Agh, I’ve spent hours on the hair last night. I can’t get the shading to reflect the direction of light, granted what I’ve done so far is incomplete. It might look a bit better once highlights are added…I can only hope. Anyone with advice, I would be happy to hear it lol!

Found the source of a very loud bang that we heard the other night - popping capacitors. We needed to borrow a SATA cable from the PC and when I booted up the PC it was throwing BIOS errors. Upon checking the hardware I found these on the video card *sobs*. Second video card that my PC has fried. Thankfully, I’ve managed to get the PC up and running with no video card installed as it’s my file server.

I have started the colouring process in Photoshop for this. I have since read some really good tutorials on different ways to colour manga though so I might redo this. Not sure yet.

Another work in progress, I’ve spent a few hours on this tonight. A lot more to go with the shading and detail, I want to add a cyborg type shoulder on her left, not sure if I’ll be able to pull it off but I’ll give it a go. Still learning a lot about Photoshop hence why my images are still at the n00b level.

Line art done in Manga Studio. I also need to work out how to smooth the lines further, they’re a bit rough in some areas. If anyone has any suggestions on how to do this in Photoshop, please let me know!

So I had the job of trying to install XP back on my EEE PC as I was having issues with Windows 7 that I didn’t feel like dealing with - performance isn’t the best so decided to go back to XP anyway.

After hooking up my IDE DVD drive to my IDE/SATA to USB adapter and firing up my old trusty XP Pro CD I received a BSOD while it was loading the files %$#@!#!. Thinking maybe a hard drive issue, I pulled that out and ran chkdsk…nope, everything ok there. Tried running the install again, still no go. Starting to freak out now because I have no other method of installing this quickly as the EEE PC does not have a built in optical drive and I am limited on the PC hardware lying around as I’ve converted to Mac. I tried a number of other Windows install CD’s to no avail, they either wouldn’t boot or BSOD.

Getting annoyed I decided I might as well try a USB install from a thumb drive. Dug out my 8GB Cruzer and formatted that and came across a quick setup solution here: EEEGuides.com: Install Windows XP on the Asus EEE PC. However! It appeared that this tool didn’t like my 8GB drive, whether it was due to size or the software that’s loaded on it, no idea. So hunted for the 2GB Sony thumb drive and used that. Frigging lifesaver! It was quick to run through so I didn’t have to muck around with PE disks/BartPE or creating any scripts. The tricky bit was getting an image of my XP CD as my Windows desktop had no optical drive and I didn’t have any apps on my Mac to convert it to an ISO. The optical drive I had appeared to be faulty so couldn’t use that. Soooo….the only workable drive was in my iMac but the OS wouldn’t allow me to unmount the drive to create an ISO so screw that, it was after midnight and I wasn’t going to Google why my Mac was misbehaving. Went ahead and fired up VMWare on my Mac which I have a VM of XP and I can access the CD drive from there. Installed a simple and light tool, Magicdisc to create an ISO image. Transferred that across to my desktop as the VM wouldn’t detect the thumb drive so I couldn’t do the setup there.

Ran all the required commands, mounted my ISO image to retrieve the Win XP setup files and voila! One Win XP setup via my USB thumb drive.

A lot of mucking around for something that should take 40 minutes and mostly unattended.

I have almost completed the lineart for this drawing. Need to rub out a few lines and correct a few others then I’ll move on to colouring this in Photoshop CS to complete my second image using my graphic tablet and Mac.

I’m working on another lineart image which I will colour once completed. Image is of Alto from Macross Frontier.

Finally finished this fan art drawing of Matsumoto from Bleach. My first full attempt at lineart in Manga Studio and colouring done in Photoshop CS4. I’m such a noob at this, I’ve spent several hours completing this. Proportions aren’t correct and the lineart is a little tacky but I’m happy for my first completed attempt.

I have so many work in progress drawings, need to finish them off. I have finally completed the only horse drawing I was working on. Muscle tone and the eye isn’t quite right, the shading probably needs to blend a little more too but I’m still happy with it. Feel free to comment.

On So You Think You Can Dance, Tyce choreographed a beautiful dance portraying someone battling breast cancer. It touched many members of the audience and moved the judging panel to tears. Melissa and Ade did a wonderful job with the piece and I don’t think it could have been danced better by anyone else. Nigel went as far to say that he would be surprised if this didn’t get an Emmy nomination next year.

…wow…for anyone who loves dance and/or has been touched by cancer in some way, this is quite emotional.