From my sketchbook, a Starchips sketch I doodled yesterday:
Posts Tagged ‘art’
Cartooned
May 9, 2008 – 11:32 am
I had a few minutes between projects, so I took a moment just now to draw a cartoon version of myself based on this picture. The inspiration for this is because I’ve kind of wanted to replace my Gravatar (again, the aforementioned photo), and I kind of like the idea of using a drawn portrait, especially one I’ve done myself. I’m starting to get more comfortable with drawing cartoon people that look semi-real, so I wanted to see if I could draw myself.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a digital version of the final product to display yet, but I quite like the outcome. It took a little bit of experimentation, tweaking, and nudging of graphite to get it right, but what I ended up with is a fair resemblance of myself as I might look in a cartoon. Once I get home this evening, I’ll ink it, scan and color it, and post it here.
Original Art
May 6, 2008 – 10:23 pm
This right here is exactly why I want to ultimately draw on paper every comic I hope to be doing in the near future – and always why Dave Kellet recommends in How To Make Webcomics having original artwork. Plus, there’s just something extremely satisfying about drawing with pencil and inking by hand that just can’t be matched by working exclusively in the digital medium.
Food Fight
April 17, 2008 – 7:34 pm
This is an enjoyable little video that depicts an abridged history of the world’s wars from WWII through the Gulf War 2 using the foods of the nations involved in each. It’s very artistic and, at points, humorous in its caricaturizations.
(Source: Boing Boing)
My Art Studio
March 30, 2008 – 2:34 pm
I spent some time yesterday clearing off my desk because I’ve added some supplies to my art cache. I’m starting to experiment and play around with drawing some new art, inking it, and scanning it into Photoshop to play with colors. Basically, I’m enjoying Reclaimer as a webcomic so much that I want to try my hand at actually drawing a comic and producing it on a semi-professional level. Heck, if things work out, I might even be able to make some money at it someday.
Now, I don’t really have room in my office to make a full-fledged art studio, and frankly I don’t really have the money for that yet, either. I’ve just got a handful of new items to let me try my hand at drawing, and if it turns out I’m good at it and continue to enjoy it, then I’ll think about setting aside a little cash to continue expanding my studio.
Prior to this, I’ve had a little sketchbook, a set of drawing pencils, an artgum eraser, and a book on cartooning that I’ve been using to practice and learn. Now I also have a set of staff pens and a bottle of India ink, a larger drawing tablet, T-square and ruler, some additional 5B, HB, and non-photo blue pencils, and a couple of kneaded rubber erasers. You can also see in the second photo a copy of How To Make Webcomics, written by some excellent webcomic artists that you’re probably familiar with.
Yesterday afternoon and evening I toyed around with my first inking project and was pleasantly surprised by how quickly the India ink dries and by how permanent it is, even with an eraser going over it. I’ve also learned a thing or three about coloring in Photoshop (thanks, Guigar, et al.!) and am looking forward to adding a few more tricks on that front to my toolkit.
Here at some point I may share a drawing or two I’ve been playing with, rough as they are. And at some point down the road, it seems somewhat likely that I’ll be launching a new webcomic. In the meantime, I’ll be practicing and refining my artwork and having fun with it.
Aliens vs Halo
August 11, 2007 – 8:26 am
This is just absolutely gorgeous – and a very interesting concept!
No Help for Drawing Fantasy Maps
December 12, 2006 – 9:08 am
I’ve had a writing project on the back-burner for a while now. Essentially, I’ve been trying to write a fun little fantasy novel for my wife. A major part of this process, though, is in creating the world her story is set in, including the geographic regions. The characters, after all, have to travel from one place to another, and it’s usually a good idea for the author to know ahead of time where things are located and how they relate to one another when writing the events in the story, right?
I’d created a very simplistic map using a less-than-ideal mapping program. I wasn’t very happy with the result, even though it did give me enough of a visual representation of the land to work with. So, I’ve started trying to re-create my map by drawing it. I’ve always enjoyed working with a pencil, so it’s been kind of fun to just spend some time with a sketch pad, an eraser, and a pencil and work for a little bit. Trouble is, I’m not always sure how to represent certain features. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s not a single adequate tutorial online on how to actually draw a fantasy map. Every single one I’ve come across is a tutorial on how to use one software package or another. This is all well and good – if I was going to use software for this project. But I’m not, at least I don’t want to have to. But I can’t find anyone who can gives good tips on how to draw decent looking mountain ranges or forests (the latter of which is especially hard for me because trees are not simple geometric images). It’s kind of frustrating, really.
My solution for the time being is to print out a couple of decent fantasy maps that others have created and try to replicate some of the features on those maps. Ultimately, I may resort to software, after all – I just hate the cookie-cutter look that most of these packages are limited to and I don’t really have the spare cash lying around to buy a decent program.
Maybe when I’m all done with this, if I’ve learned enough and created a map that actually looks half-decent, I’ll put together a tutorial geared specifically at hand-drawing fantasy maps, since there seems to be such a dearth of such things out there right now. It’s a shame, really – we’ve almost become too dependent on technology in some ways. Of course, the irony is that I’ve been looking on the Web to find help on how to perform a more ‘primitive’ task.
Cartooning
August 21, 2006 – 3:46 pm
Once upon a time, I liked to draw. Actually, I still do. I’m just not very good at it, so I don’t draw very often anymore. I used to have two or three drawing tablets and a fistful of #2 pencils. I even used to have a drawing kit, complete with the charcoal and fancy drawing tools. I just never had anyone who could show me what to do with them. So, I drew the easy stuff – buildings and geometrical figures – things with straight sides and sharply defined edges. Anything that had lots of turns and depended on shading to bring to life has always remained beyond my reach.
Lately, though, I’ve had an interest at getting back into drawing, particularly back into cartooning. Of course, when I say ‘back into cartooning’, I’m thinking about my brief hand at my slapstick cartoons when I was in the 5th and 6th grades. This was during that time when Saddam Hussein was making such a nuisance of himself over there in the Middle East, when Bush Sr. was running the American show, and right before the Persian Gulf War. It seemed like Hussein was in every headline at that time. Even as a kid, it was hard not to notice what was happening on the global scene.
Somehow, I got it into my head that it would be amusing to create a comic strip about “Sadman Insane.”1 The comic was pretty Warner Bros. – in every single one, it was Saddam versus Uncle Sam. And in every single one, Saddam always managed to blow himself up.2 In one he pulled the pin on a grenade and threw the pin. In another he rigged a launcher to throw a bunch of grenades – only he rigged it backwards so that the pins went flying and the grenades stayed. Or he walked over his own landmines. It was pretty ridiculous and very unoriginal. But to my 5th-grade mind, it was the funniest thing going. I probably drew 30 or 40 of these strips to keep myself amused, and every single one had me roaring with laughter at the idiotic antics of this moronic dictator.
I think most of those comics ended up getting lost over the years. Heck, I probably threw a bunch of them away shortly after I drew them. I mean, what kid at that age really understands the value of stick figure drawings like that, recognizes the value that they would later have for their older self? Now I wish I still had them, something to look at again now and see if I still found them amusing. I suspect I might; my sense of humor really hasn’t changed all that much over the years. And they might have actually inspired me to do other humorous drawings now, to pick up the pencil again and risk the idiotic.
I might do that, anyway…
- That was my 5th grade teacher’s favorite nickname for Saddam. The way he figured it, any man that given over to violence much be pretty sad inside and positively insane to risk the wrath of the rest of the world to do the things he was doing.[back]
- I’ve always had a bit of a morbid sense of humor.[back]
Levels of Artistry
February 28, 2006 – 9:48 am
Purdue’s campus has quite a bit of sculpture on display. Most of it is pretty nice; it dresses the campus up very well, giving it a bit more character and personality. But I must admit – sculpture is one of those artistic mediums that I don’t fully understand. Actually, I should probably be a bit more clear. What I don’t understand is simplistic art. I appreciate art that shows complexity, that shows how much work and time and effort the artist put into designing and creating it. I appreciate such art, and I respect and admire the artist for it. Detailed work takes great personal sacrifice on the part of the artist, and it involves great risk to display it in public, waiting to see if they will love it or hate it.
The thing that gets me is when the intellectual takes a higher place of importance to the visual (or the auditory, in the case of musical or literary works read aloud). I can’t understand how an artist could possibly be satisfied with his work of art that is so simple in design that it looks as though a small child could have conceived of it. I realize that the artist probably spent hours trying to decide what shape his work should take so that it could best represent the abstract concept bouncing around in his brain, and I respect that. I do. I guess I just feel that good art should be created in such a way as to need no explanation from the artist in order for the general public to understand and appreciate it.
I saw a painting once that made me turn my head various ways trying to figure out what it was, trying to figure out what possessed the artist to create it, trying to understand what, if any, meaning there was behind it. Someone who knew the artist saw my confusion and proceeded to explain in great detail what the picture was and what the concept was that inspired it. The sad thing is that I don’t remember the explanation now. It was simply too complicated and not at all inspirational.
My philosophy of art is that it should be able to be enjoyed by anyone who experiences it, not just the elite few who think in such convoluted ways as to picture the world from one man’s own twisted mind. I personally think that art should be relatively reflective of the concepts being portrayed1. I also tend to think that the art should be more complicated then a few wires twisted around or several pieces of smooth concrete stacked one on top of another. It seems to me that if a child, who is only just learning fine motor skills, can create the work, then that work required very little skill on the part of the artist. It merely required a thought to initiate it, something that anyone can do.
Maybe I’m being elitist in my own way by suggesting that so much of the art that is lauded in our high society is really just a pile of simplistic trash, but I guess I just hold a high standard for what can and should be art. I like to see art that looks like it took effort to bring into existence, that took mental discipline to manufacture, that took great care and love to detail and clearly represent some abstract concept.
- Though, to be fair, to the artist the work is probably a very clear depiction of the concept he is portraying visually.[back]