Holy crap, you guys. How long has it been since I’ve put pen to paper for not-writing/form-filling purposes?
This hardcover sketchbook that Bren brought me while I was in the hospital has been staring at me for MONTHS, and finally I guess I cracked and opened it up. (It helps I had my favorite kind of ink pen, the almighty Uniball, on hand. Yeah, that’s it up there in the pic.) But then I stalled, because I realized this was really nice paper, and my Uniball alone wasn’t enough to do it justice.
I had wanted to play with grayscale markers for awhile, and it looks like this will be my chance. But just any old gray marker from a $10 Crayola box won’t do, this is good paper and good paper demands good marker. I’ve been looking at this 12-pack of Prismacolor Neutrals for a few days, and I might just spring for it– it’s at a pretty generous discount, and after getting an unexpected bonus from a Gourmet Ramen client, I think I can justify a little fun. If I were to order it now, it wouldn’t get here until Monday even with Prime shipping, so I’ll just wait so it will (hopefully) get lumped with the Galaxy Note 10.1 screen protector I want to get. (grumble grumble something about Amazon breaking up shipments even after telling them to hold and ship all at once)
In the meantime I did scribble something on the inside cover. It started out as an attempt to replicate this circular-linear pattern I saw in Ar Tonelico (I think it’s actually the installer port tattoo that appears on Reyvateils?) and then I started playing with extrapolating the lines and then it kinda just… went out of control. Next thing I know I’m generating new, similar patterns in varying scales. No doubt it’s going to sap this poor Uniball dry, since it’s not meant for large fills. I’m torn on whether or not to put in hexagon outlines in the background, or reserve it for when I get the markers.
IN OTHER NEWS, I grabbed the Mac retuned port of SimCity. Ordinarily it’s $20 on Steam, but Joystiq Deals had it on sale for $5. I’d missed this game so much, and because I don’t have access to Blastoise I couldn’t play it on Windows! But now I nabbed the Mac retune on the cheap (“retune” as in “updated to be compatible with the newer versions of OS X”) and, uh, I kinda burned away the past two days on that game rather than working on the Law and Order piece like I was supposed to. But, I’ll be back at the Painter thing later tonight. Why not now? Because I’ve got YouTube subscription videos to catch up on, and this ramen is probably going to put me to sleep soon after.