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:

The halogen work lamp I drew a few tools back was from the same cordless tool set as this drill, which means they share an 18V battery pack.  So, in an attempt to be clever I copied the battery pack from the older drawing and used it as a base for this one. Unfortunately, because the work lamp drawing was horribly disproportionate, using it as my scaling base left me with some sort of floppy clown drill – a tool that totally sucks.

Out came the ruler and 30 minutes later I had a proportional grid from which to draw. Much better. To give you an idea of just how wrong the work lamp battery was, here it is side-by side with the proportionate battery:

In addition to corrected proportions, some serious shading upgrades were made between the first drawing and now. I shaded the drill by laying down a solid color with no depth, then selecting a slightly darker color and adding concentric bands of darklights. This ended up being pretty “patchy”, so I used the blur filter and a low-opacity eraser to clean it up. I’ll probably use this technique for the rest of the drawings.I’m proud to say that you can see increases in line quality and shading quality between these two pieces, as well as a general decline in jank.

Here are some bonus images in the form of the drill’s flesh and bones. “Bones” would be the outline and “Flesh” would be the shading with no outline at all. The flesh image looks like an impressionist piece of some sort, which is neat.

Tool #30 is definitely going to be the DeWilt Reciprocating Saw, so I’ll probably go back to some simpler tools this week.

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And now for something completely different… my wife has asked me to build her a light box for photography stuff and I have agreed to do it with LEDs and then use it to take pictures of my Legos and other assorted games and toys. This project is wife-sanctioned and involves LEDs and construction. I am excited about this. I will try to spend less than $100.00.

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.

(segue)

This is a drawing of some sort of a ratcheting strap clamp that might be used to anchor item A to item B. For example, you could use this to anchor a canoe to a car roof. Or a car to a canoe – depending on the size of the canoe.

OR – you could strap a mattress to a car roof! (9:00 minutes in…)

Finally, I am fond that this Seinfeld clip is sub-titled in Portuguese. HA.

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.

Finally, because I think this is awesome, King Panpan (whom I don’t know) who is compiling a 365 of the most radically Vectored bears you’ve ever seen.

Anyways, fifteen tools in I’m learning I don’t own as many awesome tools as I thought. Therefore you can expect to see more “creative” entries… like this one!

This is obviously a long handled tape pounder. You can use it to affix tape to things with great force. For example:

1. windows
2. moving boxes (with/without vases)
3. thin drywall
4. Saran wrap (…it never sticks by itself…)
5. fruits.

My wife wanted me to dedicate a tool to her and she suggested something “destructive” because that’s how she rolls.

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:

As you can see, this piece of rare equipment gives you two impressive bonuses. Especially if you have ropes to cut and like citrus fruits. They should pay me to design video game weapons… I would be good at that.

In other news, I beat GOWIII and it was one, if not the, best game I’ve ever played. I think I’ll rank my favorite games in the next post.

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.

I like opening manuals and seeing that the instructions consist of numbered arrows and no English text (or text in another language). Case in point: I don’t need too much help installing a mother board in a PC case, but the instruction manual for the case I just bought was hilariously lacking in text. It had several pages of numbered arrows surrounded by what appeared to be written French. I just got out the hot glue gun and went to work.

I think the arrows in this drawing really help inform people about this tool. First, you do something here. Second, something else happens over here. See – clarity.

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.

Notice the little vacuum cleaner bag to catch sawdust or perhaps citrus rind in case you’re using this to zest an orange. Next up: perhaps the Dewalt Drill or halogen flood light.

Oh, and as a side note – my wife’s computer construction was completed today and the system screams. I gave the big Samsung monitor to my wife because she does way more photo editing on her machine than I do anything useful on my machine and now I’m totally jealous. Computer pr0n coming soon.

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.

First, the rule change. I realized tonight that due to the complexity of the remaining tools, the complexity of the drawings has gotten to be more than I can handle in a typical day’s free time. For example, drawing a pair of pliers can be done in 30-45 minutes but drawing a Ryobi Corner Cat mouse sander takes significantly longer. So, The Daily Tool (TDT)  has just become The Daily Tool Every Two Days (TDTETD). This should give me ample time to make the drawings not suck and to add plenty of hilarious notations and details.

Now, what is the deal with explicitly referencing the Ryobi Corner Cat mouse sander? Well – I friggin’ own one – that’s the deal. I purchased it while at Home Depot trying to keep my wife from eating Home Depot hot dogs, and looking for screws and plywood. You see, I had to fix my car bumper after backing into a Mercedes in the MicroCenter parking lot…

… HA – that’s a joke ! I know you don’t (typically) fix a bumper with plywood. It was really to get the awesomely heavy new computer I just built off of the floor and onto a flat surface. And the sander was to turn the corners of the plywood into something a little bit more friendly to the touch. It also happens to be an excellent thing to draw. Expect to see if coming up tomorrow.

Finally, here’s a picture of the interesting part of the new computer – the blue LED case fan, of course. Also, note the finely sanded plywood.

The whole thing actually weighs about 40 pounds, which seems very heavy to me. Once I get the graphics card installed, I’ll note some technical specs because that’s what nerdy engineers do on the internet.

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.

Tomorrow I think I’m going to tackle two things:

1. Building a new computer for my wife so that she can run Photoshop supa fast and not have to worry about photos being corrupted or lost.
2. Draw my awesome halogen lamp or my Dewalt drill in gory detail.

ps: yes, it’s intentionally in inches.

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!

And here are some wonderful Dremel accessories!

[View with PicLens]

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:

Seriously though, this is about 60% of a completed Dremel. I could have ported this to Photoshop and hoped that everything translated ok, or I could have fought with Linux drivers for my Wacom tablet. Neither of those sound exciting. So…. I will finish, colorize, and embellish this drawing tomorrow and we’ll call it 10.1. Sound good? Great.

In other news, I re-learned an important factoid about embedded C-code today: you can define variables at the beginning of any valid stanza (ie: { } ), and if you hide such a definition in a macro called DO_SOMETHING_VAGUE you can make it very difficult to track down everything that contributes to the stack space of the calling function. I worked on this for about two hours today and didn’t make any headway, and then my boss stepped in and said “bazing! check your assumptions!” and I resolved it. Rock.

EDIT: I used “declare” instead of “define”… thanks for the jab/correction, Michael.