Nice Idea but a Challenge to Draw

This started out as a simple idea. The inktober prompt is Miniature and I figured as an illustration I’m looking through three different magnifying glasses at some tiny writing would encapsulate the idea. It an example of the type of Strange loop I like to include in my art. That was the inspiration Implementing it became a bit more complicated.

I tried out several compositions and they looked terrible. I’ve got a couple of big magnifying glasses and they’re circular So I needed superimposed circles which can make for an interesting composition, but the image inside circle needs to become more magnified at each step. So I thought I’d show this by including my hand or fingers holding the appropriate magnifying glass which of course needed to be smaller in a smaller space at each step. Two magnifying glasses where not a convincing composition. Three became very tight but I did have an old hand lens, which looked ok im the space available. So I spend a bit of time making a few drawings to get scales of my fingers and position of the magnifying glasses. I roughed out the basic composition but of course it’s not really possible to set up the same to sketch from life. After a couple of false starts in my sketchbook and also a lot of rubbing out I came to reasonable composition. But, then I ran into problems. I’m still having spacial problems with my vision close up and I found it very hard to do the detailed line work, particularly making things join up. What worked in the end was to begin with the innermost magnified image do all the ink line work within it and then move out to the next one.

It looks OK in the end but it’s not too obvious what I was trying to achieve. For those that are interested the text in the hand lens “This is tiny font used to get more words into a page of text within a computer file AI slop etc.” It’s hand written by me but it’s meant to be the type of hallucination LLM AI chatbots pump out. An you se the clue why? 

The moral of this story is next Keep it much Simpler, don’t strain your eye.

More Inktober and back to where Alvin Began

 As I had the idea for the second Inktober drawing I quickly thought it was a perfect topic for an Alvin cartoon, aka Meet the People.

The trouble was, recently I’d changed to first loading my hand drawn sketches into CorelDraw. Where I converted my rough ink work into smooth line work using the Corel autotrace function, and then I coloured the characters with the many great tools in CorelDraw. It took away a lot of drudgery and my work a had very unique look. Unfortunately, when my computer crashed some months ago the only version of CorelDraw also died/ I've not reloaded it onto any new computer yet. So what to do?

So I decided to go back to where it all began. Originally Alvin was devised to created using a number of cut out shapes. I had quickly sketch a few versions of him and his wife Lila. then rearrange them to create something like a cartoon I wished. I could play with the composition and exaggerate their body language. It was fun. I would then normally trace over, scan and/or redraw a final cartoon, it was simple and relatively quick. Here’s a little more detail from an old blog post.

In the interest of keeping it simple I did draw up the basic cartoon on scrap paper using a tombow pen, but then I cut out the shapes. I typed in his comments about a real relic from the past called a cassette printed that in a large font and drew a speech bubble around it. Cut it out as well and I had a decent early version of an Alvin cartoon. If you follow me on Instagram you’ll notice that so far this year I’m including the tools are used to create the drawing along with the drawing taken with my phone, rather than a scan of the drawing itself. I’m testing out my theory that I get more views when I have my hand in a picture, or showing how I created the image. Not just posting the finished image.

Inktober already

In case you hadn’t noticed I haven’t been posting much here, Mainly because I had eye troubles (again) and couldn’t see. So any computer work was a total strain. I also hadn’t done anything on social media for a couple of months, which was a good thing really. Instagram is really the only thing I check occasionally these days. However my eye is getting better and I have previously enjoyed doing the Inktober challenges. So I’m going to try draw something every day this month. Following their official prompt list.

The first topic is pretty simple. It’s Apple. First of all I thought of trying to draw a laptop with an Apple logo. I’m not an Apple fanboy and I don’t have any apple gear so forget that. Instead, I just got a nice green apple put it on the table after breakfast got out a new sketch book and my new favorite Tombow pens. Keep it simple, no need to go overboard on the first picture.

Now to keep going every day for the rest of the month.

Yet Another Microsoft Copy Disaster

 I'm still cleaning up old computer files, and I've been moving non-photo and non-video stuff into a miscellaneous folder on a USB backup drive. Eventually that drive got full, so I decided to move everything to my studio external hard drive, which still had space.

 A few nights ago, I plugged in the USB drive and started copying a large directory with multiple subdirectories over to the external drive. I didn't use TeraCopy (hadn't installed it yet) and just did a standard cut and paste operation. I didn't really check how long it would take, but based on the speed, I figured it would run for hours.

 I’ve got an eye infection that needs my attention, so I left the copy process for a couple of days. When I finally checked back on it, something had clearly gone wrong. There was a fresh login screen The computer had obviously rebooted. Only a handful of files had actually made it to the external drive, nothing like the multitudes I was expecting.

 What happened? My computer had upgraded itself without my permission. I'd specifically asked to delay updates for five weeks, but Windows did it anyway and apparently killed the entire copy operation without giving me any error messages or warnings that something went wrong.

This is exactly the kind of frustration that's been building with Windows 11 over the past six months. Yes, I could have done better by installing TeraCopy first and actually monitoring the process. But the real issue is that Microsoft's system silently failed without telling me anything was wrong.

I've totally lost faith, I cannot honestly rely on Microsoft anymore.

Teracopy is available on the Microsoft Store, but to find it you must spell it exactly without the double r and it should be the first item on the list and have an page that looks like the one on the righr. It is free. It’s simple to use and works fine

Can We Trust Them?

I got one of those promotional emails from Google Workspace recently, pushing "Ask Gemini in Drive." Their pitch: get synthesized answers pulled from multiple files, no need to actually find and read them yourself.

Sounds convenient. But here's the thing I believe strongly in this age of AI slop and post truth internet you must always check your sources.

If there's a conspiracy or cartel among tech giants, it works in two parts.

First, they're slowly weaning us off our own capabilities. Our own PCs, our own software, our own data, our own creative work. Everything gets pushed toward a thin client model where it all lives in the cloud. Their cloud. Their software. Your data, despite endless assurances it stays private (except for training purposes, except for testing, and so on, have you actually read the updated terms of service lately). That means they control everything. Sound familiar? Too much like Orwell's Big Brother?

Second, while some features stay free for now, it quickly becomes clear you'll need to subscribe, and not just to one service either. The real hidden cost will be cloud storage, and eventually being locked out of what's actually yours. I'm not exaggerating. OneDrive has already started doing this, and not just to me.

So we'll be handed answers without needing to think, but we could pay dearly for the privilege.

Is this nirvana, or is it dystopia?

Proof read by Claude Sonnet 5

Frustration Central

I lost some of my working computer files earlier in the year and confidence in Microsoft.. My office computer died right after a Windows update, and it caught me between backup cycles. About a month of photos was only partially saved. Not great!

Firstly I stepped back and looked at what I need to do to make sure it doesn't happen again. This lead to going back through all my backups and archives. It wasn't a happy task many of the archive sets were missing a significant number of files and several were of zero length. It took a while to track what was happening.

The problem turned out to be a short-coming of the copy function in Microsoft windows when copy multiple nested directories in an unsupervised way. The copy function can hit a file it can't copy and it then moves onto the next directory leaving the rest of the directory or directories not copied. Occasionally it sems it just created an empty file header and moved onto the next file. These missing files only showed up with detailed review. The number of files in the affect directories would become less in subsequent copies or the amount of disk pace required would become slightly lass. Empty files where easy enough to find once I knew What I was looking for. My adoption of creating at list of the MD5 checksums a few years ago really helped zero in on problems in recent year. 

For a short time I was side-tracked by the unnoticed update in windows 11 that copied my working directories of photo into a subdirectory under OneDrive and then started uploading them to the cloud, and worst still starting to remove older files from my computer (all unknow to me).

Turning off the link to OneDrive, was the simple solution. But microsoft seems to be able to turn on the "private" OneDrive after it updates (now manditory in window 11 home. Arrggghh!

This is unacceptable behaviour microsoft

I searched through every backup or archive I had and saw the pattern where files disappeared during times where I bulk copied many directories. Looking in forum and targeted web searches I found I was not the only one who noticed this and found most highlighted the bulk copies of directories although there was a variety of reasons suggested as to why.  Not checking the copy I had left myself open to both such problems,  The other likely cause was "data rot", from earlier backup sets that used DVD and CDs as the backup media. I also have been using old hard disk from computers that died from update in my air-gapped backups/archives, and t was possible that these might suffer from  a process known as magnetic decay or "bit rot", but I could not find any evidence of this even in disks tat had not been fred up in 3 years. Solving both these issues lead me to Teracopy because it does have the  option to verify files after copy to ensure they are identical.. It is nice and simple and works,

It was complex figuring out how best to compare a range of "incomplete" backup set I already had and just find one good copy of each photo. The crux of the problem is; I had no simple way to know what was missing and/or what might be corrupted. I realized that my "air gapped" copies on old harddrives would be a nice starting point. It was

So in the end I returned to the 3-2-1 with 1-0 extension as the best method of backup and keeping an archive of my photos. I've modified the process a little, I don't keep my off-site backup in the cloud and I use Teracopy, XNview MP to look at photos as images and the MD5 checksums to ensure that my photo collection is free of errors.

DIY Calibration Chart

 A DIY Calibration Chart for Photographing Your Art (No Expensive Gear Needed)

Ever taken a photo of your artwork only to have it look completely different once it's online? You're not alone. Professional calibration tools from companies like X-Rite or Datacolor Spyder can help fix this, but they're expensive and actually only work on devices you control. The real problem is you have no control over how someone else's screen displays your image.

So, I created a simple chart to tackle the biggest issues that come up when photographing art for the web. It’s a low cost printable calibration chart you can use any time you photograph your art to be shared on-line.

Getting Started

Download the chart (as a .jpg file) and print it at 4 by 6" (10 by15cm) on photo paper. Choose matte or semigloss over glossy to avoid reflections. Any inkjet printer works, or take it to a photo print service like Ted’s, Officeworks or Harvey Norman.

You can use the chart before you shoot, or after, when editing. Fixing lighting issues before you shoot saves time and gives better results overall. Just place the chart on or next to your artwork, under the same lighting conditions.

Why Dynamic Range Matters

Dynamic range describes how much detail a camera captures from shadow to highlight. Your eyes handle huge contrasts easily, from sunlight to starlight, but cameras struggle. That's why bright skies blow out to white or shadows go pitch black in photos.

The chart has grayscale steps down each side, each representing a 2 percent shift in light intensity, plus small target circles for finer detail. The more steps you can distinguish in your photo, the better your lighting is working. If steps disappear into the background, especially on the darker side, add more light, but don't overdo it or you'll blow out the highlights.

With practice, you'll learn to spot overexposure (dark steps look too light) and underexposure (light steps look too dark) just by reviewing the upper or lower greyscale on the chart.

This trick works after the shoot too. Use your photo editing software's exposure, contrast, and shadow/highlight sliders can make changes on your photo containing the chart, then copy those settings to the rest of your batch. Thus you only need the chart in one reference photo per series where all the photos are taken umber the same conditions

Colour is trickier than tone. Our eyes adapt to lighting variations automatically; cameras don't. The chart includes seven reference dots, six colours plus black, representing the core building blocks of the sRGB colour space used in jpeg files. The table below show how each of the tiny coloured lights (red,green,blue) on your TV screen of computer monitor are lit up to get the given colour. Zero indicated the light is off and 255 that the tiny light is fully on. These lights then make up a single pixel within the photo image.

(255,0,0)         R            0 Red
(0,255,0)         G            Green
(0,0,255)         B             Blue
(0,255,255)     C            Cyan
(255,255,0)     Y             Yellow
(255,255,255) M            Magenta

After taking the photo, you could use a colour picker to compare your photo's dots against these values. This won't give you pixel perfect correction, but it'll reveal a colour cast. The main thing to watch for. Do the dots still look clean and bright, or dull and grey?

Dealing with A Colour Cast

Colour cast is sneaky because your brain corrects for it automatically without you noticing. Old incandescent bulbs throw a yellow-orange tint; overcast daylight can add a blue tint. Reflections from walls and furniture are often the biggest culprits, since your brain filters these out but your camera doesn't.

To check for colour cast, look at the white background behind the chart's colour temperature panel. If the white looks yellowish or bluish instead of neutral, you likely have a bias. The nine squares can help confirm this.The three colour squares of the same colour as the bias will appear brighter and/or stronger, while colour on the opposite side will appered duller or darker.

The fix is usually simple, find better light. If using artificial light, Daylight LED bulbs (around 5000k) are cheap and reliable. If using natural light, shoot in soft shade rather than direct sun, like near a window indoors, under a veranda, or in an open garage. A white board opposite your light source can bounce light back and soften harsh shadows.

When editing, use white balance, warm/cool sliders, HSL adjustments, or LUTs, always test these changes on your reference photo first before applying to the batch.

One Final Tip

Avoid the saturation slider orfilters when photographing art. They can make your image look garish, especially on screens where the viewer has already boosted their own contrast and saturation. If colors look flat, use the vibrance slider instead, and go easy with using it.

With this one printable chart, you can catch lighting and colour problems before they ruin your photos, and fix them quickly if they slip through. No expensive gear required.