Character Sketch

I enjoy role playing enough to do it a couple of times a week during lunch breaks at work.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a character sketch for a sailor character, and thought I'd share the final result:


The image was created in Inkscape, which is currently my favorite open source graphics editor.

The frizziness of the hair was created using a filter in Inscape which gave the shapes a 'crumpled paper' texture. The pattern of the shirt was created using another filter to give it the faded/bleeding/rumpled look. I also took and applied a couple of different gradients over the hair to give it the sun-bleached/darkened look.

I traced three individual images to get the final result: I started with a picture of some random dude on the internet who had the general musculature and posture I wanted, then took a picture of myself making the expression I wanted for the eyes, and then looked through a Google Image search for 'portrait' to find a nose that looked interesting. The 'final result' (as in, I may add more stuff to it at some point) is what you see.

Ideally he's supposed to have a bunch of tattoos, trinkets, charms, etc. because he's a superstitious character, but I haven't gotten around to blinging him out. But over all I think the sketch does a good job painting his as a wind-tossed, no-nonsense type of person who has a decent idea what he wants and how to get it.

What's Your Vector, Victor?

Yesterday I rediscovered the joy of Vector Graphics. I downloaded and installed Inkscape, which I have played with briefly in the past, but never gotten quite into it. But yesterday I was inspired and had some free time at lunch, and so I drew up a few cartoon characters, just for fun:





The inspiration for them came during our weekly staff meeting yesterday morning. I was doodling, as I usually do, and came up with them. Hopefully I'll add a few more to the entourage, just for fun.

Wizard Wednesday: Open Source 1 - Synergy

According to Wikipedia, synergy is:

"the phenomenon in which two or more discrete influences or agents acting together create an effect greater than that predicted by knowing only the separate effects of the individual agents."

According to SourceForge (the universal repository for all open-source software worth downloading), Synergy is a kick-a program which allows one computer to share its mouse and keyboard with an unlimited number of other computers - in any spacial configuration - over a network connection. What that means is this:

I currently have two 'main' computers at work, a Dell Latitude D820 (laptop) with an extra monitor, and an iMac Intel. Up until yesterday, that meant I had two seperate work spaces on my desk, with two seperate keyboards and two seperate mice. As of yesterday, I now have one workspace, with my laptop in the middle, my secondary monitor on the left, and my iMac on the right. With Synergy configured on both the Dell and the iMac, I now run my mouse cursor off the right edge of my laptop screen, and it appears on the left edge of the iMac screen, where I click on some stuff, type in a few commands, and then bring it back, off the left edge of my iMac screen and it reappears on the right edges of my laptop screen, where I resume using it.

But wait, there's more. Suppose (as happens fairly often, actually) that I have something - a web page, a serial number, some random bit of text, whatever - on my PC that I want to use on my iMac (or vice-versa). I can now select that bit of text - say a webpage's URL - and copy it to my Windows clipboard, and then move my mouse to the iMac screen, open a web browser, and paste that link from my windows computer into my Mac webbrowser.

The program is compatible with Windows, Mac/Unix, and Linux, so you could theoretically have 5 computers, each running a different operating system, with five different monitors, and operate fairly seamlessly between the three of them.

Here's a YTV of someone doing something just like that.

If that isn't Wizard, I don't know what is.