swap to chronological order of most recently modified
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new watercolour palette
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posted to: arttagged: art supplies, art toolkit, colours, folio palette, palette, plein air, structure, watercolourTreated my birthday self to an Art Toolkit Folio Palette! It’s both big and small, with lots of mixing space, even though it packs up very slim and weighs very little; and it magnets to itself and to whatever I want to stick it to for painting. While the -14C snowy weather here in Southern Ontario is not going to have me doing much plein air this month, I think my future self will really enjoy taking this to the beach, the park, etc!
(I also picked up an extra mixing pan to swap out for two of the larger square pans; I already appreciate the extra space, as I am a messy, chaotic mixer.)
In good timing, I also finished swatching all my watercolours onto cards, so I used them to assemble myself a palette of tube paints to fill this with:
I went heavy on the granulating paints; if this is a plein air landscape and urban sketching palette, then it doesn’t need as much texture control as one I might take figure drawing. I got to include a few of my newer tubes, too, to really test run them in a more focused way:
- Lemon Yellow Deep (W&N)
- Perylene Scarlet (DS)
- Terre Verte (DS) (I picked this up because the Winsor & Newton terre verte I own is probably the palest, weakest paint I own and yet I adore the colour, so i was hoping for just a more powerful version thereof; sadly the Daniel Smith one is a totally different colour and pigment composition, but turns out I also love IT, so~)
- Olive Green (SH PWC)
- Mars Black (W&N)
The yellow, scarlet and black listed are all notably granulating versions of those colours, so I am excited to see what kind of unhinged texture I can lay out on the page with this palette!
I’ve started doing some sketchbook studies to test drive it and while I think I might have made a mistake omitting my perylene green, maybe that kind of challenge is good for me!
I will say, the mixing area on this palette is velvety and perfect. I have never had a palette be such a joy to mix on out of the box – the paint spreads usefully on it in a way I have enormous trouble conditioning my enameled metal or plastic palettes into achieving literally ever! It’s raised the bar for me and whoops, now I have higher standards.
What do you think of these colours? Do you have a beloved palette you have conditioned into perfection? Are you also dreaming of sitting under a tree and painting in a few months?
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Astronomics! It’s out! You can play it! I’ve spoken a bit about this previously but this is my first published Art Direction credit and you can bet it means a lot to me! You should go look at the steam page and see how hecking charming this game turned out:
Also, you can take a look at the slick announcement trailer they made:
Important note: Hube & the team at Numizmatic have released the game as an early access game on steam, but don’t let that fool you – this is already a big game, with gameplay from start to finish available and an incredible number of possible asteroids to encounter, thanks to the wonderful procedural asteroid design! They’ve published a roadmap for the next updates and more info on how they’re approaching early access on the game’s website.
And in wonderful news, people are really enjoying it! There are MULTIPLE enthusiastic review videos, and folks on steam are really singing its praises!
I definitely want to talk more about the experience of designing this game right at the start of its life, but I’ll save that for a later blog post. Meanwhile, let me leave you with the three main characters, to whom I am disproportionately attached:
look at him! look at this little guy!
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Gansai tambi paints and neocolor iis; a very fun combo! I am often sad about the difficulty of making watercolours create rich even dark washes, but the gansai tambi paints excel at it. The only tragedy is how glossy they come out if you go thick with them.
Neocolors lay down beautifully on them though, glossy or not, and as a test case I think this is a great proof of concept!
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Drawn without water, on a 6 x 9″ grey blue cardstock, I think Strathmore brand. Drawn from life, from a lovely birthday bouquet.
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6 x 6″, sennelier oil pastels on unprimed wood.
My partner gave me the full set of sennelier oil pastels for my birthday last week and it’s been excruciatingly hard not to abandon all my other commitments and responsibilities and just play with them incessantly because they are an incredibly enticing and beautiful medium that really doesn’t feel like anything else I’ve ever used!
They are buttery soft, and instead of the consistent opacity of other brands, they actually have a range from opaque to fully transparent stocks, based on the pigments in them. What this means is that they work much more like my watercolours, and allow me to transfer over my payment and mixing knowledge from watercolours to these oil pastels! This also means that they can produce super vibrant mixes, which you can see at work in the crystals in this piece especially, but which really helped me being everything here to life.
Finally, they are so soft that even the gentlest touch with a fingertip or blending stump blurs and spreads the pastel around, making them a constant temptation to soften everything. In this piece i tried to balance my hard and soft edges, and i think the tree leaves are a great success in doing that in an appealing way. I’m very excited to try applying some of my Russian academic oil painting principles to solve oil pastels paintings in future; since i stopped using oil paints and solvents, i really haven’t had a medium available to me that can actually achieve all the fat over lean, hard and soft edges, glazing, and value grouping techniques I was taught.ย suffice to say I am pumped on this!
have you played with these before? do you have any advice, or questions? and what do you think of this somewhat amped up painterly approach?
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Canadian here, and I can confirm that, while admittedly I have never seen a product list itself as a pencil crayon in Canada, we all agree that’s what coloured pencils are referred to as in conversation.
Now, certainly more research could be worth doing but, I have a theory… see, our packaging is mandated bilingual, and usually english first:
See how it reads as one long title?
Well, now, imagine kids throw that around for a bit till the verbal greebling is worn off:
Dunno what the official history is to this, linguistically, but this has been my working theory for some time.
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Beautiful abstract video I found while researching music videos and synaesthesia
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posted to: reccommendationsThis was a bit of a journey! First it started with me looking up Kid Koala‘s music videos, and being very charmed bythe tactile abstraction and simplicity of this one:
Which led me to look up the animation studio he had worked with, See Creature, and start poking around their portfolio of beautiful things:
…wherein I discovered this gorgeous abstract video, “Reflection”:
…and of course I HAD to watch that! and I loved it so very much!
Here’s the single window version:
And here’s the triptych, which contains its own amazing decisions regarding integrating three panes. Wish I could have seen this in person!
I love music videos, music animation, and especially abstract music videos! In history of animation in undergrad I remember learning about Oskar Fischinger’s interwar-period abstract animations, and how they led into Fantasia’s Bach sequence. mercifully there’s a beautiful scan of his Optical Poem on youtube these days!
Looks like Fishinger’s work is being archived at the Center for Visual Music in LA, another rabbit hole I absoLUTEly will be going down in future:
Center for Visual MusicWhile I know synaesthesia has a specific clinical meaning, it’s been a term I’ve really found useful to apply to multimedia realtime art – video, dance, games, theatre – to describe the particular effect of temporal unity in visual and auditory work. It’s not the only measure of combing sound and vision! But it feels to me to be similar to visual compositon and musical rhythm or mode – it’s an overall aspect that can build all sorts of emotional responses without necessarily dictating content whatsoever. I love to see it on display for its own sake, the same way I love to see a painting distilling its compositional choices down to one big bold simple statement.
Anyways, thought these were all lovely enough to share!
3 responses to “Beautiful abstract video I found while researching music videos and synaesthesia”
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Great shares. And yeah, Oskar Fischinger is such a fascinating artist (I studied him too while at university). He was a populist at his core and really attempted to get at something universal with his work by setting abstract shapes and colours to music, something that anyone from any culture or language could appreciate. Since then itโs changed the way I think about abstract art, generally. His paintings are great too.
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Yeah Fischinger and Kandinsky’s elaborate abstract motivations really helped me get excited about abstract art as well! Undermines the kind of reactionist stance that it’s about obscuring communication.
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Yeah, absolutely!
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I want to talk a bit about this tool!
It’s put out by Wacom, who make those screen tablets and drawing tablets that you’ve probably seen artists reference online. Wacom are an old, maybe the oldest brand in that space, and while I wouldn’t describe them as hugely experimental, they do have the decades of experience to know what tools are actually useful for artists. Also, because they make a peripheral, they have to invest in interoperability, so there’s been a large ecosystem of people making accessories to use alongside your wacom tablet or cintiq for a long time now — which I think if they’re open to it, can reveal to a company what their tool is actually missing.
So I would argue that Wacom has everything it needs to make actually useful tools and actually useful peripheral accessories to those tools, and when I finally got my hands on one of these remotes, I feel pretty confident in saying that they’ve succeeded.
What It Is:
The Wacom Express key remote is a tool designed to be used one-handed, that can be programmed to various key presses or macros on your computer. You can program universal settings, or software specific settings, and you can get extremely granular.
There are 12 buttons in the lower chunk of the remote which each have decently touch-identifiable surface decorations and shapes; and then a scroll wheel style circle with a button inside it, surrounded by four more buttons at the top.
It charges its battery via a microUSB port, and has a toggle on the bottom to wake it up before using it. The battery lasts a decent length of time, and it is still usable when plugged in, which is helpful!
How It Works:
The EK remote’s key assignments are managed by the driver’s properties app, just like wacom’s other tools; you select your device in the top row, and then whether these are universal settings (All Other) or software specific settings in the second row. You can easily add any open software to the list by clicking on those “…” buttons on the side.
Then the main screen area of the properties panel underneath lets you select between the touch ring, expresskeys, and on-screen shortcuts; and within those are more subscreens enabling you to adjust every single aspect of this remote and how it works.
The center column of buttons comes preassigned to modifier keys – shift alt control and space. Outer buttons on the remote come assigned to other useful keyboard shortcuts such as undo, redo, save, etc, as well as to bring up submenus they call On-Screen Shortcuts, or a quick reference image of the button assignments so you can refer back without fully reopening the properties panel – especially useful as you start building out software-specific button assignment profiles and need help remembering where you put the Undo button when in, say, Clip Studio Paint.
The button at the center of the scroll wheel works to change between three wheel functions, and you know which one you’re on because these are assigned and visible on the remote as little white lights above the wheel separating the buttons that wrap the wheel.
The scroll wheel can be assigned a wide array of different functions, some of them quite sophisticated, others as simple as simply giving each wheel direction a key press assignment and telling it how many key presses to do per stretch of movement as you slide your thumb around the wheel.
One of the things you can assign to a button is one of the built in On-screen Shortcut panels, which are onscreen popups that you can then assign further macros, keystrokes or such to buttons within.
The variety of things you can assign to buttons (physical or in On-screen Shortcut panels) is HUGE – from basic keystrokes to modifier keys to complex types of mouse clicks to contextual things like back and forward navigation or alt+tabbing around your various open applications. It can even move windows around on your desktop.
Why I Like It:
If you’re an artist who works digitally, I probably don’t need to explain any further how useful this thing can be. When I’ve got my tablet pen in one hand, I’m able to program this to contain almost all of the keyboard shortcuts I’ve spent time learning to do with my other hand.
Additionally, the ability to program complex macros and also contextual submenus into this thing is super powerful for digital painting etc. For example:
- I keep copy and paste as buttons on this remote so that it’s easy for me to duplicate pieces of layers as I need to while painting.
- The modifier keys are extremely useful for navigating canvases using spacebar, adding or removing selections using shift control and alt, or accessing other modified tool settings.
- The scroll wheel can be used to zoom in and out, to adjust the rotation of a canvas, to increase or decrease brush size, or anything else that you might achieve in painting software with multiple taps of the same button.
- For example, in clip studio paint, you might access a whole range of different tools with the keyboard shortcut B, so to get to the tool you want, you just keep tapping B until you get there. And it occurred to me this morning that I might assign that to the scroll wheel on the slowest setting and stop having to move my hand to my keyboard to tap B over and over again whenever I’m looking for a specific brush.
- Undo and redo speak for themselves, and also an easy button tap for saving your work.
But I wanted to talk a bit here about how I’ve been using the express key remote in non-drawing software:
I’ve been using it in game engine work, and in data entry work, and it’s really been a big help!
As mentioned elsewhere here on my site, I’ve been navigating a very long recovery after a nerve graft that affected my dominant hand. I’ve moved most of my mousing and typing work to my left hand, and been trying to find ways to help my right hand contribute without the usual amount of dexterity. The express key remote has been a really incredibly useful tool for a lot of complex, keyboard heavy tasks that aren’t simply prose writing.
As an aside, for longer form writing (eg. this blog post), I do try and dictate as much as possible and then manually edit for clarity. It’s not perfect, and sometimes the fancier tools have really let me down, but it’s for sure the best way to get thoughts out of my head these days.
But for work that isn’t simply an infinite flow of text, but instead has me navigating, clicking around, typing in small snippets of text, copying and pasting things, tabbing through options, etc, the express key remote has been an absolute game changer.
In game engine work, there are huge hierarchical trees to navigate with shortcuts for opening and closing subtrees, enabling and disabling objects, and moving between elements to modify or adjust things.
Building out scriptable objects often meant copy and pasting values across a huge range of small fields, as well as alt tabbing between the engine itself and my documentation.
Right now I do all my mousing with my left hand, so moving from my mouse to my keyboard and back again to press copy and paste shortcuts (contextual right click menus being a little sketchy in some of the tools I use *cough* miro *cough*) has been a major repetitive strain on my arm, among other things.
Enter the express key remote: suddenly my otherwise not helpful dominant hand is able to hold this thing and take care of an enormous amount of keyboard shortcuts. Even system shortcuts like alt+tab can be programmed onto a button, and the ability to program software specific key assignments means whatever I’m doing in engine, I can make the EK remote work the absolute best just for that, without affecting my larger system shortcuts or the EK remote shortcuts I end up setting up in my documentation. And in addition to adding navigation shortcuts, and copy and paste shortcuts, the modifier keys also remain extremely useful.
Some Complaints:
There are a couple of frustrations that I have with the remote, I won’t lie.
It’s not the most ergonomic thing to hold in your hand. Clearly their design priorities were to create something that could sit flat, almost flush on a cintiq screen, so that this remote works as a substitute for where there used to be built-in buttons on previous models. This makes it a slippery, somewhat awkward thing to try and hold in a hand with lower dexterity. However, it does magnet onto a cintiq screen quite firmly, so if you do have a cintiq, you’re able to operate it with your hand gripping the full side of the screen as well, and sometimes that can be more ergonomic.
Another frustration is that it is somewhat challenging to press multiple keys at once, but there could be a lot of potential power in combining those modifier keys with other programmed shortcuts! For example doing a ctrl+v shortcut to paste something, and wanting to add in a shift modifier key to paste without formatting. It’s not impossible to do by any stretch, and I’ve done a fair amount of it now, but you get the feeling that they did not plan for that use case.
Finally, while I certainly do not have huge hands, my hands are not particularly small either, and it’s still noticeably a reach for me to operate the bottom buttons on the remote and the top buttons on the remote without adjusting its position in my hand.
I’m not sure how many people who use these have that problem, but I know it’s not just a consequence of my low dexterity hand, as when I am drawing I draw with my pen my right hand and the EK remote in my fully capable left, and I still have the same reach problem. However, this has simply led me to put my least frequently used shortcuts on the top buttons, and frankly that’s worked out fine. Benefit of this level of customization, I guess!
In Summary:
If you do a fair amount of technical work that has you moving between mouse and keyboard, and repeating particular shortcuts, key presses or macros a lot, I would bet you could find some use in this tool, with or without a drawing tablet or a digital art practice to support it.
In addition, it’s always good to mix up your tools to reduce repetitive strain on your arms, so if this seems like a decently ergonomic solution for you, it might help extend the lifetime of your wrist tendons a little by giving them some variety. (If your tendons are particularly cranky, of course, talk with an expert about your particular situation.)
They do sell them solo, though like everything Wacom makes they’re not cheap, but they do tend to last a long time! And that means there’s a pretty good second hand market out there.
I’d also bet that there are people who got these with their cintiqs who extremely do not ever use them at all, simply because artists already have solutions they like. If you know someone who might have one they’re not using, I bet they would let you try it and see what you think.
For me, it’s a favourite tool and one I am regularly tweaking, adding new shortcuts too, and finding new uses for.
Got one yourself that you’ve gotten some use out of? I’d love to know what it’s done for you/how you’ve hacked or tweaked or otherwise improved yours! Hop in the comments if you like!
2 responses to “Recommended: the Wacom ExpressKey Remote”
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oh my god I want one. I have so many different computer based hobbies, and so many RSI problems QQ
I already use my old school wacom tablet for weird stuff like audio/video editing, which I couldn’t do with just a mouse without hurting real fast. (besides actually using it for visual art)
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yesss I also use my tablet pen for tasks that would mess up my wrists otherwise! if you can get your hands on a remote I def think it’d be worth trying.
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Shoutout to Jurie and Andy for sharing this gem with me; deeply british, dry, spooky, sweet, and shows you the tip of the iceberg of a larger occult understanding that is revealed further through rewatchings and the subsequent mulling over you might do at the pub after with a friend.
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Get scrungled, as they say.
Watercolour and carbon ink.
I decided go back in and see if I can’t push the clarity on this further with gouache and I think it really helped!
My photodocumentation is such shit in the winter with no natural light available, sorry. Maybe I’ll scan some sketchbook pages this year! But don’t count on it.
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