Tuesday, October 23, 2012

24HourComic

I attempted a 24 hour comic at the weekend. It was organised by the ever-admirable and fantastic Galway PubScrawl.

Art Everywhere! Yay!


Well, I got to the venue - 091labs in Galway city - about 6 hours late, so I attempted an 18 hour comic and fell pray to a very Gomez mistake -> coming up with a massive idea, tripping over myself to adequately brainstorm and physically create it, crashed onto the couch and slept for about 2 hours. All things considered however, I'm pretty proud of my idea and my execution was much better than expected. I think that this idea is worth a lot more care and detail. Here's 10 of the pages, including the original brainstorm. Most are not finished:

Brainstorming.
 The brainstorming process for me, from beginning a painting to formulating a blogpost, comprises of a big A4 sheet of paper from one of my many categorised notebooks (refuge of the obsessive and of the person-who-can-never-get-any-work-done) and a big circle in the middle with the theme written in it. For the 24 hour comic, I pulled out my phone and opened up my drafts folder. In there I have scribbled every random idea that is story or art related that came to me on the the go, whether I was cleaning the chandeliers (see giant chandelier monsters) or sitting on bus (which I'm at a lot).


Page 1. Cross-hatching is megahard.
 Two ideas have been knocking around my head these past few weeks - how I want to rewrite pretty much every film I watch these days and coming to terms with my aspergers syndrome traits. Oh, and of course, the early twenties, just out of college, mid-life crisis. So I managed to squeeze a comic idea out of that.

Page 2. The other 24comic people looked at this and saw a whale blowhole fetished. SIGH.

Page 3. It was around midnight and suddenly CYBORGS for 3 pages

I had a great few pages about cyborgs and I drew the most marvelous non-sexualised robot woman and it was great. You may have noticed that I dislike using panels - I read too many absolutely gorgeous, flowing, nubile manga art growing up and it stayed with me.

I really liked my cookie-cut outs in this.

I've been at this feminism-in-comics theme since I was thirteen I discovered recently whilst looking through my old sketchpads. That's right, before it was cool. Are you getting the cyborg-aspergers metaphor yet? Also I didn't want to imply that asexuality = respect for women. That would have been truly terrible.



Didn't touch up this one very much because it wasn't finished and I wanted the pencil lines and roughness to be clear.
This turned out too Ghost-in-the-Shell for me, even though I did try to normalise her as a woman by making one of her boobs a little bit wonkier than the other.

This is blue and relatively untouched up because I was playing with the Curve option and then suddenly BLUE so it stayed.

 Naturally I didn't finish this page either (I was skimming over pages and then coming back to them when I felt ready to) and those blank rectangles are DVD cases that I was going to fill in with many other films that..just could have gone a much better way.

You, Me and Dupree alternative plotline. How I really wished it went.

You, Me and Dupree was a fascinating film for it's lessons on Hollywood's How-To-Write-A-Popular-Comedy inventory sheets and the lowest current demoniator masculinity issues of the beginning of the 21st century. It will be studied in history and sociology classes in the future. Well, so I see it.

I also had ideas prepared for King Kong (shudder), Inglorious Basterds (at the request of another 24hour comic-er) and X-Men 3 (shudder again). This was the closest I came to finishing one.


Ed Wood as the Dickens-esque Ghost of Artist Integrity
I fucking love Ed Wood. He was the perfect character who could provide a breach from reality to the surreal and fantasy in this comic, as Jack Temple travels through time and space to make all the movies he hates not crap. Also yes I am implying that aspies have super powers, because they do :)

The Elemental Causes that kill Artist Integrity in the movies.

Seeing as the Phantom Tollbooth made me, I like to turn abstract concepts that effect personality and happiness into cartoony manifestations. Here are the 4 (I had yet to draw number three) causes of all films going to crap, in my opinion. The conflict here is that all of these causes are traits that aspergers as a syndrome fight against every day -> being aspergers means that you often don't understand a lot of jokes and sarcasm or take everything very literally, constant distraction and often ADD are part of everyday life, and aspies can be super naive and fall trap to manipulation easily (which they also often can't understand or fathom).


This idea definitely got a bit too heavy for the method I chose to deal with it. And too dense. But I would LOVE to make this idea my first definitive comic project. A comic dealing with aspergers primarily, and with surreal and fantasy elements, and the often sexist, racist, classist agenda in popular film culture.

Monday, October 22, 2012

The Face of Things

For a logo/header/brand for my blog, I've been thinking that I need to utilise my face.

Obviously an illustrated or cartoony one. And I did make real-life money off caricatures once upon a time, so it makes sense.

My wee caricaturing stand, circa 2009


I have had one person suggest to me that I should do a vlog because my face and chat would work for that (teehee) but I'm never going to do that because no.

I feel an blog rule coming on -> making your blog accountable to an identifiable human being is important. It helps to breach the barrier between Anonymous Users I Don't Care About and People Who I Can Emotionally Invest In and Can Sell Me Stuff. Like daytime TV actors from the nineties on informercials.

It's all about sticking visuals and the magnetic pull of story-telling. With your big, personable face, slapped all over your internet. Seeing as this blog is about my personal mission to get back in touch with my artness, putting a face to a story is more than necessary. It means that I'll give up a bit more anonymity than I'd like, but I think that if anyone wanted to track me down and give me a good trolling face to face, they have more than info personal info already to do so. Sigh.

My favourite blogs have defined characters who have made their visage an important part of their blogs attraction and memorability - Fluent in Three Months, Self Versus Self (she is a beautiful bald artist and a lot of inspiration for my blog came from hers, however her blog now appears to be private, sad. Here is her twitter), for example. Other blogs that attempt to make their writer a big celebrity leader I find...a bit mad. Probably effective, but mad. I am thinking of Chris Guillbeau, even though I do think he's pretty awesome and I totally want his book about selling art. I will buy it and review it.


It's not that I want to be you. It's that I want to be you a little bit.


That's the first InkScape project decided -> make a blog brand with my face. Alrighty.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Inkscape and Vector Art: Part 1


I have discovered Pomodoro. comprehension of Twitter remains unlocked.


So, as part of my artist-reboot misison, I'm learning vector graphics via the lovely open source program, Inkscape.

Yay it's Inkscape!


I'm methodical and Victorian about my life (like categorising and favourite-d books), so rather than carefully picking Inkscape apart and learning-by-doing, like so many masters have recommended, I have found this extremely tedious and quite boring list of tutorials to plod through one-by-one. Right now I'm working on this:

Look, it's a peacock.

I may or may not post up my finished copy, depending on how much awesome I will inevitably add to the original design.


I have encountered and taken in the basics behind a lot of Vector rules so far – paths, fill and stroke (which I love now), dragging nodes around and gradients (eh, they're flashy but bewilderingly complicated on execution). I'm still waiting for my visual mind to start seeing all the landscape, friends and family as nothing more than a collection of strategically layered objects plotted by many bezier curves.

I have manifested an absolute revulsion of layers over the years. I took the step up from MS Paint to Photoshop a few years ago, and toppled down that staircase booted by Layers himself. Beginning to add plumage to the peacock has definitely given me some enlightenment into the reasoning of Layers, but I feel like he has been smugly smugging at me for years, from atop the stairway of needlessly complicated achievement. And now it is almost within my carpel-tunnel mangled grasp.

I really need one of these. Never make digital art OR play Age of Empires without one.



The data limits are for my wireless 3 dongle are severe, so I need to watch my streaming and downloading digestion. Besides an insufferable shortage of Andrew W.K-spiration, I am unable to watch and learn further from all those very useful Youtube tutorials done by that 11 year-old image manipulation prodigy. I always learn better through videos. Although I'm pretty sure that those particular videos are for GIMP (or so I remember from attempting to design the Art Society magazine cover by myself one year, watching one of these tutorials, and crumpling into a big ball of editor-stress). Also yes, I need to learn GIMP. Soon. That will be my Everest. Or at least my Mont Blanc. Inkscape is my Magillacuddy.



Killaarrrnnneeeeeyyy


Becoming competent in digital art has been one of those skills that has been languishing on my to do list for about six years. Growing more and more intimidating, as school, college and self-doubt kept getting in the way. Like learning French or German or getting fit. Happily, getting fit is something I'm doing right now. And I'm learning Polish instead, because it just sounds nice and fuck your educational linguistic imperialism.
I was too half-hearted, woefully unresourceful and far too dedicated to homework and school to give this my full attention. There was also a large self-esteem quotient that held back my art. One that was to grow paralytic.
 

Right now, as I sit before my Inkscape window, my cursor is quivering with frustration. I am crying for a pen and mathcopy paper. I feel like I'm learning to use a knife and fork, or like I'm spending a whole semester on shoe-lace tying to standardise the education of the whole class before we open our textsbooks on set jumping whilst been forced to sit in a stadium and watch the olympics. Yes, that is exactly how I feel.


My first completed original project on Inkscape will be to do something with this blog's design (yes I know it's currently rocking minimalism now but I do like a bit of kitsch and Laura Ashel chic so there will be at least a horrendously awkard logo). I should throw up doodles about that, okay that will come next.


In the mean time, check this out for the logos which I will one day compete with with my secretary. Romantic sigh.  

My first ever logo. Designed for my brother's friends band.