I was thinking, before all this crazy flooding, about being in art classes and my peers and teachers and all of that. Since I turned 23 this week, and 13 was about when I got into comics.
And I really wish that 10 years ago someone had said to me, "Hey kid, you're awful. Stop trying to stylize things you don't understand and learn how to draw them from life first."
I would've thrown a fit, but I think I would have started to do more life drawing earlier. When all you get are compliments, it's easy to get a big ego and plateau out. When you don't understand how the thing you're stylizing looks in reality, it usually comes out looking wrong.
Anyway that's what happened to me for a long time, and I think that's a mindset that a lot of my classmates still have.
But then again, those same students make going to class hilarious every single day. It's their style, and anyone who dares question it is just jealous.
P.S. Life drawing. DO IT!
Forget the rainboots, I need a pair of goddamn hip waders.
At 8:30am Thursday there was just a little bit of water, the usual flooding we've had all summer. Four hours later it was everywhere. The creek must have started rising 2+ feet per hour. My friend and I watched the water come up SIX INCHES in about 20 minutes. They were using boats to get people, pets, and belongings out. My mom managed to flag down a guy with a truck who was willing to drive her through the water so she could grab our cats and a few other things. It was a scary afternoon, watching debris float by and not knowing if our home was flooded or not.
Friday the cops let us back in. Luckily the apartment complex was specifically landscaped so the buildings are above the floodplain. They became little islands when the water finally crested. The mobile home park across the street looks like it's been completely destroyed, and several other homes flooded.
Water's down about a foot now. I want to go look around and take some more pictures.
Flash floods: don't fuck with 'em. Get what you absolutely need and get out.
Bought rainboots because of the crazy wet summer we've been having here. Something like 1-3 inches of rain per week, all summer, along with a bunch of intense thunderstorms. Wettest summer in 118 years as of a month ago. Anyway, they came in handy when I had to get my car out of rising floodwater at 2 AM the next morning.
Still researching for Pilgrim! Learning some interesting things :)
Whoa back to school next week. Crazy.
I dreamed about a man walking through a forest. He came to a tree and plucked a fruit from its branches. Then the tree reached down and ripped out a clump of his hair. He had a sword and was about to strike the tree, but thought better of it, apologized to the tree, and went on his way.
I've also been doing some general research to lay proper groundwork for Pilgrim. Now I've got a better sense of what I want to try and model the different countries on, and I'm almost ready for more specific research.
con in less than five days, ffffff.
Just got back from seeing relatives, think I might have picked up some illness from the cousins' little kidnicks. One aunt/uncle have 10 grandkids, all girls; another have 3, all boys, with another (gender unknown) on the way.
Chapter 1 needs editing, chapter 2 is half written after about an hour. There was a lot of groundwork to lay in the beginning, but I wonder if it's too much. Might need to spread that out a bit, so it doesn't turn into walls of text and talking heads.
Need more research on the historical time frame I'm basing their little continent on. I think I'm calling the country to the west Port because of all the natural bays and harbors. It's capital, Port of Crowns, is near the ocean on one of the harbors. It isn't a big country, but it does a lot of trade and has many colonies.
The country to the east is still nameless and having problems with two warring minorities after one tried to form their own country. The ruling majority thought it would putter out quickly, but several years later it's become an all out war.
The country to the east of the east is full of ambitious bastards who want to create an empire.
The country that the story starts in needs a name, but the capital is named Sonia after the first Queen. They do not recognize the little country to the north in the barren foothills. It used to be their land, but they were fine with a minority group struggling to live there until gold was discovered. They've been fighting on and off for 100 years, and the gold is pretty much gone now. Port got most of it, since they share a small stretch of border.
Little north country needs a name and capital. They used to be obscenely rich, not so much now.
North of most of those countries is a mountain range, with an arid steppe/grassla
Yay worldbuilding!
One and maybe a quarter of a scene to go for Pilgrim chapter 1 script. My scripts are pretty much just the dialogue with a few notes flung in, yet still somehow take ages to write. Thumbs will be done this weekend, maybe?
Ah hah, oh the students in this art program. "I think X artwork is the best in this chapter because *insert a laundry list of subjective reasons with nary a mention of a single design principle or visual element.*"
Head, meet desk. I get the feeling we will become close friends in the next year and a half.
Whoa, hah. Failed NaNo big time. I ought to know better by now than to try and fly by the seat of my pants, I always fall flat on my ass. I sketched 18 pages, then scrapped half of it, so what I posted a few weeks back is the stuff I'm keeping, with some fixes.
BUT! Pilgrim seems to be heading in a good direction, so hopefully things will start moving more smoothly. More and more excess is getting trimmed out, and it's interesting to see in what areas I'm reverting back to REALLY old bits of plot. Tentative restart is probably going to get pushed back a bit. Need more research.
Caught a cold, bleh. But running a light fever always seems to get the gears clanking, so I dreamt up another idea for a potential comic. Dunno if it's any good yet. Thumbnailed 25 pages of it, while it was still vivid in my mind. I guess I will dub it "Dude who fights jaguars" and file it away with "Girl who talks to birds"
Need to work on Pilgrim thumbs.
Wow, it's been a while since I made a wiki.
NaNoMangO
Now my wisdom teeth meds are knocking me out, so I need to get to bed.
Damn, the animation class I was going to take this summer was canceled because there weren't enough students enrolled. Now I'm going to have to switch around my fall schedule.
At least this will give me more time to get the first chapter of Pilgrim ready for SogenCon at the end of July. My goal is to get it all finished and either print them on a copy machine (wasn't too hard last time), or have the local print shop do it, depending on what they quote me. I just bought a long-arm stapler, so I can assemble them myself. The size of the minis should be about 5x8"
Remember, NaNoMangO is in June! 30 penciled pages, 15 inked, or 10 finished! You can always shoot for more.
Here's the livejournal community http://communi
I'm following along with a bunch of others on GaiaOnline
Pilgrim chapter 1 thumbs are FINALLY done :D 30 pages long, provided I don't alter anything. And I'm about halfway through the script for chapter 2. A bunch of characters got trimmed out for sake of simplicity, but it turns out a lot of it was my problem with trying to shoehorn things in just because.
And the crits I was getting often mentioned how slow the pacing was, so I wanted to speed things up. 30 pages per chapter, at least 2 chapters per year is the goal. While I'm still in school, anyway.
Well, tomorrow morning I get all my wisdom teeth removed, so I think I'll marathon Lord of the Rings and keep plugging away at the chapter 2 thumbs.
http://www.you
Made by animation students at a school in France. I love well done 2D animation. <3
Yikes, I wish I knew what I did to my left shoulder to make it ache so bad. I thought it would get better after a few days, but it only seems to be getting worse. I must be sleeping funny or something. Pain killers, then back to art I suppose.
Nearly done scripting Pilgrim chapter 1, then I just need to finish up thumbs and start sketching. Gonna start inking those volunteer pages I picked up and put in a movie. I've been checking out old Don Bluth / Disney / etc animated films from the library. Very nostalgic.
Gotta pick between Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Iron Giant. Hmmmmmm...
And the semester is done.
I've concluded that half of my classmates are full of shit and how much they hate an instructor is directly proportional to how awesome of a teacher they are.
The standards were damn low, that was disappointing, and half the "fine art" pieces that got into the Student Juried Show were obviously copied from photographs. They were bad copies, too. I mean, really bad. I've seen better from middle school age kids.
I just, argh. The mind boggles.
3D Design was awesome though, I hope I can fit in another course by that instructor. Here is hoping the next semester, with a fresh batch of instructors, is better.
And now it is time for delicious comic making. I think I've had a breakthrough at last with the story for Pilgrim, and just need to pump out the thumbnails now. I'm doing 5 pages for a volunteer comic book project while I wait for my bristol board to arrive. Half penciled in 2 days, definitely booting me out of my comfort zone. First time drawing from someone else's script, too.
PS, NaNoMangO is in June. 30 days, 30 penciled comic pages. I'm gonna do my best!
I also really, really want to practice painting on the computer or with watercolors or something. I've been reading up on color theory.
Go figure I get sick right when school ends. >.<
Gonna put in a movie and draw, too much needs doing in too little time!
Blah. I'm going to go fiddle with character designs or something. The best thing about the Pentel pocket brush pen is that I can ink while sitting in bed or on the sofa and not worry about making a big mess. And the lack of mess in general. I hate cleaning brushes.
Now where did I put the 9x12 bristol...
That pen is my new favorite tool. Erasing did rub off some of the ink, so I need to try a softer eraser next time. But it is lovely on bristol. I keep reading about people who refill the cartridges with different kinds of ink, and India ink can go in it if the pen does not sit unused for too long.
Hacked another chunk off of the comic. Sometimes the only reason I have a certain scene or element in the story in there is because it was written early on. And then I wind up trying to shoehorn it in as other things are changing. And it is just not necessary anymore and needlessly complicates everything else. This is a simple story about finding and keeping company, so let's keep it from getting too complex, eh?
Wondering if I really even want to tone my comic. Designs would need tweaking to work in just black & white, and I'd need to make sure I'm able to show the different ethnicities of the characters. It's been looking decent in the face structure of the last few sketches I've done. I think the challenge will be creating the level of depth and detail I envision without it becoming a huge mess. Those trees will be interesting to wrestle with.
Toning, or at least the way I've been doing it, is just a huge chore for me. In a way it's also been a shortcut. derpderp, don't know what to do with that, throw a tone on call it good.
But I know about the principles of design and the visual elements now, so I have the tools to figure out how to make this work. Thinking back, it's crazy how much I've been flying blind. I have learned so, so much this semester. I can't wait to apply it all to my comic.
I have the rough thumbs for the first scene done, it is currently 14 pages. It's different, but the same. Rae is tougher, more assertive and being a meanie.
I want to try out the brush pen with actual bristles I got for Christmas, but I haven't put an ink cartridge into it yet because I don't want it to sit around unused. My brushes have not been wanting to hold a fine point, the lines of what I've inked lately are thick and uniform and BORING.
School's done next week, finals are in May. Wow. But that means Free Comic Book Day is coming up! :D
Fff, this chapter. Eventually I'm going to have to stop fussing over it and draw. It's the beginning I'm getting hung up on, always the beginning. I need to sit down and just hammer out a script and thumbnails.
Hmmm. I had the thumbnails almost done, but the pacing was going too fast and it felt like character interactions and scenery were getting shortchanged. So. The plan is to get a notebook, and sketch the thumbs at half the size I plan to draw at. With the tiny thumbs and 11x14 actual size, I feel like I'm either crowding or not putting enough into each page.
At least my two-week Morrowind binge seems to be over. I have no more desire to play so I'll actually get some things done this week. I don't even think about that stupid game for months, but when I do play it I get hooked.
EDIT: larger thumbnails are working way WAY better.
Good little video for those shooting for an art career:
http://www.wil
DA update in progress, some stuff I've been doing in my art classes.
http://aeacomi
I know DA (and many other sites) has problems with infected ads, so I use Firefox with the Ad Block+ add-on. Kills almost all the ads and makes surfing the internet a much nicer experience. :)