The value of a blink

I'm definitely one of those people who believe that writers should write every day, and painters should paint every day, musicians should play music every day, etc. Even if it's just a few minutes. I think that the reason that many don't is because they decide, either consciously or unconsciously, that because those few minutes feel shallow and they can't really get under the surface of things before they have to stop, there's no value to a fifteen minute art sit-down or the addition of a single paragraph to a manuscript.

I think there's a lot of value. I haven't tried to put this into words before, so I hope you'll be patient with me while I thrash it out.

Probably the least important part, and the part that is a focus of programs like Nanowrimo, is that those individual paragraphs add up. And they do. But this is super-easy to shrug off, because if you feel like you don't get to go deep, they're probably lousy paragraphs anyway. I think they always have the potential to be just as good as anything else you might write, but we're discussing writer mentality here, and even I wonder if I might not be writing stupid crud when I sit down for fifteen minutes before work and tap out a quarter of a scene.

I think it's more important to look at it as mental exercise. At first it might be true that those paragraphs written in stolen moments are probably not worth much, but with daily practice, you can't help but get better at dropping in and making quick additions.

Ooo, here's a good one: I don't stop thinking about my books when I go to work, and I get some great ideas there. Or maybe while grocery shopping I'll pick up a can of olives that are on sale and I'll think oh, oh! the contrast of salmony pink/red with purple-y black! and I'll dash home and splash some colors onto a new blank Photoshop screen. I might not have time to do anything more than that, but it's there for me to riff off of when I get some more time. And for those who rely on inspiration, having that inspired moment captured is a good and precious thing, even if they didn't have time to see it through to completion. And an incomplete gesture of inspiration is the norm, unless you're one of those rare people who completes an entire project in a single day. Even then, wouldn't it be nice to have something small and perfect and good every day?

Speaking of incomplete gestures and notes of inspiration, there's no rule that says that when you sit down and write, it has to be on the prose within the manuscript. Especially for books but also for short stories and art, I take notes which end up scattered on all different sizes, shapes and colors of paper all around my desk. Note-taking and planning is also creative time, my friends, and very valuable creative time. That is definitely part of the writing every day rule, and shouldn't be undervalued.

These are all good and true things. So, no more excuses. Write every day, even if it's just for a blink. After all, if we didn't blink, our eyes would dry out. So it is with the arts.

Dear Font Designer ....

I spend several hours a month looking at fonts that I might want to acquire for my business. I'm pretty choosy. It's not just a matter of expense. I budget for fonts that will set me back over a hundred dollars and purchase them shortly before I need them (or sooner if they go on sale.) So if price is (usually) no object, what's getting in my way?

When I'm roughing the design for book covers and interiors I don't always have a specific thing in mind, so browsing through fonts helps me focus and suggests ideas. This means that your font design might suggest a concept that will result in my buying and using your font on my next project. I don't want to limit your creativity. Your vision and passion are an inspiration to me, and I'm always eager to look at your latest font.

Having said that, I'm often frustrated by some typographic tropes and give lots of gorgeous fonts a fast pass because of problems that come up when I'm trying to create a cover. Here are some very, very common problems that keep me from buying otherwise wonderful fonts:

Letters that look similar to other letters:  Usually, font designers are good about making certain that their letters look different from each other. They do a less-consistent job of making letters look uniquely like themselves in the grand scheme of all of typography. I see S letters that look a lot like a fancy P, and lowercase L letters that look like a lowercase T. A slanted, narrow, lowercase E when placed next to a F, T, or other letter with an overhanging element can be mistaken for an i with the dot obliterated. Here's the thing. When you have the entire font or a big block of text to look at, these visual misinterpretations by the human eye are rare because the context of all the letters helps our wonderful pattern-recognizing brain tell the letters apart. But if the title of my book is FiSh, which must stand alone on that book cover, it might look like FePh, or Tilk, or any other number of weird things depending on the font's idiosyncrasies. Those idiosyncrasies can have strong artistic and traditional foundations, but tradition doesn't help me a darned bit when I'm trying to make the reader understand that the book's title is FiSh. I recently saw this illustrated painfully in an otherwise beautiful poster where STRANGER seemed to read SIRANGER. For real. I even had a whole phrase to help me interpret the typography and I still had to take about fifteen seconds to see it. This is mainly a problem in swash and cursive designs, but I've seen it in decorative serif fonts as well.

Which leads me to letters that run into each other in unhelpful ways or that are spaced poorly, aka kerning and white-spacing: I think it's fair to say that all typographers, except perhaps novices working in a vacuum, address kerning and negative space to the best of their ability. For titling, I can adjust kerning to a certain extent and I'll be fine. Having said that, there's really nothing I can do with an r and n that combine into a figure that looks like an m but that, when I adjust the kerning, have awkward negative space around them so that they look ugly. The most common problem I run into? The capital letter M whose legs have such an extreme lean to them that even when the following letter's stem is touching them, the spacing still looks far too wide, white and awkward. The abbreviation Mr. and MA suffer in particular, and neither of those are an uncommon letter pairing. I find it maddening that this happens so often. All by itself, I have to say, the broad M letters look quite nice, but letters don't usually live in a vacuum. I rejected a huge number of otherwise wonderful fonts for the title job for MASKS because the combined slants for the M and A created a huge amount of white space that was not carried through to the rest of the title, even when I adjusted the kerning for SKS. As for body text, I'm not going to go through a whole book checking to see if rn looks like an m, so please, play safely out there, typographers.

Asian-inspired brush scripts that have letters that are too rough and have truncated parts meant to serve as absence of brush or a 'natural' brush look but end up looking unfinished and awkward:  Some of my clients are martial arts writers and would love to have a font that had the elegance and sophistication of good Asian-inspired brush calligraphy. Me too! The most common problem with the fonts I've looked at are incomplete letters. (The capital letter T in particular seems to always have a broken stem.) The second main issue is an almost random baseline and x height. I appreciate a certain looseness to the baseline and an overall feeling of freedom, but more often than not the baseline looks like someone tried to make a font that looked like Chinese or Japanese writing which is artful and gorgeous, but doesn't translate well into roman letters (roman letters are what most American and English readers think of as 'normal'). There's little respect for the roman letters in their own right and even less respect for the 'normal' baseline aesthetics for roman letters. Roman letters written as if they're set on a vertical rather than horizontal line and with a huge variation in ascender, descender and x height invariably looks sloppy, no matter how lovely the individual letters might be. More griping about baseline: capital letters are used to start the word more often than not, right? How am I supposed to ground my baseline with a broken stem? Sadly, such fonts that I attempt to use on a book cover end up looking like a Japanese or Chinese restaurant menu rather than a professional book design. I like that look ... on a menu ... but I'm trying to sell a book here, not food, and more often than not I need a formal mood. Artistic, good. All over the place, bad. Very short book titles can work using a rough font provided that the individual letters in the title harmonize well, but unfortunately, often they don't. Longer titles result in very poor results. I often have the feeling that the typographer is speaking with an awkward accent rather than working with a true understanding of the language of brush calligraphy. It would be very, very nice if there were alternates, btw, so that commonly used letters that repeat in words: e, s, t, o, a, r, etc. (and especially letters that are doubled) can have an alternate to make the title look hand-written. It would also be excellent if all the capital letters had alternates so that it's easier to ground that all-important baseline with something that will enhance the rest of title. I suspect that if I want a book title with Asian-inspired typography, my best bet will be to contact a brush calligrapher and commission a custom piece. Otherwise, I'll have to stick with calligraphic fonts with no brush-style elements but which have Asian architectural influences. There are some fine Asian-influenced brush fonts out there, but sadly they are very rare.

That about covers it for now. Thanks for reading!

The Great Outdoor Mind Expander

We had a little bit of rain last night, and I wore a jacket to work.  It feels good.  And, bonus, the weather report claims we'll have a nice, warm afternoon.

With the next four days off, I'd planned on writing, editing and working on book covers for various Wyrd Goat Publishing projects, but with weather like this I'd much rather be gardening.  I may have to embrace the power of 'and'.  I'll probably be sore, tired, and coming back to work at the end of it will become needed recovery time.

It'll also be a good opportunity to write, edit and design book covers outside.  I think differently when I'm outside.  Something about the environment makes different parts of my brain activate.  I'm not sure it's quantitatively better, but when your focus is creativity then anything different from the norm is better for future work, learning, expanding, all that good stuff.  So the quality of work is probably the same, with some parts getting worse and other parts better thanks to the change in external environment, but overall because I'm doing some new things, in theory my work overall in the future will be better.

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

Pretty soon it's going to get pretty uncomfortable to be outside, not to mention that once the rain begins, it would be pretty dumb to expose my computer to that.  I think it's past time to pledge to work on my computer for at least an hour outside everyday, weather allowing.  We'll see how long I stick to that.  I'll keep y'all posted as far as things that change in my prose, editing style and artwork.  Anyone else want to give the challenge a try?

In Representing Myself, I Have a Fool for an Artist

No Carey.  The neighbors haven't caught that cat yet, though, so there's still hope it's her.

My thoughts are turning toward OryCon.  I've been invited to be a panelist again (yay!).  I'm just hoping that by then I'll be able to officially announce which issue of a certain magazine a certain story of mine will be appearing in.  It's a very, very nice magazine, and I'm excited to be in it, but I haven't gotten the contract yet, so it's best that I muffle my enthusiasm for now.

I will have some sort of card or bookmark or something to hand out, though, which I have to design.  It's funny how I can get a job to do a book cover or a promotional poster and I just sit down and do it, but I freeze up when it's my own stuff.  Human brains can be really dumb sometimes.

I don't think it has very much to do with looking foolish, though it feels that way.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that when I'm doing something for someone else, I'm aware that if they don't like it or need changes, I just do them and I feel that I've satisfied their requirements.  When I'm working for myself, I have no one to really provide outside opinions or judgements that has a stake in the result.  I can ask opinions of friends, but other than their kind enthusiasm and hopes for my success, they don't have a dog in the fight, per se.  They can't really look at it in terms of whether it represents my work well, if that makes sense.  I also fear that they must measure their response in such a way that they can be helpful without bruising my feelings, and each one of them estimates my skin thickness and aptness to bruise differently.

Or maybe all this mental contortionist silliness is just another form of self-sabotage.

Anyway, that's my latest struggle.  The good news is that I have deadlines now, and I do really well with deadlines.

Wacom Bamboo Create Tablet Review

I've been producing a lot more art lately, thanks to the Bamboo Create.  It's an awesome tool for creating book covers.  One of the things that I found fascinating was that although this is apparently considered a non-pro art tablet, or as one reviewer put it on Amazon, a 'fun' tablet, the only limitations I ran into were the limitations of my own artistic abilities.  I would not have been able to create the covers for Masks and Confidante without the tablet.

The only features I found lacking related directly to the software I downloaded.  For example, in GIMP, there's no way that I've found to create a virtual group of color dabs that I can then mix and have several different colors on the 'bristles' of the same brush that would then behave like a brush dipped into several colors before it's applied to the canvas.  Oh how I long for that!  I'm sure it's available somewhere or somehow.  I just haven't found it yet.  Also, I haven't figured out a way to tell GIMP or any other software program to, instead of a gradient forming in stripes along a line (so that if I'm making a ribbon, the ribbon is blue then green then yellow then orange then red then violet) to make a ribbon with the gradient running across the surface.  So in my rainbow example, the center would be yellow and the edges would fade out to blue on one side and violet on the other.  I'm sure it's possible.  The way I've gotten around it is to start with a thick line of violet, then a slightly thinner line of blue on a new layer, a thinner one of green on yet another layer, red, and then yellow and carefully using the smudge and erase functions to fudge the colors so that they obliterate what I want to disappear and leave behind only the colors that I need.  Obviously, making a rainbow ribbon this way would be a huge pain.  It's much less so with a tablet then it would be a mouse, but still.  That's a lot of switching between layers, and a lot of pen strokes.

But, back to the tablet.

Whenever I needed more control over an area, I just zoomed in on it.  And I learned to be patient.  My computer isn't the fastest in the universe, and so I had to sometimes wait while the pen figured out where I was and what I was doing.  I wait less now then when I started out, because I learned how close to hold the pen so that it didn't have to reconnect with the tablet.  I also found that by pausing briefly in one place whenever I moved the pen too far away and then back into range again, I recovered more quickly than waving the pen around near the tablet trying to find my spot.  In fact, now that I've had some practice, the vast majority of the time I'm working as fast as I can without having to wait for the tablet at all.  Also, in a matter of a few days, I quickly learned how to switch between mouse, keypad, touch pad and the Bamboo Create which helped me to do things like save files, name files, move between programs and multitask.  Lots of fun.  The tablet was much easier to learn how to use than the software that I interface with when I use it.

It does burn my battery power quickly, so I learned that it's best to have my laptop plugged in while I'm using it.  The pad comes with extra tips.  I bought extra tips in addition to the ones that came-with, under the assumption that I'd burn through them quickly.  So far I haven't had to change tips yet.  When I do, I may experiment with a different kind.

I also ordered a protective cover made for the tablet, but by another company.  Initially I was disappointed.  The cover wasn't big enough to cover the entire tablet area, and it wasn't small enough to fit between the guide corners interior to the 'touch' area, so there was no tidy/pretty way to apply it.  Also, it sticks on rather than being a magnetic-style screen protector like I expected.  Maybe those don't work on tablets.  I don't know.  It bugged me to basically 'tape' it on.  But once I had it positioned I was happy with it.  I had the area on the tablet that used the most protected from the pen tip (which makes little, tiny scratches on the surface that I'm sure would have built up over time) and the cover makes a very yummy surface to work on as far as resistance to the pen tip I'm using.  (It's the one that came originally with the pen.)

Overall I give the tablet a four happy kitty review out of four happy kitties.  I expected a lot less, considering the reasonable price.  I thought I would eventually have to upgrade, but I have no plans to do so.  So far, this tablet does everything I need it to do.  I doubt I'd get more quality work done more quickly with a 'better' tablet.  If I do upgrade, though, I'll let y'all know!

Links in case you're curious ....

The nibs I got don't appear to be available anymore.  I hope there wasn't a problem with them!  Mine had a couple of felt ones in the mix.  I included a link to the 'normal' extra nibs.  Also, the center link to POSRUS is for the Bamboo Create protective cover I mentioned.  I know, it looks like another tablet ....

Extra Nibs

Cover Art--I love my tablet!

I love my Bamboo Create. It has hugely improved my ability to manipulate GIMP. And yes, btw, I didn't have to do anything special for the tablet to talk to GIMP. Essentially, the tablet and little pen thingy (I'm so technically advanced!) work just like my mouse and my pad on my laptop and all that. In fact, I can switch between them quickly and smoothly, using whichever gets me where I'm going the quickest and/or the best.

I'm never sure how effective my covers are, but this was definitely the most technically difficult project I've done. The Masks cover (which I plan to redo pretty soon) involved a lot of repetitive, detailed activity, especially with the filigree on the dark half of the mask. This cover had many, many more layers and employed some skills and tools that I simply didn't have when I did the Masks cover.

Anyway, here it is. This, btw, will be an awesome, awesome anthology. It's not available yet. I'm sure it'll be all over Facebook and stuff when it goes live.

Free the Bird!

I have an excuse for not posting in a long time. No, really. And it's not that I've been working non-stop at my day job, although sometimes it feels just like that. I haven't even been sucked into garden-world, though I did rototill a bit during the good weather, opening up some more ground for the planting that will be coming soon (I hope!)

My Bamboo tablet came in, and I'm learning how to play with it. In the name of learning how to work with the stylus, I played a few rounds of Free the Bird. Man, is it addictive. And cute! OMG it's so cute. And in a couple of minutes I'm going to be searching around online to see if there are additional levels available, because apparently ten is not enough for me.

I'm so bad.

Anyway, I haven't tried the tablet with GIMP yet, but I'll be doing that very soon. Really. Just as soon as I find out about Free the Bird.

Because sometimes, ten levels of cute simply isn't enough.

Update: Wah. No additional levels seem to be available. Heart broken. Tears falling. Back to work, I guess. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggggghhhhhhh

Wyrd Goat Logo

We have a great person, T, visiting us so that's my excuse for not posting as much as I'd like. Seriously, when did it get to be so hard to post on my blog every day?

Anyway, it's not finished but I've made some progress on the Wyrd Goat logo. Specifically, the neck's proportions aren't there yet and the horns aren't done and there's no beard yet (gotta have a beard!) but I figured y'all might be curious about what I've been obsessing over the past few. I have to say that working in digital media is pretty fun. I really, really want a tablet, though. I'm doing all this with the track pad and a mouse I got for my laptop. Yowza, it's hard on the hands and wrists! I also don't have as much control as I'm used to.

But!

If I make a line I hate, I just delete it. No mucking about with covering or removing pigment or there's even a technique where you can remove the top layer of paper if you're working on something durable like vellum ... None of that. Just a click of the mouse and it's gone.

Sweet!

I Wanna Be a Loose Woman

Sorry it's been so quiet (too quiet.)  I've been working, writing, reading, and practicing brush calligraphy.

Boy does brush calligraphy reveal in painful and obvious detail my shortcomings in brush control.  Yikes.  And I'm not talking about control in the normal sense.  Artsy stuff requires looseness and relaxation.  Anyone who's practiced a signature knows what I mean.  There's a point where your brain  has it down auto-magically and you relax and just sign.  I aspire to that with brush calligraphy, not because I want to achieve a zen state or anything.  I just want the letters to flow so that it looks natural.  Right now most of the letters have at least one awkward point.  When it's the same one, I can work on that section by itself, but most of the time the awkwardness wanders, like an awful conversation that you desperately want to go well.

Anyway, I've been listening to music and watching dvds (thank you, DH, for the Castle Season 3!!) and practicing with the brush, hoping that when I look at my collection of letters the next day I'll think wow, that's the one.  That's the keeper.

And then I'll put it on the cover of a book.

Speaking of books, I'm on a couple of serious deadlines, so I'd better get some done before I crash tonight.  Gotta write every day a little bit.  

Frank Frazetta

I'm one of those people who usually reads about someone famously talented who passed away with a sense of 'that's a shame' or 'what a loss' but who never really could say that the person was a huge influence on my life.

That changed today when I learned that Frank Frazetta passed about a month ago.

The art world has lost a master artist.

Frank Frazetta was a huge influence on my art.

Early on I was impressed by realism (much to my father's dismay.) I tried to make my work look like a photograph. I had some success, and gained a little notoriety in my high school, but except for the satisfaction I got from making something unreal look really really real (like a female body builder who was pale-white on one side and dark-skinned on the other, or the young blue woman with steel gray hair) I felt like something was missing.

I discovered what was missing when I discovered Frank Frazetta's work. Passion. Motion. Fire. Unchained emotion.

He led me away from art-as-photography (I have nothing against it--I'm blown away when I see it and I highly respect people who can work creatively within those styles) and expanded my horizons into the realm of art-as-expression. I stopped feeling closed-in and pressured to work on the details of realism to the exclusion of all else and started feeling alive and creative when I worked. Now I render realistically only when it serves the emotion, rather than losing the emotion as I try to force realism.

For me, realism had become a crutch, a constantly inbreeding goal that served only to reproduce what I could see. I didn't think I could ever render that which I couldn't see. It seemed out of reach, an impossible goal. For me, it would have been, at least by the route I was taking. Frazetta took me by the hand and said stop copying the still life, and the photo, and look inside yourself first. Imagine ... and then paint.

Thank you, Mr. Frazetta, for sharing your gift, for your infamous generosity, and for your artistic vision. You changed my life, and the lives of thousands of other artists around the world without having to say a word.

You showed us better ways to dream.

Rest in Peace.

Estrogen: The Fountain of Weee

I had a wonderful time at Estrogenfest this last weekend. Hence my silence the past few days. No internets, no chores, just women, waves and art. My creative batteries have been recharged, and I'm ready to get back to work.

I seriously planned on writing while I went away, but I'm glad I didn't. I think that, unbeknownst to me, I needed the space. Focusing on visual arts for three days felt like rebuilding my computer's desktop. All the same stuff is there, in the same order, but the brain is running better.

For all that, though, it's good to be home, and I'm glad I wasn't away for, say, a week or a month. A weekend is just perfect for a rejuvenating escape.

As part of my artsy-fartsy focus, I got to take lots of photos. I'll be posting some, and painting some, in the days ahead. Yep, you heard me right. I'm painting again. I suspect that if I allow time for painting, I may be able to give myself little boosts and breaks every day. It'll be a nice experiment, and even if it doesn't work out, I look forward to playing with watercolors for a little longer. It'll stretch that coastal experience, and extend the high I get from the massive amounts of estrogen I'm exposed to when I go to one of these all-women retreats. Weee!

Chiron Business Logo

I created a logo for Rory's business. I hope to have more refined versions, but hopefully this one is good enough for T-shirt pocket-sized patches and business cards and such. I know I need to move the left (his left, my right) chest line up. I'd also like to have a cleaner sword. This will involve enlarging the image and playing with some nicer pens--this one was done with a G2 gel.

Overall, though, I like it enough that I'm not ashamed of it. Thank goodness that I only have to do this type of illustration a couple of times a year. It's really time/creativity intensive for me, far more so than writing or painting in watercolor. Probably because I'm not as practiced at it.

The Art of Not Working

I had a fabulous dinner last night with my DH and my friend R.  Good times at Ya Hala (in Portland, OR at SE 80th and Stark--highly recommended.)  One of those meals where I spent most of my time laughing about something.  We were the last people to leave.  I get to relive a bit of the flavors, if not the companionship, today when I dip into leftovers: wonderful bread they baked on the spot last night, homous (Lebanese spelling) and the cabernet sauvignon we had with out meal (we bought a bottle but didn't finish it.)  A meal like we had is a celebration of life.  The whole brain is engaged.  I'm sure my DH would have enjoyed a little danger with the meal, but I thought it was perfect.    

R is on her way to Glacier National Park today--have a great road trip, R, and take lots of pics!

R is the one that keeps me honest about my art, reminding me about the difference between an amateur (hey, it's a love thing and therefore not bad!) and a professional artist.  I simply don't put the effort into art that I put into writing.  I would like to!  But there wouldn't be hours left in the day to do that.  Well, I guess I could not sleep.  Volunteering for stuff does eat into my time, but only during certain times of the year.  That doesn't explain away my lack of focus on things of color and mind-hand-brush.  I think painting is what I do to relax and think, and I think and relax so that I can write, if that makes sense.  Gardening is the same way.  I don't think and plan and schedule my time around gardening.  I garden so that I have time to relax, think and plan my work.  The fact that I'm accomplishing stuff and sweating is purely secondary.  If I wanted to nudge myself into professional art, I would have two full time jobs instead of one (or two--however many I have right now) and the relax/think time would vanish, which would impact my creativity.  Hard to create when your creativity is compromised.

Big working weekend this weekend.  All kinds of stuff to do inside the house and out on the acreage.  Lots of time to think and plan and work on those projects that might keep us afloat over the next few months.  The weather is perfect.  It's non-stop happy happy around here.

  

Flash Tuesdays

March 17 I wrote a 1100 750 word flash.  That's two Tuesdays in a row that I've written a flash.  I finished editing the most recent one tonight and sent it off.

I think writing a flash every Tuesday would be a good habit to get into.  It's an achievable goal, forces me to think lots and lots (sometimes for days in advance) and flexes all those plot and characterization skills that get lazy from writing novels.

What? you say, novelists are lazy plotters and characterizers (is that even a word)?

I can't speak for anyone else, but in a sense I am very lazy in those areas.  Setting too.  I just have to come up with one set and then play there for months, even years.  Coming up with entirely new characters, plots and settings all the time is hard work.  Keeping it tight, short story tight and (eek!) flash tight, is even harder.  That level of creativity is a hard won skill.  And I do mean skill.  Sure, there's talent, inspiration, blah blah blah but learning how to create develops creativity.  Create-ivity can stem from a practiced ability to make stuff up.

So in a sense, I'm not very creative when it comes to plot, setting and characterization.  I can be inventive with individual scenes and what not, but it's easy (for me) to do that within a nicely established framework.  It's harder in the raw, when the idea is brand new and I'm trying to cycle past all my favorite cliche's.

In art, there's a similar problem.  The real master artists (storytellers) sketch often (create short stories often) and create masterworks within that fury of raw energy.  I'm not there yet, though I'm practicing.  I sketch much more often than I used to.  Once I have a sketch (idea) down that I like, the rest of the art (story) follows along naturally.

There are ways around being good at sketching (outlining a fresh idea, whether it's on the page or mentally in the rough).  There are various techniques, like working from a photograph (using familiar tropes or archetypes) or working in the style of a particular master (using other stories/media for inspiration) and so on.  I've done those things, and learned a lot.  I don't have anything against them.  But my goal is to create stuff that has that hot fragrance that feels alive on the page, regardless of what medium I'm working in.  That means breaking away from the defined/comfortable and searching for the familiar within the strange and the strange within the familiar.  That stuff is tough to see.

Practicing those skills means lots of sketching.  And writing flash.  I think I'm getting something right(er), because I'm getting more interest and enthusiasm in my stuff!  Flash Tuesdays are working for me.  Now I just need Sketch Mondays or something like.

The Artist's Eye

I didn't get to go to many panels at Radcon.  One was a two hour sketch session.  I had to leave about an hour in, but that hour helped loosen me up.

I've been to a few art classes over the years.  I've actually been a life model at more classes than I've personally attended, and I got to learn a lot at those.  I've noticed there are a lot of different ways of going about teaching people how to sketch, and I have a preference.

One really common way is the part analysis.  It can be fascinating.  Students learn how to draw individual portions of anatomy like eyes, noses, mouths, ears, hands and so forth.  Gray's anatomy is often referenced in such classes, getting into the nitty gritty of muscle under skin.  But these studies miss something important.  Overall composition and proportion.  

One of the most effective proportioning observations is through DaVinci's "Vitruvian Man"--an elegant display of DaVinci's understanding of Vitruvius' mathematical proportions combined with his own studies in human anatomy.  Deeper study into these proportions reveal that the 'golden ratio' or golden mean visible in the Vitruvian man echo throughout nature and inform some of the world's most compelling design elements, including (often purposefully on the part of the architect) architecture.  One of the most exquisite is how it appears in the nautilus shell.  If you can see the similarities between the Vitruvian man  proportions and how they connect with a nautilus, you've made an ancient connection that can change the way you see things forever.  I chose the link for golden mean because it's a little indirect, so it makes you think.  Where is the golden mean in the Vitruvian Man?  It's not immediately obvious.  A clue is how the circle and the square interact.  Also, look at the small lines in the joints, and look for both squares and rectangles.  You'll know you have the right ones when you look at the nautilus on the link and see the same sort of square/rectangle relationships.

So as cool (very cool!) and fun as it is to learn about creating volume/mass in noses and thickness in eyelids and the proper placement of iris and pupil when drawing eyes, in many ways I wish these things were approached after (well after!) loose sketch technique.  It's easy to tighten down.  This is so important, I want to repeat it a different way.  It's very easy to obsess on details and fail to achieve a harmonic whole.  I didn't want to pick on any particular person, so I did a search for fan art to pull up a bunch of amateur (remember, amateur is 'love of' and there's nothing wrong with or pitiful about amateur efforts) art.  Some of the images are very effective and well-executed.  Looking at the ones that don't work as well for you, can you detect a sense of piecing together parts like Dr. Frankenstein assembling his monster? Those parts can be perfectly executed, but do they work together? Is there harmony?  The golden mean isn't the only proportion set that works--do you see some proportions on the more aesthetically pleasing art that aren't golden mean proportions but still transmit a sense of harmony and layers of interlocking relationships?

Not only does obsessing on details tend to distract or detract from overall proportions, but it steals motion from art.  The more I focus on a mouth or nose or ruffles or whatever my brain fixates on, the less time I spend moving my pencil or brush around the page grabbing the flow. Flow seems like a touchy-feely abstract-y kind of term, but going back to DaVinci's observations, it's not just about finding the right proportion of forearm to upper arm or shoulder width to torso length, but proportioning the negative spaces under an arm, or discovering why the extension of a hand in gesture is so elegant and dance-like, why the fall of a skirt or the texture in hair is pleasing to the eye, why one shadow on the wall creates drama while another overwhelms or creates a distraction, and why when you make a particular change from reality (say, pile on more hair than the model has or alter the angle of the head) it works better.  If you find the squares and rectangles, find the curves, find the S, find the concentric ovals, find the diagonals and triangles and deepest shadows and lightest lights and all the neat things that make a piece of art inviting before you nail down the details it's far more likely that you'll create something that will take your breath away.  Focus on the details at the cost of overall composition, and that's what the viewer will usually do too.  If the details are perfect, the viewer will see the art as perfect too (and sometimes it's a very static, still-life kind of perfection--great if that's what you want to transmit, not so great if it's meant to transmit life and motion.)  If there's the tiniest problem, that problem will leap and shout and generally make a nuisance of itself.  Great composition overwhelms the positive and negative quirks inherent in detail, and reveals a world of fire and shadow, wind and stillness, distance and intimacy.

It's possible to create vibrant original art by focusing on details--through reference materials that themselves have excellent composition.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with taking reference photos or movie posters or your favorite family portrait and creating Boris Vallejo-type art.  Go for it.  That's the way I went, actually.  But I wish that I'd learned the other way from the beginning.  It's been (relatively) easy to copy what I see from photographs and magazine ads and books on facial expression and all that.  I could have drawn grids on paper and rendered exact copies of images on a square-by-square basis at any stage of my art education.  But to learn how to scribble and block and circle and confine and explore form rapidly on a page and develop raw excitement--I've had to unlearn so much to progress, especially that impulse to put every eyelash in the right place.  The eyelash is only as important as I make it.  If I make the play of complementary colors more important than the eyelash ... see how that works?

I imagine I'll arrive at the same artistic destination eventually, but I strongly feel that I would have created so much more original beauty on the way if I stepped back and explored the squares, rectangles, spirals and raw shapes of the universe rather than spending hours with my sketch pad drawing a model's eye.  Something to think about, the next time I pick up a pencil and draw.

The Genius of DaVinci

I was invited to attend an exclusive viewing of the DaVinci exhibit at OMSI.  Wow.  It was fun to look at everything without a crush of people.  The cookies and wine were really yummy too, and we got to listen to a lecture by an OSU professor of history whose specialty included the renaissance.  She connected some dots for me.  Like my mental roadmap of Portland, I don't see the big picture of history.  I see neighborhoods and the arteries that connect them, and I don't know about all the neighborhoods or who necessarily borders who.  A light went ding when she pointed out that Columbus sailed during DaVinci's lifetime.  I'd always held the 'Age of Exploration' and the renaissance as disconnected periods.  Now they touch.  Now they're intimate.

What can I say about DaVinci that hasn't already been said?  I developed a new appreciation for the Mona Lisa.  I got to get a good look at (a reproduction of) The Last Supper and frown at John.  Or Mary.  Or John.  Or Mary.  Is that Judas at the table, or did he already take off?  And the models of his proposed engineering designs were lots and lots of fun.  

I want to step into the room of mirrors naked.  Just saying.

So, I would recommend the exhibit, with the understanding that this stuff will be really ho hum for some people.  If you love art and history and gears and screws and levers and pulleys, you'll be all over this, unless you like Dinotopeia with all those kinds of gears and screws and levers and pulleys, and paleontology, in which case not so much.  Okay, if you like renaissance art, engineering and history, you'll be all over this.  As much as I wanted more more more, it took a long time to go through the exhibit, so more more more would have exhausted me.

Gearpunk, anyone?

Still Painting

If you've ever worked with stencils, then you know.  They seem like such a simple, elegant, easy thing to do.  Everything from conception to cutting them out to execution is simple.  Right?

Of course!  Which is why I decided (shut up, stop laughing at me!) that I could take a stencil from a book about stenciling I got quite some time ago, modify it (I can still hear you laughing) to get rid of the fleur de lis and add ivy leaves (spades if you prefer though I deliberately made the leaf asymmetrical) and lay it out properly.  You see, in the original it wasn't even.  It was wider than it was long, which wasn't a big deal, but when you folded it in half either way, it was crooked.  So I straightened it all out.  It only took, oh, about two hours working with a ruler and a curved edge.  And now I'm in the midst of slicing it out with a razor.  The best part?  I won't be done when I'm finished cutting it out.  No, that's just the beginning.  I have to treat the watercolor paper so that it doesn't absorb too much moisture and warp.  And then I have to actually tape this thing up, stencil it on, move it down to the next marked spot and stencil again.  All the way around the room.  Well, okay, I can skip the wall with the oh-my-gawds-what-were-they-thinking glue-on paneling that's peeling off now.  (I have plans for that wall later.)

Real artists use acetate and a hot acetate cutting thingy to cut out a stencil.  I don't have acetate and a hot acetate cutting thingy, so I'm doing this the old-fashioned way, the way they used to do it before acetate.

Wish me luck.  I'm gonna need it.

Paint? Not yet

Today has been prep day for painting (wall kind, not fine art kind.)  I was hoping to get some actual paint on the walls today, but it's almost 1am local time here and I've just finished filling in all the holes in the wall.

I may do some hand-painted details around the room after the regular paint is up, if I'm feeling brave.  Stuff like that is notoriously tricky, so I'm not planning anything really big or dramatic--maybe some leaves around light switches and such.  If I didn't have so many other writing and art projects on my list, I might plan out a trompe l'oeil on the section of wall between the sliding glass door and the big window.  In particular I'd love to do an ivy plant growing out of a Green Man pot with maybe a butterfly on one of the leaves and probably a caterpillar or two.

With those sorts of things it's best to first make a master sketch that you then guard with your life so that if it works out you can use it over and over again.  You transfer the master sketch onto canvas or, preferably, a board painted with the same latex you have painted on the wall as a ground.  You then paint your subject in oils if you have an oil-based paint on the wall or acrylics if it's latex, taking notes and/or pics as you go along.  If you're satisfied with your project, you then transfer the sketch onto the wall and paint it step by step (skipping any errors and making improvements as you can) and then you can sell the painting on the canvas or board.  If it didn't turn out, you shouldn't put it on the wall!  Just paint over the board or canvas and start again.  It's much less aggravating  perfecting your project on a board than making a mistake on the wall, especially since trompe l'oeils are notoriously hard to cover.  It's doable, but you have to treat it just like dark paint on the wall--a couple of coats of primer, and then two or three coats of your wall paint.  Why are they tough to cover?  Because even really good paint is just a wee bit translucent.  With a monocolor on a wall, there may be some of the underlying color showing through your paint, but not enough to notice anything but the most overt change in hue from your paint chip.  When there's a pattern, though, the eye is really good at picking up subtle variations in a monotone and you'll see just that hint of pattern under the paint unless you have enough pigment to cover the pattern so the eye can no longer detect it.

By the way, there's a particularly wonderful Green Man here, though it's not my favorite so far.  My favorite was created by my good friend Roz, and it's hanging on her wall at her house.  I've yet to find one that equals the depth of emotion and expression.

Word Clouds

Thanks to Jay Lake for pointing to this fun site.  

I had a good time pulling words out of the first chapter of Masks.  It doesn't look like a cloud to me, but the egg shape and the words that came out large are fitting.  Cold money.  Yep.

The sickness spreads, and paint geekiness

It's official now.  The girl is sick too.  

I went to the doc yesterday and my lungs are clear (so far) and I don't appear to have secondary infections going on.  So, despite the fact that I'm ill, have an off again, on again fever and sound like I've traded my vocal chords for sandpaper, I can still declare:

My immune system is mighty.  Here me roar!

Actually, you can hear me roar later, after I'm done with the laryngitis thingy.  I'm supposed to rest my voice as much as possible.  Which, btw, for those of you not in the know, whispering is as hard if not harder on your voice than talking.  Don't whisper if you have laryngitis.  Write a note.  Point.  Shake your head no no and point again more firmly.  That.  That right there.  Yes!  No, not that, that.  Oh, I give up, I'll get it myself.

In painting news I plan to get some new paints.  I've been working with the same palette for a long time (well, about four years which is not that long I guess) and, although I'm sure there's much more to learn about these colors, I've learned to trust their properties, how they mix,and I know how they lay beside each other.  It's time for some new colors to shake things up.

My 'normal' palette is primarily composed of Schmincke aquarelles (watercolors) with some M. Grahams.  I use vanadium yellow, gamboge, vermillion, cadmium red, madder red dark, quinacridone violet, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue and viridian as my 'primary' colors and yellow ochre, raw sienna, raw umber, and Hooker's green as my 'earth' colors.  My earth palette is pathetically limited and I can't paint with it in a functional manner.  Although I don't have black or gray I haven't missed them.  I mix them.

Anyway, I went to Art's Desire to snoop around.  I was almost out of quincridone violet and viridian so I picked up a tube of each (all of these are in M. Grahams, a local company, which I'm moving over to away from Schmincke) and I got pthalocyanine green because it looked useful to me.  I'd also been thinking about how prussian blue would fit into my earth palette, and since it was right there ....  After some hemming and hawing I also picked up burnt umber, a nice, red-leaning brown.  

For 'normal' colors I'd like to add new gamboge because as a yellow it has more range and interest than regular gamboge.  I'm also picking up perylene green, which, I admit, may make me lazy about mixing my blacks.  I'm probably going to phase out Hunter's green.  Although Hunter's is an artist's standard, it hasn't been very useful to me with my current palette and when I dip into it as a straight color or for mixing I'm usually disappointed with how flat it is.  With the new additions I may change my mind.  I have until the end of the tube to decide.  For now, though, it's on the 'need not restock' list.  I also at some point picked up chrome yellow.  I never use the darned thing.  What was I thinking?  

But the colors I'm really excited about are the Daniel Smith Primateks.  These so-called mineral colors show a lot of promise.  This overview on Handprint discusses some of the strengths and weaknesses of these colors.  One negative for Handprint is a positive for me--I paint very dark, and so the dark nature of the mineral hues will serve to my advantage.  I'm also excited to see how the precipitation will work on yupo.  Will it do too much?  Behave itself?  Go wild?  Disappoint?  Can't wait to try.  My choices are blue apatite, sodalite, piemontite and bloodstone.  With these colors, I think my earth palette will become at least as fun to play with as my primary palette.  I can expand as an artist and play with some grown up colors.  

One thing is certain.  My normal palette (the actual palette rather than the colors I have) is too small.  Either that or I have to break down and get a second one, separating the earth from the primaries.  I can no longer foist my earth colors into mixing pockets.  I'll need all the mixing pockets now.  Interestingly enough, although I hadn't planned on it, I'll end up with ten primary colors (replacing gamboge with new gamboge) and twelve earth colors (if prussian blue works out in that palette--it may end up fitting better with the primaries.)  This will be the first time I'll have more colors in the earth palette than the primary.  I think it will work really well with the subject matter I choose, but I won't know until I get there.  

So today I'll paint some with what I have and see what happens.  First thing, got to do some paint swatches and see where I'm at, and then it's onward and forward from there.