Bulber The Bulbasaur. Now how did I come up with that name again?

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Photo #296: BulberTime Drawn: January 2013

I’ve long had a problem drawing “cute”. Cute requires a delicate use of lines and shapes that is thrown off by the proportion errors that plague my art. A lot of people can manage it easily. I am not one of them.

It might just be my love of detail working against me. The easiest way to manage cute is with very simple clean shapes. Just look at Hello Kitty to see what I mean. She’s the epitome of cuteness via simplicity.

And while “cute” might seem like something that an artist could live without, a lot of the elements that make up “cute”, the simplicity, the clean lines and shapes, the empathy via art that makes us think of babies and puppies and all those cute things in life, those are things that I really need to learn how to do to go forward in my art.

Thus, I drew a Bulbasaur.

One of the best ways to overcome a deficiency in your art, or in fact any aspect of life, is to find someone who’s doing what you want to be doing and copy the heck of of them for a bit. It’s far faster and far more effective than trying to figure it out on your own.

And well, Pokemon are excellent examples of “cute”. It’s part of why the brand has survived so well for so long. Well, the truly excellent video games don’t hurt in the least (yes, I’ve played just about every handheld Pokemon game from Pokemon Red to Pokemon White 2, and loved every last one of them.) So between their mastery of cute and the love I have for the series, I’m now drawing Pokemon.

Standard legal stuffer-ma-bobber, Bulbasaur and Pokemon in general don’t belong to me, they’re owned by Nintendo and Game Freak. I’m not going to sell this art since the characters don’t belong to me, and I’m posting it merely as a fan of the series, not as someone who owns any part of the series.

Well, unless you count the individual game cartridges. Those I own.

And I do have a Bulbasaur. His name is Bulber.

  

You Know, this Reminds me of some Sunsets in Minecraft… Ok, not really…

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Photo #295: Yet Another SunsetLocation Taken: Columbia, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010

I’m running busy today (*cough* Minecraft *cough*), so I shall keep this simple.

This is a lovely sunset photo.  You probably noticed, but I’m keeping it simple.

I’ve posted a few photos of this particular sunset before, but I’m too busy (*cough* Want to get back to Minecraft *cough*) to hunt them up and link them.

It was a particularly nice one, with excellent colors.  You can also see some interesting lines across the lake, the lines used for the dredging operation that was going on at that lake at the time. (*cough* That reminds me, must figure out why the ocean in my Minecraft world has decided to evaporate in certain parts *cough*)

Anyway, That’s all for now, I should really wrap this up (*cough* Finish the oil refinery system I was building *cough*)

And maybe I should get something for this persistent cough. (*cough* More Minecraft *cough*)

  

Simple Birthdays Full of Exploration and Vegetables

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Photo #294: GW2 World CompletionTime Taken: January 2013

Yesterday was my birthday, the 27th one I’ve had (not counting the very first, of course, as is the standard for such things.)

There was much celebrating and rejoicing.

By which I mean a few people wishing me “Happy Birthday” and not much else.

I didn’t have a party. I’m an introvert, you know. We don’t really care for parties. About the closest I come is getting together to play games with a few friends, but I didn’t do that really.

I didn’t have a cake. I don’t like cake. It’s just a mass of carbs and sugar and usually too dry for my tastes. And there’s not enough nutrients in it to counteract the sugar dumping into my system all at once, which makes me feel slightly icky. I don’t care for sweets in general, actually. I’d rather eat Brussels sprouts than cake. Though it helps that I’ve got a really good Brussels sprouts recipe…

I didn’t go out to eat, or out to drink, or anything of that sort. I’ve frequently gone out to a favorite restaurant on my birthday in the past, but I really wasn’t in the mood for those yesterday, so I just cooked something for myself, a pizza that, as my Mom put it, a garden exploded onto. Kale is an excellent pizza topping, by the way. And I don’t drink alcohol. Never found one I liked enough to pick up the habit, and it’s a bit too expensive for my tastes anyway.

I didn’t unwrap any presents, even. I got three cards with money in them, two of which were given to me at Christmas to save those relatives the postage. Having a birthday so close to Christmas is a bit odd, since most people are all celebrated out by the time it rolls around. And my parents didn’t give me a present, since we’re solidly using the “if it’s not an item they want or use, it’s not worth giving as a present” rules that seem to set in once you’re an adult. And well, there really aren’t that many cheap items I want these days, and the ones I’d thought of I got for Christmas.

So, since I didn’t do any of the standard birthday thing-a-ma-bobbers, what did I do?

Well, I got my 100% World Completion for my main character in Guild Wars 2. Took a screenshot too. For those who don’t play that game, that means I explored every nook and cranny of their rather large world, from the jungles of Maguuma to the iceberg ships of Frostgorge Sound to the undead-infested ruins of Orr. I love games that reward exploration like this.

I also played a bunch of Minecraft. I’m trying out Feed the Beast, which is a mod pack with all sorts of interesting things added to the game for me to do. Yesterday I finally found a diamond in the caves deep in the earth (they’re quite rare, and highly useful). So I set up a portal to The Twilight Forest, an alternate dimension full of massive trees and ruins and all sorts of fun stuff. Like the Hollow Hill I came right out next to. That’s a massive hollow hill (go figure) with the ceiling studded with all sorts of treasure, from coal to diamonds, plus chests scattered through the stalagmite-studded floor. Oh, and a large quantity of monster spawners, which release an unending swarm of enemies until you get close enough to break it. It’s one of those high risk, high reward things. I lasted until I saw the creeper spawner (those monsters sneak up on you and explode, destroying you and a lot of your loot), and decided enough was enough. I “cheated” and set the difficulty to Peaceful and poof, no more monsters. Now I have a whole horde of diamonds to use!

And there was my normal Thursday Pathfinder game. I’m playing a gnome barbarian named Muffin, whose primary goal is to keep my Mom’s character, a halfling sorcerer named Wealday, from killing us or herself with the chaos she causes. Let’s just say we started the game with my character trying to convince Wealday not to burn down the city we’re in, which required some rather illogical leaps of logic…

So all in all, it was a rather pleasant birthday. Even without a candle-filled cake and a heap of presents.

  

A Warm Light Against Warm Wood – no fire danger, though.

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Photo #293: Warm LightLocation Taken: Baddeck, Nova Scotia
Time Taken: July 2012

I love how warm this photo is.

Mind you, it’s not going to catch your computer on fire or anything. It’s an art term, ya know.

Reds and oranges and yellows are warm colors, blues and greens and purples are cool. The first make you think of roaring fireplaces and the sun and warm bodies, while the others are the colors of water and nature and all those other things that aren’t as warm.

It’s an odd psychological trick, really. I mean, it’s two things that have only some correlation with each other. One’s a thing you see with your eyes, and the other is a temperature you sense with your skin. Completely different senses. It’s almost like a form of synesthesia everyone has.

That’s an odd condition where people with it have their senses mixed up in a different pattern than normal. They might hear colors (they look at a color and hear a sound) or see words in colors other than what they’re printed on based on what the meaning of the word is, or all sorts of other things that just seem odd to people without it.

But the rest of us do have some of that pattern, and it’s actually quite useful. For most people, it only shows up in places with strong correlations, like the “warm” colors in this photo. It is quite useful to be able to guess at the temperature of an object by its color without having to actually, say, touch it. So that tendency got added to the normal set of human abilities.

Every so often I really wonder what it would be like to be a synesthete. It’s not at all harmful, mind you, just a different state of mind. And it is literally a different way of looking at the world. Sometimes a better way, since the extra mixing of the senses can add valuable information about the world, like telling you that you misspelled a word because that “e” is green and the rest of the word was purple.

And yes, that is how it works for some people.

  

Crouching Photographer, Hidden Barn Cat

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Photo #292: Hidden CatLocation Taken: Readfield, Wisconsin
Time Taken: June 2012

So there I was at a family reunion at my Great-Uncle’s farm in Wisconsin. A lot of the family was enjoying themselves chatting away, but, being the introvert I am, I went photographing.

They have a lovely garden full of both flowers and crops, right by the house. It’s well cared for, with plenty of space between the plants for easy access. It made an excellent place to photograph flowers, as I could get in as close as I wanted without disturbing the other plants.

Alas, I did disturb something.

One of the farm cats was hanging out on the warm dirt when I wandered over. A rather fine specimen of cathood, I would say, even if I’m not a cat person. And the cat looked so appropriately domestic hanging out around the flowers, so I wandered over to take a photo.

And the cat bolted behind a plant.

I got a bit closer, and peeked around the plant.

The cat moved to keep the plant between me and it.

I shifted again, trying to line up a good photo.

I got one photo, this one, with the focus still set to plant-length and not cat-length.

The cat ran for the dark barn.

Apparently it hates having its photo taken even more than I do.