Here’s some mindless link propagation:

Mouse 1.0

Many years of Quake have refined my mousing skills, how are yours?

Tooling around with illustrator, it took me about an hour to make this:

Click for larger version.

Not the worst thing ever, but it took me an *hour* to do it. Coming from Photoshop’s paths, Illustrator is really messed up. Take for instance the yellow bits of hair: In photoshop, I would simply make the head shape and the hair lines, then make a subtractive selection from them. I’m sure I’m doing this wrong, but in Illustrator I had to copy the head and hair twice, and then make a clipping path for each side (in the process making about 4 useless layers). Ugh.

I’m sure I’ll crack the Illustrator learning curve soon, I’ve only had it for 2 days, it’s just frustrating when you’re migrating from a inefficient but usuable art-production method to something much more unfamiliar and convoluted.

On a side note, I’ve started working on a new version of LJI. It’s mostly a user-interface update so far, but if you have any feature requests, you can leave them here.

In my last entry, I talked about feeling a Creative Depression. After the post I got a few suggestions as to how I could go about getting myself out of the rut:

• Hannah suggested I summarize my summer in some sort of visual medium.
• erislore liked my examples
• My good for nothing brother suggested I make a 30 minute film. Although it sounds interesting, I don’t think I could manage it with my camera. The maximum of 15 seconds per shot and the lack of sound probably wouldn’t work for anything but a German art film.

I’m working on Hannah’s now, but I went ahead with erislore’s advice and took on one of my own examples.

The page itself explains it. Play around with it, and tell me what you think. I’m also glad to say it was a good mood booster for working on other arts.