haHA! You thought I had fallen off the wagon and started ignoring my Daily Tool responsibilities when I was, in fact, just busy playing Bayonetta and Assassins’s Creed 2 and slowly drawing this beast…

tags: tool of the day

I have been slacking off lately, taking a break to do things like “read books” and “go shopping for 6 hours,” but now I’m back. I am going to redouble my efforts to do a tool drawing every one to two days – depending on the tool complexity. I used the facetious quotes above because I’m so fond of them – but I actually am reading a new book, and I also actually spent six hours at Sommerset in Troy last Saturday looking for THE PERFECT DRESS. FOR MY WIFE. NOT FOR ME. SRSLY.

tags: tool of the day

This drawing will be the fifteenth in my technically cartooned tools series – which means I am exactly one-half of the way done with my original 30-tool goal. To try and be a little more active reading other people’s blogs I’ve been wandering the blogosphere and I’ve noticed that more and more people I know are working on a daily/weekly/monthly creation project. My wife and several of my Facebook friends are participating in weekly self-portraits on Flickr and Facebook. I’m a proponent of these challenges because they help us be a little more structured with our creative endeavors. Trying to meet a quota can be a strong motivational force, and if you’re lucky enough to have people observing your art it becomes even stronger.

tags: tool of the day

I was talking to a co-worker about a game we both recently played – Dragon Age: Origins – and he mentioned a character specialization called a Reaver, which I had no idea existed. Apparently Reavers are Lich King/Revenant/Nazgul types, which puts them right up my video game alley. I’m so irked to have missed this specialization that I’m considering playing the whole 80+ hour game again just to get in a few hours as a Reaver. In any case, the discussion reminded me of how much I like customizing weapons in video games; and it inspired this creation…

tags: tool of the day

Behold! A light! A halogen light! With an 18 kV battery!

This took 3.5 hours but I learned a valuable Gimp lesson: don’t “erase” by drawing white lines on things – it will end poorly for you. This white line trick caused me to have to re-draw a lot of the internal lines over the coloring, which is ridiculous and take for-ev-er. Also, I had a gimlet in the middle of the drawing. I’m not sure that helped.

tags: tool of the day

About 5 hours later, I present the Corner Cat mouse sander. I omitted the real logo in favor of this fictional brand because I probably shouldn’t be drawing the actual brand names in preparation for when Realvelour.com gets 10 billion hits a minute after the “tablet-drawn tool” craze kicks in. No but seriously, I didn’t have enough room to write Ryobi so I went off-roading.

tags: tool of the day

Exciting times in the Sisco household! I purchased two awesome things today, and decided on a rules change for the Daily Tool tablet drawing exercise.

tags: tool of the day

News flash: it’s difficult to do work of any sort on Friday night. My wife is watching Marie Antoinette on the couch and I’m trying to focus on this drawing with little to no success. That being said – voila! A very tiny brown and orange measuring tape.

tags: tool of the day

As noted in DT#10, I had some power issues that prevented me from finishing a tool yesterday,  so I pledged to not only complete and color the Dremel, but also to complete some Dremel accessories. The Dremel turned out to be a tremendous pain to draw because it’s almost totally black and the tips are really really small. Here’s what it looks like in Technicolor!

tags: tool of the day

Fact #1: Sometimes I run Gimp on my work laptop because (1) my work laptop has a nice screen, and (2) I do not have a personal laptop, but I like to sit at the kitchen table and watch the cats run amok while I draw. Fact #2: I spent a lot of time working on my laptop in the lab area today; testing the communications module I just finished writing. The result of these two facts is that I left my power cord somewhere dumb and ran out of juice mid-drawing. Now all I have for tool #10 is this ridiculous spaceship/coke bottle/electric-toothbrush looking contraption…

tags: tool of the day