Balloon

After two years of trying to get our balloon trip scheduled and have the weather actually be nice enough for a flight, it finally happened.

For a little while though it seemed like our Greyhound bus breaking down on the way to Ottawa might stop us, but the driver seemed to have some tricks that just kept the bus running.

Due to low winds, we ended up taking off outside of Ottawa in Kars.  The idea is that if you are going to take off in a balloon in the city, you want to get out of the city to land in a farmer's field.  So low wind speeds would make that very difficult.

And off we went.

 It really is the smoothest form of air travel I can imagine, except of course for the landing.  It was jostling and bouncy landing, ending up on our side, everybody giggling.

The real scary part was driving around in a fifteen person van, in the dark, in a farmer's field.  I think we only scraped one rock.

Vanishing Point Script

I've created a little George Script for Tvpaint Animation software that is used to quickly build perspective guides for drawing any type of perspective.

You use the script with any of the drawing tools with their drying options set to off.  I suggest the mechanical pencil with anti-aliasing on.

Once the script is active, just click were you want the vanishing point, and drag out a circle.

The radius of the circle defines the number of lines that will be drawn and how densely their centers will be packed together.

Here are a few images to show what is possible.

The script is available here https://www.dropbox.com/s/sb58uufrx25qeua/perspective2.grg?dl=0

And I recorded a short video of the script in action.

Kyler

Sketching in Europe

While we were in Europe I had a chance to sketch.  At first I didn't have any pencils.  And this lead to extremely sparse sketches.  The first two are in Bruges

 Here is the castle in Prague

Somewhere near the the Van Gogh museum

Here is a sketch of a Gustave Kimtl painting.  Some how me managed to see an enormous amount of his work while in Vienna.  It seemed his work was showing up everywhere.

A garden and palace in Vienna.  I finally got some pencils, which completely changes my style.

And finally we finish in a Venice.