Steampunk Drink Automaton
Having a lot of time to think when training dogs or walking them around the lakes, I have a lot to discuss. However, extreme lack of sleep is beginning to tell on me and I am not certain I could be truly coherent. Tomorrow will most likely be a repeat of same automaton nature of my brain. I will briefly say I was thinking of people I have known and their diets through part of the day. Both lifestyle diets and those frequently on one diet or another. a trend is apparent showing two basic approaches to diet, regardless of details. One, is the deprivation, denial, and restriction approach. The other is a fulfillment of need, desire, or an attempt of similar.
Deprivation eating restricts some portion and often most of a persons eating, often to excess. Observation says this often leads to drastic deviations from restrictions and shortage of a sort that must be corrected by other means such as drinks or vitamins. This however, is not my point. My thought was how quite unhealthy this seems; not merely from a physical standpoint but from a mental and emotional standpoint. How does this constant focus of restriction, deprivation, and avoiding the things you crave or are interested in impact your other portions of self?
Personally, I do not diet. I have eaten fairly restricted dies, such as vegetarian, at times. But for me it is not a matter of restricting my intake, it is a result of paying attention to my system, my body, my activity, my environment, and my health to know what I need and what cravings are indicating. A craving for sugar is quite specific if you have learned to pay attention to the differences. Is it ice cream, soda, sweet tea, fruit, candy, what are you craving. What is going on in your life or system that is causing this. Now you should know what you really need. For me those particular cravings usually indicate a need for potassium, calcium, C, or a couple other things. Environment and local climate alters cravings and needs.
Anyway…back to the matter at hand. I drew a steampunk drink automaton in pencil very old using motorcycle parts as a base. I then uploaded into GIMP and added color. I made a decision to leave it partially shaded to highlight the feel of the drawing and the sketch quality. I hope you enjoy. I am also uploading a slightly different version of my color work. He runs on leather tracks set in wood and brass fittings and has an extendable, bi-rotational tray arm to maintain balance of drink tray.
Art's Folly 
You appear to be doing better with GIMP than I do; every time I try to colourise/texturise an image it goes a little wonky.
I would be interested in seeing the sketch before GIMPing for comparison.
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I can do that. I have it on my computer. It takes work and practice. I created textures from pictures of objects and then I layer them and blend them to get what I want. It is slow. I think some things in GIMP are much harder than they need to be. I cannot seem to find a way to effectively draw lines and circles for instance. I am used to AutoCAD though. Just cannot find mine, and it takes longer to set up than GIMP does. I am going to try and create my own brushed and palettes next week. I often will overlay a blank layer to try things, merge it down if I like it or create another to test combinations. GIMP seems better for editing and coloring than drawing frankly. I am not sure how people without a good Wac-om pad draw in it.
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Coming at it from the direction of someone who last studied art when computers were either for word processing or complex maths, I have no real comparison to other professional level programs.
I started using GIMP because my camera had poor setting control and an inaccurate viewfinder, so I just wanted to tweak light balance and crop/rotate images.
I tried drawing in it to save the effort of scanning and tweaking sketches; it is easier than MS Paint, but I agree it is not easy creating from scratch.
For some reason it had never occurred to me to use a fresh layer to add new textures &c.
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See, I really want to improve my camera skills. That is what started me really using GIMP, I like photo manipulation and related forms. I also recommend the Google art program Sketch-up for drawing. even the free version is actually quite useful, we even learned it in architecture classes at one point. My husband recommends Inkscape, it’s a vector program. I am going to try it.
Regarding the layers. Use them for everything, is my recommendation. It saves frustration. I will use a few and do different parts on different ones, so I can turn them off and see the difference. when I’m sure I want something I will merge and then make new layers for the next step, to save processing and memory. My recommendation for lighting and effects or to drop images in the texture folder and just try things under various settings and see what they do. The grain merge setting at a lowered opacity is very useful.
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