“MyPaint” it’s a simple but powerful software, really powerful. Last friday Tanda drop by our little studio and after watching some of my hand drawn sketches he showed this software to me. We installed it in a few minutes (compiling from source in Ubuntu Gutsy) and I started painting almost immeditaly afterwards.
I was stunned by the feeling of it, how fast it responds and how simple it makes to paint and draw. In a matter of minutes I had a pretty decent colour sketch. Of course, Ivan’s tablet helped a lot but still…

So today I installed in my home desktop, and using only my mouse (yeah I still don’t have a tablet !) I came out with this Gandalf thing….

Bad thing about 3D is that it takes a lot of time to get the pictures out of your head and into the screen. When I am exploring and searching for a particular image trying to grab a clear representation of an idea, 3D tech side is like filling in forms before jumping in parachute… it kinda spoil the fun of it. This is why I enjoyed so much this software, because it really trims out the techy part of digital painting and focuses on the creative work.

But truth must be said, I finished colour correction in Gimp

It’s really amazing how a good illustration book can give inspiration and energy to the creative spirit. Not too long ago, a beautiful copy of “John Howe’s Fantasy Art Workshop”, got to me and almost immediately I felt the urge to draw, paint and finish this image. I had started this piece inspired by one of my favourite movies: Dark Crystal but I couldn’t find the time nor the energy to finish it up. So now thanks to the inspiring genius of John’s, here’s the finished work.

Coincidentally, the good people from Blender Art Magazine have decided that next issue’s theme is “Landscapes” and have kindly accepted a short article of mine about the making of this image, as soon as they publish it I’ll post a spanish traslation of it for the latin community here (and save some work to the kind people that traslate the magazine to spanish).

Want a high res render (1920×920) ?

It’s 10 years now since I started with Linux. I started with a Red Hat, then I migrated to SuSE, was playing with a couple versions of Mandrake, tasted Debian (not much to be honest), and since three versions I’m with Ubuntu. Up to this point in my linux life, I’m very pleased and satisfied generally speaking. However comparing my previous experiences with Windows and its versions, and after years of reading testimonials in pro or againts of Windows/Linux I have noticed a big big problem in Linux. Well not exactly in Linux but in Linux users:

The Self-Defense Denial Syndrome… or SDDS as I have proudly named it.
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If you live in Argentina and are older than…I mean… you are grown ups, you might recall Tiburón (Shark), Delfín (Dolphin) and Mojarrita (little river fish God knows how’s traslated to english but sounds funny in spanish), the so called “Superagents” who did around eleven movies in the 70’s. A couple of weeks ago I went to the premiere of “Superagents: Next Generation”, directed by our well known Daniel DeFelippo (director of Plumíferos), and introducing several local stars like Fabian Giannola and Darío Lopilato among others (click on picture for bigger version).

This is not a paparazzi’s blog so you might wonder what the heck is this about. Thing is we made all digital effects for the movie in our new “studio” with my old comrades Iván & Manuel … and of course using Blender. There were some interesting weeks, visting film sets, wandering around cameras and spotlights, and taking lots of pictures. It was particullarly fun to see people’s reaction when we took pictures of mirroring balls and other weird stuff except the movie stars !

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