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The third “official” painting of the year (seventh if you consider the character sketches) is my now called Tales 2011 painting. It used to be that all the characters got their own paintings, but obviously times have changed. The last time I had a painting with a comparable or greater figure count was 2007.

I’ve actually been meaning to do a painting in this style since the first character sketch a couple months ago. I just didn’t have a vision of what it should be until more recently (about a week ago), so it obviously didn’t happen ’til then. I think in general the figures are okay and the painting is okay, but I think the tree is pretty good considering it’s the first time I’ve tried to paint a tree at this resolution since basically the year NW started (and that painting was rubbish). I think the ground and the colors turned out pretty nice as well. I don’t usually use yellow as a master color.

There’s a little bit of cheating here and there: J always asks me how I stay in the lines on single-layer paintings like this one, and part of the answer is that I don’t. In some cases here, neighboring, discrete colors across a “hard” divider blend into the same shade of yellow, so I just merge the two colors instead of stay “in” the line. The other part of the answer is just “be pro”. Obviously. The other notable shirk is the fade-to-white background. It’s not that I didn’t want to paint anything in there, it’s just that nothing I put there, whether it be hills or simply a curved horizon line, seemed to give the same suggestion of space on paper so I just blanked the whole thing out.

And of course, since the lineart is basically a sketch in and of itself, it stands alone pretty well:

This painting would have been posted earlier, but I got distracted by one of my occasional urges to move stuff around.

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Now that I’m back from San Diego, I finally get to post about my boat.

This boat features a drive system known as the Voith Schneider propeller (VSP), which is those blades you see sticking out of the bottom of the ship. Wikipedia has a more detailed explanation of how the system works , but in short the system works by rotating the blades in a circle while changing their angle, in effect “scooping” water in a particular direction when the blades are not tangential to the circle they rotate in. The direction of thrust can be changed by moving a control rod that controls the center of tangency (?) of the blades (the blue dot in this diagram.)

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This post originally written 110728, as noted below.

[110728]

Well today’s update is a lame ass drawing followed by a wall of text.

One more version/view Normandie. This is a slightly earlier version than last week’s. It is shorter by one “section”. The bumps on the top are lifeboats. That being said, in what can probably be labeled an impulsive purchase I picked up the (old, 2010) 11-inch MacBook Air about a week and a half ago.

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It’s “Boats 2011 Part3″ this time because on Saturday the 13th, I drove Titanic off of a wall and into a debris field, losing my only propeller in the process.

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Officially, I want to name it “Ita-Titanic” or something along those lines. This is obviously a play off of “itasha“, and the reasoning will become clear in a bit. Also considering the coincidentally appropriate “Itanic”. As of the last update, there was still a bit of work to be done, but at this point I think it’s more or less complete (for now).

I say “for now” because this is as much an art project for me as it is a hardware project… or at least that’s how it’s turned out. When J and I first considered doing boats round 2, I had really just wanted to bring Titanic up to par mechanically (fix the leaks, streamlined circuitry, real ESC, etc), but as I mentioned in the last update, once the mechanical business was sorted out, I got caught up in cosmetic improvements. Even then, I’d originally only wanted to make the single cutout as shown last time, but things just kept going.

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