Because I love many things

Recently lego came out with a new random pack collectible set that I have begun obsessing over. Today, I stopped by Newbury Comics and picked up three in hopes of getting a zombie and the mexican wrestler. When I went to pay for them the cashier told me about how people have been reading the barcodes so they can get the figures they want.  

Being the curious person I am, I immediately rushed home and found a sheet of readable lego barcodes at bricks.inof.de

You can snag a PDF of the codes and their corresponding figures here.

Lego if you read this; You need to take a lesson from KidRobot and box those bags too, even without the code you can still squish them.

A little background about myself, I am a traditional illustrator and am used to doing everything the old treeware way with pen, ink, and brush. So when I picked up a book on digital painting my traditional misconceptions have been thrown out the window.

Paintings use photo overlays to help with textures and lighting. 
Mmany digital artists will use photos qtop of their paintings to add extra depth. This could mean applying a photo of treebark to an painting of a tree or treeman. The result is unbelievable depth and complexity that would take a traditional oil painter ages to accomplish.

Photoshop brushes are your friend
Photoshop gives digital painters the ability to create complex things such as scales on a fish, links in a chain, or blades of grass in an instant. All they have to do is create the first initial brush and off they go. 

Command of lighting and color
Thanks to layering technology artists are free to add and remove colors at will or apply global filters to completely change the ambience of a scene. 

It’s ok to use Gaussian Blur or Reduce Opacity
In traditional media creating a photo with a blurry foreground or background would require premeditation and careful planning. But, techniques photographers use to achieve vignettes can easily be applied to digital paintings and can often save a painter countless hours. The same goes for creating ghostly figures, why spend countless hours trying to paint transparency when a simple adjustment of a slider does it for you.

These are just a few of the things i have picked up in my reading, I can;t wait to actually apply these lessons, so keep your eyes peeled for a pictorial follow up.