Part 2 of Point of Contact (I know, I haven’t even begun drawing part 1 yet, after Christmas, I promise) has a scene in the oval office. There’s a White House photostream on Flickr, which will be good for detail reference and images of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton to get a good likeness. Even better, there’s a section in the White House museum dedicated to 3d models of the building, key rooms and Air Force One and Marine One.
Until January 7th Amazon are offering 50 MP3 albums for £5 each
There’s some crap in there, obviously, but there’s also stuff like Lungs by Florence and the Machine
Or for people to offer to buy me.
I don’t need the full on Photoshop package for working on comics and the occasional bit of retouching. I’d never considered Elements, though, until I had a look at the features. I reckon it has everything I need.
I’m going to be working at US comic size, which is nearly A3. And my old A4 scanner was shafted anyway. So I need to invest in a new, larger scanner.
And for the bits of comic art that Photoshop Elements is no good for there’s Manga Studio. It has all sorts of speed line building features and greyscale patterns as well as some fairly good drawing and image editing features of its own. Hopefully the new version has more westernised speech balloons, something sadly lacking in the earlier versions.
Appearing about 240 BC, incendiary pigs were an interesting weapon thought to have been utilized in ancient Roman warfare. The concept was to cover the pig in tar and a flammable substance and, when lured close enough to the advancing or defending enemy the pigs would then be lit on fire. The hope was that the pigs would run uncontrollably into the ranks of the opposing force, causing a certain level of confusion. In any event, the idea was to make use of the weapon as a psychological tool to harass or scare the enemy into submission, or break his concentration at the very least.
More here. You can buy models of them (unlit) from EM4 miniatures.