Categories
Dry Ink

Virginia gets the icon treatment.

mommy painting
The Mrs. got an icon

This morning I came up with the cute idea of making a memory flip-card game for my son Silas.  To make it special I’m going to make cartoons of people in the family for him to play with.  Since I already had my new icon I decided to use it as my style guide and try to work from there out.

The wife was the first to get the Icon treatment. She is a harsh critic of these sort of things so if this was going to work at all I would at the very least have to get her portrait right.  She gave the THUMBS UP so I am good to go!  Here it is.

Categories
Dry Ink

New Profile Icon

Sterling Sheehy
My goofy mug.

I realize I have a lot of inconsistent profile information floating around the web these day. Sorry about that but its easy for to be pulled in a million directions online. Its difficult enough keeping this site up to date let alone all the social junk i’ve signed up for over the years. For instance, I forgot I have a flickr account, completely lapsed on that one.

Well I was trying to do a little spring cleaning today and in the spirit of updating things created an new profile icon. Nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual suspects, hat, glasses, stripes and scruff. Hope you like it.

Categories
Website

Little iPhone pop-up bubble

Just added a swell iPhone pop-up bubble to the mobil site, so folks can add the web app to their desktop. I found the code on google code and tweaked it a little to match the Archive. Thanks Google!

Little iPhone pop-up bubble

UPDATE: killed this just because it got annoying and by now everyone knows how to bookmark things on their phones and tables. redundant.

Categories
Website

The new mobile site is up and running

so many cell phones

Having been in Hong Kong for the last few weeks I couldn’t help but notice that my site didn’t play nice with pc’s or mobile devices. So from the road I started my third rebuild with cross browser compatibility in mind. If your reading this on anything other than a Mac then the new code is working!

For the mobile readers I built a completely new theme. It’s lightning fast compared to the brick it used to be. There a few bugs concerning my logo and navigation that I’d like to resolve but for the most part I am very happy with it. I’ve been ducking into phone stores here in HK every chance I get to test it on different devices and so far so good.

For the desktop site I built a new more efficient theme as well as cutting or consolidating as many plugins as possible. I started from a boilerplate html5 based theme called “Bones”. It pointed me in the right direction on a lot of the things I wanted to do. Now my big task is to implement better image optimization and dynamic thumbnail resizing. I can always just limit the number of images per page but I would rather server higher resolution pictures to faster machines and smaller to slower.

On the back end I’m also organizing how I sort and handle content as well. The problem right now is that it is too much of a blog and not enough of an “archive”. It’s hard to find things unless you know what your looking for, and that’s just not any fun. I have some leads on how to do this with wordpress custom taxonomies but it looks sort of hard. So check back later to see if I can pull it off.

Wow, looking back Its been a pretty geeky last couple of weeks. Oh well it’s worth it if it helps me share my work with others. What’s the point of being an artist if no can ever see your work.

Categories
Website

Happy 2011 Everyone!

father time
Bringing in the new year.

Another year has come and gone. You were a lot of fun 2010 we won’t forget you!

-Sterling

Categories
Offsite Ramblin'

Perfect color IQ

perfect colour vision
Wahoo I have perfect colour vision!

Wahoo! I have perfect color vision!

…well as far as this IQ test is concerned. Now all I need is to learn is how to use them.

Categories
Website

Road Tripping

I made the long road trip from Vancouver to Northern California just before Christmas. SInce I was by myself I rigged the car with a tripod and my trusty Nikon D700 and made this time-lapse movie.

I shot the first day out the side window but the wind pushing on the lense proved to be problematic and it never stayed one hundred percent perpendicular. I had to stop a couple times to fix it. It was also freezing! Driving with the windows down in windows down is both loud and cold. I had to stop and buy gloves at one point cause my hands were freezing.

The second day it was raining and so I couldn’t leave the window open without lots of glare and raindrop blurring. Instead I did the default thing and shot out the front window. Not as interesting, if you ask me, since I’ve seen that shot a thousand times before. On winding roads with a slow frame rate it looks exceptionally bad. At night thought I tried to make the most of it by drawing with the light of my cell phone. I know texting is illegal while driving but I wonder if animation is? Maybe in the future I can expand on that idea. Till then here is the movie.

Categories
Dry Ink

Birthday painting

moms kitchen
My birthday painting

I was caught off guard on my birthday and to my surprise Virginia gave me a brand new Cintiq 12wx.

I love my new drawing tablet! Its awesome! I’m all smiles over here at our house. As a double bonus I got photoshop CS5 as well! Double score!! I’ve spent the last few years stuck on CS1 so this is a HUGE improvement. Goodbye bugs! I will not miss you.

Above is my first painting on the new gear.

Categories
Dry Ink

Busted

I’ve been rather busy as of late and haven’t had a lot of time to make art.

Last night I found myself with the odd bit of free time and so I jumped onto zbrush and made this quick bust. I was inspired by these massive sculpts by Javier Marin which are installed not too far from my house. His work is amazing and this doesn’t even come close to how mind blowingly wonderful his installation is. It took my breath away when I saw it. It is by far the coolest thing in Richmond, BC.

My little sculpt took about two hours to make start to finnish. As always the punchline is that the rendering took longer than the work.

Categories
Dry Ink

Jungle Painting

Scarlet Macaws
Costa Rican Scarlet Macaws

I have been working on some artwork for my sister. She wanted something that looked like an old tropical postcard. So first I painted the nice little Costa Rican Landscape below and then put it through the photoshop ringer, and after a lot of masking and engraving filters was able to deliver the above painting. I like it. Especially the color tones on the mountains in the background.

fully saturated
The raw un-rendered painting

There are more elements to this piece but I will post them at a later time.