Lest you think I’ve turned this blog into an all-t-shirts, all-the-time promotional vehicle, I give you the Friday Fish (well, turtle) as a stand-alone piece of art.

For the uninitiated, scratchboard is an art technique that is reductive- you start with a board that has two layers, and scratch the top layer to reveal the bottom. Little kids do this a lot with crayons, and the effect is cool. The grown-up version is also cool, but I like the digital version the best. Basically you make a brightly-colored gradient on one layer, fill with black on the layer above, and then use your eraser/pen combo on your tablet to render your subject (you’re using your eraser as your primary tool in this case. It’s reductive!). It’s more forgiving that way.

Is anybody interested in a tutorial? I think I’m going to make a tutorial of what is a really fun computer drawing technique.

And actually? I lied about not promoing a t shirt in this post. The merchandise for this design looks awesome.

Tags: aquatic, art, art technique, Friday Fish, ocean, scratchboard, sea life, sea turtle, t shirts

I do like a good internet meme. I don’t think Wordle drills down very far because apparently it thinks my blog is all about unicorns, even though I just about never talk about them. I get “cute” being huge, because I talk about cute things an awful lot.

Anyway, I thought it was a kind of fun way to ease into the morning.

Tags: meme, word cloud, wordle

So, I got a scanner (a Canon CanoScan LiDE 25, to be precise) from my uncle and aunt for my birthday last month, and never really got around to unboxing it until just now (mostly because I need to use it for a project at work, how sad is that?).

So now I can share some of the things from my pursebound sketchbook, like these doodles of the dogs. This is the maiden scan, so to speak. So far I’m pretty pleased. I like the new ScanGear software, and it all seems a little faster than I expected. Nice smooth image from a drawing on crappy sketch paper. Next thing to scan is from a product catalogue, so I’ll edit this post later to report on how it handles moire dots.

Tags: dogs, reviews