#art [RSS]
#all #tech #linux #personal #media

Journey Fanart

It's a fan artwork of travellers surfing on carpets (real lore) from the game Journey!

Now, this artwork is the most thought-out and the most finished one I've ever really done, as I usually end up cutting the scope of an artwork a lot. I felt both the most dissatisfied and the most happy about it. The initial sketch is like, uh, 2 years old? Yeah. I definitely was way too particular with how I drew it. While working on it very sparringly, the finish line felt to move further and further away until one evening I just sat and decided to finish it - "Whatever I end up with is final".

A lot of artistic choices I made here lead me to an idea of making...

...The Cutout Thingy

Look at this! I made a layered paper cutout thing. Horribly jagged edges and very desaturated print, but it exists! I will say one thing only, and it is that making this one was very theraputic and enjoyable. Honestly I wanna do more IRL stuff.

I had some other thoughts, but, maybe next time.

Small GUI to Make Weird Designs

Hello! First week already proved challenging. Unfortunately I fell ill which also made it more difficult to finish something meaningful in time, but I have some results.

The Idea

I really like art based around very simple concepts. An example of such a concept is pixel art. The idea of pixel art is about as simple as it gets - you draw with little squares. So, I was doodling around trying to come up with something similar that looks cool. I came up with a modification of pixel art, with non-parallel lines and variable line width. I tried recreating it in inkscape, but quickly encountered multiple problems, like differently angled lines being at different distances from each other and the ends of lines looking off.

How to GUI

In the end I just decided to write my own program to make this kind of designs. Only experience writing GUI I had was using QT (C++); it was painful. I decided instead to use Godot, as using a python-like language with dynamically typed variables seemed like a much better idea for a GUI.

I had a few ideas I wanted to implement in my Goo-e: shortcuts that the user can set/unset just by right-clicking the element instead of going into settings menu and searching for it there (I prototyped it but didn't yet use). Another idea was giving the user to ability to save any value as default (again, by right-clicking), for now I implemented it with a button next to a value.

How do I optimize this ;-;

As you can see the UI is incredibly bare-bones. Main features are there: you can pan, zoom, draw and erase lines on a grid. Changing the angle of the grid is incredibly laggy as the code has to update a huge amount of individual nodes (objects). I will probably completely rewrite the entire program at some point.

Was it worth it?

Writing an entire program just to make this very specific type of designs might seems silly, especially considering how I realised that this effect can be achieved just by applying a simple image transform on a picture made using a normal square grid.

Regardless, the experience is valuable. I felt good programming, abusing the hell out of Godot's signal system and other features that make my life just a little bit easier. And damn does it feel good accomplishing something at the end of the week and posting about it here. Here is something I doodled in the program: see if you can figure out what it says, each letter is made out of 1 line. That's it for this week! Let's see what lies ahead :)

15 Day Challenge: Drawing

Me and my friend PizzArt decided to do 15 day long art challenges. It is definitely a great way to make yourself learn something new. You are motivated by 2 powerful things: deadlines - 1 piece everyday, responsibility - your friend is expecting you, so you can't skip a day for silly reasons.

4 of the images were drawn with pen and pencil, everything else was drawn digitally in Krita (would recommend for painting). I used filter and concept art brush packs from Krita's website. You can download the images and project files below if you want. As you can see, the reference photos are also included. Check out PizzArt's drawings on his blog.

Website Artwork

This was the first time I ever used Inkscape. Surpisingly easy to use, the interface also looks nice. Great open-source program! This post will (hopefully) be updated in the future.