{"id":1185,"date":"2013-08-16T09:52:28","date_gmt":"2013-08-16T13:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2026-01-26T11:17:43","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T16:17:43","slug":"squirreled-again-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/squirreled-again-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Squirreled Again (and again, and again)!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"20130816-093920.jpg\"<\/a>
\nThe plan of this week was to check out how to make shrinks dinks from #6 plastic. The shrinking worked fine but the sharpie didn’t stay (possibly because I used Goo gone to get rid of a sticker) so more on that at a later date. Before I could test the procedure, I needed a design. Sigh. This is always the part where I stutter to a halt and nothing gets accomplished for several days. This is the point where my own inadequacies get to me. You see… I’m not an artist. No matter how many beautiful creations I turn out, if it has a pictorial element, I probably adapted it from someplace else. So this weeks creation, while it may not seem as impressive as designing a three dimensional figure from a drawing of a fish, for me, it is actually a much bigger accomplishment.<\/p>\n

\"Pictish<\/a>I started off with an idea. I wanted to do something with a squirrel to go with the blog. I have also been toying with the idea of doing squirrels in various historical knot work styles. That didn’t happen this time, but it was an influence. I’ve always been partial to Pictish animal carvings. I am giving you this image as a cultural reference. My inspiration actually came an image here:\u00a0\u00a0AvacadoArt on deviantART.<\/a> (A quick side note on the use of images in blogs etc. It is really easy to surf the web these days and lift pictures for our own use. I love Google image search, but it does make it very easy to forget that the images we find that way are frequently under copyright. If you are a blogger, I encourage you to include proper attribution in your posts.) Sorry, little rant there.<\/p>\n

I had my style, now I needed a pose.\u00a0 I wanted to go with a running squirrel, not a sitting one.\u00a0 Since the idea of the name for my blog is chasing squirrels, I figured it should be in motion.\u00a0 I found a motion study of a squirrel running and chose the pose from that.\u00a0 The stretched out squirrel showed a little more motion, but I thought that the one I used lent itself better to the style.\u00a0 Here is my first draft, done by… hand! This almost never happens as I am not very good with a pencil.<\/p>\n

\"20130817-080913.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You can see where I had already started to play with the knotwork in the tail.\u00a0 \"20130816-094007.jpg\"<\/a>It was reasonably simple.\u00a0 The chest was more difficult.\u00a0 I have taken classes on knotwork at Atlantia University with the SCA, but they were pretty basic and didn’t cover drawing on a curve.\u00a0 To help me out, I turned, as I do with most things drawing, to the interwebs and found a wonderful program for generating complex knotwork designs.\u00a0 Knotsbag <\/a>is sparsely documented but very powerful program.\u00a0 It is also freeware.\u00a0 For ~$20 you can upgrade to the full version which will allow you to export your knots to svg and illustrator format.\u00a0 I will be purchasing it soon.\u00a0 Here is the hand drawn version of the squirrel.\u00a0 But here is the problem with hand drawn.\u00a0 I can’t use it in a digital environment.\u00a0 So one more step to go.\u00a0 This time on my new iPad.\u00a0 The iDraw app (at ~$10, it’s expensive for an iPad program but way cheap for a vector program)\u00a0 for the iPad allows you to create vector drawings.\u00a0 I used the photo here and imported it into the background of the iDraw program.\u00a0\u00a0 I then traced it using a stylus.\u00a0 Hey presto!\u00a0 a vector drawing is created.\u00a0 It needed a little tuning up to create the image at the top of the page, but not much.\u00a0 The only think I haven’t been able to figure out with iDraw yet is how to color in closed areas.\u00a0 It may not be possible, but I have other programs that can do that.\u00a0 So shortly, Squirrel!\u00a0<\/em> will have a new logo.\u00a0 Just as soon as I can figure out how to make WordPress display it.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The plan of this week was to check out how to make shrinks dinks from #6 plastic. The shrinking worked fine but the sharpie didn’t stay (possibly because I used Goo gone to get rid of a sticker) so more on that at a later date. Before I could test the procedure, I needed a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":1182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2d","category-digital-graphics","category-uncategorized"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/20130816-093920.jpg?fit=854%2C353&ssl=1","author_info":{"display_name":"Julie Stubbs","author_link":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/author\/exhalia\/"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/20130816-093920.jpg?fit=854%2C353&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2gp05-j7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1185"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1517,"href":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions\/1517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaliastudios.com\/squirrel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}