Tag Archives: Valentine

Emerging Ecosystem Pencil, acrylic & digital

Emerging Ecosystem, drawing by Leah Palmer Preiss with digital color

It’s been a while since I posted a doodle– this one started as a pencil sketch, then I played with it some more in Photoshop, using painted textures I’ve scanned, along with text from an antique children’s science book. I thought it turned out to look a bit like a valentine, if valentines were crawling with imaginary organisms.

Heart-flower Hand-painted miniature, acrylic on paper in glass & copper locket

hand-painted locket, acrylic on paper in glass and copper locket, one of a kind art jewelry by Leah Palmer Preiss

Back in the day I did a lot of greeting card & wrapping paper art in the hearts-&-flowers vein. After a few years of that I had had about all the sweetness I could swallow. I called it a quarter-life crisis… & my art has been getting weirder ever since. Someday maybe it will catch up with the rest of me… then look out! ;-)

But speaking of hearts, flowers, & veins, this little anatomical-botanical curiosity popped into my head recently, & I thought it was a perfect candidate for occupying a small empty locket I’d purchased on Etsy. And to continue the wonky circularity (or should I say circulatory system?) of the tale, it’s now available in my shop!

It’s about an inch wide by two inches tall if you count the bail. The picture shows both front & back. The text was borrowed from an old dictionary.

BlissBot AlphaBots ~ Artificial Emotional Intelligence

Well, I’m mighty late with my AlphaBot this week, but at least I’m in time to wish you all a blissful Valentine’s Day with Oddment 200!

This is the second in an alphabetical robot series I call Artificial Emotional Intelligence. The BlissBot’s wires tend to get a bit disheveled when in the throes of his eponymous emotion. But it’s all part of his programming. ;-)

Speaking of programs, I’m using this series to teach myself how to “paint” in Adobe Illustrator. In this piece I made extensive use of the gradient mesh, which partly explains why it’s so late! It’s an amazing tool, but it can drive one a bit nuts, especially as a newbie. And of course I’m still not really satisfied. I hope one shining day to figure out how to make AI gradients tamely do my bidding. For now they definitely still have my knickers (& often my Bézier curves) in a twist. So much for my hope that I’d be as blissful making this bot as I was angstful for the last!