Free Food (for Cowboys)

In Evolution news I’m
working on implementing the new item dialogs Anna designed for Evolution 1.5. It is fairly straight forward process, but I keep finding myself wishing that I could write it in mono. I’ve definitely been spoiled while working on F-Spot.

After the monkey drawing I wanted to spend more time working on coloring in the gimp and getting more complete scenes done. When I’m just randomly sketching I tend to focus on faces and characters more than backgrounds. This is pretty common, people and faces are more interesting to most of us than backgrounds and therefore more fun to draw, but is also leads to a lot of unfinished looking work. So last night as an exercise I tried to
spend some time doing a full scene. I started with a pencil sketch, then I did
a very quick and dirty inking job with pen on a piece of vellum over the sketch. I scanned the vellum, then did some cleaning and fixups.

Progression

The results are technically pretty poor but overall I’m fairly happy with the drawing. It also feels like I’m beginning to shake the rust off the my gimp work. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep some time set aside for drawing over the next few weeks.

I spent some time this weekend getting Drag and Drop (DnD) working in F-Spot. It isn’t finished but basic DnD now works in the icon list. This adds a surprising amount of functionality, for instance now you can drag Images to the gimp toolbar to edit them, drag them to gnome-terminal to get the filnames, or drag them to nautilus to burn a cd. Many of these task will have more direct support inside F-Spot eventually, but for now the DnD adds a lot.

While I was busy dragging images all around the desktop I dropped one onto the face icon in the Evolution contact editor. It appears the addressbook needs to be more careful about resizing images it receives. A 3.1MB jpeg brings evoluton to a grinding halt as
it gets passed back and forth to evolution-data-server. This is a pretty common situation with 1.5, lots of promising new features but most still need polish.

Taking a step back

My bithday came and went with no new insight or loss of life. One of the presents I received was a new USB Wacom tablet. The new one is small enough to carry around with my laptop which means I may actually find time to do some more computer related artwork.
The monkey above is the first work I’ve done in a while and I’m definitely feeling rusty. On a side note restarting the X server each time I plug in the tablet is a constant reminder of how far we still are from Utopia.