Sunday Afternoon Haiku

Should have cleaned the house,
But since my feet were cold, I
took a nap instead.

Is He Any Better Than Layden…?

The Sports Guy had this to say about the most recent Knicks screwups moves:

KNICKS GET TWO MORE UNDERSIZED POWER FORWARDS
I have a couple of thoughts here …

1. When Isiah called the Spurs and said, “We’ll give you Nazr Mohammed, you give us Malik Rose and a crap No. 1, and we don’t care about the $20 million difference in salaries,” do you think Gregg Popovich said, “Lemme call you right back,” then pretended he was deliberating about it for 30 seconds before speed-dialing Isiah back? Was there laughter in the Spurs offices? High-fiving? Was Popovich the guy who called Isiah under the “Maybe Isiah will be dumb enough to give us a center” premise? How did this go down?

2. Am I crazy or do the Knicks have a 10-man rotation made up of 3 shooting guards, 5 power forwards and 2 small forwards?

3. Could Isiah make a trade that surprised you anymore at this point? For instance, if you read that he traded Stephon Marbury to the Lakers for Brian Grant, Tierre Brown, a lottery-protected first-rounder and the rights to Magic Johnson’s next comeback, would you even bat an eyelash? Me neither.

It’s so true it makes me want to cry. He may have been a great player, but Isiah has to be the worst executive ever. He makes being a Knicks fan even harder than it should be. How many more businesses/teams does he have to run into the ground before someone realizes that he has no talent as a manger/executive/coach/GM? Aside from the Marbury trade (only good in that you have to have someone exciting playing at NY to sell tickets), I can’t say that he has done any better than Layden. And the payroll keeps getting larger!

Flight v1.5

So what’s with this rare weekend post? Well, I am kinda stuck on how the wings are supposed to look (I should have thought this part out more thoroughly T_T), but I wanted to show how a new color blending style I’ve been using looks. Bunky suggested an orange dress, and this worked out very nicely I think. Looking back, this makes a lot of sense, since one of Sora’s outfits is that orangish hoodie with the blue shorts. Anyway, here is the latest version, and I’m still working on the background and wings.

Color Blending!

After much experimentation, I’ve come across a coloring style that I like (at last)! Check out the above post to see an example of it. The gist of it is that I lay down the base colors at full opacity and slightly smaller amounts of full opacity highlights and shadows first. Instead of sticking with three blending colors in my old cell-shading style, and instead of using more of an airbrushing of shadows and highlights like I tried in my more recent works, I’ve used about 4 shades to form a sort of gradient. After the base color and shadow are established, I pick an in between color at 1% opacity, and use the watercolor brush to blend the two together. I find this gives it a sort of painted look, and gives me stricter control of how the gradient expands. At the very end, I use an extreme dark/light color at the edges to give it some stronger contrast. I guess I should mention that I’ve never taken any art classes or anything, so if this sounds silly, it’s because I just made it up. If anyone has any suggestions or criticisms of this, let me know!