June 30th, 2009
I don’t know about you but when I was in kindergarten and first grade they’d set out boxes of objects for us to sort through and put into different piles based on different qualities. A box of keys, for example. Man, that was a great learning experience. And fun, too. Making piles is awesome!
I had a whole bunch of National Geographics for drawing reference. They defy organization because they cover so many different things in each issue, and of course chronological sequence is useless when I am looking for a picture of something specific. In the past I’d been reluctant to destroy them but I decided they were just taking up precious space. And so with gleeful abandon I began cutting them apart and for a week the living room floor was covered with scraps of magazine and chunks of dried glue (the older issues used this terrible glue along with staples
Anyway it was a week of fingers scraped by rusty staples and piles and piles of slippery magazine paper but it was totally worth it because I now have a small library of reference. So now if someone requests, say, a picture of an Uncle Sam dinosaur, or toad, I can be all like okay! Here you go.
But no more sorting for now. Back to drawing!
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June 12th, 2009
question: what would I do without sweetass music to listen to while I draw
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June 11th, 2009
My mom wanted me to draw her hot menz which I feel utterly goofy trying to accomplish. So in a self-conscious and self-effacing way I threw in a murderous giant squid. I plan on transferring this drawing to watercolor paper and painting it with acrylics or watercolors. I have very little exeperience with transparent mediums so I have to force myself to play around with them. It is very tedious, but there was a time I had to force myself to draw, too.
I didn’t even realize you could use acrylics transparently until I read Bill Pressing’s blog. This is my teacher’s fault. When we were making color charts in painting class she made me redo all of mine because I used too much water in my paint. From then on I associated watery paint with bad. She was always denouncing acrylics because they can’t do the things that oils can… but oils can’t do the things acrylics can. So there.
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May 30th, 2009
So the people I was trying to get a loan from have finally tired of making me dance for their amusement and denied me outright, so I wouldn’t be attending LAAFA, in the near future at least. Which kinda sucks because I totally gave them a hundred dollars.
It’s okay, though… I already know the secret to great art AND life, plus I have a candy bar and chocolate makes everything great.
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May 30th, 2009
When will the current movie trend go from comic books to comic strips? I want to know if a Hollywood-produced film would be better or worse than the strip it was based on.
Like anyone with taste I loathe the funny pages. I don’t understand why newspapers don’t just reprint classic comics, which couldn’t possibly be less amusing than today’s and would at least have a higher chance of being drawn by an artist and not a humorless, talentless hack. The LA Times has less than five comics that are easy on the eyes… and one of them is Crankshaft.
There was a time when I did read the comics, and I remember thinking to myself that I never wanted to end up like a comic strip artist such as Greg Evans who just cranks out the same drawing over and over. His cartoons don’t depict people, they are just flat, one-diminsional symbols that are as ugly and lifeless as the characters themselves. It’s depressing because the early Luann strips looked quite different. At one point there was evolution in his drawing, or maybe it was de-evolution, because it’s quite ugly now. Too bad it will never change again.
My dad has a collection of Peanuts strips, published in the seventies. I read it as a kid but I guess all the humor went over my head. I do remember enjoying the strips where Linus’ blanket was alive and trying to murder Lucy.
Today was the first in at least ten years since I’ve looked at it. I’m familiar with the awful strips published in the newspaper so I was surprised to find the ones in the book quite good. They’re pretty weird but still smart and often funny. It’s really bizarre reading about children who talk like professors. I feel the same way when I read Calvin and Hobbes.
Also Peanuts totally introduced me to the word “AUGH!” although for many years I was confused as to if the g was pronounced or not.
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