Dawn of the Seventy-Third Day, 960 Hours Remaining

You ever wonder why the CN Tower is red at night? It's not just those blinkers for air traffic, it's an entire set of ascending spotlights, attached to the slopes of the main structure in increments. Why does that have to be red? I walk past the CN Tower on a regular basis, and every time I see it, it reminds me of some blood splattered, demonic needle gouging a hole in the sky. You know, like the kind of place where people would go to hang out, shoot the shit, and make sacrifices to The Dark One? 

 Maybe they got red floodlights on the cheap.

Above is two kinds of death on a hog! Below is my new avatar! I tried to go for a parched, syphilitic look. 

WATER.

The thermometer is reading Incandescent Solar Apocalypse right now, so I highly doubt my laptop will last long enough for me to organize my life drawings this week. I did manage to give them a black border, so it's all cinematic. They're like 5 to 20 minutes, in no particular order. Week 10-11. 

  

Trying new things, new styles. Did you know they're working construction on Spadina? Entire tram system is down. On top of that, they're also doing horizontal renovations that make it impossible to get past Dundas by car. Every trip to life drawing feels like an adventure. Who knows what will break down next?

heh

It would probably make more sense to post this on a certain book of faces. Still, this is pretty clever. Thank you, anonymous political activist. I think these are all over the system, but I found this one on the Sheppard line, far left carriage.

THIS WEEK ON IRON CHEF

THIS WEEK on The Martha Stewart Show, we take a look at an especially botched Ratatouille! God, were those vegetables chopped with a chainsaw? What is this, Cooking with Jason Voorhees? There's like half a bottle of thyme on that thing! Are we cooking or are we trying to OD on seasoning? Join us next week, where we'll hopefully be making something that doesn't actively degrade the sanctity of creation. This has been Hell's Kitchen. Don't under cook the risotto!

I'm going to use the time I have left this summer to try new media. This week, I tried actual brush and gouache, and got an entire set of brush pens. Not much else to say, it's "exploration".

This was actually an interesting exercise. These are rough drawings in pastel, 20 to 30 minutes each, based on descriptions from a random text generator. What this site did was basically cobble together a description from randomly generated information, things like body shape, anthropomorphic features, demeanor, etc. It's a nice exercise for the imagination. I now have rough color and lighting bases for at least 5 potential paintings.

Give it a try: http://www.seventhsanctum.com/generate.php?Genname=deity 

Gorilla Warfare

He's basically wearing a bunch of Shoggoths.

Read this first: http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1000

You'll note the part about intelligent Bigfoot. Intelligent, BIOPUNK Bigfoot.

You have no idea how much I love this site.

I tried to go for a distinct, alien but "totally not Yuuzhan Vong" look. With a narrative this rich, I went crazy with the ideas. His armor is a network of plant-animal hybrids, with the one near his shoulder being a sort of organic comlink system, and the other on his wrist acting as a sort of melee weapon. His gun is like one of those Starship Trooper (movie version) tanker beetles, but with one pair of legs that link into a convenient grip. The leaves are a fashion statement.

pew pew.

A Friendlier Bigfoot

On a less optimistic note, while I did go to life drawing this past week, I basically got nothing good. Not enough to compile into a weekly progress sheet, at any rate. I did, however experiment with some new (not really) mediums, like...

Don't do wet media on newsprint. It rips. 30 min, mostly after pose had finished.

...Oil Pastel! I hear it's all the rage these days, and it's probably easier on the lungs than normal pastel. Oil pastel is actually water soluble, and the results end up looking a lot like watercolor. You hatch the drawing first, water it down, and then go back for details while it's still wet, so that it's easier to blend colors. Unless you want to deal with the mess of actually blending with oil pastels (not fun), blending with water almost always muddies the colors, so you always need to go back and lift up the fine lighting and color details again. What's nice about oil pastels is that they glide smoothly on paper, so it's a lot easier on the wrists.

Also some other drawings from the week. Really dry week.

HULK DRAW. 5 min.

Literally the only other presentable thing from this week. 20 min. 

It's up the Stairway to Heaven on the Highway to Hell, but just past the Escalator to Nunavut

I tried to do more with life drawing these weeks than just pastel and conte, and explore more color combinations and visual styles. Sparing use of pastel and lighter colors gets you this really spiffy sfumato effect, while using warm colors to make up a base tone means that cool colors can be used to make really psychedelic, popping highlights. Using markers forces shorter drawings to be more precise with form and line economy, but for longer drawings, a decent range of markers can basically be used in same way as water color.

The most taxing thing I have to face in my day to day is balancing that work load with my new found dream of being a mangaka. Yes, I've just finished reading and rereading Bakuman, and I too have become enamored with the idea of creating action adventure battle manga targeting the 10 to 14 demographic.

So like... :

"It'll be about a kid who escapes from the pressures of his life by spending his dreams inside a meticulously crafted personal fantasy. Think of it as his own personal Land of Ooo, or Narnia, or Gondor, but with giant robots and samurai and shit. One day he discovers that everything he does in the dream world has somehow become a metaphor for his troubles in real life, and by overcoming obstacles in his fantasy world, reality itself would change to reflect the results of his fantastical adventures. In this way, he attempts to deal with his real life issues by escaping through dreams, since he can now face them in a more comfortable context. However, he finds the difficulties of interpersonal relationships do not get easier through the looking glass, and there's no way of pussyfooting around love, lies and people. Ultimately, it'll be a coming of age story about owning up to life, peppered with elements of giant robot battles, knights vs. samurai, sci-fi dog fights, and lighthearted awkward teen romance."

Seriously, reading Bakuman makes me want to be a mangaka like Freddie Mercury wants to ride a bike. It was electrifying.

I got a chance to go cafe sketch at The Rex Jazz Club this week. It was oozing atmosphere out of its pores, and the best part about drawing there is that everyone's focused on the music, so no one's looking at the shadowy, escaped convict looking guy with the sketchbook. I took some of the sketches and tried things with them. Painted one, did some sort of sketchy Art Deco thing with another, and compiled the rest (poorly). That last full bar room scene I would like to polish up, with its multiple cool light sources flooding into a predominantly warm room and all. 

That bassist was really projecting the groove. The entire bar funked as hard as a collection of senior citizens could funk. Good times.

This Lightning! This Madness!

I think the one thing that I'll always appreciate about being in animation is the fact that we don't need to do straight up portraits. I hate the idea of staring at an idle face for 2 hours, only to discover at the very end that subtle shifting throughout the pose has completely ruined the likeness. I may need to work on them, and most likely I may need to work on them A LOT, but I think I'd prefer caricaturing over portraiture alldayerryday. When I gave up trying to draw the guy's face and just tried to capture the pose, drawing the head again was naturally out of the question. 

THAT, hypothetical internet audience, is the story of why there's a robot in my weekly life drawing log. 

I have nothing finished for this week, so here's a small fraction of the massive backlog that I'm trying to gun through. Looking at it makes me incredibly uncomfortable. 

I also took the time to study a few shots from Yi Yi (life through the eyes of three generations of a middle class Taiwanese family and their tale of love, loss, and moral integrity. Directed by Edward Yang) this week, mostly focusing on the use of silhouette to frame a mood. The left shot is used in a romantic context, a literally electric moment, as a girl wanders in front of a theater screen looking for a seat. Each peal of lightning serves not only to highlight the grace of the girl in movement, but also reflects the thoughts of the main character as he looks on. I think the right shot is an expression of futility. The screen door behind the character looks pretty much like a jail cell, and his internal dialogue is essentially brooding over the limitations that define his life.

Poisonous Pastel Dust

You know what I never got? Disney brand underwear. In fact, all cartoon related undergarments. I mean, are people really that comfortable about having The Little Mermaid so close to their unmentionables? Are Mickey, Spongebob and Donatello really things you would want to associate with the remains of yesterday's Trinidad scorpion chili? Diapers too, if you think about it. The baby doesn't know what the hell's going on, and goddamn Bambi isn't going to make the process of changing a diaper any more pleasant.

This week's adventures in life drawing were less productive than I would've hoped. I'm averaging like 2 good drawings per pad. I am trying more with the drawing though, colors and form and line and such. Still working on it.

Animating on a tablet that's not a Cintiq is like using two knives instead of a pair of chopsticks. Here's stuff I've given up on! The first is based on a song by The Protomen, from Act I of their Rock Opera about Megaman. Your lives are horribly incomplete without this album in it. The other one's a shot study from "I Saw the Devil". Really gruesome film, but like everything else Kim Ji-Woon does, it's brilliant.

Mel-NEH-bone-AY, eer-KOON, em-RERR-rerr?

It takes at least two hours to get to Oakville, and one and a half to get to TSA. The plus side is that I get more of a chance to ride the trains. They aren't as crowded (or as smelly) as the subway, and there's more to see than walls and ads. It's different on a train. There's a special serenity about it. Bits of nature and pieces of neglected civilization mesh together as the train passes, routes often traveled but never settled, suspended in a world that is neither here nor there. For a time there are no destinations to speak of, and no origins to recall. There's a rare tranquility, briefly, in the understanding that things like responsibility and obligation only exist beyond the stops.

I also had this idea about a clown playing a harmonica, but it's night, and he's a hobo. 

Wonder if he plays any Woody Guthrie.

New York, 1960, where infidelity is like saying hello!

God, the international lag on BBC News is horrible today. Everyone knows those awkward few seconds it takes for reporters to respond from the next continent, but when it looks like they're having a staring contest, SOMETHING IS WRONG.

First week of proper life drawings (with the class and everything!) of 14. I'm trying to use a new medium each week, out of this pile of stuff I got before years ago that I assumed I would be using in my capacity as an "artist". Might as well as have cut a hole in my wallet. This week is willow charcoal, or "the box of sticks that I paid money for". It's really messy, especially on newsprint, but surprisingly smooth. These other drawings are sorta crappy, but I'm keeping a log, hoping to see some improvement over the weeks.

btw 20th Century Boys is amazing. So is Billy Bat. And Pluto. Actually, just everything Naoki Urasawa does. It takes some real inspiration to make Doctor Tenma badass. His entire introductory chapter in Pluto had him as this shadowy silhouette, and he never faces the camera, only ominously turning his head over his shoulder, like Batman. Far as I know, he's supposed to be some sort of abusive alcoholic with coping issues. Amazing how they pulled that off, really.

"I hit small robotic children" - Dr. Tenma, sex offender

Mad WASPs

How the time flies. I'm trying to finish up the last bit of Schoolwork/personal work cleanup, but before that, I've been trying to get off the computer. To that end, I've pulled out my pastels again. Just like I remembered, really. The choking dust, the smudges that stay in your clothes and stains your skin, the poisonous residues... it's a special kind of magic.

One small note. Most of these are life drawings, but the top is the eldest Billy Goat Gruff from the Dresden Files (or a crude representation of him)!