Funny...

After the last post, I'm beginning to think that I may have gone wrong somewhere. I don't think that my cartooning has improved much recently - too much drawing, not enough cartooning. I few weeks of getting back to basics I think in my sketch book...

Pimp My Caption - 6/9/09

My latest entry to the CCGB "Pimp My Caption" contest...

Pens Again - The Update!

Ok - All my pens have now arrived. I bought 3 Zig Dual tip pens (Black, Cool Grey and Blender), a Pentel Sign Pen, a Papermate Nylon and a Uni POSCA black fine tip (I already have the white fine tip).

First impressions: The Sign pen and the Nylon are practically the same - good for quick sketches in the sketch book (the Sign Pen is slightly better at line & wash). The Zigs - well, I'm not sure. Very versatile, but the ink is slightly purple when used with line & wash - although the grey is nice (wish I had picked a darker shade though...).

The real start however, is the marker that was bought as a afterthought - the Uni Posca black fine tip. The tip is a bit harsh, and can feel a bit scratchy, but the line - lovely! Not much variance, but nice and black, with almost no bleed, and it dries fast. The added advantage is that the white version of the marker can cover the black extremely well (just make sure it's really dry first). This is one of the problems I had when I brought the white marker - on many of my pens, it couldn't cover them up (even the so called waterproof ones) - but it just loves the black POSCA.

I may even be thinking of buying more of these markers in future...

Kuretake woes

You'll remember from my last post that I love using the Kuretake Fude pen. Well, not any more, as I've hit a big snag with it. I like drawing on white card (i can get it cheap, it holds up well to rough erasing, and I can use wet media on it), but the Fude Pen doesn't like it. It's started leaving big blobs of ink, which leads to smudging. Looks as if the ink is having trouble being absorbed by the card, or there is simply too much ink being sent to the nib. Either way, it's nasty. I've drawn a piece half an hour ago, and some of the ink is still wet!

The card I've used before for colour work, and is usually fine. I've noticed that my new sketchbook doesn't like the Kuretake ink either...

If I can't get this sorted out, it will be the end for the Kuretake.

Pens Again!

Yes, it's that time of the month - pay day!

I'm looking at more pens again (I'm such a pen whore - the amount I have is ridiculous) and I'm going to go for more of a graphic look. I've been using fineliners mostly (0.7, 0.5 & 0.1), but I'm still a big fan of the Kuretake Fude Pen (see the Coyote cartoon) which is slowly becoming my favourite - so much in fact, that I've started looking at other brush pens.

I've already got Copic, Faber & Pentel brush pens, but they all have the same problem - too floppy. The Kuretake is much stiffer, and suits my drawing style more. However, there are other types of brush pens - the dual ended markers, which have a bullet tip at one end, and a foam brush tip at the other. Top of these are the Tombow & KureTake brands, so I'm going to buy two of each - one in black, and one in light grey (for shading) and see how these go...

Daleks

My latest attempt in the CCGB Caption Contest... And it got 4 points! Manga Studio this time...

Coyote...

My latest attempt in the CCGB Caption Contest - I was late, but the cartoon went down well.

Old Spock

In the same vein (jugular) of the previous cartoons - meet Old Spock. He should really have white hair, but white would be illogical...

Kirk

Inspired by my "RedShirt" cartoon - this is Kirk, ready to face the Klingon hordes... er, well, maybe later, eh Jim? :) Drawn in Ink, coloured in OpenCanvas. The second version uses a different colouring method - basically, I've created 2 layers using grey tones, appiled as shadows & highlights using ArtRage (it has a much better blending tool). This method should make sure my shading is right before I add colour - waddya think?

Back Off Me Hols 3...

Another quick analog cartoon. Don't you feel sorry for red shirts? :)

Back Of Me Hols 2...

Quick analog catroon (no digital work)....

Back off me hols - 1...

quick cartoon I did for the CCGB experiment 2...

New Method Test...

Quick test of my new method. Line work is hand inked, scanned to GIMP where it's cleaned up, traced and colour filled in InkScape, and finished in Xara. InkScape does a much better job of the vector conversion than Xara can (as well as filling in the colours), but for editing, Xara wins hands down. Tomorrow I'll post the (hopefully) finished version, which will be shaded...


...and here it is!

My Latest "Kenco" moment...

I just realized something really important regarding cartooning in Xara Xtreme. Why am I creating line art, when I should be using filled shapes? Not only do I not have to colour them in, but I choose the display hierarchy. If I create a wheel for instance as a filled shape, that can then be used both sides of a car picture that's not head on, provided the car is a filled shape too.

I can be really thick at times (slaps head). Never mind - hopefully, I'll post an example by the end of the week. By the way, a "kenco moment" is the same as a "eureka" moment, only coffee flavoured... :)

Luke and Leia - updated colours

Slightly updated colours - used Artrage for the painting, GIMP for adjustments. All I've got to do now is think of a caption or speech bubble...

Hi 'Yall

Very quick cartoon of some sort of "Trek" character -drawn using OpenCanvas.

SuSE FTP masquerading

For those in the know, enabling masquerading for certain machines & ports in SuSEfirewall2 is relatively straight forward (enable masquerading, allow the address(es) and port in the config file) but this doesn't work for ftp. The reason is because the FTP protocol doesn't just use one channel, but several, and these are decided on the fly. The firewall doesn't know this... but it can if you load 2 firewall modules called ip_conntrack_ftp & ip_nat_ftp modules. You enable these in the FW_LOAD_MODULES option. This will all work if it's a passive ftp connection - if it's active, you may have to enable a wider port range for the required addresses...

Luke & Leia - initial colours

These are the initial colours for a cartoon I'm working on now. I haven't come up with any captions yet - that's coming later! Hand inked, scanned into GIMP, colours in GIMP & OpenCanvas...

windows - inaccessible boot device

Just a quick note to myself. To fix...

1. chkdsk /r
2. fixboot
3. (optional) fixmbr
4. If none of the above do not work, if you have a backup, recover the system32 directory in windows root. Use RIPLinux or similar.
   

GRUB install problems...

I've been fighting recently with a virtual linux box, trying to get the size of the virtual hard disk reduced (and as you know, MS Virtual PC doesn't shrink Linux hard disks very well). My answer was to create a new vitual blank hard disk, repartition it, recover the data, restore GRUB, and I'd be away...

Trouble is, it wasn't that easy. Every time I tried to use GRUB to setup the MBR, I got various errors - the long ang short of it was that GRUB couldn't see the files on the partition, even though I'd chroot'ed, and could see them perfectly.

The solution to my problem was twofold. Firstly, I hadn't created the partition properly. GRUB only works with partitions that use a inode size of 128, so I had to create the ext3 partition with...

mkfs -t ext3 -I 128 /dev/sda2

The next stage (after I recovered the data) was to chroot to the mounted /dev/sda2, and run GRUB in interactive mode, to setup the MBR - but still no luck, no files could be found. The reason was twofold

1. The linux recovery system CD used had /dev/hda as the IDE disk, not /dev/sda, so I changed my linux recovery system CD to one that used the same devices as my virtual linux system.
2. The sys, proc and dev points mounted as chroot did not match my current rescue system, so I needed to do the following before chrooting...

mount -t ext3   /dev/sda1 /mnt
mount -t proc   proc      /mnt/proc
mount -t sysfs  sys       /mnt/sys
mount -o bind   /dev      /mnt/dev
chroot /mnt /bin/bash

Once this was all done, I was able to run the GRUB interactive setup correctly. Interestingly, the inode size of 128 can also affect LILO too...

For more information, please look at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Reinstalling_GRUB.