Art Cla$$e$

I hate art classes for some reason. I think the only thing I might have ever gotten out of them is dispensable knowledge and the opportunity to best somebody at something. I suppose that now that my view of art has been somewhat warped over the years dealing with whether I really loved it or if I wanted to be rich and famous.

I still can't be certain. Everybody wants to be recognized for something and many people want to do new things to entertain others that they also enjoy. I suppose what everybody wants if nothing else is to find their spot in the world.

How the hell will I ever know if my reason is the right reason? Anyway, I have always, since Elementary, had this thing about arriving at results in my own particular way, even if it wasn't my particular style. There were ways I was taught how to use crayons, chalk, etc, but I always used them in a way I felt was logical for the medium. Most of the time it turned out good. Often the best out of everybody's.

It's kind of the same now. I still hate art classes and I still don't like the teachers methods alot of the time. Without making everything philosophical or representative, I'll talk about now, in my real drawing class. I'm having problems understanding how the teacher wants us to use charcoal and why. I think pencil would achieve the results she is trying to achieve much easier than trying to make charcoal perform with lights and darks. Too much blending and erasing. I'm used to building up and correcting with graphite.

To my credit, I've grown somewhat emotionally from my youth and I realize that there is something to be learned. Something that I might have known before. I really am trying, but it's frustrating feeling uncomfortable doing things I feel like I should know how to do. Like a basketball player who has nice handles, but realizes in college he needs to work on his defense and his jump shot.

Try as I may

Try as I may, I haven't been able to draw worth crap this weekend. Maybe that means I'm not motivated. Maybe I just can't get loosened because of recent stresses still hanging over my head. If I thought I was feeling bad before, I don't know if I feel any better after my Oz marathon. I might even feel worse. Since I couldn't draw I finished watching all those downloaded Oz episodes I had. Since I didn't have cable for most of the second half of the series, I missed alot. Good stuff.

I thought I felt a tad bit of catharsis after watching Oz, but what I felt after I woke up that evening was sort of a void. I had been feverishly watching Oz for some weeks now. I know at some point last night I had that kind of feeling that Oz's ending would be grand. That all the answers to life would be contained right there in the extended length final episode. I was good, but no keys to life. I hadn't even noticed all along that the series was slowly ending the last two seasons. Winding down and wrapping everthing up in a package. Not everything was all so neat, but it was as good as I could expect. No disappointments.

I know I'm bored, but what really bad is when you know you're bored, but you can't do anything about it. Well, I'm gonna try my best to warm up and get something done or else I'll probably end up in worse shape than I was before. It's odd that things like cartoony looking cartoons should be easy, but they really aren't. They require a humorous frame of mind which I really don't have right now.

As much as I would love to just say that regularity is the key to ridding all my artistic problems, it seems like my emotional state is alot more important part than I would've thought. Who'da thunk it huh?

Ch4ng3Z

This year has brought alot of changes in me internally. Many if not all good, but when does a person, despite all good intentions, have to realize that it can't all be good. What if when this bad thing, is really a good thing to you (me), but it will also bring more bad things with it. Possibly life long negative effects.

If I could do anything--and I have tried--I would, but I don't think there is much I can do to stop it from happening. Better to take a risk than to just accept the bad indefinitely. Otherwise it just be unhappy and it might get worse.

So here goes crossing the dessert, just to come to that ominous mountain. The mountain is steep and rough, I could die climbing it. On the other hand I wouldn't last out in the dessert trying to go around it. Hope there's green grass, fresh water springs, and plentiful food on the other side. I'll settle for an oasis and a shade tree.

Zero Hour

I'm writing this now that I've just finished the redesign of my site, Scenarios, after only a month. Can't say it's a record, but it is a quick redesign by my standards. This would be my third design, one I'm pretty happy with. I suppose I didn't really know how I wanted my site to look at first. Consider that a rough draft. This new one is completely a design of my own.

It's quite peculiar how long I've been doing "creative" things that I still have no idea how the creative process works. Or else I have some kind of epiphany, thinking I've final got it. That I'll never despair or lose hope when things aren't turning out the way I envisioned them in the beginning.

I thought that I knew that when anyone first starts out doing something that they are a little confused, lost, frustrated. They don't know if they will ever figure something out (even when millions or billions of other humans across the centuries have did it before). That goes for XHTML, programming, writing, anything a person is new to. In this case it happened to be web design.

I don't really know why I've never built a web site before other than messing around with a free authoring program or the included stuff with graphics programs. If I can find the answer to that, then I would know why I don't have an "eye" for web design or any design for that matter yet. I've never really been the kind to just want to draw pretty squiggles on my paper or do newsletters. Bluntly, I've always been pretty boring when it comes down to design other than maybe trying to make another spandex super-hero costume.

Let me not beat myself up, that's not entirely true. I have always been in the business of designing characters of my brothers and my own, furries, as well as super-heroes, and normal people. Character design is design. Especially when it comes to cartoon characters who use the same look all the time except when they occasionally either change costumes or wear something else over their built-in costume. Hair, jaw, nose, shirt, shoes, damn near patented, repeated expressions. That's design. Whether I knew it or not I guess.

All the processes start out the same I guess. Even if I don't usually get inspiration for just making things look pretty.

It took me about the same development time as the previous site. Not so long designing the damn thing, the larger part is spent working out the bugs. I mean, this time I swore I got everything right, no flaws in the HTML, nothing. But when I started adding the scripts and putting the files on the server, it stopped working, so I had to take hours trying to figure out why. Usually I don't figure the problems out, so I end up having to take it apart piece by piece to see what part is making the code not work. It was an incorrect usage of a link in the iStrip tags is all. I was relieved when I finally figured it out. The rest of the pages were a snap.

Still don't have the comic up yet though. Luckilly tomorrow, whoop, today is Labor Day. It is right? I really don't look at calendars much and don't want to.

The Making of 'Prisoner in Your Own Mind' Part 1

First I was on to Scott McCloud and his theories, now I'm on Dave Sim, creator of Cerebus. I've been reading some of his old letter columns at http://www.cerebusfangirl.com/artists/nftp/notesindex.html and I've been brought some more realizations that I've haven't been doing as much as I could've been doing. I've thought about this before, but I've always had my reasons to delay. Sim was saying, look at those things that stop you from doing your comic. These are the things holding you back from realizing your dream. Yes.

Generally, I know that I need to just do something, but even when an idea comes my way or after I've written a script, I'll typically sit on it for a little while if it doesn't feel right and maybe revise it. That goes for drawing ideas as well. I used to just do them, but now they have to reach some standard of perfection before I even touch the page.

Sometimes I wait for it to "feel right" as if there was some divine intervention going on. Hell, that's how I used to do it. Now, I've filled up many a page with sketches that I don't like. Never seeming to be able to get my style just right. Other time photo reference or the perfect thumbnails are needed. So I'll know for certain that when I sit down at my desk for the next 8 or so hours, that I'll come up with something that I am happy with.

That reasoning is flawed in several ways. I have so many distractions now with a family and school, that the right times to do anything are few and far between. Often times this waiting phase will be prolonged because if I start on something, I feel like I'll miss a good show or won't be able to read a book I've wanted to get to that day. Those were misplaced priorities, I can admit that now.

At least I don't have cable anymore. I'm not surprised I don't miss it. Where I live, there is bad reception, so even with deluxe antenna, I can't catch broadcast channels. I don't miss TV at all much. I don't feel the desire to need things quite as much and I'm more content with what I have. I generally feel I have more time to do important things as well. I bootleg alot of movies and make a night out of watching them every once in a while. Podcasting and streaming news takes the place of everything else. And no ads! I can draw while I'm listening to podcasts too.

To the comic:

A couple days ago, I don't know how to compute it, I woke up during the evening and just felt like doing 'Prisoner in Your Own Mind.' I was really feeling the first sentence and the vision of the first panel I thought up when I awoke. So, I got up, still needing to pee badly, went downstairs and quickly rewrote the script and it came out the way I wanted it to.

Taking a cue from Eisner, rather than going on to the next page, I did the thumbnails to the story quickly. I had the drawings all bunched up in my hands, but still I had to go pee, eat, and watch a show. (Bad, I know.) I still maintained the feeling for a few hours afterwards, so I took some ref photos just for the poses and started on the first panel.

The first panel came out with practically no flaws, but I was nagged with the feeling I needed to do tight pencils because I was using some good art board that I had been saving for years. First time I used them for any occasion. I even used comic strip boards of roughly the same quality during that time. So, either this was a special occasion, or I just realized that this comic would never fit it a three panel strip. Well, maybe that is a special occasion. I wrote a comic that I actually feel could go beyond the bounds of a three panel strip with no challenge. In fact to two pages, further if I let it. Two pages was all I thought I needed though. If I stretched it to two weeks or two different days, that would keep the story like I wanted it. Not too short, not so long that I feel I could waste time.

I've written longer stories. A number of short stories under my belt and many "Scenarios," but no novels yet. As far as word-wise, longer than graphic novels, but not story wise. I know how, just haven't yet.That's one thing I learned in my creative writing class, you have to crawl before you can walk.

I've been doing comics and even comic book length stories practically all of my 25 years, but I've never stuck with anything long enough to do long range stories. It's funny when I was taking the class, I looked back at my thick portfolio of drawing since grade school to see all the comics I've done stories I've written, but I can't honestly say I've done any long range stories. Most writers don't though until they're my age. I should feel secure in that. I wasn't prepare mentally yet. Not that I honestly haven't tried, because I have tried to write novels. I just let stuff get to me.

That hardly means I'm unqualified to be in this business. I still steadfastly would rather think of myself as a "writer" than only a comic artist/writer. Drop the comic part. Some of what Dave Sim said still applies to me though even then. Not like Stephen King didn't say the same stuff.

After the first panel, it took me a while to do the rest or the page. I had to eat several times, my body clock didn't exactly know when it was supposed to eat not sleeping and all. I had to watch Poetic Justice and had to mess on the web a little bit. But all the while, I was working on the comic in between, still needing to do tight pencils before I could go on to the next panel.

It was maybe 1 or 2 in the afternoon before I was down to just one more panel. The pencil I use is hard so I don't get too messy, but as a result after ever so many erasures, the pencil won't lift from the page. So I just did a little "place holder" inking where the eyes and mouth would go on the second panel and moved on. By the last panel, I was tired, but I knew I didn't want to go into my nap without at least having one eye and the mouth done on the close-up. I did one eye, which was coming out a little too realistic, so I had to make it look a little bit more stylized. I'd previously noticed that is hard to get the feel I want out of a story when I get too realistic. Even though this story is serious, I didn't want it to be slowed down with too many details. So what I ended up doing after I redrew the stylize eye was call it finished and scanned the page into the computer.

After piecing it together in Photoshop, I touched it up in Alias Sketchbook Pro, fixing panel two and flipping and reworking the right eye so it wouldn't look like a mirror image. Damned if I didn't work on that for another hour or so before I called that done. It still didn't turn out just like I wanted it too, but I wouldn't have even had that opportunity if it was just pencil and ink. I would've already screwed up the page and would've had to just ink what I had.

The stage I'm at now is bliss. All I have to do now is bring the pencils into Painter and ink it. Then add the word balloons in Adobe Illustrator. That way it'll stay editable. After all I've needed to censor one of my comics already. It's not quite victory, but as far as I'm concerned, this process is like post-production seeing as how I've done the heavy artwork already. I should have kept the pencils loose. I'm much more sure with the pen in Painter than I am doing unfinished pencils now. It helps me go faster when I can get immediate feedback of how it's going to look. Just use "Preview" to check the progress every once in a while.

Well, I'm going to bed now. I just know this thing is too long to read and it'll be another podcast. If (and it will) it becomes a podcast, I'll definitely put it alongside page 2 of 'Prisoner in Your Own Mind' that'll come out next week. Look for the first installment on Saturday or Sunday.

Tomorrow I'm doing page 2 as well, so maybe I'll tag that onto the podcast going up next week as well.

Rain

It's been raining for two days here in Tulsa and I love it. I was raised in Houston, so I'm used to alot more rain than we get here. It gets so hot upstairs in this apartment with no central air.

When the storm started a couple days ago the wind was blowing fiercely. Everybody in the neighborhood came outside practically to see what was going on. It got real dark and cool out, no signs of any tornados or anything. I was hoping for the rain while my neighbor said it "looked nasty." I wonder why everyone always has this negative disposition about weather in Oklahoma. Can't it just be a nice day?

I like the atmosphere rain creates. And for a while good things used to happen after it rained, so I associated rain with good times or good fortune coming. Unfortunately, we had a drought in Tulsa a little while after I started thinking that way, oddly enough one of the rougher parts of my life (if life ever stopped being rough, I should do my next podcast on that).

When it did start raining again regularly, I didn't like it as much. Usually because I had to drive in it. I used to love that, but the blower in my car wasn't working, so the windows would fog up. Also, when the water got high, my electrical system acted like it wanted to go out.

Without the fear that anything would be ruined I don't mind the rain. I'm water-proof and so are many of my clothes.

My son is starting first grade in the morning and my daughter pre-k in the next week. I don't think I'll mind going back to school next week either. I really enjoyed this break. My brain really got a chance to breath. In fact all of this internet presence essentially arose during the summer. Very little of it came before.

I have Scott McCloud to thank for a lot of that I suppose.

Final Thoughts on "Reinventing Comics" (Podcast)

Listen to the podcast:

My new site Scenarios is as done as it's gonna get. Take a look and tell me what you think. A redesign of this blog is coming.

I'll use and image map next time.