Sandra Gilbert talks Blenderart Magazine | processdiary.com

Sandra Gilbert talks Blenderart Magazine | processdiary.com.

Last night I had the pleasure of being invited to sit and discuss Blenderart Magazine and various blender related topics with Paul Caggegi from Process Diary. It was a heck of a lot of fun with lots of laughter.

Goodreads

So I got a bee in my bonnet today and decided it would be nice if I joined Goodreads and added all the books I have read since I got my kindle.

Color me an idiot, I got signed up, started adding books and then realized that I was going to be at this for hours and I mean HOURS. I have read over 150 books since I got my kindle a few years ago.

Sooooo, time for a new plan. I am going to add a few at a time until I get them all in there. Probably going to take me forever, but eventually I will get all done.

And if any of you are all that curious as to what the “amazing dreamsgate” spends her free time reading, then just check out the handy little widget I added to the side of my page today. But be warned, I do read some strange stuff on occasion and I LIKE it.

Alrighty then, back to adding books….. grumble grumble…. why isn’t there a magic button for this…..

The importance of “Play Time”

We all know how important it is to push away from our computers and get some real life play time in.

We do know that right?

But as artists it is equally important to take time to play in our chosen art medium as well. All too often we get locked into the mentality that we must be either involved in a project or working on improving skills and techniques and we forget to just play.

This is something that I am very guilty of and I’m sure a good many of you are as well.

Sadly enough, it took watching my five year old to remind me how important it was to play.

I recently received a graphic tablet for my birthday. Now mommy got to use her graphic tablet all by herself for about two weeks before the ever curious five year old noticed that mommy could use it to draw on the computer.

Yep, you guessed it, she has been hooked on it ever since and every time mommy tries to use it, she is in my lap demanding “draw time”.

First thing, it was amazing how quickly she grasped the concept of the tablet and how easily she uses it to draw and paint. Yep, mommy is still occasionally struggles to get it to do what she wants. (Yes I am blaming the tablet, not my completely pathetic skills )

Okay, on to the play part. While eventually she ends up drawing “something”, she actually spends far more time simply playing with the different brushes. Moving them randomly about to see what effect they have and changing colors often to see how they blend together.

If I would let her, she would probably spend the better part of the day just swirling colors around and changing brushes.

It is absolutely amazing watching the different combinations she comes up with, something I probably wouldn’t have known about if I hadn’t been watching her just “play”. Some of those brushes are just fun.

We have even done some tag team drawing time, which results in lots of giggles and drawing over each others scribbles.

It is relaxing and rather liberating, so the million dollar question for today is;

“When is the last time you just sat down and played?”

for wondering minds, my daughter’s favorite program is MyPaint, and her favorite brush collection is Deevad4.

I think my blog is haunted

Or at the very least it was temporarily possessed.

I started this blog in 2007, yeah I know surprised me too. And over the years I have gained more visitors. Odd enough in itself considering that I don’t advertize or really push it in any productive way.

So I have gotten used to a steady flow of visitors, granted not a huge flow. General average over the last year or so has been between 50-100 visitors a day. Not fantastic, but not really bad either. Of course there are periodic spikes in visits if I post something really cool.

So imagine my surprise when I checked my stats about a week ago and saw 1274. WTH! What did I post that was that interesting. A quick check showed that I hadn’t posted anything remarkable.

hmmmm….. probably a glitch in the stats system then. No biggie.

Except the next day there were even more and it continued to grow over the next week, reaching a peak of 3,354.

That is some glitch!

Sigh, and obviously only a temporary one, because here we are back at my normal stats.

Snap!, and here I thought I had finally gone viral

Oh well, back to normal. Which means playing in blender, reading and chasing my 5 year around the house.

bye now!

Huzzah! I drew a pumpkin!

LOL, I crack myself up!

CGCookie recently launched a new section of their site, Concept Cookie, a cool new learning spot for concept and digital art tutorials. And would you believe they launched at the same time I received a graphic tablet for my birthday. Now how cool is that.

So for the last week or so I have been trying to learn how to use my cool new tablet, resulting in a lot of unsaved doodles as I have been experimenting with how to hold the pen, how hard to press etc.

Today I decided to give it a real try. I had already watched Tim’s tutorial on how to paint a pumpkin and it looked easy enough for me to follow. So I launched the video and GIMP and then discovered the coolest thing. I accidentally touched the tablet with my pen while the cursor was over the video….. and …. THE VIDEO PAUSED!

That is too cool, another touch restarted the video. LOL, yeah I discovered that you can do the same thing with the mouse. Apparently I had never clicked on a video while it was playing. I’m guessing everyone already knew that, but it was news to me and it made following the tutorial much easier. I just touched the video whenever I needed to pause so I could do whatever Tim had just done.

It worked really well. And I ended up with a pumpkin, which was the whole point of the exercise. Sadly it is a very oddly shaped pumpkin and it appears to be floating. Which brings me to my working excuse:

My drawing looks less than perfect because I am still getting used to using a tablet.

And I am sticking with this excuse until further notice.

Actually I couldn’t care less that I don’t draw exceptionally well. I haven’t done any serious drawing in years (and I mean YEARS!) and I was only fair at it then.

But I am loving being able to blend colors and I have already played some with sculpting in blender with my new toy. I am having way too much fun to fuss over being able to draw or not.

On the up side, practice will improve my drawing to a certain extent, which is just fine. In the meantime, I think I am going to give that eye tutorial a whirl and see what I end up with.

bye now…..