Sunny Day on Harris

Illustration of a traditional Scottish cottage on a flowering meadow (Machair), surrounded by the sea. It's a beautiful day, there's sheep and birds and mountains in the background.

„Sunny Day on Harris“

This has been waiting patiently in my unfinished-pile to be rediscovered ^__^

I love summer in the #OuterHebredis and the #Machair* is such a thing of beauty!

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machair

#JfmlArt #art #illustration #creative #DigitalArt #FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #ArtistsOnMastodon #Harris #Scotland #landscape #animals #birds #StandingStoneSunday #mountains #nature #sheep #ocean #summer #spring

The Selkie / Winter Morning

Vector illustration of a young, white child with long, braided hair standing on the edge of a lake in a snowy landscape. In the lake is a mermaid-creature with a seal-tail. The selkie is almost completely underwater only the top of their head is above the surface. There is an eerie glow coming from the bottom of the lake.
The same illustration but it's not snowing.

I really enjoyed #JonKlassen’s #book „The Skull“, so here is a #hommage with a #Scottish twist* ^__^

The #braids almost killed me, I’ve struggled with #drawing braids before and can totally understand when people just draw a bunch of wonky circles (like Klassen does ^__^) but this time I wanted to understand how to do it and it probably took twice as long as all the rest of the illustration. I think the dramatic shadows on them fit the eery glowing light that’s coming from the bottom of the Selkie lake, no idea how I’d do it in „normal“ circumstances …

Not sure about the #snow, I personally love it but I got #feedback on another piece that it makes it the composition very restless, which I totally see.

Snow or no snow, what do you think?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie

#JfmlArt #art #illustration #creative #FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #ArtWithOpenSource #Inkscape #ArtistsOnMastodon #fantasy #fairytale #winter #selkie #scotland #edinburgh

Surfer Space Wizard Raven

Digital drawing of a raven-creature with a wizard-hat surfing a yellow surfboard above a green planet with clouds and floating megastructure cities. There are red moons or other planets in the violet sky.

Hi there ^__^ Here’s a Surfer Space Wizard Raven from a few years back! ✨

Floating, pill-shaped cities in the clouds are cool but I especially like the character, I think that would be a cool motive for a shirt, what do you think?

Have a nice week! 💖

#JfmlArt #art #illustration #creative #DigitalArt #FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #SciFi #ScienceFiction #fantasy #raven #crow #CharacterDesign #planet #weird #surfer #wizard #skull #tshirt #floating

A tree on a hill

A black and white sketch of a bendy tree with round canopy on a round hill.

Here’s something a bit different from my usual #style from the #archive: A nice bendy #tree #sketch 🎉

I like it how you can’t tell of those things are tiny #clouds or part of the #canopy #floating around ^__^

#JfmlArt #art #illustration #creative #DigitalArt #FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #drawing #pencil #BlackAndWhite #landscape #nature

Cosmic Cow

Vector drawing in dark greens and blues of a night-scene with a highland cow on a small peninsular. The cow's reflection in the water reflects the milky way in the sky above. There's a crow sittig on the cow's back but in the reflection it is somehow in flight.

„Cosmic Cow“, first #illustration of the new year 🎉

A magic #cow and it’s time-bending #crow-companion enjoying the night on Harris ^__^

I like #HighlandCows a lot, they’re so chill and cool. This was probably inspired by John Maher’s night photography of the #OuterHebrides:

ISLE OF HARRIS, OUTER HEBRIDES

#JfmlArt #art #creative #DigitalArt #FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #inkscape #landscape #milkyway #astronomy #photography #birds #animals #fantasy #mystery #scotland #harris #blue

How to batch-convert videos with ffmpeg including all audio and subtitles

Since I spend quite a bit of time tinkering with this I though it might be interesting to others.

The following can be executed on a folder with a bunch of videos which ffmpeg will convert including all audio and subtitle streams and put in a subfolder (not very) originally called „Done“ (not sure if you need to create that folder or if ffmpeg will do that*):

for i in *.*; do ffmpeg -hwaccel_output_format cuda -i "$i" -map 0:v:0 -map 0:a? -map 0:s? -c:v hevc_nvenc -b:v 2000k -preset slow -c:a aac -b:a 128k -c:s copy "Done/${i%.*}.mkv"; done

All the for i in for the batch-conversion is way above my tiny „I can’t learn programming“ brain and is taken from this StackExchange thread (among other things I can’t find now). You could do *.mp4 or *.mkv if you only want those types of videos to be converted.

-hwaccel_output_format cuda and -c:v hevc_nvenc? tells ffmpeg to use the GPU with Cuda (so will probably only work with NVIDIA) and use HEVC (x265) as the video-codec.

The interesting bits are -map 0:v:0 -map 0:a? -map 0:s? which selects all video(?), audio streams and subtitles. I was using -map 0 before but this sometimes created empty video or audio streams which caused all video players I tried to crash (except for good old VLC who did not care). Not ideal.

-c:v and -c:a select the audio and video codecs (c = codec) with slow preset in this case, whereas

-b:v and -b:a tells ffmpeg the bitrate (b = bitrate).

-c:s copy copies the subtitles.

* Edit: You do need to have a folder withe name you specify there in the folder where you run the script. If someone knows how to automate that I’d be happy to hear how ^__^

The Peninsular

Digital drawing of a night scene: A person is standing on top of a cliff looking down at the ocean and a peninsular with a tower on it. The moon is full and there are towering anime clouds in the background.

Hello ^__^ I realised I never posted the finished version of these sketches (1), so here it is!

I’m not super happy with the colours and the outlines but it was a nice, very meditative experiment ✨

(1) https://mastodon.art/@jfml/110695867856903358

#JfmlArt #art #illustration #creative #DigitalArt #FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #Krita #painting #landscape #beach #ocean #clouds #fantasy #night #moon #magic #witch #bird #seagull #travel

Nach der Zeit – Cityscape

A nightly streetscene with old houses that are partly submerged in water. In the distance two reed moons and a cloud kinda form a monster's face

Hej ^__^

Here’s another #illustration from my #diploma (1),which I like a lot, I feel like this #cityscape harkens back to my prediploma (2) which was a reaction to my #erasmus #studenexchange in #Istanbul (which was very good but as a lover #nature it was a strange experience).

(1) https://jfml.eu/2009/09/illustration-nach-der-zeit/

(2) https://jfml.eu/2009/10/illustration-ein-labyrinth-ein-traum/

JfmlArt #art #creative #DigitalArt #FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #underwater #apocalypse #climatecrisis #wallpaper #fantasy #night #dream #surreal #monster #flooded #TraditionalArt

Love Music, Fight Fascism!

Round illustration on a pink background with a boombox-character dancing happily on a broken swastika. Text around it says „Love music, fight fascism“.

Aus aktuellem Anlass (und schon wieder #LateToTheParty 🥳) mein #OldieButGoldie #Antifasticker, leider ohne Reim aber immerin #cute ^__^

JfmlArt #art #illustration #creative #DigitalArt #FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #CharacterDesign #süss #NoAFD #NieWiederIstJetzt #FightFascism #LoveMusic #antifa #ekelfhAFD #FCKAFD #Music #Hiphop #Rap #Boombox #Oldschool #antifascist #AlwaysAntifascist

ArtVsArtist 2023

ArtVsArtist2023: A picture divided into nine squares, the middle one is a rather dorky photo of yours truly with the hoodie up, drinking something with a (paper) straw, the rest are illustrations I've finished 2023.

Late to the party as always (🥳) here’s an #ArtVsArtist2023 thingy (I’m super unsure about putting my face on the internet but since this is not going to #Instagram anymore I feel better about it).

I feel there’s a lot of #pink going on which is really nice ^__^ I hope I’ll remember doing more of these in the future, it’s a good way of looking at the past year.

Late to the party as always (🥳) here’s an #ArtVsArtist2023 thingy (I’m super unsure about putting my face on the internet but since this is not going to #Instagram anymore I feel better about it).

There’s a lot of #pink going on which is really nice ^__^ I hope I’ll remember doing more of these in the future, it’s a good way of looking at the past year.

#JfmlArt #art #illustration #creative #DigitalArt #FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #inscape #blender3d #fantasy #cute #birds #science #space

Bye, Insta.

I just finally quit posting to Instagram, this is the text of my last post:

I’ll take the news that Insta’s parent evilcorp Meta has a new AI tool trained on „billions“ of Insta’s images as the final straw (it’s as good as any, really) to not post here anymore.

Sure, rich, white techbros will steal my art to get even richer with their AI bs no matter where I post it on the internet but at least I will not feed it to them „willingly“ anymore.

Continue reading Bye, Insta.

How to import PDFs as „images“ in Scribus

Since I had to figure this out multiple times now (because I always forget how to do it +___+), here’s a workflow that seems to be working for me to add white frames of different widths to different sized pages to vector illustrations – my local printer The Art of Print (which is amazing ^__^) here in Edinburgh wants it that way.

I need page sizes ranging from A5 to A2, including borders between 5 mm and 2 cm.

Screenshot of Scribus showing the same illustration on different sized pages.

Yesterday I figured out that it should be possible to do this in Inkscape with clones but there seems to be a bug that just exports nothing instead of clones on a new page (and cloning a whole illustration is no fun because you need to put it all in one top layer with sublayers).

After a lot of fiddling I remembered that in Scribus you can actually import PDFs (but not SVGs, apparently) as images into image frames (ctrl-i or rightclick > Content > Get Image) if you change the „Files of Type“(?) to „All supported formats“.

This imports the vector graphic as an image (not what we want at all!) but unlike File > Import > Get Vector file which imports (or rather appends, inserts) the PDF or SVG as editable objects this cuts the image at the original page border (yay).

You can then arrange the PDF / image just as you need on pages and when exporting it to a PDF for printing you can check the box on the PDF export dialogue in General > File Options > Embed PDF & EPS files (EXPERIMENTAL!) to export the PDF „image“ as vectors. This has always worked well for me so far.

Scribus PDF-export dialogue with the Embed PDF-Files option highlighted

Thanks to Raghavendra Kamath for pointing out this last trick out to me, otherwise this whole process would be useless ^__^

Now I just need to remember how to do this when I need it again in a few months …

Door to Summer

Sketch in blue on white of a mountain lake with a tiny island in the middle. There's a giant crystal hovering above it and in one of it's sides you can see another landscape with flowers.

Let’s continue with the #winter theme ^ _ ^

I wanted to try #manga style grey-toning and it is a lot of fun (but as I feared it’s a nightmare to export for Web / as a JPG).

#JfmlArt #art #illustration #creative #DigitalArt #FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #Krita #ArtWithOpenSource #sketch #BlackAndWhite #landscape #snow #crystal #fantasy #lake #birds #ArtAdventCalendar

„Fixing“(?) Duplicati MissingRemoteHash error

I recently got a few errors like this:

2023-11-30 23:46:34 +00 - [Warning-Duplicati.Library.Main.Operation.FilelistProcessor-MissingRemoteHash]: remote file duplicati-[stringofnumbersandletters].dblock.zip is listed as Verified with size 0 but should be 52383505, please verify the sha256 hash "[anotherstringofnumbersandletters]"

rebuild-missing-dblock-files and no-local-blocks (saw that on the Duplicati forum) didn’t work, so I copied the files Duplicati was complaining about somewhere else and deleted the originals.

I then deleted and recreated the database via the Web-GUI (got errors that said files where missing and registered as such 😱), ran backup again, no warnings or errors, anymore. Profit?

There’s a lingering doubt that the files are just gone and not recreated but at least there are no more errors +__+

Inprnt prints

Another photo of a print with a whole lotta birds in front of a landscape.
A photo, this motif is a room with a cluttered desk in front of a window opening out to a fantastical landscape with dragons and giants.
Photo of a print lying on a carpet. The illustration is of a person flying on a giant bird to a castle on top of a mountain that's guarded by a white wolf.

The new test #prints I ordered from #Inprnt arrived super fast! 🎉

And just like last time they’re just tooo good! ✨

#Redbubbe or #Society6 don’t come even close to it +__+ My photos don’t do the vibrant colours and deep blacks justice at all, they’re so amazing! I can’t get over it ^__^

I didn’t have to pay custom fees this time, which is interesting. I don’t know if this is down to just luck or the fact that last time they arrived in a tube and this time in a flat (big) letter. The packaging was excellent as well, quite sturdy and well made.

Get prints here:

https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/jfml/

EDIT: Ordered some more for my family, I had to pay customs (Germany not UK?) this time (7€ on a 100€ order) but the prints are just mind-blowing again! Aaahhh, if only we had something like this in Europe that does not get flown in from the US! 😭 There has to be something, right?

How to fix hyphenation not working for Scribus on Fedora Linux

I just found out how to fix #hyphenation not working in #Scribus on #Fedora (probably for #languages that aren’t system language):

Check that the text frame (Windows > Content Properties), character and paragraph styles (Edit > Styles, maybe you need to double click on a style to edit) are all the correct language (in my case German on an English system).

If Extras > Hyphenate Text still isn’t working, go to Windows > Resources > Hyphenation Dictionaries and check that you have the correct .dics installed (for me it was only English) and download the appropriate ones if necessary. You can also see the path where they are installed on the system here, so you could manually move a .dic there if you manage to find one.

Tadaa 🎉

Pumpkin Cat Wendy

Illustration of a cat sitting on a carved pumpkin that is flying through the air, with a full moon and clouds in the background. The pumpkin has vampire teeth and tiny Will-o'-the-wisps in it's eyes.

You’ve heard of Skate Cat Wendy* now get ready for:

Pumpkin Cat Wendy! 🎃 🐈‍⬛ 🌕

This came from of the many pun-laden back-and-forths between my partner and me but this time it actually turned into something ^__^

You can buy it on my #Inprnt ✨:

https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/jfml/pumpkin-cat-wendy/

Happy #halloween!

#FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #JfmlArt #art #illustration #creative #DigitalArt #cat #mastoween #cute #adorable #spooky #moon #krita

* https://jfml.eu/2016/10/illustration-skaterkatze-wendy/

Solar System

Abstract model of a solar system on a pink / salmon coloured floor, rendered with Blender3D. A big glowing orb in the centre, with copper circles (orbits) around it. More spheres on the circles (planets) with copper rings (orbits) and smaller spheres (moons) around the center. They're all made of „natural“ materials, like glass, wood, fabric, copper etc.
Portrait variant of the same motif but with a smaller sun and three blue glass half-spheres arranged around the sun, protecting it?
Another variant with green sphere cuts shielding the sun, wrapping around it from above instead of the sides like the last variant.
Last variant, again with blue glass, this time they kind of look like an abstract blossom or leaves, enclosing the sun?

Hi! ^__^

Which variant do you like best? Anything I could change / do better?

I found out recently the @kde@floss.social is doing a #wallpaper #contest for #plasma6!

Themes are:

  • Trustworthy […]
  • „A reflection of me“ (i.e. personalized, familiar, comfortable, „fits like a glove“)
  • Personal growth […]

What my #subconscious (?) has come up with is kind of a #solarsystem #model? Weird!

@kde@floss.social I’m also kinda getting #DysonSphere(1) #SciFi vibes from this which I like ^__^

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #JfmlArt #art #illustration #creative #DigitalArt #blender #blender3d #b3d #planets #abstract

Birds!

A vector illustration of a landscape stuffed with (European) birds, there's probably 25 of them including crow, blue tit, jackdaw, seagull, owl and many more.
Detail of the illustration featuring a jay, a robin and a swan (and a house in the landscape).
Another detail with a swift, a crow and a kingfisher, all flying in the sky with clouds in the background.

So many #birds! 🐦‍⬛🦉🦢🦅🪿 Who is your favourite?

Started this project over a year ago as a birthday present (it’s a #jigsaw #puzzle! I didn’t take any photos when we did it 🤦‍♀️) and now it’s finally here!

Testing out #Society6 as an #printer with this one (and #CutePlanets), check it out:

https://society6.com/jonaslaugs/designs

Greeting Cards!

Photo of three square greeting cards with birds on them, on a wooden floor.
More close-up photo of the cards, the birds are a jackdaw, a blue tit and a robin.

They’re here! 🥰✨

I’ll be selling #GreetingCards printed at pennybatchgallery.co.uk at this year’s #ColonyOfArtists!

And they’re #beautiful! Printed on #recycled paper, with #EcoKraft envelopes and #compostable wrappers (just like my #prints).

Come round the #weekend after next in #Edinburgh’s #Abbeyhill to have a look ^__^

Character-Sketches

An illustration of five people, all rather fat, old and/or bulky, done in (digital) ink with blue shade.

Hallo ^ _ ^ Instead of bringing you something #ColonyOfArtists-related (which is in less then a month in #Edinburgh, #Scotland!) …

Here are a few sketches of older women main characters. Some day I want to do a #ChildrensBook or #Comic about an #old #adventurer who has lived #TheQuietLife for a few decades and goes on another #quest. Mh, that sounds like a #TerryPratchett #novel doesn’t it?

Postcards!

Reprints of some of my #postcards hot of the presses, yay! ✨

I’ll be selling them (along with #prints, #stickers etc) here in #Edinburgh on #Colobee (aka #ColonyOfArtists) in September but I’m also thinking of putting them on my #Kofi

Would you rather want to buy postcards in packs or individual? What would be a good pack-size?

Bluetit

Vector illustration of a tiny bluetit with a meadow, clouds and mountains in the background. It is very cute.

Look at this super cute #bluetit! Just look at it, it’s just too cute ^__^

JfmlArt #art #illustration #creative #DigitalArt #FediArt #MastoArt #CreativeToots #vector #landscape #abstract #nature #animals #Inkscape #cute #adorable #birb #bird #birds #birding #birdart