Still Tracking

[rowyn]

I forgot to post about this at the end of February, but I've been keeping up with my goal of "do more useful stuff". (For a given value of "useful".)

As I suspected would happen, the shiny has worn of drawing and I am getting sick of doing art. I've gone from contentedly spending several hours on one picture in a weekend to grudgingly spending a couple. It is still ranking above writing, which is apparently a great evil that I want no part of, but not by much.

Despite hating on writing, I spent more time on Sign & Sacrifice in February than I did in January. Which is still not a lot of time. But honestly, with a goal of working 4.5 hours a week, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on anything. It's amazing I manage to get anywhere at all.

This weekend and last I've been working on a picture of Jrurut, one of the major NPCs from my World Tree game. It's nowhere near done. Oif. I am tempted to post an image-in-progress, but I am pretty sure that will only sabotage what little motivation I can must for this stuff. It's actually coming along pretty well for the four and a half hours I've put into it. As opposed to the picture of Feralan & hCevian, which took six hours. For a headshot. OIF.

I have to wonder how much my "I am sick of drawing pictures" is due to using digital media. I have a love-hate relationship with digital media. On the one hand, lots of things that are a huge pain in real media, like masking, are a snap in digital. And it's so easy to fix mistakes!

On the other hand, it's so easy to fix mistakes! Which means everything takes an eternity to finish because I keep seeing the mistakes and then, y'know. Fixing them. For hours. And hours. With markers, when you make a mistake, it's "darn!" and move on. With digital, I am never ever finished because I can always sink another twelve hours intio fiddling. ARGH. The main reason I'm not using real media is that I haven't figured out what to do about my scanner not working under Wn7. v.v

Anyway, the extended goal for weekends seems to be going fine. In fact, I'm way over quota, having put in nearly two weeks' worth of extra time since January 1. So I'm still carrying on with February's plan.

I need to do some work on the World Tree game today, so that I don't have a panic attack of YOU ARE NOT PREPARED on Thursday. But for now, I'm going back to bed. Because I hate Daylight Savings Time. *shakes fist* *snoozes*

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

*purrs the Rowyn*

I can imagine the same affliction befalling writers - 'with digital word processors, it's so easy to fix your mistakes! I find myself editing my paragraphs too many times after I've written them, and not doing enough writing.'

Maybe the same solution would work for both writing and art: get a draft done before you go back and fix mistakes, that way you can see the whole picture at once, and judge it properly.

[rowyn]

Heh, maybe. :) Although with my books, I have exhibited even less interest in editing them than in finishing the first draft, so I'm not sure that works to produce a better final product. c.c I've been wondering it if I should quit pushing to finish things and just do all my editing as I go!

[detroitfather.livejournal.com]

If I could change only one thing about oil painting, it would be to somehow add an Undo button into the process.

I often have trouble knowing whether to blur and blend things in an oil painting, or to leave the "rough edges" which give life to the painting, and I cannot even count the number of times I've lost the magic of certain part of a painting by blending that which I should not have blended. At those times, digital media seem momentarily very attractive. Watercolor is worse still.

For some reason, I have known several excellent caricature artists in my life, and have had the thrill of watching them work close up. They general work with markers, and it is an education to watch them at work. The first guy I knew was self-taught, and I became his friend in 10th Grade. I will never forget watching him make mistakes in black marker, and then skillfully change something about the drawing so that it was okay again.

[rowyn]

What I remember of oils (it's been sixteen years and I only did three paintings then) is that they were much more forgiving and easier to work with than other paints. Not as forgiving as digital, it's very true. :)

The program I've been using (ArtRage 3) is designed to simulate different forms of real media, including oils and watercolors. I have to admit, I'm very curious about how someone who did a lot of work in those real media would find the simulation. I have gravitated to the effects that are least like anything I can do in real media: ink, airbrush, and its "stickers", which are good for textures. So I like the program, but not for any of the things it's supposed to do best. :D Well, except its pencils. I do much prefer sketching in simulated pencil to sketching in solid colors, for some reason. I'll still do a "pencil sketch" for my digital picture, instead of skipping straight to color, even though both are equally easy to erase.

[detroitfather.livejournal.com]

You are right about oils being more forgiving. I probably have 24 hours or so where can blend new wet paint into what's just been put on the canvas. I hated working in acrylics, because of how fast they dried.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

What, you meant the big explosion at the end of last session wasn't something you had planned for months? And planned to happen sooner. /o.o\

[rowyn]

Well ... okay, yes, it was. I should still do more prep. Because just because I've been planning it for months doesn't mean I'm properly prepared for it. v.v

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Yes... I was thinking about what to do next in the pathfinder game all weekend, and came up with 'unicorns'. I suspect 'unicorns' is not a good enough plan.

[rowyn]

Maybe a little light, yes. You might want to expand on it. Like "Magic unicorns". Twice as much prep as before!

I waited until bedtime to start doing anything yesterday, and then stayed up late mostly playing the distilling puzzle. Somehow I did get a chunk of notes written down, though, so hopefully I will evade unprepared-panic this week.

[whitefangedwolf.livejournal.com]

"Magic unicorns" is good, but still a bit vague. Something more specific like "Fire-breathing magic unicorns" might provide a better plan. The only downside would be the increased prep time.

[rowyn]

But you gotta leave some room to improvise, y'know? You don't want to over-prepare.

[the-vulture.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should have more generalized goals. Instead of saying "I will do x amount of drawing per y amount time," maybe try "I will complete x amount of creative projects in a y time frame." That will give you flexibility to move from one creative medium to the next to follow your current interest.

[rowyn]

Umm ... my current goal is "I'll spend X time on creative stuff". It doesn't have to be drawing, I've just been defaulting to that on the weekend because I'm slightly more interested in that.

[the-vulture.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay. My bad. :)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

One thing I found to be fairly stress-free was to do "painterly" sketches in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet, with separate layers, rather than trying to do an outline drawing and then "coloring it in" on the computer.

Trying to make things painterly and with nice crisp sharp edges gets back out of the stress-free zone (particularly since it seems to involve lots and lots and lots of revision and clean-up work to do properly), but there's some sort of happy medium in there. I found it worked rather well when having to churn out lots of expressive figures for "figure flat" work. Plus, since I establish up front that I'm doing things a bit sketchy, I can avoid the temptation to get stuck into recursive cycles of refining.

[rowyn]

I've found it takes me a lot longer to get anything I like if I start in color, although I have no idea why. I haven't tried starting in color with Artrage, though. Maybe I'll give it a shot this weekend.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I wish you could see some of Gab's art sessions online. That's been pretty inspiring to me. =) In the past, she's held a few days when she draws LJ icons for people, and does it on some sort of online streaming thing where you can see her progress (though the lag can be pretty bad). It's an interesting process of starting with the rough and building up detail and highlights (somewhat), but still leaving a deliberately rough, sketchy edge to things.