Thursday, November 5, 2015

I got the scanner working...

Not only is my scanner/printer out of storage, but I've found a way to use it with the laptop. And so, it is now possible for me to scan any number of the hundreds of drawrings from both recent years and farther in the past.
` Today, after about four hours of work, I have a whopping two scans to show for it. I'll get to why that is, but first, the images.

This is from when I first began to learn about psychedelics, around in late 2012 just before the world didn't end. Although it's in black and white, the colors seem apparent to me. What do they look like to you?

Glimpses of The Vegetable Mind, 2012
The intended colors are as follows:

Top left: Alternating red and chestnut-colored surfaces, with mother-of-pearl panels and various colored jewels.
Top right: Gold-spangled Champaign sky with weird little 'planetoids', reflected in a deep ocean of sparkliness.
Bottom: Snake-like, plant-like creatures which are mostly red and orange. They possess little 'tendrils' that shoot out of their bodies, then retreat out of sight. These tendrils, which are light in color, can be seen shooting by through holes in the sides of their bodies.
` Sometimes, they are found in cups around brightly colored pencils with pencil toppers, like the two depicted above (one of them meant to be pink and fuzzy). Why this might be is a mystery.

The second image for this post was originally going to be my second large psychedelic inspiration, which is a view inside of a dodecahedron of portals to various worlds. (A photo of it serves as my background image on Facebook.) Alas, for reasons I'll mention below, this one will have to wait.

Instead, here's a drawing I did around seventeen years ago. I left it sitting in my scanner while it was in storage, in order to remind myself to get around to scanning these old drawings. Well, that worked pretty well, didn't it?
` I present to you, this ancient drawing of three faceless women surrounded by friendly alien creatures:

Faceless Women on an Alien World, 1998
What is going on when you're spending the evening with a six-legged, four-eyed alien, watching some four-legged beasts in some kind of competition, with small creatures flittering through the air?
` I don't know, but this drawing was meant to take you there anyway.

The reason I call these figures 'faceless' is because I originally was going to put some kind of breathing apparatus on them. After all, if you're on some foreign planet, what are the chances that the air is even safe to breathe, especially with alien microbes in the air?
` I even went so far as to not draw faces on them, although I thought that looked strange, so I added just a suggestion of faces. I was also going to make their clothing look more like spacesuits, but alas never did bother.
` The result is... well... unique. I'll give it that. And after all this time, why bother completing it? So, I haven't.

In other news, what's going on with the scanner/printer? The scanning function doesn't work directly with my computer, although it does have an SD card reader.
` Here's the funny thing; I have a mini-SD card with a regular SD adapter, so I can plug it into the scanner. In order to get the scans into my laptop, I plug that adapter into a USB adapter.
` Ah, technology. Thank goodness it works.

As for the dodecahedron drawing, I was going to put two different views of it on this post (instead of the aliens drawing). It is very dense as far as detail goes, and I noticed (too late) that when I used 'Crop To Selection' in ShowFoto, it clipped off the other edges as well.
` I will not stand for this mutiny, especially after scanning this drawing three different times before it was centered well enough to get opposite edges in.

Next time, I will take care to use Windows for photo editing, because Microsoft Paint can be relied upon for simple tasks such as cropping.

Happily, I have tons of neat artwork, as well as photo prints that could use some digital archiving. Not to mention digital photos that I haven't gotten around to uploading on Flickr.
` And posts that I haven't gotten around to uploading on this blog. And podcasts, even videos. As the momentum builds, I should be churning out a lot more content soon enough!

Until next time....