Sunday, 18-Dec-16 12:40:33 CET

Sonia 18 December 2016

It is Sunday 18 December and I am on my way to the last model painting session of the year! The train is absolutely smacking full. I got myself a place to sit with a little table so I am one of the lucky few. It is a little bit awkward to write a blog post in public like this when people are leaning over your shoulder watching what you are doing but I think of it like so that it is just a matter of time before I placed this on Internet so they can as well read it while I am writing it!

Perhaps I have not been talking about my book project? I writing a book! It is a users manual for a synthesizer. Not just any synthesizer but Harmor from Image-Line. It is a subtractive additive synthesizer. It all started in August this year 2016. Image-Line released a new version of FLStudio and in it they updated Sytrus. I had already written a book about Sytrus, or better said, updated a book. The Sytrus book was originally written by Erik, living in the USA, a long time ago. His book was released as jpg images and open source. Highly inconvenient format. I decided to convert it to PDF. Now, this was some years back. This August when Image-Line released 12.3 of their software they updated the Sytrus user interface and then I got the idea to revision the book. While working on it I could not help but rewrite much of the texts.

When I had finished the Sytrus book I decided to write my entirely own book – about Harmor! So in my spare time, I worked on this new project. Right now I produced 18 chapters and 100 pages. The original documentation from Image-Line is not convenient for an inexperienced user. The user interfaces, for example, doesn't match what is written in the manual. Many times the manual is repeating the text of the button.

This means that this is not just a write-up but it is actually finding out what happens inside the software. I am trying to include the user into this research. I create sample projects and link to these from within the text. It works excellent actually. When clicking the link in the PDF the sample project is downloaded and opened inside FLStudio. At this point, I don’t know how many pages it is going to become. I learn a lot while working on this project.

Now I am almost in Amsterdam. There is an exhibition of Marilyn Monroe going on in the city. Perhaps I can get to see it?

The model today was Sonia from Italy. I decided to zoom in a little bit more on her today and to paint her from another angle. I think it will be nice with the combination of the painting from the previous session with the same model from different angles and composition.