CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

So, the grey-lead pictures on different backdrops were kind-of okay, but what if I wanted to have colours? I’d read somewhere that some artists used a grey-scale drawing to give them an idea of shade, so I decided to use my Rosebuds on Colorized Backdrop – Saturation 6 as a base. Here’s what I did: 1.       Imported the image I wanted to use. 2.       Saved it as Pink Rosebuds on Colorized Backdrop-Saturation 6. 3.       I selected the brush icon (9th symbol down in the left column of the Toolbox dock) 4.       I didn’t want a heavy mark, so I chose something that looked a bit fuzzy—the first blotchy symbol in the 9th row of the ‘Brushes’ dock. 5.       I also wanted to be able to see the grey-scale through the painting I did, so I went to the Tool Options box and changed the Opacity slide bar to 43.9 6.       ...

One of the things I recognised is that I would need to digitise my artwork in order to incorporate it into books, or to ship it to anyone interested in purchasing it... should I ever get good enough, and that reminded me that there are programs out there that are quite powerful, but not so intuitive to use. Gimp, for instance, is free, but has its own quirks. I decided I would try to get my head around what this tool could do... or, perhaps, what I could manage to achieve with the tool. I wanted to isolate the rosebuds from the background clutter by cutting them out. This is done using the 'Free Select Tool'. This is not as easy as it seems, because the clipboard will only take 525x525 pixels. There was much cussing and crying until I worked out I had to shrink the longest edge of the image to 525 BEFORE I began my cut. Of course, the trickiest thing is to remember to write down the original dimensions of the picture and then return the finalised image to the original size....

So, for a very long time I've been saying I'm going to re-develop my drawing skills. I *did* make a start on it in January, but I still haven't managed to coordinate the time factor to really get into it. That's going to be a challenge this year, but we'll see how it goes. It only took a month to start pulling the writing schedule into a vague sense of shape. In the meantime, I started with still life and grey lead to get the feel of it again. Here is my first picture in far too many years.