Types of pencils used to draw a map

[CaptainJohnHawk]

Sorry to hear that, but I am glad you like the icon. It is the pirate flag of Monkey de Luffy! It is an anime called One Piece, that i have been a big fan of for awhile now. Glad to hear you finally got the computer back up and running. I have been there before, when I built computers for my old University. We would have to match certain specs, but still had some freedom of part buying. It led to a lot of "I want this processor, but it would only work with this board, with these drivers...etc." So it was always a long trial and error period, before we got something that worked.

[markem]

I've had this Dell laptop for about 10 years now. I have a newer one (quad core) my younger brother gave me when his company upgraded everything. The one I use is just a dual-core cpu but it is also a 17" laptop whereas the quad is only 15". I like the extra real estate. I'm hoping to finish a program and make a few million. Then I'll get one of those laptops that blow flames out the sides, 3D film on the screen, and 64GB of memory on the mother board. (And if that doesn't blow all of the money I might retire just to be able to work on my site instead of everyone else's stuff. :-) ) Such are the pipe dreams of people all over the world. :-)

Back to pencils though - how do you see what a 9H pencil even draws? I tried them and went "Did it even make a mark?" I felt that I might was well get a rock and use it on the paper. I went through a lot of different leads. The entire gamut actually which is why I wound up at 4B. I wanted to not have to change pencils just to draw a dark line. So my hand acts as the weight. Heavy-light-in between. It is just a matter of how much weight you put on the lead. Of course - the one big drawback is that too much weight and it snaps. What can I say?

Anyway - here is hoping no hacker decided to claim jump my computer. I had to leave it on while all of the scanners were going. At least I am plugged directly into the router so I am behind its firewall as well as Comodo's firewall. I'm hoping that's enough to keep the computer safe while I am gone through the day. I always turn off the internet on the laptop when I go to bed. Don't want any hacker trying to get on at night while I am asleep. 99% of all of the attacks I've encountered happen after nightfall. Usually starting around midnight until around 6:00am the next day.

[markem]

Bad news. I installed PDF Creator (a program from France) and it downloaded something called Web Companion. It is supposed to be from Ad-Aware. Anyway - it download Find Products which download about a 1,000 PUPs. Needless to say - I have had to reformat the hard drive again and I am in the process of downloading and installing all of the Windows XP updates again. Then I have to redo all of the restores. I guess I will leave PDF Creator off for the time being. Before installing any other programs I am going to install and run Avira, SuperAntiSpyware, Malwarebytes, and Comodo. I may try Comodo's AntiVirus software before installing Avira. Avira is finding things (like it found 7 Viruses that were downloaded and installed but Malwarebytes found 1,384 PUPs. Strangely SuperAntiSpyware did NOT find more than about 20 PUPs. But Malwarebytes continues to abort after finding everything. You have to run it twice to get it to remove them. *sigh* The trials and tribulations of using free and open software sometimes. What each of these free and open software people need are wealthy benefactors who set things up so they are always going to have money coming in. Then they wouldn't need to do the ad thing.

[CaptainJohnHawk]

Wow..this seems to be a very frustrating endeavor. Sorry you are having so many problems with this.
So the 9H is very light, but I typically sketch on handmade cotton paper, that shows just about every single mark you leave (accidentally or not).
As far as printer paper or a normal sketchbook would go, I have no idea how it would translate. Normally when I sketch on those mediums, I use a standard pencil.

[Gamerprinter]

While I find drawing with a pencil easy and fast, I absolutely hate to redraw pencil lines with ink - preferring to do the drawing as a single activity. I use a micropoint pen instead of a pencil for linework and skip the pencil stage altogether. Once complete, I digitally scan the drawn linework, import to my preferred vector application (Xara Designer Pro 9), apply a stain-glass transparency so that anything not black linework is fully transparent, then I create shapes, apply fractal mix color fills, bevels, shadowing and feathering placed beneath the linework for a digital/hand-drawn hybrid style map.

[markem]

CaptainJohnHawk: HANDMADE cotton paper???? That must be very expensive! I tried Vellum once. I loved the texture but it was a real pain in the rear to remove any mistakes. Since I make dozens of mistakes in drawing anything by hand if I tried to use what you use I'd probably wind up tearing it into little pieces or put holes in it trying to remove the mistakes. :-) I used to think a tablet (like an Android tablet and not the digitizing tablet) would help me out a lot but other than doing finger painting - you really can't use them too well to do what you want. (I hear the iPad is different but I can't afford to shell out that kind of money.) I was recalibrating my Tooya tablet (digitizing tablet) the other day. Wound up making a quick sketch which came out really nice. But then I forgot to back it up. Gone forever. :-(

One of the people I worked for at NASA tried a digitizing tablet. We had asked NASA to buy us a tablet for the Windows computers. Instead, they got us one for a Mac. Since the only Mac we still had at the time was an old Mac IIfx - it was a fairly useless thing to have. Anyway - this guy sat down at the Mac and tried the tablet. He'd never done anything graphically (drawing) before but he produced this absolutely wonderful ballerina. I told him he should save it and I'd upload it to the SGI systems for him but he deleted it instead. I was like "Why?" He just didn't like it. I told him it was something worthy of putting in a museum. (It really was that good.) He didn't think so. He never tried using the tablet again. I thought "What a waste of such inherent talent. To be able to just sit down and make something like that and then think it isn't worthy of keeping." Sad really.

Gamerprinter : Xara Designer Pro sounds really like a very nice piece of software. I looked at it but, as I've said before - I'm not all that well off finacially so I just use what I have (or what I can buy cheaply). What type of pencil lead do you use? Hard or soft?

[CaptainJohnHawk]

Sorry I haven't replied to this in a few days. It got lost in my history page haha.
It actually isn't that expensive. There is alot of good quality handmade paper companies that produce sheets for print making and intaglio work.
Some companies create entire sketchbooks with the paper. I have my BA in Graphic Arts, but the program requires you to have a well rounded understanding in all aspects of art. So unfortunately it gave me a very refined opinion on what "quality" art products really are. So yeah I do pay more for my materials than some would, but I just can't work with anything else.
However, there is a great company out of India, that makes Leather embroidered, handmade paper sketchbooks for like $80 or so. So it really is affordable

[markem]

Wow. Hand made paper sketchbooks. I'll have to Google that. :-)

Close to finishing. So far (now) over 1,500 PUPs and PURs found and removed. 9 viruses, and about 200 various spyware programs. I'm at work presently but when I get home I'm going to start HitmanPro which is the only program that actually can get rid of the PUPs and PURs. Malwarebytes removes the files but HitmanPro actually finds where the spawning program is located and removes it. Been a tough week. Install some software - run all of the anti-everything programs. Install some more stuff - run the anti-stuff again. So VERY slowly rebuilding the system. Finally put in FireFox and Thunderbird. MS Office and Visio is coming up. Finally got the Fujitsu Scansnap software re-installed. So now I can scan again. Soon now I will be able to upload some images.

[CaptainJohnHawk]

Yeah it is a great sketchbook. It hard to treat it like i do my other sketchbooks because it is so pretty looking. So I only want to sketch great things in it.

But I am glad you finally got everything back up for you. Hopefully it is all fixed now and you can start getting some work out here!

[markem]

I am 99.9% finished restoring everything. Last couple of things to do is to go through that backup I made and see if I have, indeed, restored everything. I know that am going to have to extract a few thousand graphic icons from the backups and I'm thinking maybe twenty or so programs. Of course, life would not be life if the hacker didn't try to get back on again. It happened on Sunday. I was sitting there when suddenly Comodo said "The internet is trying to connect to you." This told me the hacker had our router's password. I immediately told Comodo to STOP-BLOCK-TERMINATE. Unfortunately that "TERMINATE" part also caused my system to reboot because it terminated one of the system processes. Luckily - no harm. I immediately generated a new 512 bit key (64 bytes long), got onto the router and replaced the password. Then I had to do the same on each of our computers. It has been quiet ever since. A lot of people never realize just how many people are trying to break in to their routers/modems. At least once a month everyone should check their router's logs. If they are not enabled - enable them. You'd be surprised. On a daily basis about a 1,000 attempts are made to break in to our router. It takes about six months for a hacker to break a 64 byte (512 bit) password. So every five months I reset it. I'm thinking of writing an AutoIt script to automate doing this. (By the way - if you've never heard of AutoIt you should Google it. It is a basic-like language that you can use to automate anything under Windows. Of course - if you have a Mac you'd just use Applescript and Linux boxes just use Perl or another scripting language.)

Yeah! I still want to draw that map with the two trees surrounding it. I took a whack at it last night as I installed software. I found out that Fireworks won't go back to using the mouse if you first start off using a tablet pen. Very frustrating but I'm sure I just didn't do something right. After I had finished installing Adobe Master Suite CS3 I tried Fireworks and then Photoshop. Then when I got Corel's Painter X installed I tried it. Painter X really let me make a nice set of trees but then I mucked the whole thing up trying to make the forest in the background look good. I wound up just getting out of Painter X. So then I was like "Well, I really like Visio - let me try that." - bad decision. It looked really-really bad. Got rid of that too. So then I had downloaded Pencil2D and wanted to try that. It came out ok but I mucked it all up trying to use the vector graphics part of the program. The program finally crashed. So then I tried Illustrator. I'm not all that good in Illustrator. Haven't played around with it enough. So things came out looking like a Picaso picture. Only with Picaso on some heavy drugs. It was so disturbing I got rid of it too. By then I was installing MS Office, creating shortcuts, moving the shortcuts to the folders on the desktop where I keep them, searching through other directories for software, and then it was midnight and time to go to bed so I could be up at 5:00am.

Tonight I plan on getting out my pencils and some stiff printer paper and I will try again that way.

Question: Is it better to start with the background items or the foreground items? I'm thinking background but I really want to get those two trees done first.