Isolationism

I’ve been searching around today (in vain so far) for an open-source, command-line tool that allows for the conversion of an SVG-formatted file to PDF—I know of ImageMagick which would be perfect if it weren’t for the fact that it rasterises the damn SVG before converting to a PDF (which defeats the purpose of creating a PDF at all in my opinion).

In my travels, however, I stumbled across Xara Corporation’s press release page (looking at something to do with Über-Converter, which would probably do the trick if I were willing to spend 12 hours getting all the Perl dependencies installed required to get the damn thing running), when I stumbled across the latest entry which was amazingly dated today (how lucky is that?):

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I’m not quite back on my feet after a solid 11-12 hours of driving in the space of 30 hours over the weekend to visit Midland (splitting headache today since I woke up), but I felt well enough to start this last night and finish today as I don’t feel well enough to concentrate on much. This drawing is also of Bex, my wife and best friend, done in pastel to complement an earlier piece I drew years ago. Click the image for a larger version.

Well, what did you expect? I’ve never been one for much besides figure drawing; the human form is immensely challenging and what I enjoy drawing most.

In honour of my very good friend Marc who is abroad in Taipei, I present this portrait to let him know he’s still very much in our thoughts and hearts. Though it may still be another year before we see him again on this side of the Pacific, I haven’t forgotten what a true, loyal friend he’s been to me and my family. Cheers, mang.

Every once in a while you run into a piece of really nice software that you have to sing form the hilltops about. Everyone who’s even casually glanced at my blog knows by now that I feel that way about Boodler, although I know my audience’s interest in the same is considerably less than my own.

I’m writing today to talk to about another piece of software that is right up my alley that you probably don’t care about: It’s called ArtRage and is made by the folks at Ambient Design who appear to write software geared toward designers and artists.

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Well, it’s late and I’ve already been politely reminded to head to bed, so I’m not going to stay up any longer to talk at you about how I drew this except to say that it’s (obviously) a digital drawing and I’ll write another post about the software and process tomorrow.

This is a portrait of my beautiful wife, Bex, using photo reference, by me using mixed media. You can click the image for a slightly larger version.