These are two recent sketches I created in The GIMP.

Futuristic War Vehicle

The mechanical contraption above was somewhat inspired by the vehicle in Aliens for those who have seen the movie. However, I didn’t reference anything when I drew it and was really intended as a GIMP test.

The above portrait of a witch was also a GIMP test. I experimented a lot with this working with brushes and colors and many of the tools within GIMP. The final result of the mosaic was due to a filter I applied to the image. The sketch wasn’t really all that good so no big loss.

Daniel Craig is the new James Bond! Well not so new anymore, his second Bond movie is out and I’ve yet to see either.

This is a pencil drawing which was modified in Photoshop to bring up the contrast to 100% and reduce the brightness level. After this minor adjustments were made like fixing the shape of the mouth a bit.

I’ve had the account for a long time actually but I decided to actually try using it to see what I can do with it. Here is a link after 30 minutes of work tonight:

http://eternalseven.wordpress.com/

I’m mostly going to use it for testing stuff at this time but who knows what the future may bring…

For those unfamiliar with it Blender is a 3D open source suite capable of modeling, texturing, animation and rendering. I’ve recently been playing around with it after hearing about the incredible progress which has been made on this front over the last few years.

Below you can see a screenshot of the basic interface.

Click on the image for a full size screenshot.

Basic Navigation in the 3D Environment

Chances are, unless someone is there to tell you how to navigate around the 3D environment, it won’t come natural to you. The good news is that all navigation is handled by the middle mouse button of a standard 3 button mouse. After a few minutes of using Blender you brain will form the required connections to do this properly! Here are the precise functions and how to perform them:

 
Also note that Blender is cursor context sensitive. This means the above functions will only work if your cursor is above the 3D view in the center of the screen. If you’re over the “File, Edit, etc” menu these functions won’t work to navigate around the scene for example. This generally applies to all things Blender, if you’re trying to do something and not getting the expected result make sure your cursor is correctly positioned!

Good luck and have fun Blendering!

This is the second digital painting I’ve done of Luba and she is quickly becoming one of my favorite muses.

The above image is a digital painting, I used a photo as a reference. Approximately 45 minutes of work mostly spent on black and white sculpting.

I’ve decided to use the Nextgen Gallery plugin to showcase some of my art, eventually I might make a new theme for my website and use this for the top logo. The slideshows/galleries you see below were generated from the same plugin. The artworks featured here are from 2008 and earlier.

Above you can see the slideshow version of the plugin. Immediately below you can see a gallery version of the plugin:

[Show as slideshow]

lust-and-gluttony.jpg ◄ Back Next ► Picture 1 of 12 Lust and Gluttony

Gallery Image Growser!

It appears the Gallery tag does not allow for height and width specification. However, if you embed the Gallery within a table it works great! Also this variation of the plugin allows for users to save the images easily while the Flash Slideshow version makes it a bit harder…

It appears the plugin also allows for a watermark to be placed on the images. I’m not testing this because frankly I dislike watermarks. I sign my images and I like to retain full control as to where that signature goes. Still, some would be interested in this feature.

After a very long wait the new CG Challenge has finally been announced!

Here is the main page: Steampunk Myths and Legends

I have been around CG Talk for years now and have seen many challenges go by without bothering to participate. Every time a challenge is announced I don’t like the topic at first, though usually by the end of the challenge I see the work done there and I regret not participating. This time I’ve decided to take part as I actually really like the topic and I already have many ideas in my mind.

Here is my thread in the challenge forum: Niva’s Steampunk Thread

Gallery of my Steampunk Drawings

Everyone knows the myth of Icarus who dared to fly. It was the first idea which came to me. Then I started experimenting with some concepts for Baba Yaga – the old Slavic legend of an old hag who abducts children.

Keep checking here, as I make new additions they’ll appear in the gallery.

Here are links to other entries in this challenge I am interested in following:

• Goro’s Entry
• Intervain’s Entry
• Paperclip
• Cyberone
• Tolgahan Gungor
• Michael Dashow (Walrus)

This is a painting made by DTAmos from CG Society. I worked on adjusting proportion and details per his request after I provided some critique to the original drawing. Here are the results:

The first thing I did was desaturate even though the colors of the original image were fine. Since this was a quick paintover I wanted to work in grayscale in order to go faster. After this I made major changes to the hands and then zoomed in for details on the highlights.

I’ve noticed a recent drought of hits incoming from Google Images. This is rather important to me as my main purpose for having my blog is to showcase my artwork (images!) and this reduction in hits affects my traffic big time. I went from getting over 2000 hits per month from Google Images to less than 200 last month… While I did change some things on my website (like upgrading WordPress) I didn’t change the content.

After some searching on the web I discovered I’m not the only one who has noticed this. Check out the following link for an example of other people talking about this: Webmaster World Forum

Sadly I’ve not found anything which definitively states where the problem is. I’m suspecting something changed within Google’s tools and it may take a while for this to settle out. Most of my searches into this problem are out of date, I’ve found people complaining about this as far back as 2005.

In the meantime I’m working through Google’s Webmaster tools now and if this gives me a positive resolution I’ll report here. I’m also checking the settings of my host such as hotlink protection and allowing direct access to images by typing them into the navigation bar.

This is a huge deal for my website as you can see from the above graph which shows hits to one of my sub-sites. The drop in traffic is associated with the de-indexing of the associated files from the Google Images search.

Edit on Nov 13, 2008:
So far this month I’ve still had zero hits from Google Images. None of the images on my website are indexed in Google with a path back to my website. For other webmasters you can check this by searching for “site:www.domainname.com” within Google Images.

So far there has been no resolution to any of this. However, I must admit it has been beneficial in a way: I found out a lot of things about search engines which I didn’t know before I started looking into this problem.

Edit on Nov 19, 2008:
In my host control pannel I disabled hotlink protection and direct image access blocking. One of my images now shows up in the search under site:eternalseven.com

What’s odd about this is how it shows up. Apparently Google indexed it through the Top Cow forum thread which also contains MANY other images from my site.

I’ve now also found some interesting Google related tools and web resources, follow the following links:

• Google Blog
• Google Webmaster Group

Edit on Dec 14, 2008:

I have now decided that Google simply hates my website for some reason. I’ve tried everything I can think of to get my images indexed and there’s no improvement to the situation. I sometimes get one of my images indexed through Top Cow’s website but that’s about it. Even more amazingly, through that particular post on the Top Cow forum, there are multiple images linked from my website, this one isn’t even the first in a top-down scanning of the post. Why the other images from that post or the entire thread don’t appear… no clue! The developers of Google claim it is smart, so I guess there’s a very good reason behind this. Even when the said image does get indexed by Google, it seems to show up for only brief periods, it will show up for a day or two and then disappear from Google Images only to show up again for a day or two a week later. At this point I’ve had no help from the Google Webmaster Group, not even a hint as to what might be happening. I’m also getting a feeling that this could somehow be related to some of the drawings of my website which are clearly referenced to porn-stars I used. However, this still doesn’t answer the question why the filter doesn’t kick in and still index them as unsafe rather than dump all images from my website.

Even more oddly I’ve now tested multiple other search engines, both Yahoo and Windows Live seem to have MANY of my images properly indexed. What this means to me is that my host isn’t the problem. If other search engines can index my images why can’t the super-smart Google get to them?

Frankly I wish Google’s Webmaster tools were properly set up. All they have in there is a check-box which says make your images available for the google image labler. I’ve had that box checked since I started this quest and nothing has properly worked. I don’t think it did anything for me and frankly a month and a half should give some partial resolution to this mess… I should be able to directly submit particular images in an advanced tab and have the ability to get my images indexed as a return of service. Say I play the Image Label game, and I index 10 other images (not my own) why can’t Google return the favor at that point and index one of mine? I’d be all about indexing 10 images for the return of getting one of my own indexed.

All of this is really stupid considering all my website images used to be indexed just a few short months ago without me having to do anything. I never thought I’d say it but here’s one aspect of Google which absolutely resembles a flying monkey turd.

Almost halfway through December I’ve had 6 pings from Google Images and only 1 actual visitor. This must’ve happened during one of those brief periods when that one image was showing up in the search engine…

February 8, 2009

Finally, some images are starting to trickle into the search and being properly indexed to my site. Here is the proof:

While there has been no indication as to why my images were removed from the search index it now looks probable that they’re coming back slowly. I’ve been monitoring my raw access logs and Googlebot-Image is regularly visiting the website and seems to be collecting images. I’ve also seen a big spike in traffic coming in from google images with just 3 images in the search engine, this has caused over 100 hits to the site in just a week.

Update – March 2^nd, 2008

I’ve decided to post a link here to the Google Forums thread where I’ve been complaining about my problem, mostly for my own ease of access.

Google Forums Topic about Image Indexing Problems

So here is a status a month after my last post: More images now appear in the google search. Oddly enough some of my images appeared and were then de-indexed by google. For example, the pencil drawing of the Witchblade which appears on the screenshot above is now gone from Google’s index. Also for a couple of weeks a large number of my thumbnail images were indexed, they’re now gone too… But in general it appears that Google may turn around and begin cooperating with my website, unless it’s smart enough to be upset by what I wrote in this post.

More updates will come in the future.