I’ve been trying to come up with a very stylized fox to fit with the tree & owl and so far that’s not been working out so great. I may need to go back to some sort of ancient technology like paper and pencil to get the sketch done first!
Instead I made another color-block fox. This time I tried to use simpler lines, but I may need to ‘cartoonify’ him even more to get him to fit the scene. Still, I like him.
#27/365
We hiked almost 4 miles today on Gold Creek Trail in Snoqualmie Pass.
My photos today were near misses. I really need to pay more attention to my settings and actually look at the photos in the camera before I just presume that it’s OK. And I need to zoom in to look at more details. This one is my favorite and it’s because I love the color and swirls that came out in the sky.
This is a vector tracing/coloring of a photograph, with some creative embellishments. I’m not 100% happy with the colors or how I split them up, but it came out, overall, better than I expected.
I thought my trees could use some foxes. This one is probably a bit too realistic in shape to go with that, but I will modify it to fit the tone as I get better.
#25/365
I may try this again with flatter colors to see if I can still convey the roundness without using a gradient and get more variation in the color (and a background). But in the meantime, here are some blueberries:
This is the original photo.
#24/365
It was a wet morning and my little Japanese maple was covered in droplets.
#23/365
I’m cheating a little. I didn’t make all of these soaps just now, but I did re-take all my photos of them. The Sandalwood & Rose clay is a new soap. I was experimenting with madder root for color, thinking I’d get a pale pink and wanted a darker red swirl inside it. That was the plan… but I had some separation from high temperatures and wound up having to hot process the soap and the swirl was destroyed. C’est la vie. On the plus side, it will be ready to use much sooner. I still want this to count as something creative, but is it 1 new thing (sandalwood soap), 2 new things (soap & photos) or 7 new things? (soap + 6 photos?) I’ll go for 2. #21-22/365.
I added a background to the new oak tree with owls. Getting the blur effect around the moon was fun. I’m not entirely happy with the background trees but we were watching Bob Ross while I was thinking about them and it turns out that things he can do easily are going to take some time and thought for me.
#20/365
Just messing around with Inkscape again. There is a glass technique called “millefiori” that means “thousand flowers” and this is my (incomplete) attempt to recreate that look.
I showed it to my husband and he thinks I need to turn down the screen brightness.
#19/365
I lead a 4-H club that is mostly devoted to hiking, kayaking and general outdoorsy stuff, but we sometime dabble in some kid-size engineering projects. In the past we’ve built pop-pop boats and a pumpkin-hurling trebuchet. This week I built a prototype mousetrap car. The kids tested and critiqued the design and will have a month to build their own version and race them when we meet again.
I’ll get some video of the race next month. I was able to get the still shot on the right because my duct tape construction method was failing and so the boom arm was no longer exerting enough force to move the rear wheels.
Back in 2002 I was backing up my computer to CD – this seems like a good use for that stack of old backups.
#18/365
I made another tree with a more oak-tree shape than my first. The ferns are present, plus a few of the little ferns that grow on the trunks of trees in the rainforest. This oak had a large horizontal branch that needed some owls.
The first owls were based off a movie – but I wanted to draw my own version this time. As it turned out the cartoon owls looked the way they did for a good reason: this is just what owls look like. My own owls are very similar. If I change anything it will to make the eye edges more distinct from the white face and perhaps to make the feet more fuzzy.
#16-17/365
