DIY: James Marshall Technicolour

I've had my iPad for well over two years now. Two new generations have been released since I've bought it (and how I've fought my inner geek full of WANT to not buy them). And in all that time I've never seen a really good doodling app. What gives? It's the non-pressure sensitive touch screen isn't it? Odd that old technology like resistive touch screens would work better for sketching than this spiffy multi-touch capacitive one.

Recently I've been messing with Bamboo Paper for the iPad. It's one of the few sketching apps which doesn't suck total donkey balls. It's free (aside from possible in-app purchases) and it comes with a decent set of tools. Bit of a limited palette, though. And the canvas is exactly as large as the screen. And it's all a bit ham-fisted without a stylus, you can forget about really detailed work. Though I suppose I could make my own stylus. But still, it IS a ton of fun to noodle around with.

DIY: Astroids Wall Mural

So this is pretty much the laziest way to DIY - have blank wall, buy wall stickers, stick them to wall. Still very happy with the result :)

Those guys sell a ton of awesome stickers, check them out.

DIY: Super Mario Triptych

So I have this room I call "the Red Room". Because the theme is 'red', not because of a literary or Twin Peaks reference. In fact, there are several colour-themed rooms in my home, but perhaps we'll talk of that some other day. Anyway, the red room had this one wall that needed a nice big painting or something. Except I couldn't find anything suitable; it was either too small, or had the wrong proportions, or the colour scheme was off. So one day I was walking through town and this local art store had a blowout sale. I came away with three massive 115x75cm canvasses, a bunch of acrylic paint in various bright and happy colours, and a couple of brushes, all for less than 40 euros.

But what to paint? Also, how to paint? I hadn't touched a brush since high school. And then I stumbled across this old Super Mario Bros spritesheet. I always did love the old 8-bit sprite art of the NES era. And my art teacher always told me to paint what I love. I never got what he meant. Now I do.

I'm still fiddling around with the spacing and getting it all level so they're not perfectly aligned but yay! Super Mario triptych! God I'm such a geek. If you spot the error in the middle painting, you're at least as much of a geek as I am. Click on any image to see a larger size/slideshow.

 And for funnies, a couple of "work in progress" animations I threw together from snapshots I took along the way. This is the first painting I did, I was all over the place, ha ha. I learned a lot from it, and I may even give it away and make a new one to replace it. Still, it turned out okay.

This is the second one, it went much smoother. I didn't shoot any in progress pictures of the third.

I had a ton of fun doing this. I'm not sure how many hours I put in, but it wasn't that many. The most time-consuming was setting up the grid, after that it was just "paint by numbers" on a large scale. After spending so much time analyzing and reconstructing these sprites, I am more impressed than ever by just how much personality and expression they managed to eke out of a 32x16 grid and three colours.

DIY: Zelda faux stained-glass windows

Even since I saw these stained glass Zelda Wind Waker pictures on the web a long time ago, I've wanted to do something with them. I just never had windows where they would work. And then I moved shop, and now I do. A nice row of 4 windows in my lounge. Yay!

As a first step, I enlarged the pictures to 4xA3, printed them out, glued them together, and stuck them on cardboard. Then I took a boxcutter, and cut out the silhouette of the window shape. Then I fixed them over the existing windows. By which I mean I took a hammer and nails and pounded the suckers in place.

I'm rather happy with the result, even if right now you have these stupid bars where I pasted the separate pieces of papers together. I'm still debating on having them printed (in a single sheet, of course) on transparent plastic (versus just regular paper). The thing is, the colored paper doesn't alter the colour of the light coming through like 'proper' stained glass would. I did not expect that. I think transparent coloured plastic will, which I hope will enhance the stained glass effect further.

First a shot of the entire array, sorry if it looks fuzzy, my cheap-ass digital camera doesn't handle the extreme differences in contrast well. Click on any of the images to see a larger version/slideshow.

And some shots of each window individually. I wasn't entirely careful in cutting out the window silhouette as this is just a mockup of the final version, but it turns out this gives a nice sort of "glow" effect around the window proper.

 As mentioned, the "cross bars" are just because these are A3 sheets stuck together, the final version will hopefully be in one piece.

 Number three of four...

 Yeah, this one needs a little work, I wasn't entirely careful doing the cutting.