The Weekend Threesome has some tasty neapolitan from The Nest’s past week to serve up to you. No, not vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, you won’t find these three flavors anywhere among Baskin Robbins 31…
It was almost 14 years ago that a love of drawing animal characters along with a willingness to learn how to create digital art became the first sparks that ignited the fire that would become Evil Squirrel and later, this blog. And while this blog has become my primary hobby over the past decade, one thing that hasn’t been present much at all the past few years was that drawing that inspired it all. 99.9% of all ES-inspired artwork I ever did was on two different computers that all included late 00’s era Microsoft Paint programs. When that last computer bit the dust in October 2017, so did my drawing passion…
Old school Paint rocked.
While I learned to enhance my Paint (and hand drawn scans, which would be the comics) in Photoshop, I never really liked it as an actual medium on which to draw. In the post-Paint age, I mainly used it to add text and special effects to the Shelf Critter Theatre photo plays, which would take over my blog for the next few years…
Photoshop blood is Zeeba approved.
Well, I wanted to try making actual digital art again, and when I came up with the idea to create a Shelf Critter Request countdown for Monday Muzak, I thought it might be neat practice to try transforming my “live action” critters into drawn form. So I decided to create the song title cards for each post completely in Photoshop, while also trying out a new style inspired by the Japanese concept of “chibi“…
And Sparklepony got all the attention of Caper when I showed her off last week!
While sometimes frustrating due to the multiple “layers” that must be worked with in Photoshop, I’ve had a lot of fun with these so far, and have the next three already done as well. I have to set the real thing next to me on my desk so I have an accurate model, and I’ve already noticed a few small details about my critters I never knew… like the bow in Mary’s hair, which for some reason is white.
Draw me like one of your French girls, Evil!
A little something you can look forward to for the next 29 weeks…
I made an abbreviated trip to the park Thursday before the anticipated heat wave broke back out. I didn’t get many squirrel pics, but did capture this mound of…… mulch?
I’ll bet it’s 20 degrees cooler at the peak.
Certainly one for the oddball photo challenge that used to go around…
Every once in a rare while, an unencrypted search term string will still sneak through and end up on my stats page for me to mock. This one popped up Thursday morning with 2 hits…
mtv video in the 80s had a squirrel smoking a pipe in it
Because it was early in the morning, I could easily deduce from my Stats page that they had checked out two of my three MTV Classic posts from the early years of this blog. Sadly, the answer to this person’s query won’t be found in any of those posts… and I kinda feel bad for that.
Can you show me how to use this, Uncle Fuzzywig?
So just in case they should try again, the scene they’re looking for is near the end of George Harrison’s video for “Got My Mind Set On You”…
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
You’re far more patient (and probably a heck of a lot more skilled) with Photoshop than I ever was. Before I switched to Apple products I had a copy of it on my HP but happily ditched it. It was soooo aggravating to try to create anything, let alone try to edit images.
The last time I played with anything Apple was when they were the standard for school computers…. i.e., back in the dark ages of green screen monitors. I’ve learned some tricks, but probably don’t even know 1% of what Photoshop can do…
I got all excited when I got Photoshop Elements but all I’ve ever used it for is adding dialogue to drawings and photographs for various Contests of Whatever…
Perhaps I can offer advice now and then if you need it about Photoshop. The nasty thing about Photoshop is that Adobe (it’s creator) has turned into one of those huge money grubbing business concerns and they ‘update’ Photoshop almost as often as Microsoft does Windows. But. I’m proficient enough, having gone to school and from futzing around with the extremely outdated version I bought back before Adobe only saw dollar signs. One cool thing about the layers is that if you’re into tweaking something (like adding some color to Mary’s bow) or that kind of thing, if you do it in a new layer, and you decide you hate how it looks, you simply delete the layer and can start over OR leave things as they are. At the end of all the tweaks, there’s a pop out menu that offers choices like “Merge Layers” and “Merge ALL layers” and finally “flatten image’. The Flatten thing is important to remember to do because that way the piece you’ve worked on looks finished. Photoshop will flatten the image without you doing a thing of course, but there are subtle ‘errors’ probably visible only to the fantastically nit-picky like myself. And No. I’ve never seen any errors on any of the images you drew or made.
Second thing: If you have a scanner attached to your ‘puter, you simply hand draw your cartoon or image and scan it in. J-Peg, PNG or PDF work as formats you can pull up in Photoshop. Then you have your base image (which granted will look extremely cheesy) and you can add layers and tweak the thing as much as you like.
Too much effort? Well there is NOTHING wrong with hand drawn art, I’m a huge fan of it myself. And just FYI, there’s a ‘free’ program called “Gimp” that I was turned on to, when my tower first crashed and I was not going to pay an enormous sum to buy Photoshop again. Here’s a link to the top ten, although all of them aren’t free, some have a trial. Maybe you can find a Paint ‘clone’ among them? https://wp-modula.com/free-photoshop-alternatives/
I had never seen Harrison’s video and never thought to look for it so thanks for the link – I watched all the way to the smoking squirrel…LOL. Never got into computer art but I bet it was tons of fun creating your old ‘toons. They STILL rock.
Pam
I loved that song before I loved The Beatles.
That’s the song that introduced me to George Harrison. I knew Paul and John before I knew there ever was a Beatles, and I knew George before knowing he was in the Beatles. Ringo…. well, he musta took the 80’s off.
He was high and drunk. He also appeared in a few Tom Petty videos.
He was in George’s video for “When We Was Fab,” and yeah, he kinda hung around George and Tom during the Wilbury days. I guess mad because they wouldn’t let him join.