Dusty Ghost Blog

Take a look at this:

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This is my old desk at home and as you can see I had no room at all for my tablet! I had to prop it on the edge of the desk and rest it on my knees and was constantly fighting with a wall! It was sooooo frustrating!

Well, my mother in law moved out a few weeks about and I got one half of her old room for my new workspace!! cool!!

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I got this new desk from an auction for just £20! It was in perfect condition, and it MASSIVE!! Those are two small book selves you see on the left side there!

First shelf has all my art reference books on, the second shelf up has my sketch books and pencil cases, all within arms reach.

I have room to keep my tablet plugged in at all times, 2 screens now, and I still have some space to draw in! Phew!

The book open on my desk is Digital Painting Techniques from Focal Press. Highly recommended!

So I decided that I wanted to get back to basics.

This is an anatomy study I did in Photoshop. There is also a GIF to show the progress I went through. Total creation time, about 5 hours 30 mins.

However I lost his head at one point and forgot to paint in back in. LOL! :p

Also had to use the liquefy tool to get the proportions right, I kinda dropped the ball on that at the start. But it was easy to fix. And you learn from your mistakes.

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Believe it or not, the hardest bit was getting the veins on the arm to look natural!

Just for fun, and the fact I wanted to practice with Adobe Illustrator a bit, I created this website design.

I created all the images used on the site. I didn’t take the picture of the workman, but I did edit it to fit into the square tile theme of the site.

Please note this for a fictional company I made up!

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This company is not actually live yet, but they gave me permission to post this logo here.

Hi all! Sorry for the delay since my last post. As you could see from my last post I’ve had a fair bit to deal with and have taken a longish break from any hobbies, business, ventures and such.

However, recently I have started to get the busy momentum going again!

So, what have I been up to?….. man…. where to start….

Although I said I was taking a break, I still seem to have found time to get into all sorts of mini projects along the way.

Just posted a new set of images in the Photo Editing section. A colleague of mine at work had an old family photo, and for what ever reason, he wanted me to remove one of the people from it and have me re-print it for him.

So that’s what I did:

Before (Click to View)

After (Click to View)

Ok, so this was a little creepy, removing someone from history…. lets just hope I haven’t stopped someone from being born now! :S But, this was also a great test of my skills, having to reconstruct things from the background where the man used to be. My colleague is happy with it though, so I guess I am too.

One thing that I am badly missing at the moment is ZBrush! I still have not had a chance to mess with it, even though we are now on V3.5R3!

But, with God’s blessing, I hope that will change very soon.

I have a couple of other projects I am working on at the moment too. Including:
A new site to help players of Pen and Paper Table Top Role Playing Games…. more on that later!
A small 3D printed money making idea with a friend of mine…. more on that later!
A 3D printing job for a space ship model…more on that later!
A possible 3D job on a music video…. more on that later… if it happens…;)

Not to mention the fact that I am still trying to fit all of this around 1 full time job, 1 part time job, and a VERY active family life! LOL!

So as you can see, I am still VERY busy! Hopefully some order will come to my life and I can get back on track with my various ideas and schemes!

Laters for now,

Mark

High folks!

Well 2009 is nearly over and I have to say that it’s been one of, it not the most traumatic and the most thankful year of my life!!

As I mentioned before my pregnant wife had to be fitted with a pacemaker. But she recovered and gave birth to a wonderful baby boy we called Thomas David Johnson on November 5th.

After my son was born all looked to be settling down and we seemed to be getting back to a kind of normality.

My son is healthy and has been growing well over the last few weeks. My other two children love him and help out with him as often as they can.

Katie’s Mum has now moved in, and is a absolute blessing, as she is helping out all the time with the house and the baby. But more than that, she is helping keep Katie sane by being a GREAT mum and best friend to me.

Katie also received a letter from the hospital telling her that her heart block (the reason she was fitted with a pace maker) was not caused by any heart disease, and we had a mini celebration to know that.

Just when all is looking well, something happens to utterly shock us all!

A couple of weeks ago Katie was feeling very ill. We thought she had a 24 hour tummy bug, but that 24 hours turned to 48, then 72 hours then nearly 5 days! She was only sleeping about an hour a night, and had little liquid and no food (any she did eat came back up fast!)

5 days without keeping food down and hardly any water or sleep took its toll on her. Eventually she was rushed to A&E at the Royal in Leicester UK. There they gave her anti nausea drugs and morphine and for a time it looked like she might recover. She was even drinking and eating, good news we all thought. They kept her over night to be on the safe side and she got some rest.  She looked like she was getting better, but then in the next day she started to lose her appetite again and suffer black outs and mini seizures. This went on for hours on end, and they sent her for many scans and blood tests. They tested for everything from tetanus to hepatitis.

In the end they found that the sack around the heart was filled with fluid and was suffocating her heart. This in turn was putting a major strain on her liver, raising her blood pressure and…. basically…. was killing her!

They had to urgently transfer her over to the Glenfield hospital (one the best on heart conditions in the country) to treat her. There they managed to get her stable, and fitted her with a tube to drain the fluid from her heart, a very painful and traumatic procedure. That tube drained over a litre of bloody fluid from around the heart! They were very concerned that this fluid was infected and gave her top level antibiotics just in case.  They also left the tube in draining any more fluid.

Almost right away she was feeling better and got her colour back, but make no mistake, before they drained that fluid, she was dying!

One very shocking piece of news was that if the heart was infected, the pacemaker would have to come out, and a new one would have to be fitted. To take the pace maker out would take weeks of recovery, and the new one would not be fitted until the injuries had healed. They were talking about her spending a minimum of 6 weeks in hospital!

Katie missed our Daughters birthday, so me, all the kids, her Mum and my parents went down and had a mini celebration in the day room on the ward. It was only an hour, but it really cheered her up!

Eventually after numerous scans and tests, no more fluid appeared around the heart, and the doctors were happy there was no obvious infection. A Massive relief!

They eventually removed the heart drain. And kept an eye on her. They performed many more scans and were happy that whatever caused the problem was now no longer an issue.

Eventually she came home and at the time of writing this, she is spending most of her time catching up with her baby son. One of the worst things about all of this is that she could not spend more than an hour or so with her new son every day she was in the Glenfeild Hospital.  She is making up for that now and I often catch her with tears of joy in her eyes when looking at him.

She is VERY frail after loosing so much weight when she was sick, and her body is still recovering. She has a mild pneumonia  on one of her lungs that has to be dealt with, and he heart is understandably bruised and going to need to recover.

We also still don’t know for sure what caused this. They think that maybe there was a probe on the end of a pacemaker cord that punctured the heart wall during the birth of Tom. If that’s what happened then this has now healed as there is no wound to be found now. She received some anti-clotting drugs after Toms birth for another suspected problem, that should have been harmless in its self, but maybe these made the heart puncture worse. We just don’t know and there really is no way to tell at this late stage.

We now have Christmas at home, and this is going to be the most grateful of experiences for all of us!

I am VERY happy she is well and I love her so much!

We are both very grateful to God, and all of our very special and loving friends and family for looking after us. Some of them have been nothing short of heroic over the last couple weeks. THANK YOU!

On the upside of all of this, Tom is growing well, and is now 9lb 14oz!! He is sleeping well enough, though still has some sleeplessness at night. But it’s worth it for how special he is!

My other children are also well and have grown out of nearly all their clothes these last few months! We are VERY proud of them both and love them dearly!

So, to all of you out there:
Maybe 2009 has been a great year for you and I am truly happy for you if it has.
Maybe 2009 has been a disappointment in parts, but chin up, there is light at the end of that tunnel.
Maybe you are going through a traumatic time right now. But remember things can get better with time and healing!

To all of you out there; family, friends and people I have never met, I wish you all a wonderful Christmas and a VERY magical 2010.

Best wishes, and God bless you all!

Mark Johnson A.K.A Dusty

It’s with great pride and love I introduce to you all, my new son Thomas David Johnson. He was born at 10:39am on the 5th of November, weighing in at 7lb 1oz.

He wasn’t due to be born until 26th November, but due to medical complications, Katie had to be induced early! It was a VERY long night as Katie was induced at 12am and didn’t give birth until 10:39am!

There were a number of VERY traumatic moments during this process, that I won’t go into here, other than to say he very nearly didn’t survive. However, once I got to hold my son and look into his new eyes, it was all better! I have honestly never been so relieved in my life about anything, and I swear my poor heart nearly broke when I first heard him cry. He really is a miracle baby, and I thank God he made it!

Here in the UK the 5th of Nov is Guy Fawkes Night. It’s a time of celebration and fun. I remember sitting at one of the hospital ward’s windows, holding my son watching fireworks shoot into the sky. It was like the whole world was happy for him, and I have to confess I broke down in tears of relief and joy.

I am pleased to say that now Mother and baby are now doing VERY well. There is still some more recovery for Mum to do, but baby is doing GREAT!

I’ve always found it amazing what can be done to images these days. I’ve seen some seriously inspiring adverts on billboards and magazines around the world. The internet is full of clever deceptive images edited in Photoshop and other such programs.

I thought it would be cool to learn how this is all done.  I’ve used Photoshop to create images for websites and to edit my 3D works in post production. But I never knew just how much fun it is to edit photo’s and make them into a new reality!

Ok, I’ve created a new page to show off my progress in learning this wonderful process, you can visit it here.

There are only a couple of images there ATM, but I plan on adding more later.

The unfortunate thing at the moment, is that I don’t have a decent camera, so all the images I am taking on the one I have are JPG format. That, and the problem of auto focus and bad lighting mean that I may have to find stock photo’s to edit for professional looking edits. But at least I can practice for now.

A great cheap resource for high quality stock photos is www.fotolia.com They offer relatively cheap stock photos that you can download and use for almost any purpose.

Keep coming back as I plan on doing a lot more of this fun!

My children’s dance school teacher has been in dire need of a website for a while now, so we came to an agreement and I created this website for her.

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It was a challenging website, as it needed to have a number of pictures edited to fit the colour scheme of the website. Also their needed to be an editable private area for her students to log into to get information, whilst still keeping some of that information hidden from the general public.

There is also a promotional video there created by Greensleeves Films. Greensleeves is a very professional company who I enjoyed working with.

Julie is very happy with the site, and I hope it will be really useful for her, her teachers and her students.

A looooooong time ago, in a galaxy far far away….. well… actually it was a long time ago, but not too far from where I live….

So I’m working on a REALLY cool project for my friend Ben. He’s designed his own Star Trek  ship …. a long time ago ….(he REALLY loves Star Trek BTW!) and we both thought it would be cool to make a 3D model of it. Actually Ben had made it in clay once…. but it melted…. at least that’s how it looks.

Anyway, so I started working on the ship in Blender and it’s going well so far (more pictures to come on this later), and then I discovered…. SHAPEWAYS.COM!!!!

I kid you not this is the single most exciting thing I’ve encountered since ZBrush and Blender!!!

Imagine not just creating your models, but actually having a plastic version of them sat on your desk!!

Now I know 3D printing has been around forever, but it’s never been cheap! Well, Shapeways.com seems to be working hard to bring the costs down as much as possible for its customers.

So we want to make Ben’s 3D ship become a real thing you can hold by actually 3D printing it into a plastic 3D model!! Cool!

We had to make a few tests first, so I uploaded my DG Mascot model (the one you see in the background of this site) and requested a print to see how detailed it is.

Check this out:

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How cool is that!! As you can see the detailing is actually VERY good! So good you can still see some of the edges on the polygons, though that’s mostly down to me rushing the model for the 3D print and is something I will avoid in future.

So we learnt a few lessons and are really happy with the print.

BTW, this model is 6cm high and hollow (hollowing out drops the price dramatically BTW). It cost just under $27, which exchanged to around £15 for me in the UK. Cool!

So, I now have Dusty sat on my desk, looking at me! Bless!