Bindweed

Absolutely - I'll go to the pub tonight and pay about £2.70 per pint, and maybe £6 on a Chinese takeaway I probably won't finish. Then I'll wake up tomorrow feeling rough and about £30 poorer with nothing to show for it except some forms of physiological damage.

And yet I'm too mean and lazy to stump up £1.50 for a box of crayons.

Being an adult is really quite hard to grasp...

Oh well, nevermind. I wasn't sure because I think there's a difference of interpretation regarding the term 'marker' between the two sides of the Atlantic. Over here the term tends to mean something quite different from children's felt-tips (which are far from anything you'd find in professional use). But we're gradually catching up to the correct usage of these words , and I take your point, Wassy.

Unfortunately, I shall have to drop out of the competition as I've definitely run out of time, now. I should have cleaned that bathroom, I guess. Now I'll catch it from the wife...

I was worried that I'd have to drop out this month, but then this morning I found a couple of hours to dug around in my kid's toy cupboard and come up with some suitable (I hope) materials.

I used generic kiddies' felt-tip pens from the Early Learning Centre - they were on the very brink of all being dried up and dead after a few years' heavy handed use by a small boy, but I squeezed a little life out of enough of them, I think. I don't know what construction paper is - I'm guessing that it might be an American term for a paper that's possibly similar to cartridge, and bog-standard cartridge paper. is what I used.

Anyway, I spent a couple of hurried hours knocking out this doodle of a generic CoH superheroine building a substantial rockery for her spring alpines. I hope it qualifies. I should have been cleaning the bathroom and kitchen instead of doing this, so it'll be doubly painful if it fails!

Just added a few more pieces to my DA page - Kat and Terra have already posted their pieces, but I don't think this piece has been foisted on the forum before. A commission for WhamBamBoom of his brute:

I also wanted to poke a few possible passers-by, as I'm about 30 away from 10,000 pageviews on DA

It's probably not much to some of the DA veterans out there, but it seems a lot to me!

Here's my entry for March:



I'm really disappointed that I just ran out of time before I could finish colouring it, but better to submit the line art than nothing at all, I guess.

This is a darn good thread! I'd been browsing on Sunday to try and find some helpful guidance regarding a new tablet but came up with very little, so the collected reviews and suggestions and opinions here are really very useful and interesting.

I have a Wacom Volito 2, which is quite old. It's supposed to be pressure-sensitive, but in practice doesn't weem to want to go there. Also, the work area is smaller than 5"x4" which is pretty cramped.

There are so many variations on Bamboo Pen, Bamboo Fun, Intuos etc that I have no idea what to look at as a serious upgrade. I just want a reasonable work area and a pressure-sensitive pen function that works with CS2 on Windows 7, but finding out which does this at a reasonable price is hard. Especially, it seems, when you live in the UK. It's not like you can try 'em on and replace them if they don't fit.

(Oh, I would like to have a weekend to play for free with one of those $2000 Cintiq things...)

It's been really hard coming to a decision, it really has. But I suppose I really ought to stop dilly-dallying on this, so my opinion goes thus:

1. Juggertha
Not only does it meet both the Romance and the Pin-Up criteria, but it makes me chuckle.

2. U-naught
The classic pin-up medium of the last few decades of the 20th Century; possibly the only reason Pirelli aren't suing is because she's got too many clothes on

3. Clutch
I guess it's a romance, of sorts, and a pin-up. Plus I clearly have issues surrounding a desire to see Ms Liberty embarrassed

There are several others who were almost on the list but I just had to stop chopping and changing the top three at some point. It's taken me a few days of going back and forth to reach a decision - having three votes certainly makes me think harder about how I allocate them. I really think it's a very fine group of entries, and I'd like to offer my humble congratulations to everyone who entered on some really imaginative work. I'm enjoying this, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the March FArts.

I guess I was thinking too much about the advertising poster concept and not enough about the original brief. I think CR is right in that this doesn't meet the romance element of the brief. I'd like to think, however, that it still meets the pin-up element - if I was a Paragon City denizen with a thing for Liberty Girl, I might have a poster like this pinned up somewhere (or use blu-tack. It's the 21st century, fer cryin' out loud - but then "tacked -up" sounds a bit naughty ). I'm just interpreting pin-up as having a much wider meaning. True, Betty Grable showed a lot of leg in 1944, but also Farrah Fawcett's face sold a lot of posters of her with all her clothes on as well as sitting in the surf wearing a bikini

It's no biggie if this doesn't meet the brief - I'll just do another one - it's still early days, after all

(*starts thinking about Gorgeous Glenda, in the surf, in a Freakshow bikini...* )

After checking with Wassy that it's OK for me to do such a thing, I'm ditching my previous entry and replacing it with this one, which is a bit better, I think.



I still need lots more practice with the tablet and brush settings, because it's still really hard for me to control the brush effects, but it's still early days, I guess.

Omi's done a fantastic job! It really makes the picture look good. I truly envy the ability to colour this well, I really do. I'm lovin' it!

Thanks Kai - although I don't think the problem lies with CS2. I think it's my inability to set a workable sensitivity for the tablet that doesn't make the brush effect all patchy. I like the idea of the pen sensitivity, but perhaps I might have to turn it off and settle for having it behave like a mouse.

Many thanks, Caem!

Thanks to Caemgen, I can now do this!

Here are the pencil and the inked versions of VexXxa, side by side, each pic is a link to the larger version on my DA page!:



Hoorah! Now I feel less like a technological troglodyte, and will celebrate by drinking enough beer to eradicate the brain cells where I stored this newfound knowledge!

As promised, VexXxa - a protopiece in pencil, here: http://happy-dan.deviantart.com/art/...ncil-152856904

and the inked version, here: http://happy-dan.deviantart.com/art/VexXxa-152857054

I'd like to color this, but I'm still beating my head against Photoshop's brick wall trying to get my tablet to work as well as the mouse (I'm not comfy painting with a mouse, not least because of the RSI I feel marching up my wrist as I do so...). Maybe I will one day, but it will probably take a while.

BTW - can anyone explain to me, in terms any two-year-old can understand, how I can insert an image in these posts, when the source is on a DA page? Whenever I try to link to an image using the little "insert image" button, I get nuttin' I'm sure inserting images and adding descriptive linnks was much easier with the old board software...

I'm reminded of falling off a swing when I was about 8 or 9. In those days there was none of this namby-pamby sand, bark chippings or spongy tarmac: it was Whammo! - head first onto the concrete flagstones. Although my head hurt, it was my knee that hurt most, after it came down a split second later, my dense skull having broken the fall

As if to prove a point, Fate put me under a half brick, tossed into the air by a school friend who was pretending it was a hand grenade. It dropped onto my 11-year old skull and bounced off, but the inch-long pebble that followed it hurt like buggery and brought up a lump the size of a golf ball.

Add these details to my inability to remember anything more complex than "I like beer", plus an ongoing failure to engage common sense, and it's plain to see, now, that my skull must be several inches thick, and the brain inside, therefor, only slightly larger than a pickled walnut.

I'm not happy at all with this. I think it would have been much better had I stuck with pen & ink, since I don't have a clue how to work in Photoshop, and digital painting is clearly a real challenge for me. But anyway, here's a cheesecake pin-up advert for Lord Recluse's fave washing powder...

That sounds like a mighty fine idea!

Thankee kindly

I think Kat likes it, so all is well.

Just need to colourificate the thing now...