Drumstick Plushie
Looking at the computer has been giving me headaches/making me feel sick for the past week, so while I’ve been off it I’ve been trying my hand at some plushies. Tessa has been making really cute keychain-sized plushies, and it made me really curious to try, even though I haven’t sewn since middle school (and I sucked at it even then) and never thought I’d ever try making plushies.
I found out that I still suck at sewing haha and was also quickly reminded of how I can’t do cute things. But the actual sewing itself was surprisingly fun and very addicting. And seemed to help my headaches. This drumstick one is the 4th or 5th plushie I’ve done since last week (the others are much smaller, about the size of a closed fist, and most aren’t finished yet). I read online somewhere that larger plushies are easier than small ones, but haha no, they’re harder. At least being hand sewn. Maybe if I did this more I’d get faster, but right now it feels sooo slow to me.
For this drumstick I didn’t use a pattern since it’s really simple – I just did pencil sketches then cut the fleece and sewed them up. Oh yeah, it’s made of anti-pill fleece! Joann’s was having a 50% off sale so it was superrr cheap. Like $4.50 for a yard. So nice. And super soft and huggable. Though admittedly hugging a drumstick is a bit weird hahaha.
Alchemy Drawings
Hoatzin Sketch
Hoatzin pencil sketch/study. A Hoatzin is a type of cuckoo! A very pretty one at that. It’s the punk bird of the cuckoo world.
It’s amazing how much more fun drawing can be on different types of paper. This is on a lightweight watercolor paper.
OpenCanvas
Before I switched to a Mac, there was a small, lightweight, little-known app called OpenCanvas that was my digital paint program of choice. As OpenCanvas is not Mac supported, my Mac forced me to learn Photoshop. I’m glad it did, as I grew to really love working with Photoshop. But, I always wondered about OpenCanvas. I remembered the program had a tactile quality to it that Photoshop never quite matched – Photoshop was developed as a photo manipulator that artists used to paint digitally, whereas OpenCanvas was developed from the start as a sketching and painting tool. It was coded specifically to utilize pressure-sensitive tablets.
The result is that OpenCanvas feels much more like drawing than Photoshop does, at least without custom brushes (the great thing about Photoshop is that you can customize it to perform the way you want).
After building my computer, though, I finally have the option of using OpenCanvas once again. So I headed over to Portalgraphics.net and downloaded a free trial of OpenCanvas 4.5+, as well as the first version, OpenCanvas 1.1, which is the only freeware version (so you can still download it here) to play around with.
The program actually didn’t feel as comfortable as I remembered in either version (the version I actually used years ago was oC 2.x). I suppose I’ve just grown too used to Photoshop! But here’s a sketch from 4.5+:
I do like these plants very much….