September Blog Post

Happy Wednesday everyone!

I’ve shifted from working full time hours during the summer at Red Hat, to working ten hours (give or take) part time remotely while I’m starting classes again. I’ve decided to also chat about my thesis work on here, and I’m still deciding whether or not to make their own posts on the off weeks in between my intern posts, simply because neither probably has enough to talk about every week.

Let’s catch up though. The latest thing that’s been on my mind preparing for a sketch note session today on Hopin for a research talk, from 1:30-2:30 EST by Jose Renau and Karsten Wade. So basically Jose will be giving a talk about Live Hardware Development at UCSC and Karsten will help lead the conversation, and then at 2:00 it will be an open round table discussion. While they talk and give their slides virtually, there will be artists sketching on screen about the topic, which is my job.

On Friday I met with Heidi Dempsey, Sarah Coghlan, and Mo Duffy to go over the website and program and make sure we were all sure how it was going to work. During that session these were the doodles I came up with. I’m very intrigued by super heroes and detectives who are the champions of code and besides drawing what I imagined Sarah’s dog, and Heidi, that filled up the page pretty much.

I’ve been working on some doodles for ChRIS as well as the illustrations for the coloring book.

Onto Part Time at Red Hat

I hope everyone is having a great week. At the beginning of the summer, I thought today would be my last blog post since this is the end of the summer internship. What an experience! However of course, I’ll still be here next week, just working way less a week haha.

On Thursday last week Mo asked me to help with the Fedora 33 wallpaper draft package that was supposed to go out on Friday or Monday at the latest.

You can keep up with the happenings on the ticket here, but I tried to create bump map (I’ve never made one before that and although I consulted the internet, I don’t think it’s quite right) but it was fun to try. And then I made a watercolor background of the stars to go behind a 3D model of a planet.

This part I was pleased with very much.

We had recharge day on Friday and I soaked up some sun on a blanket in my yard which I’m truly grateful for. And over the weekend a friend and I decided to split a Skillshare account and I’ve started bookmarking tutorials for blender and other open source programs that I’d like to become even more proficient in.

Monday I cranked out what felt like a lot of inking, and on Tuesday I made this tracker to try and make sure I’m keeping on top of the pages. It’s really easy to get lost in the computer and having this as a reminder to check on pages that are almost done or need more work is proving helpful.

Although there is the aspect where I look at it and because I don’t work on one page at a time, I feel guilty about how much I have done because I hoped it would be more/think I should be farther along.

I also did some really low key sketchbook brain jogging for some illustrations for the about page on the ChRIS website.

I hope you’re all enjoying these days of August!

-Madeline

Closing in on the end of the Summer

Can you believe we’re two weeks through August already! And I’m so happy that my internship has been extended so last week isn’t my last week, even if it is the last full time week for awhile.

I’ve been working on the coloring books of course. Finally got the main font downloaded however I need to take the illustrated pages into Scribus and put the font in through there. So I actually can turn the font layer on this page off.

I’ve been working on some sketches for the ChRIS project however it always takes longer then you think to come up with something… of course.

Hope you all have a great week!

Working From Home Challenges

Hello Hello!

Last Friday I learned that I won third place! in the July intern video challenge!!! I won a whole $75 Amazon giftcard. And now, am I trying to limit my Amazon purchases because I despise the entity that is Jeff Bezos and thinks his workers deserve more? Yes. However, this money is already allotted to me, so I may as well use it for necessary stuff I need in the future.

We are continuing the inking of the coloring book. It’s super fun for me to draw, if a little challenging. Here is what it looks like as I ink. And then usually at some point while I’m drawing I’ll turn the sketch layer off to see if I like what I’ve done without the sketch underneath.

The biggest challenge I experienced this week!!!! Has been the hardest challenge of the summer haha! Hurricane Isaiah has swept the East Coast and caused a lot of damage for everyone, luckily my house and neighborhood just saw a lot of wind, like a LOT of wind, but at 4:30 on Tuesday afternoon my power went kapoot. And it continued to stay out until Thursday 4:20 am lol. Almost 36 hours. We don’t have a generator, my mom was actually able to get one on Wednesday afternoon but it only brought power to our fridge and freezer and a few outlets. And at that point the workday was kind of over.

Luckily I don’t need wifi for a lot of my work, the drawing part can be done without it, but emails, meetings, downloading fonts from the internet, looking up references on the internet, working on a computer that needs power with no power, trying to work in 90 degree heat without a fan, are all more difficult things. But I did the best work I could in the circumstances and after the initial grumbling in the morning getting things sorted, it turned into a good day.

For this upcoming week I’m going to try and come up with some illustrations for the CHris website, and continue inking this bad boy out, and attend part of the Flock conference this weekend.

I hope you are all having a great week!

Happy End of July

Hello hello!

Let’s see what have I been up to! Last week I had a design review with the intern team for all the artwork that I created for Red Hat’s social media on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which I shared the process and sketches for on my last blog post.

You can see this on twitter but this is one of my favorite ones from the project!

I also worked on filming and editing the video I submitted for the next round of the July Intern Video Challenge, which only six people moved on in. You can watch it here, and vote for my video here until Friday July 31st ;)

And of course I’ve been inking the pages for the coloring book.

This is without any of the text or boxes but I think it’s fun to see without the red sketchy pencil that I have underneath.

Hope you’re all having a great week as we reach August!

Intern Day is Coming Up

I hope you are all having a good week! I have to say, writing these blog posts and reflecting on the week and what I’ve done has become a really therapeutic process. Also maybe I’m enjoying myself this week even more, because I’m testing out a Bluetooth keyboard that I got for school and for writing on the go without a laptop.

Let’s see what have I been up to. Over the weekend I decided to take the plunge and order some stickers with my own design. I had this great drawing in my sketchbook of a plant with a little face on it’s pot, so I redrew it with the right dimensions and higher quality on my iPad and ordered a small batch of die cut stickers, to see the quality and if I want to get more for the future. It was really cool and I’m looking forward to getting them in the mail in the next week or so.

The process for the Fedora 33 and Fedora 34 wallpapers has started, you can look at the tickets Mo’s created for them here and here. But over the weekend people voted on which scientist/mathematician/inventor/amazing human being for inspiring the wallpaper, and Walter Lincoln Hawkins was chosen for Fedora 33, and Ub Iwerks was chosen for Fedora 34. I compiled a document full of info for all of the options, which I hope was helpful to others, but at least it was helpful to me.

Walter Lincoln Hawkins was an African American chemist and engineer widely regarded as a pioneer of polymer chemistry. He was instrumental in designing long-lasting plastic to sheath telephone cables, enabling the introduction of telephone services to thousands of Americans, especially for rural communities.

Ub Iwerks was an American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician, who invented the multiplane camera for animation in 1933. The last movie to use this technique at Disney, I believe was The Little Mermaid.

These are some sketches that I did, working through some ideas on how to represent the inspiration for the wallpapers.

The intern team reached out to me from the Intern team last week and proposing a side project to me for National Intern Day which is on July 30th! Which was super exciting. A perfect example to remember why it’s important to show your process and document your work so its shareable for others. I’m making some illustrations for Red Hat’s different social media platforms. This illustration was my first idea, of a black and white photo of two current interns, with the Red Hat red on them somehow.

It would be cool to make gifs for Red Hat’s instagram.

As for the coloring book pages I’ve finally settled on a new schedule for myself. Bezier-ing continues to be a challenge but it’s getting easier and quicker. This was what I screenshotted after I first started using the tool. I’m glad the words are still round and loopy. It’s a shame because I spent a lot of Monday and Tuesday lining the cover with the pen tool and mixing the tools only to realize they weren’t compatible and scrapped it. Ah well. A learning experience.

Hope you’re all having a wonderful week!

-Madeline

(Practically!) Half Way Through Internship

Can you believe that tomorrow on the 17th it’s officially half way through my summer internship?! I can’t :O

Let’s see what have I been up to?

Over the weekend I finished creating a really low key zine for my 11 year old neighbor.

It ended up being 20 pages I believe, I went over each feature of the face and it turned out pretty well for around 13 hours of work spaced out over two ish weeks. My parents have a black and white printer so I made sure all the art was on a grey scale so I could give a physical copy. I think if I actually made proper zines of these I’d want to add and change a few things so I wouldn’t feel guilty for charging a few bucks but this was a great test run :)

On Monday and Tuesday I finished wrapping up all the changes that our technical reviewers made and then after figuring out how to easiest make a pdf- sent it out with a little doodle. Maybe this would be helpful for other people to include for time sensitive emails haha.

After working on simplifying the Flock logos and remembering how hard the bezier tool in vector programs are- Mo recommended me some really great tutorials and practice programs which I’ve been doing. They’re fun but kinda hard, and if you have a touch screen or tablet this game may be worth a try!

Mo also let me know about the Fedora 33 and Fedora 34 wallpaper tickets on Fedora so now it’s time to crank up the ol’ brain storming machine and start thinking ideas :).

Hope your weeks are all going well!

-Madeline

Quarantine Slump

I’ve been desperately trying to search for the post I saw that captured this more eloquently, but summed up it asked the question, ‘Are you experiencing caution restlessness? Accidentally being more careless, seeing more friends even at a distance?’ It made me think, I haven’t left my house in over a month? But I have interacted with the same neighbors semi regularly and have I been making sure to do so safely?

If you’re guilty of this as I am, it’s important to make sure we’re looking after ourselves. Getting adequate sleep, eat three meals a day, and implement a simple exercise routine are the first steps. And be kind to yourself in this time :) If you want, lemme know how you are in a comment!

This week I wrapped up making a video for the July Madness Intern Video contest with the theme “school spirit”

You can vote by liking my comment with the video in it here on the mojo page!

Last week I submitted some logo ideas to the Nest ticket and I had to clean up the ones they enjoyed. Went through some inkscape tutorials to refresh and see if I was doing anything slower then some tips and tricks.

Attended Boston’s lightning talks and got me thinking of potentially doing my own towards the end of the summer.

Going through the changes for the coloring book so I can send them out in an email to the reviewers by Friday hopefully, and speaking of the reviewers.

And I asked the technical reviewers to send pictures of themselves so we could put a credit page with drawings of them, thanking them. So I have three sketches because I have three selfies haha.

I know this week I struggled with staying motivated however someone just recommended me the podcast ‘Creative Pep Talk’ which I think will be a huge help to listen to for fun while working, and remembering you can’t wait for motivation to do work :).

Finished Storyboards!

First off the storyboards for the Knative coloring book, all 20 pages are all done! 🥳 Click here to read them all together in a pdf!

My feelings are captured similarly in this high five session going on between Snow White and the Dwarves!

On Monday I wrapped up the last details on the pages and on Tuesday we had two meetings with our amazing technical reviewers who helped make sure the script was accurate and gave the thumbs up towards the images that correlated with the script! It was really amazing hearing some feedback face to face from people besides my family.

I also came up with a few logo ideas for the Nest logo, which is related to Flock I believe. A lot of logo design is just small changes and as your keep drawing and designing, you keep getting ideas!

I also attended an executive talk this week which was really interesting to listen to. I believe it was by DeLisa Alexander (Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer) and hearing about her career track and how she encouraged working for cool places who actually took listened to your demands was an important thing to remember.

Next things on the immediate to do for the workday list include:

1. Finish making the changes for the script and panels

2. Compile all the selfies from the technical reviewers into cartoon faces for their credit page

3. Play around with vector-izing stuff finally!

On the less immediate personal to do list for the three day weekend:

1. This one’s actually related to work. There’s an intern video challenge that needs to be submitted by Monday at 5pm, and I do love making videos! It only has to be one minute long and I finally have an idea for the prompt which is “school spirit”. I think I’m going to make a promotional video for a made up college. We shall see!

2. Lately in the intern bootcamps and just with other interns, we have discussed successful linkedin profiles and other social media type profiles. It has made me realize now more then ever, that I need to make some professional icons and banners for my various platforms that make it clear to my audience I am a ✨ professional artist ✨ haha

3. Gonna make a pavlova tomorrow because I dream of sweet sugary desserts.

Almost done with storyboards!

Wherever you are I hope you’re having a good day :)

I’m over half way to finishing the storyboards of all 20 pages for the coloring project, and by this time next week I’ll have had a meeting with the technical review board to go over all the pages and see what everyone’s opinions are. These are a few of my favorite pages that I’ve worked on this week, but as a reminder you can see all of them here on github as I upload them! Perspective has caused me some trouble this week but I’ve laid out my troubles and solutions. For the next week I’m just going to be working hard to finish these up for the weekend, and then get ready whatever presentation I need to for the technical review.

I finally got Snow into a kimono surrounded by koinobori (carp-shaped windsocks) which is only one panel, but I think I can go back into the pages and add some nods to her being Japanese :) Obviously theres more to being Japanese then just this!

the process

On Wednesday I finished one of the more complicated perspective wise pieces and as I worked on it i took some screenshots to share how I build something like this. I’ve always been slightly intimidated by backgrounds but this past semester we were being thrown into them even more (think like throwing a baby into the pool when you’re teaching them to float) and this is a great challenge.

This is the finished image.

I can still tell that there are a few areas that make my eyes squint with “Something’s off” but for now it is fine, and if I can’t figure it out I can ask some people who’s perspective skills are higher than mine for advice.

I should have made the canvas a bit bigger for this process but honestly I forgot I could have marked the canvas boarder, enlarge it, and then cropped it back later. But the first step is to pick the points for your perspective, this being two point, I had one on the page, and one off the page (the problem child haha). I also added some vertical lines throughout the page.

Grabbed a reference of what my oven area wanted to look like and started drawing Snow White and her pie. I later changed the angle, as well as the position of her arm. This was a pretty busy scene and I wasn’t sure if I should have this be in a back room setting or split, and I ended up including the smaller box to show a back room with Tekton and Service Mesh.

I’m pretty content with Snow White, the oven and the shelf and I actually started drawing Service Mesh out here, before remembering he’d be doing a different job. Time to draw the baked goods!

This was the last screenshot I took as most of the perspective and background was built, and the rest of the page went pretty quickly!

I hope you are all having a good week and enjoyed this little look into my process.

-Madeline

Work Update

My last post was a dip into talking about my work that I’ve been doing, and as I type this I’m listening to a Red Hat meeting on how to support your Black Associates. In the past two weeks the Black Lives Matter movement has extended even more across the globe, sparked this time by the unjust murder of George Floyd. The movement was initially created in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. I suggest if you haven’t looked around their website that you take advantage of the resources provided, as well as the lists of important texts and books by black authors being shared around the internet. There are no shortage of podcasts as well (I’m currently listening to Fanti). Black lives have always mattered, they are beloved, and needed. Every time I as a white person feel the need to speak on the current situation, I need to take a step back and ask, “Is this going to drain black people emotionally? Am I going to unintentionally add to the trauma that they are going through? Am I in my lane?” Don’t talk about the racist conversations you try to shut down to your black friends, just so that they can give you a medal, because no ones giving them a medal for all the racist encounters they experience. Sit in your discomfort but don’t stop learning, continue to sign petitions, donate, and if you can go to protests then do so safely.

Black lives matter.

And now I provide a sneaky peak of one of the pages I’ve been working on this week, which I hope that you will enjoy as you take time to take care of yourself.

I save all my files and jpegs of the coloring book here on github, so if you’re curious about what else is getting wrapped up it’s all out in the open before I even create my blog post.

Right now I have a few several pages created and formatted that I’ve been jumping back and forth from, so I guess you’ll just have to wait until they’re done, or download my saved files for krita on github haha.

Stay safe out there!

First Week of my Affair with Fedora

Hello! So perhaps I should introduce myself really quickly.

I'm Madeline, I'm 21 years old, I've lived in the same house my entire life, I'm the oldest of three (I used to be able to pin my two younger brothers at the same time, and then they kept growing *sad resigned face*. They remind me that's in the past now [but really we love each other!]) I've wanted to be an illustrator ever since I heard that it was a proper job at the beginning of high school, and I adore drawing. Since it'll be awhile before any of us actually meet imagine me at 5'8" so you really get the tall energy through the computer screen.

I am developing a new, openly-licensed coloring book in the style of the SELinux Coloring Book and the Containers Coloring Book, in order to help explain kubernetes technical concepts and open source technology to a wide audience. I am going to be developing storyboards for the next two weeks, which I will then clean up to produce a final, print-ready coloring book for the end of the summer.

This doodle like page was after I downloaded Krita (which by the way is amazing? My dad said to our family, "Madeline has been drinking the open source cool aide a lot this week" but honestly I think kids who want a digital program that's way cheaper than Adobe would love Krita) and was trying to set up my tablet, figure out what brushes were speaking to me, and how the characters for the story should look.

Everyone really likes the huge mustache-y dwarf apparently. Which makes me extremely glad.

This is the storyboard/rough version of the cover.

And the back cover.

These below, are my first pass at creating a layout for all the pages at once while looking at the script.

I don't expect many to understand what is happening, but I wanted to have a clearer idea of how many pages I needed to be working on in a day. Also it's interesting because Mo said 12-20 pages, and I really hit the limit with 20 pages exactly lol.

And having the general overview will help me make these more clearer, and in the style of the cover and back cover, to present to the technical advisors on the project.

Have a wonderful start to your week!

- Madeline