Meanderings and art

I have so much in my mind that I want to write that I don't know where to start. I keep thinking "I'll post an entry" -- and then I don't, because I can't settle on a topic. It's ironic that, because I want to go too many places, I end up going to none of them.

I still want to write about my trip to Canada. I only posted a couple of short entries about it, and didn't really get to most of the good parts. I have some thoughts on love and sex and marriage that I want to set down at some point. I've got an auction I need to set up, but first I have to get a Paypal account, and I suppose I need to decide if I want a merchant account so that I can take credit card with it. And I have some scattered thoughts about art.

oceansedge put out a request for icons last week, and last night I did one for her. Because I was too lazy to find paper and a pencil, I did it entirely digitally. This was an interesting process

My digital sketching, even with a tablet, leaves a whole lot to be desired. I haven't settled on a method for doing pure-digital art. What I did for the icon was set the pen to solid grey, and roughed in really ugly, blobby circles for the face, so that I had a rough outline of where nose/mouth/ears/cheeks etc. would go. Then I paint over the sketch on another layer, and work on getting the details refined and accurate in the painting.

The weird part about it is how ugly the process looks. I spent about an hour on the icon, and for the first fifteen minutes it looked horrible. As in, "Wow, a five year-old could do better than that". [Edit: Rhetorical statement altered to clarify that no, I do not have a five year-old child at hand with which to prove this.] The next fifteen minutes, as I tested colors, were almost as bad. It wasn't until I'd been working on it for 45 minutes or so that it started to look all right.

This is very different from sketching with pencils and then using real paint. My early pencil sketches aren't all that great -- I've never liked my roughs as much as I like other artists' roughs. But still, I can sketch a person's head in fifteen minutes and have it be recognizable as "the artist was trying to draw a human head." This lioness was more like "what the heck is the artist trying to do? And would she please stop, because my eyes hurt from just looking at it."

I'm tempted now to do snapshots of work-in-progress, both real and digital mdia, just to showcase the difference.

Maybe if I'd had any real art training, I wouldn't be so haphazard about my methodology.