Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-06-28:

"It was terrifying and surreal to be talking to someone, sometimes someone you knew, listening to them pleading for help, and being able to do nothing but reassure them that help was on the way - and then to hear screams, shots and the silence of a dead line." -- Romeo Dallaire, general and former commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, recalling his force's inability to save lives during the Rwandan genocide. From Dallaire's 2005 book, Shake Hands with the Devil.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-06-28:

"It was terrifying and surreal to be talking to someone, sometimes someone you knew, listening to them pleading for help, and being able to do nothing but reassure them that help was on the way - and then to hear screams, shots and the silence of a dead line." -- Romeo Dallaire, general and former commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, recalling his force's inability to save lives during the Rwandan genocide. From Dallaire's 2005 book, Shake Hands with the Devil.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

[Not really a whine so much as an exasperated "WTF?".]

Argh! I had an idea for a cartoon, a silly visual pun, but when I went to try to draw it it turned into this more complex full-colour image that's really beyond (wait, let's put a more positive spin on that) stretching and expanding my Photoshop/GIMP[*] knowledge and skills, and so far has eaten five and a half hours over three days, is a 17MB XCF file (the end product will be smaller when I save it to PNG or JPG for display), is about to require another tool, and is around one-sixth done (and it's not really thirty-hours worth of joke, fercryinoutloud, but the image wants Out). I'm currently using eleven layers (not counting two pairs that already got merged) and will be adding at least four more before I start merging again (I may be using layers, once a confusing mystery to me, as a crutch to get around lack of skill in other techniques -- I don't know how Real (visual) Artists tend to use them in programs like GIMP and Photoshop; maybe I'm actually using them correctly, I dunno). And now I need to draw either a crane and a tanker truck, or a human figure, either course taking me into areas of drawing well outside my (limited) strengths.

I've considered clip-art. I'm still considering it. I want this to be all My Work (if I can count the amount I rely on mathematical filters as "my work"), but clip-art may wind up being the best way to present that portion of the idea. I also haven't entirely dismissed the idea of asking one of my Real Artist friends to help me out with the human. I'll have to see how many hours that one feature takes me and whether I can stand the result. (I'll probably try the crane and truck approach first, so the human can be suggested as the unseen crane operator and get me out of drawing a person in a realistic pose. If I can draw the crane.)

All this for what I should have just left as a stupid, line-art cartoon[**].

[enhanced incest-suggesting expletive]ing muse! Why does Thalia have to be such a hardass? (It would be Thalia, muse of comedy, right? Is there a muse of painting? And if there is a muse of painting, why is she picking on me? Thalia, at least, I can understand thinking I owe her something.)

Why couldn't this idea have come to me as a song I had to write, something I'm good at, instead of a computer-painting? (Though I suppose it could have been worse: I could've thought it needed to be oils on canvas, in which case I'd be even farther toward the wrong end of the learning curve.) I wonder how long it takes artists who are good at this stuff to do something comparable (given that this is not a masterpiece, but more like ... say, one of the Dr. Fun cartoons with a photo-like background but on a larger canvas).

Then again, as a result of this muse-yanking-my-leash exercise, I've learned how to make grass in GIMP and what the heck those menu selections and buttons referring to "paths" are about. And I should be relieved that the version of the image in my head didn't absolutely need to be rendered by ray-tracing (though it could stand to be more photo-realistic than what I'm doing (stop stop stop that line of thought right there dammit)).

In any case, if I do manage to complete this thing, don't worry, the folks reading my journal will be the first to know. Then y'all can judge for yourselves whether the pun is worth the effort.

And maybe after enough of this sort of thing, I'll be able to get the painting I've been carrying around in my brain for more than twenty five years out of my head and into a form where other people can see it too (though that one really does want to be an oil painting, even if I wind up settling for computer-produced). I've tried to insert that painting into painters' brains a few times over the years, hoping one of them would translate it to canvas for me, but Apparently I've never managed a suffciently high-bandwidth connection between brains for the transfer to complete in the time available[***]. More than a quarter century that damned panting has been bugging me, asking to be let out of my skull and into the world. I'd love to give it what it wants. In addition to being able to show friends what I've tried to describe in the past, it would by nice to be able to look at it with my eyes open for a change.

[*] I'm using GIMP; I mention Photoshop in the same breath so that people unfamiliar with GIMP will know what type (and scale) of program I'm referring to. ACAICT, the knowledge and skills appropriate to one carry over to the other (at least that was the case as of the last version of Photoshop I used).

[**] Not that all line-art drawings are trivial or line-art cartoons are stupid -- I can rapidly fill my brain with counterexamples without having to look any of them up, and what some artists can convey with a minimum of ink (or black pixels) is amazing -- just that that's what this cartoon probably ought to have been (especially at my level of drawing ability).

[***] Which reminds me of something that popped out of my mouth regarding Ouija boards recently, which probably ought to go in a different entry instead of being buried in a footnote here.

[Not really a whine so much as an exasperated "WTF?".]

Argh! I had an idea for a cartoon, a silly visual pun, but when I went to try to draw it it turned into this more complex full-colour image that's really beyond (wait, let's put a more positive spin on that) stretching and expanding my Photoshop/GIMP[*] knowledge and skills, and so far has eaten five and a half hours over three days, is a 17MB XCF file (the end product will be smaller when I save it to PNG or JPG for display), is about to require another tool, and is around one-sixth done (and it's not really thirty-hours worth of joke, fercryinoutloud, but the image wants Out). I'm currently using eleven layers (not counting two pairs that already got merged) and will be adding at least four more before I start merging again (I may be using layers, once a confusing mystery to me, as a crutch to get around lack of skill in other techniques -- I don't know how Real (visual) Artists tend to use them in programs like GIMP and Photoshop; maybe I'm actually using them correctly, I dunno). And now I need to draw either a crane and a tanker truck, or a human figure, either course taking me into areas of drawing well outside my (limited) strengths.

I've considered clip-art. I'm still considering it. I want this to be all My Work (if I can count the amount I rely on mathematical filters as "my work"), but clip-art may wind up being the best way to present that portion of the idea. I also haven't entirely dismissed the idea of asking one of my Real Artist friends to help me out with the human. I'll have to see how many hours that one feature takes me and whether I can stand the result. (I'll probably try the crane and truck approach first, so the human can be suggested as the unseen crane operator and get me out of drawing a person in a realistic pose. If I can draw the crane.)

All this for what I should have just left as a stupid, line-art cartoon[**].

[enhanced incest-suggesting expletive]ing muse! Why does Thalia have to be such a hardass? (It would be Thalia, muse of comedy, right? Is there a muse of painting? And if there is a muse of painting, why is she picking on me? Thalia, at least, I can understand thinking I owe her something.)

Why couldn't this idea have come to me as a song I had to write, something I'm good at, instead of a computer-painting? (Though I suppose it could have been worse: I could've thought it needed to be oils on canvas, in which case I'd be even farther toward the wrong end of the learning curve.) I wonder how long it takes artists who are good at this stuff to do something comparable (given that this is not a masterpiece, but more like ... say, one of the Dr. Fun cartoons with a photo-like background but on a larger canvas).

Then again, as a result of this muse-yanking-my-leash exercise, I've learned how to make grass in GIMP and what the heck those menu selections and buttons referring to "paths" are about. And I should be relieved that the version of the image in my head didn't absolutely need to be rendered by ray-tracing (though it could stand to be more photo-realistic than what I'm doing (stop stop stop that line of thought right there dammit)).

In any case, if I do manage to complete this thing, don't worry, the folks reading my journal will be the first to know. Then y'all can judge for yourselves whether the pun is worth the effort.

And maybe after enough of this sort of thing, I'll be able to get the painting I've been carrying around in my brain for more than twenty five years out of my head and into a form where other people can see it too (though that one really does want to be an oil painting, even if I wind up settling for computer-produced). I've tried to insert that painting into painters' brains a few times over the years, hoping one of them would translate it to canvas for me, but Apparently I've never managed a suffciently high-bandwidth connection between brains for the transfer to complete in the time available[***]. More than a quarter century that damned panting has been bugging me, asking to be let out of my skull and into the world. I'd love to give it what it wants. In addition to being able to show friends what I've tried to describe in the past, it would by nice to be able to look at it with my eyes open for a change.

[*] I'm using GIMP; I mention Photoshop in the same breath so that people unfamiliar with GIMP will know what type (and scale) of program I'm referring to. ACAICT, the knowledge and skills appropriate to one carry over to the other (at least that was the case as of the last version of Photoshop I used).

[**] Not that all line-art drawings are trivial or line-art cartoons are stupid -- I can rapidly fill my brain with counterexamples without having to look any of them up, and what some artists can convey with a minimum of ink (or black pixels) is amazing -- just that that's what this cartoon probably ought to have been (especially at my level of drawing ability).

[***] Which reminds me of something that popped out of my mouth regarding Ouija boards recently, which probably ought to go in a different entry instead of being buried in a footnote here.

*grumble* *mutter* damned Heisenbugs *mumble* *mutter* *growl*

[ETA: Found it. Uninitialized array problem. Rookie mistake. I should stop and eat something.]

*grumble* *mutter* damned Heisenbugs *mumble* *mutter* *growl*

[ETA: Found it. Uninitialized array problem. Rookie mistake. I should stop and eat something.]