Cardinal4

I thought the changes were a lot. Now it's like ... the site is completely different!

It's not that bad for me because I only use so little functions on the site, so I don't have much familiarity with anything apart from submitting deviations. And that hasn't changed much. I do like how the site looks so new and modern, but yea I do worry about whether a lot of this information on the front page is relevant or not, and whether people can find what they need. Because that's apparently what most modern UIs do, provide big wide areas of articles and media but fail to present data in way that facilitates fast retrieval.

And the logo, it looks cool and flat. I like it. It feels deliberate, crafted, and looks like it belongs in something like architecture or engineering. And also green.

DeviantART changed a lot recently. I think I pretty much lost track of what new features there are now, and how to use it. I am convinced it's not an issue of age, it must actually be that older folks like me have less time to fiddle with the site settings to see what everything does. *nods*  

I'm a fan of mechanical pencils [henceforth called pencils, for simplicity]. They can be used for school work and art work, so you could always doodle in school if you ever so feel like it. They don't need sharpening, so you don't need to have a pencil sharpener; you also don't have to deal with graphite powder smudging or getting a blunt edge 99% of the time. (Very important to me since I write on my notes in super small fonts).

Being such an integral part of the drawing process, I always tried to find more ways to get a better pencil. That's how I have 2 drafting pencils, each loaded with 0.5mm 2B and 4B lead. The former I use for school stuff; the latter is softer and more fun to sketch with, but it smudges my lecture pad when I write on the other side, eg. like writing on carbon paper. I would have gotten a better drafting pencil, encased in aluminium with ridged grips, and unbalanced heavy on the front side. Unfortunately its price tag is double-digits , so I gave it a miss. Otherwise it would have been a very solid-feel of a pencil.

Today I realised there's yet another element of variation for these pencils: I could change the color! There's this Pilot Color Eno mechanical pencil lead that you'll occasionally see stocked around bookshops. Apparently you can use it to sketch something in a different color from your inking color, so that during scanning, Photoshop can easily filter out your sketching color.

The best color apparently is blue. davesmechanicalpencils.blogspo… You can see over here that the aforementioned Color Eno lead (Soft Blue) is completely invisible when scanned in! Wow! Can you imagine how convenient that is, easily saving hours that I usually spend cleaning up lineart!

The bad parts are that, color lead are more prone to breakage, and due to their softness, they use up faster. That's pretty expensive for lead that basically costs the same as standard black lead, but instead of 40 pcs you only have 10pcs. >.< They also only come in 0.7mm, so that means fatter lines.

More importantly, Color Eno leads are prone to fading under UV light. davesmechanicalpencils.blogspo… They can fade completely under sunlight after a week. For some it's a deal-breaker. I thought that was pretty cool, and not really detrimental for me. After all, I would WANT those lines to disappear anyway. The only thing I would mind is, if I accidentally overexposed my lead, and my whole package of lead all faded off . Apparently you can have too much of a good thing.

I wonder if the lead will really improve my workflow as much as I imagined. I hope I won't have the crazy tendency to try to re-ink digitally again, even with clean lineart. My workflow also needs some fine tuning too, since I now have a 4B lead and a pigment pen, and it seems I'll only need one for inking. Originally I use my 4B for sketching and pigment for inking, but with the blue lead, i don't need either of them for sketching anymore.

After my exams these 2 weeks, I should have 3 whole months to do on art, yay! Prepare to expect weekly submissions very soon.


helpplz.info/index.php?&lang=e… For all the plz icons you'll ever need.

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