I found it a bit depressing when I realized that I was going to have to hire a 'Geek Squad' guy to come and fix my Frankenstein-style wireless network. Otherwise the internet was going to be something that only worked for other people. That admission of technological inadequacy made me feel old and useless--until I realized that the Geek Squad guy was at least as old as I was, which meant--
I was just 'useless'. Grrr.
Oh well, I paid me my money and got me some internet, so the computer is happily humming again and I can post something that may look familiar: it's a drawing from a old post, a pretty detailed one, that I've finally got the motivation to return to and (hopefully) finish. Whoot, whoot.
The first image is the entire castle, done with some fairly extreme perspective (which is what took so long, with all those annoying crenellated walls, even though I wasn't as anal as I could have been on it) and a close up of one of the sections of detail, a woman leaning over the wall, watching some knights leave. Hopefully it'll be interesting in its detail and overall impact when it's done, although it's still early to tell for sure.
On the writing side, it's a very good thing I went into this fantasy novel with the right mind set. Yikes, it's taking a lot of hours to plow through. It reminds me of trying to clear a path from my front door to the end of the driveway after a heavy snowfall, using only my boots (yes, it is winter in Canada, how did you guess?). The first struggle down the driveway loosens up the snow and creates the shape of the path (it also soaks my jeans and makes my socks all soggy), but the snow is still deep and makes for tiring slogging. So I have to go back and forth a bunch more times, stamping down all that loose snow, one small section at a time, to make it all smooth and pretty. All that stamping is tiring and time consuming. (For the record, I do have a snow shovel, this is just an analogy.)
In other words, the second draft is a lot of work! I'm guessing that it will take considerably longer than the first draft, even though the rough plot line was laid down in the early effort. Oh well.
Hmmm, I could use some sunshine!
On the upside, my copmuter escaped being left in the snowbank at the end of my driveway. Thank you Geek Squad guy! :)
...now I'm going to drape those wet socks over it to dry, he he he....
I thought I'd combine a writing and art thought today, because it applies to both, but a good lie requires a good detail.
Huh?
Let me explain. :)
Any young person knows, if you're asked where you were at a certain time and the real answer is going to get you grounded for decades, you have to come up with another one. But your Mom is pretty smart and starting off suspicious. So how do you throw her off the trail?
1) You stick as close to the truth as you can (this has nothing to do with art or writing, but might help some children survive to actually practice my other tips).
2) You add in some very specific details, which adds in the ring of truth. For example: You don't say: "I spent the day at the park, um, looking at trees and stuff, and then came home", you say: "I rode my bike to the park and then stopped to watch some of the soccer game going on. I actually made this one kid cry, because I wanted to kick his soccer ball back to him, but I hit it a bit hard and knocked him over. His mom gave me a good lecture."
So why is this lie better? (assuming your assualt on soccer kid actually didn`t happen) Because it has some creative, concrete detail. This is the same idea in both writing and art. Specific concrete details, that the eye and mind can appreciate for a second, then flick on to the bigger picture, produce more enjoyment.
In this Santa image, I spent a bit more time on certain sections of the beard, hat, and coat to give the eye a place to stop at for a brief second before moving on, and used some color and contrast to draw the eye to them more surely.
Of course, I should also point out that you shouldn't get in trouble with your Mom. Or kick soccer balls at little kids. Just FYI. :)
I didn't get this image finished in time, but thought that I'd post the work in progress while it was still the holiday season! :) The (loose) reference for this is a shopping mall Santa that my son got his photo taken with. I felt like trying my hand at a human face, with some of the new style/ technique I've been working on. Fun. (I did a quick scrub in photoshop to whiten some shadowed areas from the photo, for those wondering why it looks a bit odd.)
Not sure I have any massively deep thoughts for this post. On the writing side, maybe it's worth noting that conflict doesn't equal suspense; that's something I've been thinking about lately. Conflict is generally suspense producing (if the baby pullls the dog's ear, is the dog going to bite him?) but it helps to consider other suspense as well. (There is a strange odour in the room. Does the baby's diaper need changing, or is that Dad, who has a suspiciously innocent look on his face?) A question that the reader wants to know the answer to, and will flip the page to do so, is as powerful a tool as having a life-threatening conflict in every scene (because after so many run ins with the baby, the dog will just go hide under the sheets of his parents' bed).
There you go, a deep writing thought for the day--and a mostly accurate recap of our holiday festivities.
(For the record, it was the diaper.)
Happy holidays!!!
The paint and lighting made this image very hard to photograph and reproduce without a lot of muddiness, but here you go anyway, the finished giraffe. A study of one of my baby's toys. I thought it would be fun and similar to some of my animal paintings, but I found the small size of the painting (maybe four or five inches high) made the amount of detail required somewhat less than I expected (even though I originally tried for more), so you don't get the same quality of texture as with the lion, as an example. Oh well, live and learn.
The second draft of my fantasy novel is steaming ahead. This technique of saving a lot of the detail until the overall story arc is determined makes it easier to layer in details and conversation that have more meaning than I would have likely been able to do the first time round, not knowing what came next. More work, but I hope it'll pay off. We'll see! :)
I'm hoping to get the book finished by mid year. Should be fun.
Bad Joke time (shamelessly stolen from a radio ad, but I had to laugh when I heard it):
Q: What's brown and sticky?
A: A stick.
Ha ha. Happy Holidays everyone!
This month, I finished reading Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee, a movie writing guru (this book was recommended to someone by literary agent Nathan Bransford). Some of the writing was a bit flowery for me, but I still really enjoyed the book, because it's one of the most thoughtful analyses of story structure that I've read so far. He uses some earlier ideas from Aristotle and other story writing coaches through the years, and gives a very good framework to analyze a story when it's finished (I'm not sure it would really help write a bad writer write a good story, it's not that kind of 'how to' guide, but I think it helps to polish and perfect a story once it's underway). Sometimes all the pieces of a story are there, but only when analyzing them in a framework do you realize you haven't put them in the right place, or order. I suspect that this sort of thing becomes instinctive for great writers, after a while.
Anyway, I am thankful for the people who enjoy my art and writing, and hopeful that I will continue to create more and perfect my skills for many years to come!
PS, I know I haven't been posting much original art lately, so here is a piece that is still a work in progress, but closer to the end than the beginning now. Enjoy!
A quick post. I'm not dead, but the baby is demanding and fussy. And cute. Luckily for him. ;)
I am absolutely dying to draw, sitting in the baby's room, trying to rock him to sleep and looking at the paintings I framed and put up there. Thinking about technique and new things I could try, even while I know that the more months that pass without much drawing make the actual drawing part increasingly difficult (a little break is fine, but after that the brain/ fingers connection starts to lose the muscle memory). Sigh.
I am plugging away at my fantasy novel, which keeps me somewhat sane. I've got a first draft done, well actually I had it done before the baby came, I think, and am now polishing up all the details that I know I neglected or didn't put the effort into clarifying the first time round. Plot inconsistencies, motivations, deeper character sketches (okay, any kind of character sketch for some).
A bit of an experiment, but I'm going to use the second draft as a complete rework. The first draft was all about plot and pacing. The rest of the elements: character, setting, mood, dialogue, are all coming here. It may be a complete mess. I may lose motivation and get sick of the story, for spending too much time on it before putting fingers to keyboard on the second draft. And maybe it still won't measure up to the bar I have set for it and this will be another learning exercise. But for now, I'm still having lots of fun.
And I think if I wasn't doing something creative, I'd be struggling to get through this phase. There are a lot of demanding and frustrating, not to mention time-consuming, tasks that come with a baby. It's nice to do something completely unrelated and creative once in a while too.
But, wow, isn't he a cutie? :)
A little football sized bundle of sleep, hunger, and big blue eyes arrived two weeks ago, putting us into a haze of sleepless nights and zombie like feeding and cuddling.
Oh, yes, time has suddenly become a lot more precious.
As a result, this won't be a long post, just a quick update. I haven't done much art lately, although I feel the motivation building, which is actually good. I think for more ambitious projects, I need a bit of umph to get me going. We'll see when I get the chance to fool around with the paints, though. As I said before, I see the writing as being a bit easier to squeeze in than the art, for the immediate future, but I'll try my best to do both.
I'm just cruising into the end of my first adult fantasy novel. At the moment, it's a hot steaming mess. Which is fine, I have a million editorial notes that I've made going through and I've known it needs some major surgery. Having done one novel already, even in a different genre, at least has better prepared me for the magnitude of editing a book to a reasonable shape. The first draft is really only halfway or less through the process. But, I'm still fairly upbeat about the story, so it should be fun. :)
I don't know if talking about an adult book is the point of this site, but it's all I've done lately in the writing/ artwork world, so why not, right?
I'll try and get some original artwork up here soon!
Until, then, off to see the football... :)
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