christina's journal

Got two dls overnight, now at 1000 dls. My trusty white tablecloth was the 1000th sale. Of course if I included ELs in the count (istock doesn’t) then I made it yesterday, but no matter. That tablecloth is only twelve off a flame too, which will happen in about a month at the current rate. To celebrate I had a small glass of wine with my breakfast of smoked salmon and cream cheese on lightly toasted slices of sourdough baguette, garnished with cornichons and dill.

Meanwhile I’m hoping to get most of the illustrations about position done for Tom and Iliana. I managed three last night, with nine still to do. Getting this job done is mostly about managing my confidence to do it well enough. I hope that someday I’m as confident as I am with my work and my photography.

Later…

So here’s another illo on the cat theme. It’s a bit quicker having some elements already done, and the rest just being variations. That’s six done in the past 24 hours, which is pretty good going.

And here’s another, illustrating the concept far. Guess it could go with quite a few other words too. Suggesting the exact term is not easy. One reason Iliana wanted me to do many of these is that the students couldn’t arrive at the right word from the illustration. Sticking with the cat theme for all these place words.

11.30pm

Done! I’ve finished the dozen illustrations for adverbs (?) of position – on, in, in front of, behind, etc. Very pleased to have got quite a significant job done in a reasonable amount of time. I’ve definitely become much more productive as far as illustration goes. I do feel a lot more confident now.

So here I am with over 1000 dls and over $2000 on istock, and about 50 illustrations done for Tom and Iliana, that they seem pretty happy with. Guess I don’t need to keep working so hard to improve my art. Maybe I can get back to making some progress on those projects at work for a change.

Here are some recent illustrations I’ve done for Tom and Iliana. These have been done in Flash, which is now my preferred tool for this job.

OK, so I’ve made the shirt and pants separate components instead of being versions of torso and legs. Much better idea. It might make posing a little more tricky, matching up two layers instead of one, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. This image is a bit rough still – I was just working on converting the graphics to a different structure. Tidying up the bits and pieces will have to wait. It’s a fiddly job.

Meanwhile I’ve done no work on last weeks assignments from Robert. I’ll try to get a couple done over the next few days. I’m meant to be colouring monochrome images that he has provided.

So here’s Herman with an alternate styling. Looks like he’s gone to work in tights! I’ll have to do a bit more work on the pants. At the moment it’s just the legs with different colouring, but should probably be a completely new element. The reference I’m using doesn’t deal with objects that are there sometimes and sometimes not. Guess I’ll have to work out my own solution to that. Lots to learn still.

Quick and dirty exercise in animation. Rough drawing, even rougher animation. It’s a start.

I’ve been working through a drawing tutorial produced by CartoonSmart. This one’s a freebie, although I have purchased a couple of others. They look good. I didn’t quite finish this – hat, hair and some minor details missing, but I think I’ve done enough for today. This one was in Flash. I guess I could have used Illustrator but in some ways its easier to follow along with the same program as the instructor even though I’m a bit less familiar with it. Come to think of it I actually did start doing vector illustration in Flash as a student so many years ago.

This kind of work is really not hard but it is a bit time-consuming. I think it will be a while before I’m whipping off drawings in minutes. Coming up with ideas to draw is still not second nature, but I guess there are other things I do that require an endless stream of ideas, such as thinking up examples and assessment tasks for teaching programming courses. Pretty similar really – a few basic types, the details change.