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| title | date | description | type | tags | ||||
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| Colored Pencils | 2022-08-15T21:23:26-05:00 | Random musings about colored pencils and other things | post |
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2kwatts: I should get back into blogging
Me: Yeah, I just write about whatever and post it to my exozyme-hosted website
2kwatts: I can't really think of anything though. Other than the generic tech tutorial
Me: For me, I choose my topics based on whatever I'm thinking about during that day, and then write as much as I can without worrying about if it's good or bad.
If it's bad, I save the post as a draft and don't publish it.
In fact I think I'm gonna write a post right now.2kwatts: About colored pencils?
Sure, why not.
Colored pencils are amazing, until you put them into an electronic pencil sharpener and jam their internal mechanism into smithereens. I think pencil sharpeners just hate me, since they never work. I've never successfully sharpened a pencil to a picturesque perfect cylindrical tip.
Anyways, back to the topic of colored pencils. Have you ever tried erasing something drawn by a colored pencil using a normal pencil eraser? If not, try it now.
Screams erupt.
Yeah, as you can see, trying to naively erase colored pencil using a normal eraser will only lead to misery and suffering. Your eraser will hate you from staining it with colored pencil lead chemicals. Your paper will hate you from smudging the colored pencil marks all over the page. Your colored pencil will hate you for censorsing its marks.
But that last one is a necessary evil. For anything I'm doing, I always need an eraser (or Ctrl-Z). I know special colored pencil erasers exist, but not everyone is lucky enough to have one at hand. Using Krita for me consists of Ctrl-Z after almomst every brush stroke, mainly because I can't draw.
I wish paper supported Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-F.
Anyways, I'm really getting offtopic here. Back to colored pencils! My sole use for colored pencils is drawing colored lines on geometry diagrams, because staring at monochromatic diagrams can get fatiguing. As I said, I can't draw, so that limits my range of possible uses for colored pencils considerably.
Well, I actually misspoke. I do have other uses for colored pencils, expressed using regular expressions:
- Drawing colored lines on physics diagrams
- Drawing colored lines on chemistry diagrams
- Drawing colored lines on .* diagrams
- Drawing colored lines on .*
- Drawing .*
- .*
Oh oops, that's all possible strings.
smolshep has a pack of artist-grade colored pencils which as expected, look the same on paper as normal colored pencils, because only suffiently snobby professionals can delude themselves into seeing the difference. They were a total waste of a lot of money compared to just getting normal colored pencils, but smolshep lost some of them... 😳
smolshep can actually draw, while I can't, but they can't finish projects and I can, so you probably wouldn't want to commission either of us. Shockingly, I do know how to use Krita decently well, but I'm a KDE shill so I have to know all the KDE apps (except for the KDE PIM suite, which is too bloated for someone who calls bloat a myth).
In Krita, there is a colored pencil brush, but I've never used it and instead usually just waste my time tweaking the dozens of tuneable knobs for each brush trying to create the perfect brush. By the way, Krita is also an surprisingly amazing as a photo editor, and I've found myself opening it instead of hacking together a nightmarishly long ImageMagick command or using GIMP, which breaks my brain.
Anyways, I'm now back again offtopic, so maybe I should write a bit more about colored pencils. Thankfully the topic is colored pencils, instead of crayons or watercolors or acrylic paint or bioluminescent proteins, since I definitely prefer coloring with colored pencils over coloring with bioluminescent proteins. Actually, I prefer not coloring in the first place, because coloring is too tedious and OCD-inducing.
So what else do I have to say about colored pencils? I still have a lot more, but I think you've probably had enough of my ramblings. I think that's enough for now. If you enjoyed it, I'm genuinely surprised.