Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Got up this morning, read the majority of DC’s short-lived — cancelled after 19 issues — supernatural prison comic Hard Time and enjoyed it. It seems that everything I enjoy ends too soon <insert sad ironic laugh here>. Then Caitlin and I watched the Walking Dead from last night (and Comic Book Men). She thinks it’s too slow moving and isn’t as sold on it as I am (it’s not as if the comic isn’t a bit ponderous at times as well — but such is war, even zombie war: long periods of boredom punctuated with brief moments of extreme terror and danger), but for me it’s a close competitor for the top slots of my favorite TV of all time along with Breaking Bad. Speaking of “cancelled too soon”, I was also a fan of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the TV spinoff from the Terminator movies (whose latest installment was beyond terrible). My afternoon was supposed to be to go to the post-office to send the stack of ModCon books (see entry before this one) that sold over the weekend, only to discover that because it’s a holiday here (“Family Day”) I can’t go to the post office, let alone buy envelopes at the stationary store, also closed. So for those of you expecting books, they’ll ship tomorrow.

I did however do one productive thing, and that’s adding some transparent layers on my dream painting, selectively highlighting and shading it to give it a bit more depth. The colors were totally flat before that — although now that I’ve added flourescents, it’s difficult to photograph even in perfect light (I took it outside) because it’s too bright. Anyway, here’s an animation of the changes I made and you can click on it to view the current version in high quality (the image shown inline suffers a lot because of the animation compression, but it gets the changes across nicely).

Be warned that the click-through is a one meg image because it seems JPGs fall short in the color scheme I used and I had to set the quality setting very high to keep it from being blocky.

Other than making a frame for it (which I guess I’m not doing today either since the lumber store is also closed it seems) I think I’ll freeze it where it’s at because I’m not in love with this enough to beat it into any semblance of perfection. I got a request to make a zombie bracelet charm in silver, so I may work on that. I’m struggling with getting up to speed with silverwork, although I did make Caitlin a nice charm/pendant of a little fellow holding a heart for Valentine’s day that I think turned out nicely. Which reminds me, she just posted a picture of the beautiful painting that Nefarious painted her for Christmas. Oh, and I’ve also been converting Ryan’s blog (which I still have a link to, I know, but has been down since October) to a book for him as well, so my blog-to-book software is getting more mature as time goes by. It will never be a release-candidate but I will probably post the source code and some resultant XML, HTML/CSS, and PDF files since I can see them being useful to others…