Well, for those of you who don't already know, my main desktop PC has taken a big fat turd and is done. I'm pretty sure that I can fix it.

But I refuse.

The poor beast is a frankensteined collection of probably 4-6 generations of hardware. It's time to put the poor thing down. She's been good and faithful, but I think that I make enough money that it will be a better use of my time to buy a new machine off the shelf of some big box company, strip it of all the crap they load on it for 'Joe-Home-User' and have it... well... just work. Obviously that doesn't mean that I won't ever hack or mod the thing, but at least for a time, I want a machine that just does what it's supposed to do without me holding its virtual hand and stroking the case sweetly while saying prayers to long dead gods in the hopes that it might get through the night.

Clearly I'm putting too much thought into this.

Anyway. The point is that I am not without my ability to surf teh intarwebs or post to LJ, but it does vastly restrict my ability to do digital art. Both of my laptops are not exactly what one would call 'gaming rigs' This means that anything I do digitally will not likely be anything I could use for prints - even when using software with as few system requirements as Open Canvas 1.x (which I am still amazed would fit on a 1.44 floppy unzipped!).

I want to wait until xtingu and I are in our new place before I go buying a new desktop. We're so close to move in day that I don't want to buy a machine just to transport twice.

But I was getting the digital art itch. I've been doing more with traditional media. (See crappy camera phone 'scans' here and here.) As usual, I found myself learning at a rapid rate when I forced myself to shift gears back to traditional, but it just doesn't satisfy me the way that digital stuff does. Especially with OC's ability to replay the process, I find that I learn a lot from digital as well, I can work (muuuuch) faster and it more readily translates to the net (I don't have my scanner hooked up to either of my laptops and wouldn't want to really).

AnyMcWhoozles, I tell you all this to let you know that I finally installed the driver for my wacom and did a quick sketch self portrait -
As always, I'm more than a little interested in everyone's thoughts - so comment away.

Click here if you would like to go to the first post in this series.

Stage Two: Inking - Wow. I have to say that I really loved this stage. I found the image pulling together and becoming more 'tight' as if by magic. I found myself forced to make a single line to edge a form where I would normally be very 'sketchy'. I didn't have the time to be sketchy and refine it later. In fact, I had pretty much completely finished the image of me and had only 3/4 completed the head of the dragon when I realized that my time was over half gone. Also of note I love that I started to have the ability to 'hint at' a spot (like the dragon's toes) and have it flesh out very fast.

On to Stage Three!