Category: Challenges

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Krampus Challenge – Day 04, I made stripes!

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Okay, I lied. I did not start another Krampus Raven today. Instead, I started something just for me!

Stripes!

Oooooh! Stripes

I realize this doesn’t look like much, but it’s the start of a Krampus Cowl (or should that be Krampus Kowl?). Why am I making myself a cowl, you ask? Because every Christmas Eve, the Hubster and kids celebrate what we call “Drag Your Buddhist to Church” night. Yes, Christmas Eve is one of the three times of the year where I am obligated to show up at church. The other two are Easter Sunday and Scout Sunday. Scout Sunday is actually pretty funny, because I’m the one who has to organize the event for all the Catholic Girl Scouts at the girls’ school, and I’m the one who ends up standing with the priest as he blesses all the scouts. Yeah, funny.

Anyway, every Christmas Eve, I run into the same problem. I have nothing appropriate to wear. I don’t go out to a lot of fancy events, see, so I don’t have a big stock of nice clothes. Oh, I have tons of t-shirts and jeans! In fact, I think I may have a t-shirt for just about every occasion you can imagine! Zombie apocalypse? Check. Zombie invasion? Check. Zombie slumber party? Check and double-check!

Okay, so I mostly have t-shirts about zombies. And kawaii food. Which is kind of like zombies if you really, really think about it after having a few glasses of wine. Work with me here, people.

But back to the cowl. This year I have decided that I will have an outfit to wear for Christmas Eve. And because it’s always so bloody cold on Christmas Eve, that outfit is going to be something that will keep me warm. So I’m making this cowl. It will be alternating stripes of purple and black (the OFFICIAL colors of Krampus as declared by me) and run from the top of my neck to halfway down my arms. The pattern is from the December 2012 issue of Crochet World and it is made of nothing more than single crochet, half-double crochet, and double crochet stitches. I have tweaked the pattern a bit by making it in alternating stripes rather than one solid color. I like stripes. I especially like purple and black stripes.

To make this cowl truly Krampus-ish (Krampus-like? Krampus-ian?), I plan to crochet a small skull applique to stitch on the front. I may add crossed holly leaves or crossed bones. I haven’t decided yet.

But this is what I got done today. I will be doing more on it tomorrow, and hopefully, I will also get the other Krampus Raven going. Good night for now!

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Krampus Challenge – Day 03, This ain’t no partridge!

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Krampus Raven!

What a pretty bird!

So this is what the black hexagon eventually became! This is the Krampus Raven, my idea of a Christmas bird. I used the bower bird pattern by Attic 24, but chose appropriately gloomy colors and used black and red monster eyes. He’s a little too big for my small Krampus tree, so I plan to put him on our usual Christmas tree and make a second, smaller version for my smaller tree.

But for today, I’ve posed him with a zombie cupcake I made last year, so he can peck at the oozing frosting brains. Mmmmmmmm… I LOVE braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains!

I’ll get started on the smaller bird to tomorrow, and hopefully have it done by the end of the weekend 🙂

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Krampus Challenge – Day 02, Is it a hexagon? A frying pan?

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I did a little more work on the Krampus challenge piece I started yesterday.

 

Frying pan of doooooom!

Frying pan? Is that you?

I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to, I’m afriad. Today just ended up being one of those days where I had a lot of OTHER things to do, like some volunteer work for the school and training for the upcoming Girl Scout cookie season. I’m actually excited about cookie season this year. We have a fantastic cookie team at the service unit level (that’s the level above troop level), and the program for this winter looks like it will run more smoothly than previous years. There’s been some nice changes the website for the online database, and a few other things have come up that I’m really looking forward to trying this year 🙂

But back to the Krampus challenge! I have nowhere I have to be tomorrow, so I intend to spend the morning finishing off this piece so I can hang it on my Krampus tree! And then I’m going to take pictures of the ornaments I made last year as well as the one I’m working on now, so you can get an idea of what I want to accomplish this month.

For now though, it’s late and I’m headed to bed. See you tomorrow!

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Krampus Challenge – Day 01, We’re Back in Black!

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Aaaaaaaah… After a month of drawing, I have picked up my crochet hook again and settled in with a nice skein of yarn. I love drawing and crocheting both, but trying to do both activities everyday can be difficult. I’m hoping to change that this month by doing some drawing as well as crafting each day, but we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, I hit the local craft store today and bought 4 skeins of Vanna’s Choice for $10. Woohoo! I feel like a big spender today! And what am I going to do with those 4 skeins of lovely yarn? This, for starters…

 

Hexagon of Doom

Huzzah! I have made a hexagon… OF DOOOOOOOOOOM!!

Yes, I know, this doesn’t look like much. Honestly, today was pretty busy, and I’m lucky I even got this little project started. I did some other drawing and even a bit of painting today, but none of that has anything to do with this particular challenge, so I’m just gonna share my little black hexagon instead.

Tomorrow, I hope to get much further on this so I can show you what it’s supposed to be. And if I’m not too busy tomorrow, I’ll take pictures of my Krampus tree to show you what I did last year and what I hope to do this year! Bye for now!

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November Drawing – Day 30, Finishing “Time”

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I took this drawing as far as I could go in the Concepts app…

 

What a way to end the month!

 
I have exported the SVG of this to work on in Corel Draw. I don’t know if I’ll get to him this week, but I think I can finish the Pirate Queen. And I will continue to work on the other mermaid I started at some point before 1 January.

Considering that my main goal this month was to draw every day, I’m very pleased. I finished up 4 drawings on the iPad, and have a 5th drawing about 3/4th finished. I do believe I got the hang of the Concepts app. It helps that they released a major update at the beginning of the month.

Today I also found out that Indeeo’s Graphic app also had a major update. Graphic is another vector app that I use, though I haven’t played with it much lately. That’s going to change! Indeeo added the ability to  draw tapered vector strokes using a variety of brushes. Add to this that Graphic has a text tool, complex shape tool, alignment tools, SVG export and import, and other nice features, I’m thinking that Graphic is going to become one of my go-to programs from now on. And did I mention it plays nice with Concepts? Yeah, going to use those two apps a LOT from now on.

As for Adobe Illustrator Draw, I will be abandoning that app. They just did a nother big update today, and still no SVG export. I doubt they will ever add that option back in, and that stinks. I paid for the original app, paid to unlock the layers and SVG export features, and now I have drawings on there that I can’t do a damn thing with because I can’t export them as SVG UNLESS I OWN A COPY OF A PROGRAM I CAN’T AFFORD AND DON’T WANT TO BUY ANYWAY. I will export low-res PNGs of my work from there so I can redraw them in either Graphic or Concepts. It’ll be a lot of work, but it will be worth it.

So that’s the end results for November Drawing! Tomorrow we start work on December’s Krampus theme. YAY!

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November Drawing – Day 29, Flat Colors for “Time” Finished

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Flat colors!

I have no idea why I chose these colors, but they seem to work.

 
I am hoping that tomorrow I can finish off any detail coloring on this one. Then I’ll spend the rest of the week fniishing off the red-haired mermaid I started at the beginning of the month (yes, I am STILL detailing her hair). When I get that done, I’ll clean up all the drawings from this month. I plan to offer at least four of them as prints. I have a Society 6 shop, but I also have a Zazzle shop. I’m thinking of closing the Society 6 shop and just moving everything over to the Zazzle shop. I don’t really have the time to manage multiple shops, and the greeting cards I sell do well on Zazle, so I think it would be best to consolidate there. I’ll be taking a look at both shops this week to see.

Anyway, tomorrow is the last day for this challenge, and then I move on to the “Krampus” challenge for December. Fun times ahead, people! Fun times indeed 🙂

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November Drawing – Day 27, Drawing “Time”

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I decided to see if I could squeeze in one more drawing this month. 

Just one more drawing this month!

I think I will call this “The Fly of Time.”

 

I think this was kind of sort of inspired by the latest trailer for “Alice Through The Looking Glass,” but I wasn’t really consciously thinking of it when I started drawing. I was just thinking about what it would be like to have one really big giant eye. A really big giant clock for an eye.

I did the pencil sketch in Sketch Club on my iPad, then imported that into Concepts. I love Sketch Club for sketching quick pieces but also for more involved digital painting. I’m thinking that sometime in the next couple months I may do a painting challenge.

Meanwhile I’m looking ahead to next month’s challenge. I’ve decided that for December the challenge will be “Krampus.” I want to do a series of projects related to Krampus – drawings, Krampus cards, ornaments for my personal Krampus tree, and maybe a few Krampus related gifts. I’ll be crocheting, doing computer graphics, sewing, and who knows what else. We’ll find out next month!

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November Drawing – Day 26, I’m thankful for a cleaned up SVG!!

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I did it!! I managed to clean up the Victorian Mermaiden this morning!

Pretty, pretty Mermaiden!

Oooooh, so cleaned up and pretty!

It took a few hours of work, but I think I managed to make this look really nice! I created a custom brush stroke to use on the inking lines, and then had to fiddle with the settings for a while to get a stroke that wasn’t too thick. It helped that I scaled the drawing up by 250%, but was able to keep the stroke width of the inking from scaling up with it!

See the difference between the before and after images!

Sad mermaiden drawing...

No line variation, just thick heavy clunky lines!

Happy mermaiden!

MUCH better! The lines look like ink strokes, and the colors look nicer too!

I spent a lot of time playing with the colors. The background frame really gave me trouble. The original colors were way too dark, but I wanted to have a strong contrast between the frame and the mermaiden. So when the dark colors weren’t working, I went in the opposite direction. Lightening up the frame made a huge difference!

I still want to add a few touches to the background frame, but this one is pretty close to done. Yay!

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November Drawing – Day 25, SVG FAIL!!!!

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I had really hoped to show you all a final cleaned up version of the Victorian Mermaiden I’ve been working on. I exported it as an SVG file from Concepts last night, and opened it up in Corel Draw this morning to work on it. It was definitely an SVG file, and I was happy to see that all my layers had made the transfer with the names I gave them intact (it makes it so much easier to sort through all the vector objects in the drawing to find that one line or fill that needs a bit of tweaking. I spent about an hour working on it before I realized a couple things. First, the airbrush dots I had drawn on the tentacles were now hard-edged circles. Fuzzy edge all gone! And second, the variation in the ink lines was gone too!

Where did all my inking go?!

DAGNABBIT! Where did all my pretty inking go?!

As you can see from this snippet, the lines are now all regular width. Some lines are thinner than others, but I can’t adjust the width on any of the lines to get a variable width.

Unless…

Corel Draw does have “natural media” tools. These are vector brushes that use a vector shape to stretch along a path. If you create a vector shape of a lopsided circle, for example, then turn that into a brush shape, when you apply that brush shape to a vector path, the lopsided circle will be stretched along the entire length of the path, giving the path the appearance of a variable width. You can use all sorts of shapes, with all sorts of colors, to make natural media brushes for Corel Draw. I played with a few of the brushes that come with Corel Draw’s library, but couldn’t find one that worked exactly the way I wanted it to. They were all either too fat in the center (which won’t work for the shorter line segments), or too squared off at the ends (I want tapered ends, like I had when I originally inked this this drawing in Concepts).

So what I plan to do tomorrow is spend some time playing with Corel Draw to see if I can make a custom brush that will work for ALL the ink lines. Like I said earlier, the SVG of this drawing opened up in Corel Draw with all the layers intact as I had set them up. So there’s one layer that has all the ink lines in it. If I can set up a brush that will work, it will then just be a simple matter of selecting all the ink lines in that layer and applying the brush to them. Quick and easy!

I may contact Top Hatch (the company that makes the Concepts app) as well, and see what they say. Mayber there’s another update in the works that will fix this. But for now, I’m going to bed. We’ll see if I can solve this issue tomorrow.