Getting Festive

Having spent a good chunk of yesterday over at my folks' place (ended up actually making my pie over there, rather than attempt to transport the finished product and, yes, it went down very well... but I have the remainder to polish off), I've been fairly inactive today. Not completely inactive, of course... I still seem to have some energy and inclination for arty stuff so, for no more reason than simply doing something festive, I grabbed a sketch I did around this time of year a decade ago, scanned it nice and fresh, and coloured it up in Photoshop.

Turned out pretty well... a bit scrappy, but I'm still very lazy when it comes to colouring things. Even managed to print out the finished product, just for fun, and to make sure I'm getting something like continual usage out of my inkjet printer.

Considering I got it for my birthday, and I'm reasonably competent with computers and peripherals, I'm surprised it's taken me this long to unearth the paper quality settings... In one dialogue box, it seems to imply that the printer auto-detects the quality of paper being used, and adjusts its ink output accordingly. I'm not sure I trust that, and prefer to define 'high quality' myself, just in case. The real surprise, though, was that the setting did not appear to be in any way hidden.

Then again, I did get a firmware/software upgrade download a while back, so that may have altered and extended the functionality of the software...

This coming week, I really need to sort out Christmas presents... I've bought them all, but need to wrap them. My mother's is already wrapped (I had the sense to select gift wrap on my online order!), but presents for my father, sister and niece still need to be properly encased.

It's something I keep putting off simply because I'm no good at wrapping presents... I always seem to cut off either too much or too little paper, so the folding bits overlap themselves excessively, or don't quite meet, let alone overlap. And I'm not too good at making the folds, either...

Oh well... Practice makes perfect, they say...