Dragonsept Arts & Publishing Blog

It’s been about three months since I decided to make a steady effort to get my art skills back to their old standard, and hopefully exceed that. I think it’s been going pretty well. It’s been less than a month since I decided I should try to draw something every day, and no excuses.

I have missed two days in that time, but even on those days I kept up my reading, so I am content.

My confidence and consistency have definitely improved in the last month. My ability to put lines and color where and how I want them is definitely getting better. My reliance on grids to help me use references is less as well.

Some things I definitely still need work on:

• Shading. I’m getting better, but probably still too timid.
• Anatomy. Standard.
• Backgrounds. I finish the principals of my drawings or paintings and I am at a loss at how to plan the backdrop.
• Style. So far I have been working mostly on realism and comic-style art. I am feeling the need to branch out a bit. Maybe explore some more creative uses of color.

My latest piece of work is School’s Out

I’ve been pretty focused on visual art these last few weeks, rather than writing.  I don’t think it’s a newness factor, since I have been making visual art on and off since I was in middle school.  I think I have just remembered how much fun it is.

I’ve been doing some creating in the GIMP, of course.  You can see some of my GIMP work over at DeviantArt.  Swallowtail in Lily is what I consider my best attempt, so far.

Posted: July 18th, 2009

If you want to see some more of what MyPaint can do, check out these links:

• Screenshots at the MyPaint website
• MyPaint wiki, including gallery
• Developer Martin Renold’s DeviantArt gallery
• Griatch-Art, an active and helpful community member.  (You may recognize some of his work from the screenshots.)

art, open source, mypaint, digital painting, gimp

The Girl Who Circumnavigate Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is a serial YA fiction novel by Catherynne M. Valente.  She is writing the novel “live,” posting each chapter on Monday as she finishes them.  The novel is freely available to read, but the author is asking for donations if you like it.  Her family has been hit by the global economic downturn pretty hard, and this is her way to help make ends meet.

From Her Website:

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making began as a book-within-a-book in my adult novel, Palimpsest, a part of the protagonist’s childhood, a strange novel for children written in the 1920s, about a young girl spirited away to Fairyland by the Green Wind, and her adventures there, battling the wicked Marquess, befriending outlandish creatures, and growing up.

Ms. Valente is an excellent author of imaginative and complex fiction.  I recently finished the excellent Palimpsest, which I suggest for anyone who likes mythopoeic fiction.  She’s also a published poet.

CMV is also not afraid to experiment with the medium.  In addition to this serial novel (a well known and traditional form of fiction with a new delivery mechanism), she is trying something she calls her Omikuji project.  Subscribers get a regular piece of original fiction and illustrations, in a beautifully printed and sealed form.

Please take a trip over and check out this wonderful author’s work.  If you like the first chapter, which was posted today, think about sending her a little something.  In addition to an original novel, you get insight into the creative process, and maybe a new catalog of work to follow.

I have been pretty productive with my drawing, designing and the like for the past few days.  What I really need to do now is to maintain this rhythm.

I have not been very successful at that in the past.  So, I put it to you, my creative friends – how do you maintain your rhythm?  Do you work even when you don’t feel like it?  Even when it seems like everything is coming out like crap?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Fonts can be an issue sometimes when you use Open Source software.  Many of the fonts with which Windows and Mac users are most familiar are licensed and only available for a fee.  Some of those fees can be pretty astronomical.

On top of that, the creators of your favorite distribution might just have a very different aesthetic from you, and package a selection of fonts that you just don’t want to look at all day, every day.

Enter the Open Font Library.  OFL is a place to share and download open source fonts.  They can be shared, used, remixed, and otherwise rearranged.  Examples that I have seen so far have ranged from the extremely specialized (buttons and icons from a German kitchen appliance), to the standard (fixed-width font), to the sublime (I quite like PhaistosDisk’s whimsical Layne series of fonts).

Most of the fonts are available either under the SIL Open Font License, or released fully into the Public Domain.

What are your favorite fonts?  On my Linux boxes at home, I like to use RedHat’s Liberation family of fonts, so far.  All this web design, semantics, and font investigation has got me curious about typography, though.  Who knows where *that’s* gonna lead.

typography, opensource, fonts

Google released a “developer preview” of Chrome for Linux today.  As they say at the site:

In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.

Predictably, I downloaded the DEB and fired it up.  It’s not bad.  The lack of plugin support is too bad, and certainly makes this browser unusable as a primary tool.  But it seems pretty speedy, and it looks nice so far.

It’s nice to see that they are working on it, and hopefully enough people will try it out that the bug reports will be helpful.

Ah, spring.  When a young geek’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of code.
Or something like that, anyway.
I have been bitten rather severely by the tech bug this week.  I think it started with an innocent enough question on the linuxwacom-discuss user list.  I ended up talking to the lead developer on the project and am going to see if I can’t hack the xsetwacom utility to allow one to set the LED labels on the Intuos 4 series of tablets.  (I actually have a few ideas for this, and related to this, but let’s not put the cart before the horse, shall we?)
I’ve also got some web design stuff traipsing around in my head.  I used to be part of a team that worked on a local dance studio’s website, as part of a barter arrangement for tuition for my daughters.  The studio owner (who shall remain linkless) rather abruptly replaced us with her boyfriend, and our overly-pink-at-her-request but clean design with a horrible mess that must have come out of Microsoft Frontpage.  Left without any commercial work to do on the web, we began thinking of ways to find and take on other projects.  That set my mind to turning over the idea of web design in general, and was a fertile field when a friend from the Ubuntu-MN list happened to make a post about microformats.  This has led to a reexamining of semantic HTML in general, and a major resurgence in enthusiasm for me.  So, I hope to make some changes around here, soon.
(And if you happen to like my style here, and know of someone that needs a web design guru, give them my name.)

The UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is debating a treaty that creates exceptions to copyright low for the purposes of making information equally available to the blind, reading impaired, and other persons for whom a particular work is currently inaccessible.  The language of the treaty makes it clear that the primary intended recipients of this treaty’s effects would be the large number of disabled persons living in the poorest countries of the world.

In a move that is sadly unsurprising, the US, EU, Canada, and a large number of other developed countries are fighting this treaty.  Their rationals are fairly boilerplate, and pretty much empty.  The US response, which was made on Tuesday, more or less boils down to “we talked to some people, and we already have some laws.”  No real explanation as to why they oppose the treaty at all.  I hate doubletalk.

The text of the treaty is pretty clear, and the rights that would be granted are not extreme.  It sets up provisions for third parties to create works in accessible formats without the copyright holder’s express permission.  That in itself would be pretty broad, and not something I would support.  However, the treaty goes on to set out a large number of restrictions, provisions, and guidelines that make the exact circumstances under which it would be applicable very clear.  For one, the distributing party has to already have a license to the work.  So, you have to buy it in the first place before the treaty comes into effect.  Any commercial use has to include remuneration to the rights holders.  Distribution is only allowed to disabled persons as defined by treaty, etc.  I suggest reading the document.  It’s not long, the legalize isn’t bad, and it’s pretty sane.

If you think that allowing access to works that would currently be unavailable to disabled persons is a good idea, be sure that you are heard.  Blog about it, contact your government representatives, the Obama administration, and others.

Another fact that should surprise no one is that I first heard of this from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

With Wacom 8.2 I knew where I stood.  HAL sort of worked, but only recognized a single device (the stylus) and if I wanted to use anything else, I was just out of luck.

When I got my Intuos 4, I had to move to the 8.3 beta drivers, because 8.2 doesn’t know about the new tablet.  I was thrilled to find that HAL recognized all four devices right away.  Unfortunately, it names the devices the wrong thing, so the Wacom utilities can’t recognize them.  That was soluble with some HAL modifications via script, and all was good again.

Then something changed in HAL (I think?) and my HAL definitions for the Wacom went away.  I put them back, but it is attaching Mouse2 to my stylus anyway.  No good.

I think I’m just going to switch back to using the Xorg.conf method, and try HAL again under 9.10 or something.

In my release day post, I mentioned that the new Intel drivers has some serious performance issues that were going to keep me from upgrading my laptop.  Well, if you like to fiddle and aren’t afraid of kernel installs, the wait for good performance may be over.

psyke83 over at Ubuntu Forums has posted a Performance Guide detailing how you can get more performance out of the current generation of Intel drivers.

In case you weren’t familiar with the current crop of issues, here’s a good summary taken from the performance guide:

1. The current driver in our repository has some performance issues with the EXA acceleration method. Users will notice 2D performance is poor due to the default “migration heuristic” employed by EXA (to “always” migrate pixmaps), but this causes performance issues for many users. Setting the heuristic to “greedy” alleviates this problem somewhat. See “man exa”.
2. The new and faster acceleration method (UXA) is not enabled by default, due to issues reported by many users. This code is being actively developed, and many stability and performance issues have been resolved in the latest drivers (specifically within the intel driver, libdrm and the latest kernel 2.6.30-rc2). Unfortunately, Jaunty will not include the latest versions necessary to improve performance.
3. 3D performance has regressed compared to the Intrepid release, possibly due to major code changes that have resulted from the introduction to the new acceleration and memory management code (UXA, GEM, DRI2). Due to these changes, there seems to be some regressions in the “legacy” DRI acceleration.
4. Either Xorg or the “intel” driver seems to be suffering from a bug in which the memory region allocated for the graphics card is not set up with the proper type of caching. This results in jerky video playback of almost any content (from 720p media, all the way down to simple 320×240 mpeg content), and a potential loss of performance for other 2D and 3D operations.

The way to fix it involves installing the latest 2.6.30 kernel, updating your graphics drivers from the xorg-edgers PPA, turning on UXA acceleration in your xorg.conf, and fixing an MTRR prefetch issue with a script that has to run every time you start an X session.

The guide assumes Ubuntu, but should work for any Debian based distribution.  Clearly, this is a pretty complicated solution, and I wouldn’t suggest it on a mission-critical system, or for the casual dabbler (unless you are okay with the possibility of having to reinstall).

My only Intel-based system is my laptop, which I share with my wife.  She’s much more likely to get frustrated with a system that doesn’t “just work” than I am, so I am not going to go this route just yet.

If you try it, let me know how it goes!

ubuntu, jaunty, intel, linux