Damn you, Kumoricon, why must you tempt me so. An endless cavalcade of cosplaying anime geeks for my sketching pleasure, Dance Dance Revolution, a karaoke room, and - god help me - a maid cafe!
(Oh, and some anime or something. Whutever :P)
Grr...so many conventions, so little time.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
20090214 - Circumambulation
A lot of the more eye-catching Moleskine spreads I see on Flickr use acrylics, so I finally decided to try it myself. This is actually a "proof of concept" piece - I'm going to make a postcard with a similar design.
I'm pretty happy with the results, although when I make the postcard version of this I'm going to stamp the sansrkit in the middle in gold ink instead of using image transfer.
Acrylic makes the pages of a sketchbook Moleskine curl a bit, and you need to spray some fixative to keep the pages from sticking when you're done, but it seems to work pretty well. I'm going to read up on acrylic techniques and play with the medium more in the future.
I'm pretty happy with the results, although when I make the postcard version of this I'm going to stamp the sansrkit in the middle in gold ink instead of using image transfer.
Acrylic makes the pages of a sketchbook Moleskine curl a bit, and you need to spray some fixative to keep the pages from sticking when you're done, but it seems to work pretty well. I'm going to read up on acrylic techniques and play with the medium more in the future.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Radiant GMail
If you're not familiar with Radiant Silvergun this will make no sense to you whatsoever.
Google is giving out G-mail stickers if you send them a self-addressed stamped envelope. People have been sending them some pretty neat stickers, notecards, art, and other goodies the spirit of good trade. I decided to do some mail-art on the back of my envelope to them, but I didn't have any good ideas.
For no particular reason I had the Zen-like Engrish saying from Radiant Silvergun running through my head all day today:
"BE ATTITUDE FOR GAINS"
Which collided with my envelope to G-mail with the messy result you see above.
...
...It's a geek thing. Trust me, they'll get it.
Google is giving out G-mail stickers if you send them a self-addressed stamped envelope. People have been sending them some pretty neat stickers, notecards, art, and other goodies the spirit of good trade. I decided to do some mail-art on the back of my envelope to them, but I didn't have any good ideas.
For no particular reason I had the Zen-like Engrish saying from Radiant Silvergun running through my head all day today:
"BE ATTITUDE FOR GAINS"
Which collided with my envelope to G-mail with the messy result you see above.
...
...It's a geek thing. Trust me, they'll get it.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Marathon
Tonight was my second night of drawing class. I've been fighting a cold for the last couple days, but it's more of an annoyance than anything else.
I have a couple of hours after work before class starts, and I'm really beginning to appreciate them. I have some dinner near school, head in, walk around and look at the galleries and the announcement board, maybe do a brief sketch or two, and usually spend a few minutes in the student lounge before class. They have these huge comfy couches that are great to just sit back in, close your eyes, and do absolutely nothing for about 20 minutes. Very refreshing.
And I need it, because class can be tiring. I'm used to drawing simple subjects and figures, usually for no more than 20-30 minutes a day. Even excepting break and lecture time, we spend at least 2 hours drawing in class, and so far it's been pictures of still lifes with many complex subjects jumbled together.
I get tired, my shoulders start to hurt, I lose focus, things don't line up, proportions are wrong, objects that weren't there before suddenly spring into view. By break time I feel like I've run a mile full out. And, while things come out better than I expect, I expect better.
I'm not complaining, mind you. I think this is really just another lesson., and that lesson is endurance. Despite the zen-like aspect, drawing requires focus and mental discipline. I have an inherently lazy mind, and I suspect as it stands right now without a class I'd probably never draw anything more complicated than the abbreviated studies I do in my Moleskine.
Our teacher is like a trainer for a marathon runner. His job is to challenge us, put adversity in front of us we'd never have thought of by ourselves, and help us get over it. My hope is if I persist that I can internalize the aspect of the challenger and begin to seek out tough but rewarding projects. I suppose to some degree I've already done this, or I wouldn't even be in class, but I have a ways to go.
I find it strangely appropriate that our next assignment is to draw a pair of running shoes.
I have a couple of hours after work before class starts, and I'm really beginning to appreciate them. I have some dinner near school, head in, walk around and look at the galleries and the announcement board, maybe do a brief sketch or two, and usually spend a few minutes in the student lounge before class. They have these huge comfy couches that are great to just sit back in, close your eyes, and do absolutely nothing for about 20 minutes. Very refreshing.
And I need it, because class can be tiring. I'm used to drawing simple subjects and figures, usually for no more than 20-30 minutes a day. Even excepting break and lecture time, we spend at least 2 hours drawing in class, and so far it's been pictures of still lifes with many complex subjects jumbled together.
I get tired, my shoulders start to hurt, I lose focus, things don't line up, proportions are wrong, objects that weren't there before suddenly spring into view. By break time I feel like I've run a mile full out. And, while things come out better than I expect, I expect better.
I'm not complaining, mind you. I think this is really just another lesson., and that lesson is endurance. Despite the zen-like aspect, drawing requires focus and mental discipline. I have an inherently lazy mind, and I suspect as it stands right now without a class I'd probably never draw anything more complicated than the abbreviated studies I do in my Moleskine.
Our teacher is like a trainer for a marathon runner. His job is to challenge us, put adversity in front of us we'd never have thought of by ourselves, and help us get over it. My hope is if I persist that I can internalize the aspect of the challenger and begin to seek out tough but rewarding projects. I suppose to some degree I've already done this, or I wouldn't even be in class, but I have a ways to go.
I find it strangely appropriate that our next assignment is to draw a pair of running shoes.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
20090208 - Raccoon Model
Last night I dreamt I was watching a Japanese TV show, one of those ladies talk shows that comes on during the day. They had some models showing off new fashions.
One of the models had a raccoon's tail. For whatever reason this was perfectly normal. Indeed, one of the people on the show commented on how well the skirt matched the model's tail.
Part of the reason I want to draw better is so I can draw the crazy stuff I dream about. I'm not doing the model justice with this picture. She was very cute, tail and all!
And, there was something really right about a place where something so odd was considered wondrous and beautiful. It's late and I have a terrible cold. Time to get some sleep, but I'll keep my notepad near.
One of the models had a raccoon's tail. For whatever reason this was perfectly normal. Indeed, one of the people on the show commented on how well the skirt matched the model's tail.
Part of the reason I want to draw better is so I can draw the crazy stuff I dream about. I'm not doing the model justice with this picture. She was very cute, tail and all!
And, there was something really right about a place where something so odd was considered wondrous and beautiful. It's late and I have a terrible cold. Time to get some sleep, but I'll keep my notepad near.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Cat
We had a fun game of John Wick's "Cat" this weekend, simultaneously making nuisances of ourselves and protecting the neighborhood humans from unseen supernatural evils.
There were a lot of players. My cat - Old Tom - is the oldest, and I'm fairly proactive as a player, so somehow I ended up being the person giving a lot of the orders. Well, as much as you can give orders to a herd of cats! To avoid hogging the spotlight I would give vague orders or suggestions, occasionally intervene, and then go off for a nap on the front porch.
We had a fun first half trying to get food, which involved laying out a breadcrumb trap for a flock of pigeons. One of the characters, Little Monster, got pooped on by a pigeon in the process. This prompted a conversation that I'm sure I've never had in an RPG before...
The latter half of the game involved us squaring off against the big bad, a malevolent raccoon. We fought him in the dream world, which is always a formula for wtf-ery. This time it involved an overheated dryer and the Snuggle fabric softener bear come to life. Good stuff.
We also have a new player who, much like Dawn in Buffy, was just there when we started playing. My head asploded when I found out that they played at GoPlay with someone from my other gaming group, knew about Polaris, and actually knew about all the crazy hippie games I play. My gaming world is getting smaller, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
There were a lot of players. My cat - Old Tom - is the oldest, and I'm fairly proactive as a player, so somehow I ended up being the person giving a lot of the orders. Well, as much as you can give orders to a herd of cats! To avoid hogging the spotlight I would give vague orders or suggestions, occasionally intervene, and then go off for a nap on the front porch.
We had a fun first half trying to get food, which involved laying out a breadcrumb trap for a flock of pigeons. One of the characters, Little Monster, got pooped on by a pigeon in the process. This prompted a conversation that I'm sure I've never had in an RPG before...
Little Monster: Ewww! How am I supposed to get this off?
Old Tom: Kid, you clean your butt with your tongue. What's the problem?
Little Monster: Well...yeah...but that's my butt. This is different.
The latter half of the game involved us squaring off against the big bad, a malevolent raccoon. We fought him in the dream world, which is always a formula for wtf-ery. This time it involved an overheated dryer and the Snuggle fabric softener bear come to life. Good stuff.
We also have a new player who, much like Dawn in Buffy, was just there when we started playing. My head asploded when I found out that they played at GoPlay with someone from my other gaming group, knew about Polaris, and actually knew about all the crazy hippie games I play. My gaming world is getting smaller, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Disqus Commenting
Because all the cool kids are doing it, I'm going to try using Disqus to handle comments here and on the Tumblr. That is all.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Drawing Class - Week 1 - Magic
Just finished my first day of drawing class and I thought I'd share some impressions. Of late I've resolved to write whatever the hell I want on this blog, including stuff where I wax way too poetic. In other words, the better angel of my nature has my inner critic at gunpoint and is keeping him quiet. You are warned.
I think whenever I imagine a school of magic from now on it'll be modeled after the art school I'm attending.
I got lost in the back corridors and every room I passed had some very focused group of people performing arcane rituals in parallel, all leading to the creation of something out of nothing. They hunch over paper or mouse and keyboard, with a look of utter focus as they work. People pile up plaster of paris and slather paint on canvas, or build up strange assemblies of glass and metal to catch the light just so.
The end product of these arcane efforts strew every hall and room, each one unique and often quite bizarre. Indeed, art suffuses everything here. Everything, down to the bathroom signs and the posters for student council candidates, has had the hand of a designer laid on it.
There are subjects to spark the beginnings of magic everywhere. The building is old, and deliberately left rough. Exposed machinery protrudes from the floor and ceiling in the commons, just waiting for another student to bind it in pencil or ink. Every chair you sit in faces on some new subject for the pen. The whole place is a still life composition waiting to happen.
The students are refreshingly unique, as if the charcoal dust on their hands has gotten into their veins, permeating them with the same magic. They wear odd hats, elaborately worked jewelry, piercings of every kind, tattoos, overcoats and hoodies, horn-rimmed glasses, Doc Martens, red sneakers, striped stockings, black jeans. Every surface of every flat object they carry bears some mark or sign, often created by themselves, symbols of their art and affiliation.
The students in my class are largely mundane, though. A couple of us, myself included, have grown tired of endlessly shifting numbers on a computer screen and consuming media created by others, and long for something more. Some have tried drawing before, but have lost their way, lost the magic, and are trying to get it back. Others work in esoteric fields - design, photography, printmaking - and have come to learn some secrets to take back to their own craft. It's an odd cross-section - accountants, students, doctors, executives, young, old, male, female.
Our professor wears a tweed vest and round spectacles and claims that he was once a mountain climber. I suspect he's understating, and has sketched ancient ruins in the Mountains of Madness in the Antarctic, or the gold-rimmed eaves of the temples in Shangri-la. His mania is infectious. He never stops moving, or talking. He is quite engaging.
He has a stack of leatherbound tomes holding his past works. We are supposed to believe that the lifelike self-portrait he shows us in one of them is something he "did before breakfast". We are skeptical.
He dumps a jumble of objects before us on the table - a mason jar with sand and shells, a loop of twine, a coffee cup, a wooden sabot, and commands us to draw. By way of example he sketches the objects out, peering through an arcane magic square called a "viewfinder" and trying to talk to us and focus at the same time. When he's talking it sounds like he's having a cell-phone conversation with the right side of his brain, and we're only hearing half of it. 10 minutes later he is well on is way to a rough yet oddly compelling rendition of the subject.
Now it's our turn. We work slowly at first. I've done this before so I'm not entirely a stranger to the process, but as I expected the professor has described a different way of using the same tools and I'm willing to follow his lead. He does this for a living after all.
As we work, he reads from a couple of drawing texts. Words like "line", and "mass", and "contour" repeated and related again and again in the text in a myriad of ways. I thought it would be distracting, but his reading is sincere and his beat-poet like cadence is entrancing. He, like everything else outside my subject, fades quickly into the background. Everyone is breathing very slowly.
We do another drawing, and another, losing track of time. Finally we draw our hands, mine posed in some odd mudra I remember from a Buddhist statue in Kyoto, a nervous habit I picked up years ago. It's not the best drawing, but as always when I'm done I'm left with the strange impression that the work before me was done by someone else.
And then, we're done. Time to pack up the pens and paper and head home. Driving home, hidden shapes in the skyline reveal themselves, and the slice of sky between the lit towers of the Convention center is as present as the towers themselves. All the cars move in concert with the music on the radio. I sit down at my computer and I know I have to write these words, even though I'll wonder who the hell wrote them when I look at them in the morning.
Tomorrow I will return to my keyboard and spreadsheets, but for a brief time tonight things are magic.
I think whenever I imagine a school of magic from now on it'll be modeled after the art school I'm attending.
I got lost in the back corridors and every room I passed had some very focused group of people performing arcane rituals in parallel, all leading to the creation of something out of nothing. They hunch over paper or mouse and keyboard, with a look of utter focus as they work. People pile up plaster of paris and slather paint on canvas, or build up strange assemblies of glass and metal to catch the light just so.
The end product of these arcane efforts strew every hall and room, each one unique and often quite bizarre. Indeed, art suffuses everything here. Everything, down to the bathroom signs and the posters for student council candidates, has had the hand of a designer laid on it.
There are subjects to spark the beginnings of magic everywhere. The building is old, and deliberately left rough. Exposed machinery protrudes from the floor and ceiling in the commons, just waiting for another student to bind it in pencil or ink. Every chair you sit in faces on some new subject for the pen. The whole place is a still life composition waiting to happen.
The students are refreshingly unique, as if the charcoal dust on their hands has gotten into their veins, permeating them with the same magic. They wear odd hats, elaborately worked jewelry, piercings of every kind, tattoos, overcoats and hoodies, horn-rimmed glasses, Doc Martens, red sneakers, striped stockings, black jeans. Every surface of every flat object they carry bears some mark or sign, often created by themselves, symbols of their art and affiliation.
The students in my class are largely mundane, though. A couple of us, myself included, have grown tired of endlessly shifting numbers on a computer screen and consuming media created by others, and long for something more. Some have tried drawing before, but have lost their way, lost the magic, and are trying to get it back. Others work in esoteric fields - design, photography, printmaking - and have come to learn some secrets to take back to their own craft. It's an odd cross-section - accountants, students, doctors, executives, young, old, male, female.
Our professor wears a tweed vest and round spectacles and claims that he was once a mountain climber. I suspect he's understating, and has sketched ancient ruins in the Mountains of Madness in the Antarctic, or the gold-rimmed eaves of the temples in Shangri-la. His mania is infectious. He never stops moving, or talking. He is quite engaging.
He has a stack of leatherbound tomes holding his past works. We are supposed to believe that the lifelike self-portrait he shows us in one of them is something he "did before breakfast". We are skeptical.
He dumps a jumble of objects before us on the table - a mason jar with sand and shells, a loop of twine, a coffee cup, a wooden sabot, and commands us to draw. By way of example he sketches the objects out, peering through an arcane magic square called a "viewfinder" and trying to talk to us and focus at the same time. When he's talking it sounds like he's having a cell-phone conversation with the right side of his brain, and we're only hearing half of it. 10 minutes later he is well on is way to a rough yet oddly compelling rendition of the subject.
Now it's our turn. We work slowly at first. I've done this before so I'm not entirely a stranger to the process, but as I expected the professor has described a different way of using the same tools and I'm willing to follow his lead. He does this for a living after all.
As we work, he reads from a couple of drawing texts. Words like "line", and "mass", and "contour" repeated and related again and again in the text in a myriad of ways. I thought it would be distracting, but his reading is sincere and his beat-poet like cadence is entrancing. He, like everything else outside my subject, fades quickly into the background. Everyone is breathing very slowly.
We do another drawing, and another, losing track of time. Finally we draw our hands, mine posed in some odd mudra I remember from a Buddhist statue in Kyoto, a nervous habit I picked up years ago. It's not the best drawing, but as always when I'm done I'm left with the strange impression that the work before me was done by someone else.
And then, we're done. Time to pack up the pens and paper and head home. Driving home, hidden shapes in the skyline reveal themselves, and the slice of sky between the lit towers of the Convention center is as present as the towers themselves. All the cars move in concert with the music on the radio. I sit down at my computer and I know I have to write these words, even though I'll wonder who the hell wrote them when I look at them in the morning.
Tomorrow I will return to my keyboard and spreadsheets, but for a brief time tonight things are magic.
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