Today was a busy day, but I managed to spend some time on page 20. I fooled around with Clip Studio Paint’s screen tones. You can see them in the shadows of Tufa’s shirt and pants. This exported image looks darker than it should. I’m thinking that thumbnail images may, by nature, appear to be darker. The question is, how will this look in the print version of the book?
Bedside lamp and pillow and Monet print, Corel Painter, Sargent brush
Today was a normal chore day. I welcome normal. I love a day when there’s no snow, no wildfires, everyone is healthy. I ask for nothing more than normal.
For the record, I did all of the laundry, vacuumed the entire house, baked some quinoa flat bread for fun, and tested Rebelle 3. Rebelle is known as the best digital watercolor app, but oil painting is coming in version 4. It looks like it will be awesome. I want it!
Even though my day is normal, I have problems: I like Corel Painter, and I like Rebelle, and I like Photoshop, and I like Clip Studio Paint Ex. That’s a lot of likes. Am I spreading myself too thin? Time will tell where I eventually focus my attention.
My other problem is that I have to create a page for this blog that displays my books. That’s a good problem. The next problem is that I have a Tumblr site that gets updated when I publish a post here…but the images are not exported to Tumblr. I have to get into a groove so that I upload every image to Tumblr. The last problem that I’m aware of is that I need to do better with social media, by which I mean post regularly to Instagram. I should be posting there every time I create a post in this blog.
The “more!” would be doing laundry. After the chores, I installed Photoshop on my iPad. I was curious to check it out. It’s free with Adobe CC. I fiddled with it for a minute and decided to uninstall it. I don’t need another distraction.
I drew my self-portrait using the Shahn brush from the Kyle T. Webster’s Summer 2019 brush pack. It’s got awesome unpredictable texture. Sweet!
Today I moved another centimeter forward: I added my name to the cover of my children’s picture book: Doug Doukat, I thought a lot about the font and chose a comic book font named “Jack Armstrong BB”. It’s one of the default iPad fonts. The main title uses the Impact font, a brute of a font. I figure that using a comic book font lightens the mood and says,This book will be fun and serious at the same time.
As for chores, I cooked for my furry friends, and for myself. I made more plant-based cheese sauce. There’s not cheese in it, of course. It just feels and tastes something like cheese, but better. Really. It does taste better.
Besides my usual chores (cooking for my furry friends), I went to the Coop for onions, garlic, kale, and vegetable broth. There are times when I feel disbelief that I now eat only plants. But, I do, and I’m happy with what I eat.
Besides thinking about food I made some color swatches for the Arteza gouache kit I bought a few weeks ago. There are 60 colors, most of them are convenience colors. Here are the first 20. There’s no telling when I’ll do the other 40 — I find doing the color swatches to be tedious and frustrating. I usually screw them up with misspellings, putting the wrong label on a color, irregular lettering, and so on. When I see Youtubers with Youtube smiles on their face doing elaborate and perfect color swatches, I assume they couldn’t think of anything important to talk about, so, hey!, why not do another set of color swatches using some gouache/watercolors they would never use in their own art.
Here’s my contribution to color swatches. You can see that some of the colors are transparent or semi-transparent. The Peach Red is a neon color and difficult to capture in a photograph or scan. The “Pearl” colors are mica-based to give them a shimmer, which also cannot be captured in a photo or scan.
Chore day. I spent the day whacking weeds, chopping down a sad lilac bush suffering under the overpowering Diadora Cedar, doing laundry, setting up summer irrigation for the yard, changing to a plant-based, whole food diet. What’s that? Changing to another diet? Yep, the keto thing is over. I decided it’s ridiculous to be on a diet that requires a bucket full of supplements to stay healthy. From now on I’m just going to eat real food.
I’ll be back to making a children’s book tomorrow.
