the undersides of the details very well, and so the paint didn’t stick)
3. Have good lighting.
This one was extremely fun to make. The monkey was fun, but this one was a blast. I learned a lot about Leopards and Jaguars while doing it. It’s a lot more detailed than the monkey as a result, and if I do make this into some sort of Flash cartoon series, or a comic strip, this is the only time I’ll be drawing her this detailed (yeah, it’s a her).
To the keen eye, you can actually tell that this beast is a Jaguar, not a Leopard. Jaguars have a darker orange color, compared to Leopard’s lighter (almost white) coloring. Also, note the pink nose. Leopard’s noses are almost black.
Leopards are from Africa/Asia. Jaguars are from the Americas. But, when you look at their behaviors and coloring, it seems they are basically the same cat, just removed from each other by several centuries.
The reason I am calling this a Leopard instead of a Jaguar (even though Jaguar is an infinitely cooler name, and Leopard reminds people of crApple) is because of the awesome hunting behavior of the Leopard.
Let me digress for a moment. Each of these code animals I am drawing is a metaphor for programmer personalities.
The Code Monkey is a crazy fast, highly caffeinated, crack coder. They get the job done, but good lord is it ugly!
The Code Mole is a highly skilled, appropriately careful, somewhat reclusive, programmer. It refers to books, and other reference material, and stops to survey it’s design for flaws. However, when needed, the Code Mole can tuck it’s head down and dig like crazy to get the code done. How much time the Code Mole has given itself to plan it’s system will directly effect the quality of the result.
The Code Turtle is a Code Mole in the making. However, for whatever reason, the Turtle is tentative and cautious. It can get the job done, and it can even do a great job, but it’s really slow. The Turtle get’s spooked at the first sign of trouble and ducks back in it’s shell to reconsider everything before continuing.
The Code Hawk has a 10,000 foot view of the system. They might have grown up near the code, but now they are very hands off, keeping an eye on everything and constantly evaluating everything. When needed, the Code Hawk will swoop in for a quick kill before immediately resuming it’s lofty heights. (This is obviously a managerial role. Hard to even call it a “Code” Hawk, since even a non-programmer can sometimes assume this role)
This brings us to the Code Leopard, and finally, to the African Leopard’s hunting style. You see, the Leopard is the only large cat to live in trees. The Leopard does everything from the tree. Even hunt. That’s right, some little water buffalo comes walking along and all of the sudden–BAM! The Leopard pownces down on him from out of the tree! Maybe crush the spine, quick skull crushing snap of the jaws, twitch of the head to snap the neck, then the Leopard drags it back up into the tree (keeps away the scavengers). So, the Code Leopard has a bigger view of the code base, but they are still “in it”. This would be more of a debugger, tester, quick-fix type coder. Probably a super-visor, or a team lead/head coder. They know how the whole system works, and when they see a problem that needs knocked out, the jump on it, kill it, and get back up in that tree.
Let me know if you have any other Code Aminal(tm) ideas!
Semi-interesting trivia about the creation of this image: Last Sunday I was watching a PBS special on African cats, which is what generated the idea for the Leopard. I couldn’t remember what kind of cat it was afterwards, only the hollow-spot pattern. When I looked up “Jaguar” on Google, I saw the hollow-spots and assumed that was the right cat. Then, when looking at Jaguar pictures on this page noticed it lived in North America, meaning it could not be my cat…
So I Googled “African Cats” and discovered the cat I was after was, in fact, a Leopard. Thus the name change from “Code Jaguar” to “Code Leopard” (since I referenced the Jaguar picture only to color it in. The sketch and lines I drew from my memory of the PBS special, and looking at it now, I realize it most closely originally resembled the stuffed white tiger my wife used to snuggle with).
While I was Googling cats, I found this (on this page):
When I’m done with the series, I’ll be printing off some fat head stickers to put on my wall at work. 2′x4′, 1″x2″ & 1/2″ x 1″ will probably be the sizes… Let me know if you’re interested in one. If I get enough interest, I might print enough to put some up for sale (not for profit, just enough to cover printing/shipping costs).
So I bought this on iTunes for $4.00 before it was available for free on Hulu. You’d think I’d be mad at them for giving it away one week after I bought it. I’m not. It was worth it. Check it out:
I present to you, Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog:
The first six minutes are a little slow, but it picks up after that.
Hrm… so this one is slightly embarassing since it is unfinished and kind of crappy. That’s just motivation to do better next time I guess.
I’ve hooked my wacom tablet up now and so I expect to be doing so drawing with it soon. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have some sweet line art posted. Or maybe I’ll redo the redmoon picture with the wacom tablet (the guy liked it a lot).
This is my first attempt (ever) at three point perspective. Not bad, but I’ve not really studied 3 point perspective so I’m probably not a good judge. It was a LOT of fun.
This took me about 30 minutes to draw. I used a little notebook as a ruler (I need to get a ruler!), pencil to sketch, an eraser (probably used this most), and a sharpie to ink it. I didn’t shade with the pencil at all, only the sharpie.
I actually used the third vanishing point as the lens flare off the top of the tower. The second vanishing point is the bottom right hand corner of the second building. The first is off to the left of the first building (there’s actually a dot you can see if you look close).
My first attempt in a long time at drawing an actual person. A guy at my work wanted me to draw his whole band cartoon style for him. I never got around to it, and so today I tested my hand at it to see if I still had any talent at people. I’m… ok… I want to be 10x this good, and 10x as fast. This took me 2 hours (sketch + color). I used a.viary (free online image editor) to color and ink this.
Here’s the original:
Here is the band I’m drawing (called Red Moon). The guy in the gray shirt is the one I was trying to draw:
This kicks off a new blog feature. We’ll see how long it lasts. Each day I’ll post a sketch I did that day. This is more for me than anything. I’m going to try and commit to doing at least one setch per day to try and exercise my artistic skill. I’m no where near where I want to be, and I’m trying to remedy that. My long term goal is to draw a comic. Probably based on the book of Acts, but I’m not sure yet…
No, don’t bother looking, you won’t find reasons 1, 2 & 3 on the blog. I haven’t quite decided what they are yet. Something to do with listening to musac in an air conditioned office, getting paid decently to do something I love, and reading/writing in code…
But reason #4 is that I love to make diagrams. Here is my latest masterpiece. I spent the last 3 hours on it, and I actually enjoyed it so much I worked through my lunch.
I did it as part of my documentation process for a website I’m working on, and because I was getting an error with my paypal payment. For some reason the paymentId wasn’t getting inserted into the right table and I couldn’t figure out why. Once I mapped this puppy out I saw it in a heart beat. Somehow I had two identical variables with different names. I instantiated them both to ” ” and then set one to the payment Id, then I inserted the other one into the table. So the payment id dropped off the face of the earth once the page closed, and the table received a blank entry. Oops. That’s what happens when you rename crucial database columns in the middle of dev and forget to propagate the changes to your code fully…
