daily slice-of-life photo blog of a Gen-X dad
こんばんは。How’s it going?
Today I’ll just post a few photos that I took today. They aren’t really related, except that they were part of my life today. A toy for the cats, a dirty motorbike, and sunbeams in the car. I guess the sunbeams only became a part of my life because of the amazing device called a camera. 😆 📷
I hope you had a nice Monday!
おやすみ
Some rock n roll to get the week off to a good start!
こんばんは。How’s it going?
Today I dropped off my son and his friend downtown (Austin) so they could post some concert photos. And of course I had to stop by my favorite book store, BookPeople! It’s my favorite place to buy greeting cards and I needed to stock up on a few. But before that, I checked out my favorite section, which is Travel Memoirs. I love traveling so looking at all the cool destinations gets me excited! Where to go next?
What I love about BookPeople is that as an independent book store, they have the freedom to make staff recommendations (which are awesome) and also create their own displays. For instance, this incredible display:
Love it!
And then I had to browse the notebook section. I almost bought a Rhodia notebook, but then found these really nice (and affordable) Japanese notebooks. The staff recommendation said they are perfect for fountain pens, so I picked up these two notebooks:
The paper is nice and writing on the pages with a fountain pen is smooth and the ink looks great on it. I kind of regret starting my daily journal in the current notebook now… it’s too big! Will take me years to fill it up. I should use smaller notebooks so that I can try different ones. I guess I just need to bite the bullet and switch over, leaving all those pages in the old book blank. 😭 But life’s too short to worry about those things, right?
I hope you had a nice Sunday!
おやすみ
I’m getting more comfortable using the Wacom tablet in Photoshop. For this one, I scanned the pencil sketch, then brought it into Photoshop, set the sketch as a top layer, with the Transparency Mode set to Multiply, and locked it. That let me see the lines on top as I painted on layers below.
I also used a technique for picking colors, which is to basically create your swatches on the canvas (like a traditional paint palette) instead of using the color picker or swatches window. It’s fast and keeps the overall palette consistent. Not that I have a lot of experience yet, but it’s a neat technique that I think I’ll keep using.
I only used color for this digital sketch, and left the existing pencil lines. My intention was to just practice with shading and using the tablet, and I spent maybe 40 minutes on it, but I like this look. And it’s fun to try new things!
To see all the sketches I’ve been working on, you can check out the Flickr album “My Sketching Journey”, or my Instagram account barron.sketches which I created just for posting sketches, watercolors, and stationery items.
I wonder what is going through their minds.
