Shelving

I'm having to put drawing on the back burner for the time being.  Not because there's no time, but because I seem to have temporarily lost my mojo where drawing is concerned.  All the nice buildings that I would like to draw in London are obscured by the currently-blooming trees or some other obstruction.

On Sunday I went to Hyde Park looking for something to sketch.  The weather was flipping erratically between rainy and sunny but I decided to chance it.  I came upon a sculpture of a cherub wrestling with a dolphin.  The perfect angle from which to draw it would have been from the front, but the bench nearest to the front was occupied by a guy who had taken his shoes off.  I had to settle for a bench to the right of it instead.  I started drawing and soon realised that the sun was positioned in a place behind the sculpture that made it impossible to make out the cherub's head.  I decided to make the best of it.  It soon became clear that I was using the wrong pencil and the picture was going all wrong as a result.  I started again with a different pencil.  The second attempt went wrong.
I gave it up for a waste of paper and walked next to the lake looking for another subject.  I found an interesting building and began to draw it.  Then it began to rain.  In the end I gave up.

Checking in...

Okay, I'm back after yet another extended break (busy busy busy!).  So what's new?

3D: Over the past week I've been producing morphs and textures for my rigged tortoise character, using Hexagon for the former and Blender for the latter.  The texturing has thrown up issues: firstly, because the model is broken up into "material groups", there is now no single overall material for the model that I can paint on to; secondly, while painting a superhero texture for the character, I find that the lines dividing his skin from his mask (for example) are far too jagged.

Story: I've invested in a Bluetooth keyboard so I can type on my Kindle at work.  This means a lot more is getting done on it, and the story has gone into some strange and unexpected places.

Poser reference

A while ago I had this idea of using Poser as a reference tool for producing illustrations for my Razorback story.  I managed to produce a few suitable models for some of the characters - Razorback, Matt, Charley and Roptar - but then I got sidetracked for about a decade.  Just lately, with the writing of the story having taken off, the idea of using Poser as a reference tool for the illustrations has resurfaced.  Unfortunately, the original models that I produced got lost when my computer was stolen (around 2008) so I've got to produce the characters again.
These are not meant to look exactly like the characters, just resemble them enough so I can base pictures on them.  I think of it as being like dressing actors up in costumes.  Matt was produced by taking DAZ's Michael figure and producing a bunch of extra bits (belt, shoulder pads, etc.) using Wings.  Razorback was also based on Michael, but with his proportions shrunk to child size, the legs distorted a bit to give them a more feline structure, and DAZ's Millennium cat's head and tail added.  So far so good...