Well I've gotten back to work on this Doctor Who painting.

As I stated before, it was a mistake to include all of strips in the scarf in my flats. It made it more difficult to select areas and make adjustments. To correct that mistake, I have repainted the Doctor's scarf as a neutral gray. This will allow me to select the entire scarf in one click.

So for the next few days, I'm going to be filling in the highlights and shadows. Once that's done, I get to hand paint the texture of the scarf in a new layer. I've tried to think of any short cut that I could use, but nothing has really worked. The texture has to change on the angles, stretch, and shape as it drapes across different parts of the Doctor's body, and the floor.

Perhaps I should have chosen something a little less difficult when experimenting with a new technique, but hindsight is always 20/20.

My wife had found a documentary series on medieval life by Terry Jones.  She wanted to watch it because she has recently become a Monty Python fan.  I wanted to watch it because I knew that he had become an interesting historian.  We both enjoyed it because it covered the not only the fact, but the fictions that surround people's perception of medieval life.

While we watched, I had brought a pad and paper.  This peasant was what came out of my pencils.  I later scanned him into computer and used GIMP to do a quick color sketch.  

Thank you Mr. Jones for a rather enjoyable evening.  

This pen and ink illustration was created for fun several years ago.  At the time, I was thinking that the best place to hold the 2001 WorldCon would be the moon.  That lead me to the idea of astronauts taking pictures with the monoliths from 2001. 

In case you can't read the button on the monolith, it says, "Hum if you're sentient."

I wish I could say that things have been quiet around here, but that would be lying.  So, I just state that I have a new scanner, and have opened myself back up for business.

My scanner has quit working.  I'm not sure of the reason yet.  Unfortunately I can't put up some of the pencil sketches that I have made recently.  Should have everything fixed soon. 

I pulled together a quick Christmas card using GIMP.  I really should not have waited until the last minute to get this completed.  It is finished, and that is the important thing.

Merry Christmas to everyone, and a Happy New Year. 

I stepped away from the Doctor for a moment to enter a new daily sketch on CGTalk.  This topic I chose was "The Cure."  As soon as I read the title, I flashed upon a friend's face the night after he had been drinking.  I'm hoping that I made him look pitiful enough.

The entire sketch was done in GIMP.  I created a new layer, and selected the pencil tool.  There I switched between a full black and a 50% black.  Occasionally I used the eraser tool to get rid of some excess lines.  

I really liked the expression I drew.  I was going for that, "Kill me now" look, and I think I achieved it. 

I was right, painting the individual strips on the scarf made more work for myself.

Using the method describe in Hi-Fi Color, I create a selection mask from the flat colors. This way I can make changes to the painting, but still select the individual items as needed. This means that if I wish to paint a section of the Doctor's scarf, I have to select each individual strip. It also means that I have to clean up the selection because the areas between the flat colors are not perfect. Therefore each time I paint the scarf, I am spending an extra minute or two cleaning up the area I will be painting.

I would have continued to work around this mistake, but then I made two additional mistakes.

The first mistake that I made was taking a short cut. Instead of hand painting the texture of the scarf, I was going to use a image of a knit that I had available. Now the Doctor's scarf does not lay flat. It wraps around his body two or three times. It is rolled up on itself. It's even folded. With all of these shapes, I should have realized that I needed to hand paint the texture. I could have recovered from this, but then I made my second mistake.

I was not saving incremental files.

I work as a programmer, and I am very familiar with version control. The rule is that once you get a section working, save it to the version control system. The reason is simple. It gives you the ability to go back to a earlier version. What I should have done was save a new file when the flats were complete, and then again when the hat was complete. If I had done that, I could have back to the version that had the completed hat. Now I have to clean up the mess that I made before I can go forward again.

Hopefully, I'll learn from my mistakes.

If I am learning how to treat my art professionally, I need to learn to market it.  So I am going to begin a series of experiments to see what are the best methods of marketing art on the Internet.  I figured that I would start with the signature.

The artist signature was the first method of advertising a painter or sculptor.  I believe that the signatures started during the Renaissance era when merchant families could brag about getting the family portrait done by the latest painting super-star.  As more people bragged, more people went to the artist to get additional work with his signature.  The simple advertisement of an artist's signature could increase his patronage. 

The question that I ask now, "Is the artist's name good enough for a signature?"  Most artists use either their a combination of their first and last name or just their last name.  Some artists, like Michael Whelan, use a symbol or their initials.  But in these modern times, is this the best approach to advertising your artwork?

When I went to google I looked up Jeff Baskin (without quotes) and got over a half a million hits.  The first entry was my livejournal page, but none of the other hits on the first page had anything to do with me.  In fact this website is not mentioned in the first five pages of the google search.  I then narrowed the search down by entering "Jeff Baskin" (with quotes).  This narrowed the search down to over two thousand entries, but again, this site was not in the first five pages.  Baskin by itself had over four million hits, and I wasn't mentioned in the first five pages at all.

Since my name will clearly not work as an artist advertisement, I am going to use this website domain as my signature.  My logic is simple.  The art could be placed anywhere; on a t-shirt, a poster, or downloaded from the Internet.  The person looking at the art will see a signature of http://art.JeBas.US will instantly know where the piece of art came from.  The first rule of advertising is make sure that the customers can find their way back to the store.  

I'm not sure of the results of this experiment yet, but I have seen one encouraging sign.  This website has a proportionally higher number of people directly accessing the website.  They must be pulling the domain name from somewhere.  Hopefully it's the signature. 

My shoulder is now feeling well enough to draw again, so I have painted in the flats for the fourth Doctor parody. For those of you that are not familiar with the term, the flats are solid pieces of color that cover an entire shape. The hat and coat are one solid color. The pants are another color, and the trim is another.

I might have made a mistake here, but I'm not sure yet. Since the scarf was made of four or five different colors, I painted out the strips in flats. Since the flats are used to select the sections of the painting later, I may have created more work for myself. I'll now have to select all of the individual scarf sections to select the entire scarf. Of course I thought of this after I was almost done painting the scarf.

It has been said many times. Art is a learning process, and I am no master.