What sort of mood does this evoke in your mind? What sort of story should I write about it?
(A note on creation: This was drawn with MS Paint first, then put through Invert Colors and Focal Zoom in Picasa)
Tag Archives: MS Paint
Life Under the Generator – Paint Doodles
The first thing I hear in the morning is the pervading hum of the massive ether generator above my house. I go up onto the roof and gaze up into the mass of wires, like the mad weaving of some colossal steel spider. The collector ring, the focal nodes, the arc needles: each piece fits together perfectly. There are a million parts going in all directions, each one exactly where it needs to be.
The sun sets and the sky darkens. Above me, the wires start to reveal their faint glow, which was overwhelmed in the light of the sun. There are twinkles and flashes of every color imaginable. I lie back and stare up at the man-made galaxy above with me with its celestial host of linear stars.
Paint Doodles – Red Line Hiding
Can you see the red path?
It’s hiding in plain sight
It takes unexpected twists and turns and gets lost in the surrounding noise
But it stays unbroken
(Try squinting; it helps)
Paint Doodles – Multiple Worlds
multiple universes, multiple worlds
so similar, so close
but never touching
Here’s what I draw when I’m not feeling inspired to write.
Doodles in MS Paint
So, what are your nerdy hobbies? One of mine is making designs with a pencil and straight-edge. I used to do it all the time in high school when I was bored. Another hobby of mine is using MS Paint. I admit that it’s no Photoshop (which I love, but can’t afford at the moment) and the lack of layers can be really crippling sometimes, but you can do a lot more with it than some people think. My friend Sharmishtha Basu is a good example of a great MS Paint artist. Anyway, today I decided to play around with designs in MS Paint. All of it is done by hand, just using the tools in the program.
Step 1
In this first step, I just measured regular distances and connected the lines, just as you’d do with a pencil and ruler.
Step 2
For this step, I just colored in the blocks. MS Paint doesn’t have a gradient tool, but you can adjust the color manually, so I colored one part and then successively made the color darker or lighter.
Step 3
The middle seemed a bit empty, so I used a similar technique to put a diamond in the middle. It’s a lot of fun, if you have the patience for it.
Visual Fiction – Mountain Valley Map
What do you see when you look at the picture below? My wife said it looked like an amoeba. What it is, is a topographical map I drew of part of a world I’m creating. Here’s what I see:
- It’s a valley with steep mountains around it.
- This map was originally 16 pixels to a mile, so it’s about 35 miles across.
- Each elevation line is 1000′, so the highest peaks are about 16,000 feet off the valley floor.
- The darker areas are the mountains. The green areas in the middle are depressions in the valley floor.
- There are 137 mountain peaks, ranging from 3250′ to 16,340′ tall.
- The circular area on the right is a deep lake with high mountains all around it. There is a waterfall falling off the northern face.
This is why I love drawing topographical maps. I can look at them and see the places in my head. To some people, it may just be a bunch of lines, but for me, it’s truly inspiring.
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