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Dragon wings tend to be more or less bat-based, but photos of bats in flight tend to be rarer than ones of birds in flight, making studies a bit more difficult.

For birds I recommend the deviantart account of Cheryl Moore, where you can find a great number of photos of birds in flight – most of them white birds, meaning there is no pattern on the feathers distracting from the shape.

As for bats, during the last week some photos of bats drinking from a pond in flight went through the bits of blogosphere I watch. Looking up Kim Taylor brought up Warren Photographic, which has more (albeit smaller) photos of bats in flight.

On Deviantart I found one compact tutorial on bat wings by cactusart.

The wing tutorial by Kandice Zimbleman-Wang may be a bit weird on the formatting and spelling side, but content-wise I find it very helpful.

For the sake of completeness and comparison, you could look at pterosaurs wings, too. (What intersts me more after a bit of poking around wikipedia are the various head shapes, though. Fascinating.)

Thought I’d share/make note of a few (Windows [Vista]) tools I use for my image files.

Bulk Rename Utility
Exactly what it says on the box: It lets you rename files in bulk. It doesn’t look particularly pretty, and the load of form fields/options at the bottom may be intimidating at first glance, but I found them pretty self-explanatory when reading them one by one.
I use the “File” field on “fixed” setting together with Numbering to change the filenames of photos I take from IMGXXXXXXXXX.jpg to 2009-07-21_XXX.jpg, which helps a lot with sorting them.

iTag
With this program I can add titles, descriptions and keywords to jpg files. This is not only useful because the Windows Explorer can search these fields, but also because various websites and scripts pull that information out when you upload them, including Flickr, Picasa, and Menalto Gallery2. Saves some work if you upload your images to several places.
iTag is my favourite among the tools I tried so far because it lets you include linebreaks in the description (unlike Picasa or the function built into Windows Explorer), and ladjust the size of the form where you enter things – particularly the fact that the latter enables you to view all keywords you entered on an image.

SyncToy
…is not only useful for images, but all kinds of documents, but here goes: A very basic program to synch up different folders. I’m sure there are better ones, but this works for me.

Digger, my all-time favourite webcomic, finally got out of its “subscribers only apart from the newest page” cover.

As to the comic: It’s epic, the titular character is the only sane person (also wombat) in a somewhat crazy, rich world. I’m also a sucker for black and white art.

Here’s a shortcut to page 1

Speaking of webcomics… I recently got back into Magic: The Gathering (a fantasy-themed collectable card game), and while poking around on their website, I found that they had made some, too, about Planeswalkers… You can ignore “Chandra’s Ultimate”, because it’s repeated as part of Chandra Nalaar: Fuel for the Fire, Part I … That story (all 3 parts together, not only the first) is my favourite on the site.

In Magic lore, Planeswalkers are very powerful magic-users which can travel between planes/dimensions/worlds, and each player of the game is a Planeswalker. The way Wizards of the Coast is pushing that theme lately looks a bit odd to me, because on the table its more of a strategy game with high random factor than anything involving playing a role.

Oh, well, the whole “you are misunderstood and don’t fit in because secretly you are superspecial-magical” apparently can work well for marketing, when you’re aiming at misfit geeky teens*… Look at Spiderman, for example. Bullied goodie two-shoes geek power fantasy to the max.

Lastly, two articles that may be of more general interest I found hidden between the Magic-specific ones:

• Frakkin’ Zounds, about cursing in speculative fiction (nothing terribly exciting, but a nice nudge to think about it if you haven’t yet)
• Tipping the Scales, about ways to make big monsters look big even in tiny images. All those “tricks” of course work for bigger pictures, too, and it looks quite useful to me.

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* Like I was when I got my first Magic cards. I guess now I’m a slightly less misfit geeky twen.

So, I was working on a bit more Fimo stuff, and my mother asked me if I had some sort of red pendant. I didn’t, so I made one, and since she wants to wear it the day after tomorrow, I rushed a bit and didn’t make some of the things I wanted to try out.

Since Mutt asked for photos of the draggies, here is a quick preview photo of nearly all of the stuff (click for bigger view):

The two sitting dragons are 2,5 cm = 1 inch tall, the little one is smaller. I made a rush job of the red-and-gold one, placing the eyes too low, and I forgot smoothing the belly properly, so I had to go at it with sandpaper, and will have to buff it up again.

For the scales for a change I tried to cut thin slices of some Fimo rolled out into a thin string and stick them on right away, rather than rolling tiny little spheres and mushing those onto the dragon, but with the metallic effect Fimo that doesn’t work well, probably something about mica shift. I’ll keep it in mind for normal colours, though, it’s way, way, way faster.

The gargoyle head has eyes just like the two black and green dragons, they just don’t shine because of the angle. The eyes are rocailles or seed beads or whatever you call them. The important thing to keep in mind is that they get embedded with the side facing outwards, not the hole.
Anyway, back to the gargoyle head: that one was planned as a pendant, but I messed up the balance and it’s not usable as such. Maybe I’ll repurpose it as a magnet, even if it’ll have random holes in it…

Apart from the mentioned problems I am quite happy with those last two pieces; I think I noticed improvement from previous attempts. Yay, practise.

I’m going to test the gold leaf I got for the jewellery design course on the blue thing in the foreground.

On the brownish thing in the background, I tried painting the thing for an aging effect before baking with sepia acrylic ink, and sand it afterwards. The ink gave the clay under it a reddish tint in places, and I nearly get the impression it’s in too deep to sand off. Next time, bake first.

Speaking of baking, or curing or what you want to call it: The little dragon charm, which cannot stand up, and the beads I baked in a bed of flour to avoid the shiny “pressure” mark I got otherwise. It worked fine.

Anything else i forgot? Oh, well.

Merry Christmas.

Sometimes, it takes some additional input to understand advice.

One thing is the “draw lines with one long stroke, not by adding up lots of smaller lines” one. I never understood how that would be possible, until I came across advice on how to improve your handwriting saying you should use your shoulder and back muscles, not your wrist and fingers for writing. Doesn’t mean I can magically DO it, but at least I have some idea of what I might try to learn.

Another are the scribble pictures. I remember doing those in art class back at school. Here’s the idea:
You scribble random loops and lines on a piece of paper
Then you look at it, and turn it into an image of whatever you happen to see in it.

I thought the idea was drawing over the lines as they were on the paper, so mostly I ended up with blobby rubbish, like snakes without heads, three-story mushrooms, or faces like this one:

Then I came across a tutorial at deviantart, which is not safe for work due to nudity, and looking at the example… You could add stuff. You could turn a circle into a face, or a hand. Yeah, I see how that might actually be fun, rather than frustrating, and result in more interesting images.

I guess that’s a good time to upload some of the more interesting results of those warmup-practises.

The following four are other sketches, from my figure drawing class, and people who want to avoid nudity should avoid those.

Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-27426-8

As the title suggests, a book on drawing animals. Ken Hultgren was an animator for Disney, the former showing in poses and walk cycles, the latter in some of the “carricature” examples.

Ignoring the preface, here we have 134 pages full of black and white illustrations, with a few explanations thrown in. Quite many of the example drawings are shown as one roughed in and one finished version.

After 18 pages of general notes (the division of the body in three parts, rule of the thumb for placement of eyes and ears, boxing in forms, examples for simplified skeleton and mannikin frames, “mood and feeling”, “use of line”, and some examples of textures you can achieve with a brush) the book is divided into “chapters” of very varying length devoted to one animal or group of animals each. Nearly all of those have action poses like leaping, and a page or two on carricaturing the animal(s) in question.

The first one, “The Horse Family”, goes over 29 pages into most detail, starting with how the different parts of the skeleton are made up and fit together, the assumption being that the reader will be able to apply the same methods to other animals without being walked through all of the steps again. In addition to random action poses throughout the chapter there are sequences on leaping, kicking out, trot and canter. For a bit variety from the “generic horse” there’s a page on draft horses and zebras each, as well as a double page on colts.

The 20 pages of “The Cat Family” is mainly devoted to lions, with a page each on Tigers and Domestic Cats.

“The Deer Family” (including stags and fawns) is covered on 9 pages including sequences of walk and jump. It only shows a “generic deer”, no note on different species. By contrast, the later chapter “Dogs” of the same length has only a page of random sketches for general information, followed by one or two pages each with sketches of a particular breed. “The Bear Family” and “Elephants”  are similar in page count, with the elephant chapter being noteworthy for a for the species unexpected variation of poses (albeit none “leaping”).

Five pages spared for “Cows and Bulls”, four for “Kangaroos” (including a jump cycle), three each for rabbits (and a hare which wasn’t labelled as such), foxes, pigs and warthogs, and gorillas, two for giraffes, and camels (both, like the elephant, sadly lacking any information about pace, their main or only gait), and a single page on squirrels.

The book is capped by a 7-pages chapter on “Composition and Animal Grouping”.

I was slightly disappointed because the title implies more variety than is actually shown; “The Art of Mammal Drawing” would have been more accurate. The “The X Family” chapters are more concerned about showing (presumably) commonalities, rather than going into details of differences between species.

There is nothing like the staple of how to draw humans books, the figure divided into head-heights, so you need to be able to see or measure the proportions from the examples, or photos or models.
On the other hand, I think the many examples of “roughed in” mannikin – simplified skeleton and/or basic shapes – next to a finished image can be very helpful.

In my eyes the greatest strength of the book are the dynamic poses, and particularly the running and jumping sequences.

Considering the low price, this for me was worth it.

This is something I can cook, and it turns out well, so, here goes the recipe.

Ingredients:
500g minced pork
1000g sieved tomatoes
1 onion
1 garlic clove
2 vegetable stock cubes (assuming 2 cubes together are good for 1 l of water according to their instructions)
oil

If neccessary, for example if it’s still half-frozen, pluck the minced pork into bits using two forks.
Put some oil (1-2 tablespoons or so) in a big-ish pot and heat. Fry the pork in the oil, stirring frequently, and “cutting” through too big lumps of meat with whatever you are using to stir.
Dice the onion, and add into the pot when the meat is just about done on the outside. Run the garlic through a press and add that, too. The onions should turn transluscent, but not brown.
Then add the pureed tomatoes, and the instant vegetable stock (you should just drop in the dry cubes, NOT cook a litre of broth and add that).
Let cook on small heat for a while until you like the consistency of the sauce.

I got a biiig box of art supplies in the mail today, mostly paper and Fimo. While I’d been waiting for it, I had an idea for a cane, and here’s the result:

The blue was mixed of equal parts Fimo Classic blue and Fimo Soft white (later experiments make me think 4 parts white and one part blue is better for sky blue). Yellow is Fimo Soft sunflower, and the red-orange layer was orange and yellow scraps mixed with indian red.

I rolled out the sunflower and the mixed blue on the thickest setting – 1 – of my pasta machine, and put two layers of each together, for thicker layers. I rolled out the orange-red mix on setting 7, pretty thin, and wrapped the yellow with it – note that the ends are wrapped, too. Then I rolled it up in a spiral.

For the sun rays I rolled a long sausage of yellow, wrapped it in more of the red-orange rolled out at thicknees 7, shaped it slightly triangular in profile, and cut it into lengths corresponding to the height of the spiral. Then I rolled more of the mixed blue into sausages and filled out the gaps between the rays.

Last I rolled out the rest of the blue mix to wrap the outside. I didn’t have enough left for two layers at thickness 1, so it’s one at 1 and 1 at 2 or 3.

If I try that again, I might use a thicker layer of yellow, or otherwise thinner and in turn more rays.