1920×1200 | Illustrator
I managed to escape from Azeroth for long enough to actually complete a vector again. This time it’s Touko & Yumi from Marimite. I tried a slight variation on my usual style and used coloured lines. Not sure if I like the effect or not. I initially thought this was going to be easy, but the source was a lot worse than I thought on closer inspection, plus there’s a fair amount of detail obscured by the giant falling snowflakes and the elaborate gate / fence thing which I ended up leaving out. I also ended up having to sample colours from some promotional material of the pair too, since the colours in the source image were completely whacked (purple hair?). I’m still not 100% happy with how this turned out, but I think it’s reasonable enough. I’m also not sure why this is, but the usual colours of their hair ribbons are reversed - don’t know if that was deliberate or a mistake.
I upgraded to Illustrator CS4 and greatly regret doing so. The ‘enhancements’ that they made to the path / anchor system included making anchor points you put down snap to the edges of previously drawn paths. Sometimes that’s cool. Most of the time it irritated the hell out of me because I generally don’t want that when I’m colouring. Unfortunately in true Adobe fashion, there’s no way to turn it off. Every iteration of Illustrator leaves me more and more convinced that the development team hate their users. For every annoyance they fix, they add one or two more. 
EDIT: I found out how to turn this off.
Can’t be bothered cropping this to 1600×1200 for the rapidly shrinking 4:3 crowd. Sorry, you’ll have to do that yourselves.
In an attempt to cut down on annoying comment spam, I’ve set things up so that posts more than 120 days old will get locked and any comments made will go to moderation. Hopefully this will cut down on the number of tsubasa-loving mexicans that like to flood that particular post with stuff I can’t read.
Crap. Looks like I won’t be playing for a few weeks. I think that it must have seen me ordering a Japanese PS3 and gotten angry. It’s one of the Australian launch batch, though not purchased until 6 months after launch, so it’s surprising how well it’s lasted.
So, due to an interesting alignment of circumstances my father somehow ended up getting given a brand new camera, which he passed on to me since apparently I’m the only one that didn’t have one. Additionally, my Alter 1/1 Scale Reinforce Zwei arrived in the mail this morning so I had something to test it out.
What can we tell from this? Given that it’s pretty much the only half-decent photo of a set of about 30, we can assume that a) I am terrible at photography, b) the camera was free for a reason (though it’s not terrible and if I can figure out how to get it to stop compressing the damned images it’ll look nicer) and c) I desperately, desperately need new curtains. And also a new cabinet to store all these things in, they’re taking over my bedroom and my cabinet’s been full for months. I actually still have a couple in boxes because I don’t have space.
If I’m getting a reputation for angry rantage, then I wouldn’t be surprised. Today’s subject of my ire: The Rightstuf, International. The ‘International’ part being a joke if you actually buy from them internationally. I’ve purchased stuff from them five or six times now, always large packages with a pile of stuff in them. They charge absolutely insane prices for shipping - roughly double what my usual retailer does - so I usually only bother when they’re having clearance sales.
So, what does that super-expensive shipping get you? Well, what generally happens is that they fuck around with your order for two weeks or so, then finally ship it. About ten days later you’ll get an invoice in the mail. 2-3 weeks down the track you get your box of goodies. Despite TRSI being based in Iowa or something, the box will be postmarked Malmo, Sweden. And the box will be really, really badly damaged. I don’t know what’s going on, but every box I’ve gotten from TRSI has been in an extremely poor state. The corners bashed in, the cardboard ripped… But usually they have structural integrity so I don’t really care (except for the fact I’m paying double the price for shipping that takes twice as long and apparently has handlers that play rugby with my packages).
Continue reading ‘TRSI: Fix your fucking shipping’
