Why is it that I always write articles when I’ve forgotten half of every important events and is on the verge of forgetting the rest?

First things first, I’d like to dearly thank miss Maja for creating this fantastic piece of art, It’s so awesome!!! -  it’s a painting of an astronomically important person, a future leader of nations, a paragon of justice, namely… Me!!

Maja and I hooked up through school, she let me join her rockband, and just like that we suddenly knew eachother.
Truly there are still moments when I am awestruck by her personality, she’s probably the kindest sweetest girl I’ve ever met. So keep it up Maja! Never stop waving your drumsticks and flicking your brushes! Love you sis!

The bad news is that my main winxp harddrive crashed on the 9th May, and ever since I’ve been stuck with ubuntu in search for a new harddrive.
But the thing is, I’m not really sure I want to switch back to XP. I mean ubuntu is truly the best OS I’ve ever used, In an odd way I learned how a glove really fits!

The only thing I really do miss is Corel’s Painter – having scaled the walls for a few days I woke up one morning and decided that titan does not bend!
So I enforced my way into the Ubuntu community in search for a replacement tool!

After figuring out how to rebind my wacom pen buttons I fired up gimp.
I lifted an eyebrow and thought “This is never going to work”, steeling myself; I let the pen touch the surface…

Photoshop! Damn It feels like photoshop! And it really did. The brushes use mostly the same algorithms for alpha calculation. But the most impressive part was that Gimp featured a much better colorpicker than photoshop does.

So there i was sketching away intending to grasp the photoshop painting techniques once and for all. My first attempt was so so.. The goliath looked dull, the color contrast was out of tune.
I woke up the next day and drew a girl in a bathtub, experimenting with natively imported photoshop brushes.
Still feeling rusty.

In the afternoon I painted a third picture this time with color and I spent so many hours on it that i felt sick. Having uploaded it to my sketches it was again deleted when I woke up the day after that realizing what a horrible painting I had achieved.

It took me quite alot positive reinforcement to fire up another painting. But this time I participated in Conceptart.org’s Character of the Week activity.

Now that was fun! I got lots of nice comments and educational tips. But in the end i blundered and did’t make it to the final voting poll. Having slaved to complete it for a week I was left with nothing but a sense of Irony..