In early May, we visited the Volcano House at the Volcano National Park (both now closed because of the ongoing oozing of toxic gasses and lava). Whenever I’m there, I stop right outside the entrance and snap a few photos. This time, it was of ferns. Macros, mostly.

Again, I’m impressed with the Note 8 camera. It was cloudy and misty and the light was less than optimal. Given all that, these are pretty good (if I say so myself because others might not). 

Some of the photos were taken with the on-phone flash, but I’m not sure it helped.

You might be able to tell because the colors are slightly different. Not better or worse . . . different.

I had my P900 with me, but I didn’t bother using it because the Note 8 does at least as good a job — if not better — with shooting macros. It’s also easier to deploy. 

So, ferns change in color as they mature . . . they are also rather interesting as far as going through their stages of development. For them who haven’t seen many ferns . . . 

They also manage to amaze (me) when past their prime . . . 

I mentioned drawings . . . 

So, I’ve been playing around with drawing stuff using Infinite painter on the Note 8. Here’s the thing . . . what I am about to show you is the third iteration of this drawing. I thought I had saved the other two but it turns out that I misunderstood how projects are saved and I only have the third iteration . . . 

So, the scene I had in mind was the Monument Valley view from that great scene when Forest Gump stops running and decides to head back home. 

The first iteration had a crappy representation of the road. The above is not perfect (far from it) but it’s better than the initial try.

The second iteration had wagons I had drawn directly on the canvas. The problem is that the tools to draw things like that are not very good. Basically, a brush is not good for detail work and it looked like decrepit wagons pulled by misshapen dogs.  So, I opened up a new drawing and drew the wagon and ox (yes, it’s supposed to be an ox) based on a photo I saw. Not traced (that would be cheating) but using the photo as reference. 

I then copied the above three times and resized each of them for scale after individually coloring them. They didn’t look quite right so I added a shadow under each . . . and it still doesn’t look quite right since they appear to be floating as opposed to contacting terra firma. 

I have some ideas as to how I might improve it . . . I mean both the bringing the wagons into the picture and other details like the clouds and birds. I like the Smoke Signals and I’m reasonably happy with the shading and textures (not enough, but I’m still learning). 

I happen to have a photo from that spot, so I was drawing from memory . . . as it turns out, I wasn’t very close. But, hey, I’m just starting out. 

I need to also include different shading and layers in the sky; too uniform, I made it. The original post of my trip there is HERE.

Here’s the gallery of the above. 

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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