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Various projects and art things
15 years ago
Poster project is coming along, the rough pencilling's almost done.
New comic is vastly overdue again, I've just been consumed by the other thing. I need discipline badly. :(
I made a drawing for
clayton which you can view in my submissions. I love doing little pics like that; if anyone wants me to draw a clean picture of me with them for free just go ahead and ask. It'd give me something to actually do at work.
I love trying new styles and mediums. I love going from detailed and anatomically precise works to cartoony and simple, expressive stuff. I've discovered the fun of painting recently, and I've been drawing naked models for the past 9 months now. Comparing my work from February 2009 to July 2010 is like looking at the work of two different people. (I still love my old stuff though, even if it's a little less organized than what I make now.)
If I look at my stuff, I think I'm more of an expressionist type of artist. In fact I think most cartoonists are, whether they know it or not. Expressionism is where you use the principles of perspective and anatomy, but you exaggerate the colours, angles and proportions of things to get the maximum amount of contrast and emotional impact across. Cartoonists do this out of necessity--the subject is the characters, and you don't have the time for complicated colour or texture work. Painting is all about the way light hits a subject, but cartoonists rarely have this luxury--they're all about the subject itself, because it's all they have the time and resources for. So they exaggerate the subject, go crazy with the expressions, the movements, and the perspective in order to make up for the lack of visual depth. It's a fun challenge and if you're inspired enough, you can achieve some great things with it.
But again, your inspiration for the subject depends on how much of an emotional bond you share with the character. That doesn't mean you have to go all autobiographical and make a character exactly like you, because there's so much of that stuff out there clogging the graphic novel sections these days, and if you're always talking about yourself, you'll be telling the same story over and over. The question to ask is, what do the characters represent to you? Friends? Enemies? The characteristics you wish you had? The ones you wish you didn't have? If you abstract things a little bit and figure out the kinds of people you like and don't like, you can start contrasting these people against each other and create a compelling situation for them. It's all about how much affection you can muster for your characters, because this will force you to develop them fully and treat them as human beings, rather than caricatures you'll get bored with after a month.
New comic is vastly overdue again, I've just been consumed by the other thing. I need discipline badly. :(
I made a drawing for
clayton which you can view in my submissions. I love doing little pics like that; if anyone wants me to draw a clean picture of me with them for free just go ahead and ask. It'd give me something to actually do at work.I love trying new styles and mediums. I love going from detailed and anatomically precise works to cartoony and simple, expressive stuff. I've discovered the fun of painting recently, and I've been drawing naked models for the past 9 months now. Comparing my work from February 2009 to July 2010 is like looking at the work of two different people. (I still love my old stuff though, even if it's a little less organized than what I make now.)
If I look at my stuff, I think I'm more of an expressionist type of artist. In fact I think most cartoonists are, whether they know it or not. Expressionism is where you use the principles of perspective and anatomy, but you exaggerate the colours, angles and proportions of things to get the maximum amount of contrast and emotional impact across. Cartoonists do this out of necessity--the subject is the characters, and you don't have the time for complicated colour or texture work. Painting is all about the way light hits a subject, but cartoonists rarely have this luxury--they're all about the subject itself, because it's all they have the time and resources for. So they exaggerate the subject, go crazy with the expressions, the movements, and the perspective in order to make up for the lack of visual depth. It's a fun challenge and if you're inspired enough, you can achieve some great things with it.
But again, your inspiration for the subject depends on how much of an emotional bond you share with the character. That doesn't mean you have to go all autobiographical and make a character exactly like you, because there's so much of that stuff out there clogging the graphic novel sections these days, and if you're always talking about yourself, you'll be telling the same story over and over. The question to ask is, what do the characters represent to you? Friends? Enemies? The characteristics you wish you had? The ones you wish you didn't have? If you abstract things a little bit and figure out the kinds of people you like and don't like, you can start contrasting these people against each other and create a compelling situation for them. It's all about how much affection you can muster for your characters, because this will force you to develop them fully and treat them as human beings, rather than caricatures you'll get bored with after a month.
