Sneaky
Wiktionary definition – Sneaky – 1. Difficult to catch due to constantly outwitting adversaries. 2. Dishonest.
Catching those thieves will be hard, they’re so sneaky they keep eluding us.
This is the word for the Illustration Friday art challenge this week. Although I had a few ideas already, my first step was to start Alchemy (from the open drawing project), and see what my subconscious mind might produce. BTW – even if you don’t want a new drawing and painting app it’s worth visiting the Alchemy homepage to see the video they have there showing a graphics tablet slung around the presenters neck like a base guitar as he draws live on stage on a JumboTron. Well, actually it’s just a projector, but JumboTron sounds way cooler. How long before graphic designers and digital painters are recognised for the rock gods that they actually are, deep inside.
Alchemy inspiration
Playing around in Alchemy for just a few minutes allowed me to build up a very complex and random image, although it conforms suspiciously closely to the image I already had in mind – so there must be sum subconscious direction of the graphics tablet stylus. I could already see a few sneaky characters lurking within the graphic shapes of this image and the next stage was to begin to focus on one of them and bring him out.
I exported the image from Alchemy as a png and loaded it into GIMP (the GNU image manipulation program) to do some trimming, cropping and processing. I cropped out an interesting segment from the centre of the canvas and deleted some of the colours (replacing them with a transparent alpha channel).
Image cropped and given transparent background
GIMP shows me I have a transparent background by using the grey checkers pattern.
Now came the real fun part. I loaded the image into MyPaint, my current favourite digital painting app, to actually turn what was in my head into an illustration for the art challenge. Actually the next thing I did was update GIMP to version 2.7 so that I could swap files easily between GIMP and MyPaint. (I had these Python issues though and wasted two or three hours trying to fix them, and it still didn’t work. So ora file support in GIMP is broken for me, oh well).
Here it is.
When I finally opened Mypaint and started working on the image I was quite pleased with the results. It’s nice as is, but I think I’ll keep working on it, and make it a bit more painterly.
