James's Weblog

I quit my job at Google a year ago because I was too stressed from trying to get work done with little kids at home.

During my past year of semi-retirement, I finally started playing around with Inkscape more seriously. A couple of pieces:

	Autotraced from scans of some of my ink doodles, cleaned up, and colored. I made stickers of the green head when Sticker Mule had a promotion selling 10 stickers for $1, but I have no idea what to do with them.
	Drawn on a Samsung S-Pen tablet with Concepts and colored in Inkscape.

I also made SVG versions of a bunch of my ambigrams and added some simple animations.

More ink doodles from 2014 through 2018. These were done with a Pilot G-2 0.38mm gel pen. While I like how I can make tiny writing with Pilot Hi-Tec C pens, I find the G-2 0.38mm pens to be more practical: they create lines fine enough for my taste, but they’re not so fine that I have issues with the tips clogging. It also helps that they’re easier to find in typical office supply stores and are cheaper.

I do like using ink, but I’m even more conservative drawing in it (i.e., I draw even more disembodied heads than usual). (Maybe someday I’ll get a knack for inking over pencil.) Beyond the typically similar content, I noticed that I unintentionally used much of the same layout in these two sheets for the placement of dragon heads, orc heads, smoke, and background practice.

Various whiteboard doodles I made at VMware with dry-erase markers.

2005. One of my coworkers was working on a project named “EIT” that got killed when some deal fell apart, and he asked me to scrawl this on his whiteboard. I’m not really sure why I bothered to sign this.

2008. This started off with a magnetic stick figure holding some duck magnets, and my office-mate Christine and I gradually drew different things that he was rescuing them from. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but Christine attached wings to the back of the stick figure and crafted him a giant broadsword.

2009. When my office-mate Christine (Wu) left to attend graduate school at CMU.

2013. When my office-mate Christian left.

2013. When my coworker David left. Christian and David left on the same day (they both left to focus on their startup). I made Christian’s first, and I was too tired afterward to spend much time on David’s (sorry, David). I made a lame attempt at jazzing it up a bit by adding a second color.

The second half of my NaNoDrawMo 2012 doodles. This includes my first attempt at doing a realistic drawing in almost 9 years. I probably should just stick to lettering.

I started drawing again a few months ago, this time using ink and no pencil, which is mostly new and unusual for me. A significant motivating factor probably was my usual, futile desire to eventually become good enough to impress someone who likely would never care anyway.

Done with a Pilot G-2 0.5mm gel pen. (I hadn’t yet acquired the impressive Pilot Hi-Tec-C pen that I kept reading about from various Kickstarter projects.)

Doodles I drew on various Sony CLIÉ handhelds from 2001–2003. Like all other Palm OS devices, they used resistive touchscreens that lacked any kind of pressure-sensitivity, and the digitizers in the touchscreens were somewhat noisy, so hand-drawn lines ended up with a shaky appearance.

I made the first image with TealPaint (which at the time supported only the traditional Palm OS resolution of 160×160 and not the 320×320 resolution of the CLIÉ devices). I made the rest with MemoRu!.

• Troll (2001-05-31)
  
• Demon (unfinished) (2002-03-03)
  
• Heathcliff (2001-12-02)
  
• Dragon head (2001-12-04)
  
• Ant man (2001-12-02)
  
• Fat baby (2003-03-24)
  

More dragons, doodled between people’s presentations during a VMware R&D conference in December, 2007.

(I really need to start drawing other things. Or I at least need to stop drawing disembodied heads all the time.)

A wyvern I doodled in 2003.