them's good broth

Seventh week’s worth of scroodls. I’m afraid the...

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 09:38:00 +0000

Seventh week’s worth of scroodls.

I’m afraid the Post-It note offerings have continued into a second week.

[it’s just so much more convenient than dragging my sorry arse all the way over to the computer and setting up my Wacom tablet!]

I also seem to have created a monster; namely Colonel Wanderbury and his arch-enemy Baron von Brücken-Stempfl, who seem to have taken over my scroodls, at the moment. Trouble is, having given spawned the two eejits, I havenae the heart to kill them off. Oh well, let’s see what next week brings.

By the way. Not that anyone is remotely interested, but the “Wanderbury” in the first picture [the ‘bath of bras’ incident] is not Colonel Wanderbury himself, but his nephew Quantock Wanderbury –a man whose career has thus far not progressed beyond that brief walk-on part.

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The mighty Scroodl challenge; pick a start date and then aim to create and upload a hand-drawn piece of art, every day for the next 365 days –or a “year”, as it’s sometimes also called!

Sixth week’s worth of scroodls. This week, depending on...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 21:36:00 +0000

Sixth week’s worth of scroodls. This week, depending on how charitably disposed towards me you’re feeling, I’ve either been “pushing the boundaries of what constitutes an art medium”, or “being a lazy bugger”.

However you want to dress it up, it means i’ve mainly been doing quick 10-20 minute doodles on Post-It Notes. Normal service will be resumed as soon as arse is once more in gear.

———

The mighty Scroodl challenge; pick a start date and then aim to create and upload a hand-drawn piece of art, every day for the next 365 days –or a “year”, as it’s sometimes also called!

Into February with my fifth week’s worth of scroodls. Bit...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:43:06 +0000

Into February with my fifth week’s worth of scroodls. Bit of a mixed bag this week, with a couple of pretty half-arsed ones slipping in under the radar, towards the end.

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The mighty Scroodl challenge; pick a start date and then aim to create and upload a hand-drawn piece of art, every day for the next 365 days –or a “year”, as it’s sometimes also called!

Fourth week’s worth of scroodls. Inspiration was at a bit...

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:58:00 +0000

Fourth week’s worth of scroodls. Inspiration was at a bit of a low this week, hence the preponderance of cartoonish faces, which tends to be what I doodle, when I cannae think of anything else. Maybe, I’ll start picking a theme for certain weeks, to add a bit of variety into the mix.

———

The mighty Scroodl challenge; pick a start date and then aim to create and upload a hand-drawn piece of art, every day for the next 365 days –or a “year”, as it’s sometimes also called!

Third week’s worth of scroodls. Woot! –under the...

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:10:00 +0000

Third week’s worth of scroodls.

Woot! –under the “fifty weeks to go” milestone now.

Exciting News!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:37:35 +0000

██ ████ all ██ ████ is ████ ██ ████ ██ well ██████ ██ ██████ love ██ ████ your ██ ████ ██ government ████ ██

Second week’s worth of scroodls [and they said he’d...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:46:00 +0000

Second week’s worth of scroodls [and they said he’d never keep it up!] Forward we go into week three, scribbling away like a good ‘un!

The mighty Scroodl challenge; pick a start date and then aim to...

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:56:00 +0000

The mighty Scroodl challenge; pick a start date and then aim to create and upload a hand-drawn piece of art, every day for the next 365 days –or a “year”, as it’s sometimes also called!

I started mine on 31st December, so 6th January marked my first ‘week’. Here are my first seven Scroodls.

Review reviewed

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:46:32 +0000

I’ve just stumbled upon this, through the randomness that is retweeting and I love it! It’s an entertaining read and it combines a review of the film with personal anecdotes and hand-drawn artwork. what’s not to like? Possibly something to ponder for you lot out there with reviews to write for your PDPs.

“Think outside of the box”, and all thon!

War Horse –an illustrated review.

Have you made your 250 contributions to world culture today?

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 18:21:27 +0000

Have you made your 250 contributions to world culture today?:

squid-vicious:

Tumblr Post limit:

Okay so it’s 250. I guess that’s like a lot of posts in one day. But as someone who used to spend like a whole day on Tumblr because I had nothing else to do and posted 300+ posts (not every day, on rare occasions), I have posted more than 250 posts in one day many times.

So…

I stumbled across this post, whilst trying to search the Tumblr API for a way to limit members of a shared blog to a certain number of posts per day.

WTF! –All these people crying, complaining and petitioning because Tumblr limits you to a ‘mere’ 250 posts per day.

Why don’t you actually try and, you know, create something for yourselves, you fucking retards –instead of just sitting there, compulsively clicking “reblog” on every picture of a cat supposedly doing something amusing, or of some bint with her norks out –that causes a momentary flicker of interest to pass through your vacant skulls?

Jeebus! –anyone fancy starting a counter-petition to ask Tumblr to lower the daily post limit to single figures? That might do something to address the signal-to-noise ratio around here.

Remembrance of posts past

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 17:13:10 +0000

I’ve been racking my brain for a week or two now, trying to remember the name, web address [anything!] of a site I came across a while back, whereby you sign up with them as an illustrator and [subject to being accepted] you get to illustrate eBooks for iPad, from a selection they sell on iTunes. I thought it might be of interest to Vanessa in particular, but also to some of the rest of you, who enjoy a bit of illustration, on the sly.

Anyway, purely by chance, I came across the link to the site in an old post on this very self-same blog. I knew I’d mentioned it before *somewhere*!

So, here it is: Pictorical

Disclaimers:

1: The above link takes you to the signup page and includes a referral code from me [They say you’ll get accepted quicker, if you refer other people].

2: I’ve had no dealings with Pictorical at all, other than signing up myself. So read the small print and make sure you know what the deal is, before committing yourself to any work. This post is just to flag up Pictorical’s existence. It is *not* an endorsement.

Meet Scroodl

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:38:40 +0000

Howdy boys and girls.

At that depressing post-Christmas time of year, when you look at your haggard hungover face and turkey & mince pie-bloated carcass in the bathroom mirror and realise that you’ve spent the entire Christmas break stuffing your face and poisoning your liver and done “absolutely-no-work-at-all©” it’s nice to set yourself some aspirational New Year’s Resolutions.

And what could be more assuaging of your festive guilt than to pledge yourself fervently to some unattainable goal which, deep down, you know you’ll give up on, halfway through January and return to your self-loathing indolent ways?

Well, that dream can now become a reality!

Meet Scroodl, my fantastic new concept, for all boys and girls of an artistic disposition. The idea is simples. Just sign up, using the contact form on the Scroodl site and then your challenge is to upload a scribble or doodle [ie. “scroodl”] every day for a whole year. Read the details here.

Well –are you with me artistic brothers and sisters? Are we gonna do this thing and show those nay-sayers that we’ve got what it takes to produce crap artwork, all year round?

Brothers?…

Sisters?….

Where’s everybody gone?

calendar-iffic

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:10:00 +0000

How do you like my saucy new mini-calendars, showing the post-dates on my blog entries? Pretty nifty, eh? – and the cool thing is that it’s all done with good ol’ CSS. No image files were hurt in the making of this website.

If you fancy having a go, here’s what you need to do:

1: First, add the following code into your theme’s custom HTML. If you don’t know how to edit your theme’s custom HTML, you probably shouldnae be doing this anyway but, if you like living on the edge, refer to my previous post for instructions on how to access the HTML editing screen.

The mini-calendar code needs to go inside the title block. Here to be precise:

Replace the highlighted line above with the following code:

[You can use {Month} instead of {ShortMonth} in the above code, if you’d prefer your calendar to display the full month name].

2: If you save the changes and reload your Tumblr blog, you should see that you now have post-dates embedded in the titles of your posts, although the formatting will leave a lot to be desired:

Dinnae panic! The fact that the date is there shows that that part of the code is working, but there are no styling rules applied yet, so the date is just displaying in the same font and colour as the rest of the title. Time for a bit of CSS magic!

3: Edit your theme’s CSS declarations. If you followed my previous post about extracting your CSS to an external file, you need to edit that. If you’re just using the standard Tumblr themed editing features, then the CSS will be inline at the top of the HTML for your theme. Whatever the case, here’s the CSS which I’ve used to style my mini-calendars. It disnae really matter where you put it within your theme’s CSS; I stick it next to the declarations for the post-title, so it’s easy to find:

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to customise the mini-calendar CSS to get the look you want, to fit your particular theme.

4: One other tweak I made was to add a bit more padding at the top of the post DIV itself, just so the mini-calendar wasnae wedged right up against the top of the post border:

Before

After

Well, that’s all folks. Have fun!

less pain - more gain

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 17:27:00 +0000

Trying to edit your Tumblr theme’s HTML was annoying enough previously but, since the latest update to the interface, it’s even more of a pain in the arse than ever. Now you have to have two tabs open and make at least three clicks back and forth between the “Customise” section and their annoying HTML editing screen, every time you want to make the slightest change.

Here’s a way in which you can set things up, so you can edit your theme’s CSS locally and then have the changes automagically applied to your Tumblr blog:

Assumptions:

You’re using a custom theme.
You have a Dropbox account.
You’re using a mac. [Actually, the OS isn’t important, but the instructions & screenshots assume a mac, so if using sommit else, you’ll have to adapt accordingly]
You know what the fuck I’m talking about.

1: Login to Tumblr and, in the Dashboard, click on the name of your blog:

2: Then click on “Customise Appearance” in the sidebar.

3: Now click “Edit HTML” in the lefthand panel which opens:

4: When the HTML window opens, cut everything between this line…

and this one [inclusive]…

The line numbers shown here are what I see, using a customised theme based off the default. If you’ve added extra stuff into the header, or are customising another theme, you’ll likely have different line numbers, but the “style” tags should be the same.

5: Now switch your attention away from your browser and fire up your favourite Text Editor. In my case, TextMate. Create a new document and paste in all the code you cut previously.

6: Delete the first and last lines of the pasted code. ie. the beginning and end “style” tags:

Delete these two lines

7: Now save your new file to your Dropbox’s public folder, not forgetting to give it the “.css” extension:

8: Now login to your Dropbox account on the dropbox.com website and navigate to your Public folder and the CSS file you just created [I’m assuming here that your local Dropbox folder on your computer has by now sync’d with Dropbox in ‘the cloud’, which usually happens pretty instantaneously]:

9: When you’ve located your CSS file in your online Dropbox Public folder, click the disclosure triangle to the right of the filename and select “Copy public link” from the popup menu:

10: When the link popup window appears click “Copy to clipboard”. Your link will obviously be different from mine:

11: OK. We’re done with Dropbox now, so head back on over to Tumblr and the “Edit HTML” window again. If you correctly followed the instructions above, your theme’s HTML code should now look something like this [The highlighted line showing where all that CSS code was previously cut out]:

12: Now, instead of having the CSS code in the actual template itself, where going to import it directly from Dropbox. Into the highlighted area above, put the following, replacing my dropbox CSS url with your own:

13: Now click on Appearance, then Save, then Close, to commit your changes:

14: Visit your blog in your browser and make sure that everything looks OK. If there’s no formatting at all, then your external stylesheet is probably not being loaded. Looks like you’ve not followed these instructions exactly and I’m afraid you’ll have to start over again.

However, even if the external stylesheet is loading properly, you will probably find that there are a few visual glitches still to iron out. In my case this was most noticeable in that my page background defaulted to white and the sidebar got a bit messed up:

The reason for this is that a lot of themes [including the Default one that I’ve customised] use special “Tumblr variables” within the template and CSS, to allow users to change things like background colour, fonts, etc. via the web interface. These Tumblr variable codes look like this:

They look like this in the theme HTML

And like this in the CSS

These codes are not valid CSS, so when you extract the CSS from within your Tumblr theme to an external CSS stylesheet, they’re going to break and your template will just display defaults in their place.

In order to fix things, you’re going to have to do a Find/Replace on your new external CSS file, looking for these Tumblr variables and replacing them with ‘proper’ CSS definitions

Here are the variables defined in my theme, which I’m going to have to ‘hardwire’ into the stylesheet:

15: Open up your CSS file and do the necessary Find/Replaces. For example:

…etc. etc.

16: I also found a few other bits of conditional code in my CSS, as well. For example to display the correct “Follow” image, depending on what language you’ve set your blog to display in:

Replace that with a single declaration for the appropriate language:

17: There was also some conditional code which would either set “display:none” or “display:block” on the “Ask me anything” or “Submit story” sidebar items, depending on whether or not they were enabled. I just hardwired them to “display:block” as, if they’re not enabled, they won’t display anyway, so why make a conditional rule? [unless I’m missing something here?].

Before

After

After doing all of the above, I’d got rid of all the broken conditional code from the CSS and was left with a nice clean stylesheet. I did give it the once over, just to make sure and spotted a few double “;;” which needed cleaning up. Then, finally, I ran the whole thing through the W3C’s CSS validator, just to make sure nothing else had sneaked through.

Eventually, after all that cleaning up, I’ve ended up with my site displaying as it did before, but now with the CSS loaded externally from Dropbox:

So, what was the point of all that hard work? –you ask

Well, now whenever I want to edit my Tumblr blog’s theme, I can just open the local copy of my CSS file and work on that, with my favourite text editor, instead of having to wrestle with Tumblr’s fuckwitted editing interface. Because the local file is saved in my Dropbox folder, any changes I make to it are automatically sync’d to the version saved on my Dropbox in the cloud, which is then imported by Tumblr into my custom theme. So, in otherwords, tweaking my Tumblr theme is now as easy as; editing a local file, hitting CMD+S, waiting a second [for Dropbox to sync] and then refreshing my browser window.

[In practice I’ve found that Dropbox sync’ing usually takes place within about a second. It’s certainly faster, and involves a lot less annoying and unnecessary button clicking, than using the Tumblr interface.]

Pretty damned cool, eh?

stop-frame genius in action

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:31:18 +0000

I saw this video a month or two back and forgot to book mark it and had absolutely no luck since in finding it because:

A: I couldnae remember who it was about

B: I couldnae remember the name of the film.

Thanks to a casual comment by Rob [AKA “Big Tough Gully”] in one of his posts yesterday, I finally remembered that it was

A: Barry Purves

B: Tchaikovsky

Really clever on two levels; Firstly, you get to see the master, Barry Purves in action and secondly, it’s a stop-frame within a time lapse, which is judged just right to give the effect that the stop-frame model is moving at normal speed. Very clever indeed. I only wish it was a bit longer.

Charlie and the Pickelhaube of doom

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:20:00 +0000

After they got fed up with me hanging about looking dejected, because I wasnae allowed to play with plasticene too, my 2nd year animation students took pity on me and said they’d allow me to design one of the characters for our forthcoming ”Project Innocence” stop-frame animation.

Presumably because they’ve already seen the state of my drawing and modelling skills, I was given the job of designing and building Charlie, brother of the main protagonist, who spends most of his brief appearance in the film clad in an old army greatcoat and German Pickelhaube helmet [war relics, belonging to his granda], so that not much of him is visible, apart from his chin.

Luckily, I specialised in Chin Design at art college, so I feel confident I can meet the demands of the brief. Here are a couple of early scribbles to get the ball rolling:

Cert. Ed. –ifiable

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:08:24 +0000

At the last session of my terminally tedious Cert. Ed. course [which I’m being forced to complete, to prove I’m qualified to do the job I’ve been doing for the past eleven years], I was actually given carte blanche to do some doodling in an official capacity –instead of using it as a means to attempt to preserve my sanity, while the lesson drags by, as is usually the case.

We were split into groups of four and charged with producing some “visuals” which explained how ‘something so boring I’d rather eat my own dung than think about it’ differed from ‘something else so boring I’d rather eat my own dung than think about it’. Whilst the rest of my group went online to collect and collate some suitably uninteresting facts to prove whatever the hell it was we were proving, I was given the task of providing the accompanying graphics….

Graphic 01 – illustrating ’something so boring I’d rather eat my own dung than think about it’

Graphic 02 – illustrating ’something else so boring I’d rather eat my own dung than think about it’

And here, purely for illustrative purposes, is a picture of a man preparing to eat his own dung, rather than think about it [whatever “it” is].

Project Innocence

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 15:57:52 +0000

Since I’m looking forward, in the next few weeks, to bollocking those of my students who’ve not bothered to post anything to their PDP blogs, since the current term began, I thought I’d better get my arse in gear myself, lest some barrack-room lawyer pipe up with a, “Please stop hitting me with that length of two-by-four dear tutor for, in our indolence, we were only emulating your good self!”

So, here come a couple of posts from the “Leading by Example” school of lecturing:

Project Innocence, is the working title we’ve given to a stop-frame animation film, which I’ll be making during the course of this academic year with a select band of my 2nd year animation students. By “I’ll be making with…”, I mean, “They’ll be making… while I stand around. pointing at things and generally getting in the way”

Project Innocence is a story of a young girl, Innocence who, whilst staying at her granny and granda’s house, along with her brother Charlie, accidentally unleashes havok when she innocently [pun intended] begins playing with some old Voodoo dolls, which she stumbles across in the attic.

Here’s a wee ‘mood-boardy’ type doodle from my sketchbook, which I scribbled up after one of our early production meetings, where we’d thrashed out the bare-bones of storyline and setting.

clean slate

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:22:51 +0100

Well, I hope all you smart young NMD and Anim students have been listening to the repeated advice from your Uncle stío and Auntie Alex, to back up and keep copies of all your work. Because, last week, while we were on holiday some ~~fuc~~.. ~~twa~~.. ~~ars~~.. clever person from IT decided to completely wipe every computer in room 222 –without even consulting with us first.

So, anything not backed up is “gone like the snows of last winter”, if you’re feeling poetical about it [which I’m not!]

the great sketchbook project rip-off

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 11:45:00 +0100

I’m feeling pretty pissed off this morning.

After writing previously [on a couple of occasions] about The Sketchbook Project and my mixed feelings about it, postie has just delivered my sketchbook for this year’s outing –and i’ve got to say that $25 for the tiny, sorry looking sub-school exercise book quality “sketchbook”, which tumbled out of the envelope, is a fucking joke.

I had some correspondence by email last year, with the organisers of The Sketchbook Project, with regards to their describing 2011’s sketchbooks as moleskines, when they were patently nothing but cheap knock-off copies. I’ve owned several moleskines in my time and I know how to spot a real one! [in fact ASDA do a nice line in moleskine-esque notebooks for about £1,99]. Anyway, in said email correspondence, the Sketchbook Project representative i dealt with refused to accept that what they were sending out were not genuine moleskines, even when I pointed out several features that appear on real moleskines, which were lacking in their fake ones.

So, it was with a slight feeling of reluctance that I entered this year’s Sketchbook Project. Having dealt with these people before and found them to be less than honest, I was loath to put any more of my money their way. But also being the lazy bastard I am, I know it takes something like this kind of project to get me motivated enough to actually fill a sketchbook these days. So, last week I reluctantly ponied up my $25, noticing in passing that the project website no longer claimed to be sending out moleskines [fake or otherwise] but…

Sketchbookers spoke and we listened! This year, Art House created a custom-designed sketchbook in collaboration with Scout Books featuring a host of improvements and a greener footprint.

This year’s official Sketchbook Project book is made from high quality 100% recycled paper milled in the Pacific Northwest, printed with vegetable-based inks and produced with renewable energy. We’ve also improved the weight and texture of the paper, enhanced the strength of the cover and selected wire saddle stitching so that each book is easier to rebind if necessary. We’re proud to say that these are the best books we’ve ever been able to offer for the Sketchbook Project – thanks to feedback from hundreds of members of the Art House community.

Well folks, here is the magnificent “custom-designed” sketchbook, “featuring a host of improvements”:

No. I havenae got giant hands. This postage-stamp sized object is apparently a “sketchbook”

Maybe I shouldnae complain about the anorexic dimensions too much. At least there shouldnae be much difficulty filling it!

And, if nothing else, at least the shoddiness of the “sketchbook” has already inspired me to put pen to paper.

Translations:

“…enhanced the strength of the cover…” - made it from recycled cornflakes boxes

“…selected wire saddle stitching...” - it’s got two staples holding it together.

I had a look on the scoutbooks website [the people who make these all-singing, all-dancing “by user request” sketchbooks] and found the following:

hmmm… three of these crap-o-trons for about half the price of a single ‘real’ moleskine

It’s great to see an organisation responding to customer demand in this way. Without regard for what it might cost them financially , The Sketchbook Project were quite prepared to charge their customers the same money this year for a sketchbook 2/3 the size and about 1/6 the price of the ones they [claimed to have] sent out last year.

You dinnae get customer sevice like that too often!