Story & Illustrations 2

Work continues on the pictures for my story. I've experimented with placing hand-drawn characters in 3d scenery and it almost works, but not quite.
I took a look at some stills from Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings and Fire and Ice and noticed that he placed cel-drawn figures with flat colouring against painted backdrops.

Christopher Wren

Just over a year ago I participated in a project to draw the London churches designed by Christopher Wren, set up for the members of a meetup group. There have been emails since then from the leader of the group about putting together a book using our pictures and putting on an exhibition. The latest email has confirmed that we have a venue in a London church to display our pictures but no boards to hang them on.

Story and Illustrations

Yet again I'm trying to work out how to do the illustrations for my story. Last night I tried tracing over a print of one of my Poser pictures (using a lightbox) and am feeling... unsure about the results. Of course, tracing always feels like "cheating" but I'm not trying to produce a drawing so much as do extreme post work on a digital image.
The digital pictures - rendered in black and white using Poser 10's toon shader - are almost there. There are just things I can't do with Poser, like produce flexible tendrils for one image in which a character is being attacked by a carnivorous plant. And the model I'm using for the story's central character looks more or less like what it is - a child's body with a cat's head and tail stuck on it.
There's also the matter of using models by third party vendors that those vendors would no doubt want credit for if they featured in one of my pictures.

My problem is that I have a brain that overcomplicates things, always trying to find a more elaborate way to tackle a simple task.

My story is in the process of being rewritten yet again, this time in the third person rather than from the central character's perspective. It is like the weights have come off, and the writing is now so much easier, without the need to keep describing everything through one person's eyes. This whole story has been through a gradual process of simplification, in fact. To begin with I was writing it from the perspective of a character who knew nothing about the universe he was exploring and that was *really* difficult.

Busyness cards

I have finally got some business cards done, after a great deal of struggling with ratios, shifting details like my email address around and deciding which of my many pictures to place on the reverse sides of the cards. Unfortunately, when the cards arrived there was an annoying white strip on the bottom and right side of each card, necessitating the removal of half a millimetre from two edges of each card with a hobby knife, which kept me busy on Monday evening.

I gave Moo.com the requested feedback this evening, explaining exactly what the problem was.

 

Fiddly bits

I've just had two prints of my "building portraits" delivered and have stuck them in IKEA frames and put them on the wall. One of them looks fine, the other one looks rubbish. In the case of the latter the print is good quality but somehow it's getting lost inside the frame, which is particularly galling as it is one of my better pictures and looked fine on my computer. It just doesn't benefit from having a thick black frame enclosing it.

My limitations as an artist: I love the act of drawing pictures but don't enjoy the design aspect. Turning a pretty picture into a physical object that can be hung on a wall is particularly tiresome: getting prints done, working out the size a picture needs to be to fit in the frame, deciding on the colour and thickness of the frame - these are all tasks that I'd like to hire someone else to do. I'm currently trying (not for the first time) to pull my finger out and get some business cards done, although that is proving just as fiddly as the framed prints. Moo.com allows you to put one design on the front of a card and then up to 50 different images on the back. Naturally none of my existing images fit the dimensions of a Moo business card.

Razorback Synopsis

I have put any further writing of my Razorback story on hold while I work on a proper synopsis, as the thing has got a little out of hand recently. The longer a story is, the harder it is to keep track of certain details - who is where and doing what to who at any given moment - and plot holes and inconsistencies are more difficult to spot and keep control of. I badly need to step back from it and focus on the broader brush strokes.

WIP - Assessment

This pic is mostly finished now - the shadows were a pain to put in but help to make the picture look less flat. In the end I decided to add a bunny to the group of guys with clipboards (not for any particular reason, I just felt like drawing a sinister-looking bunny - maybe the influence of Easter).
There's a nice big space in the picture for a pithy punchline or maybe a verse from scripture, but I can't at present think of anything.

I've stopped posting pictures on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook recently, having become disillusioned with the whole social media thing. This leaves the question of what to actually do with the pictures that I produce. I've been putting the finished ones on my website, but still have the problem of how to direct people to the website.

I've had some outstanding jobs on the back-burner for ages, like producing a business card and ordering prints of my pictures to put in frames. It seems important to have something in the real world to show people, otherwise they just don't bother looking at your stuff. I was having a conversation with a friend recently who said that the reason she doesn't look at photos posted online by her friends is because there is too much too look at online as it is. On the internet your stuff can get very easily drowned out by the noise being made by the multitude of other artists, writers, podcasters, etc.

Lars Walker quote

A wonderful quote from Lars Walker in his review of The Star Fox by Poul Anderson:

What I liked best about this book was that it’s a military science fiction novel written before political correctness. Thus, Poul Anderson’s The Space Fox is blessedly free of tiny little girls with mystic ninja skills who throw 200-pound men around in the manner of Summer Glau.

Portrait

A picture of the lead actress from the TV show Orphan Black. I've realised that the best way to draw a human face may be to start with the facial features and then draw the head around it rather than doing what I've always done (starting with the head and then struggling to fit the facial features inside it). The latter is yet another technique learned from "How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way" which may work for John Buscema but which really doesn't work for me. Constructing human figures from boxes and cylinders is another example.

I don't normally do drawings from photos of celebrities, feeling that there are a multitude of artists out there in Instagramland and vending such pictures on London pavements who are much better at that sort of thing than I am. However, one of the young people who I work with requested it.

WIP - Juggler

Some progress on the "Arnold juggling" pic that I posted on previously. In the picture, Arnold is being watched by a couple of sinister "examiners" with clipboards, although I feel that there is a third examiner needed to complete the group. I'm just having difficulty deciding what species of animal that third character should be at present.
The unicycle and chainsaws were both Poser models that I rendered using Poser 10's improved toon rendering facility. I had to seriously modify the unicycle to make it fit Arnold's proportions.

Finishing

There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory.

Francis Drake

WIPs

The above pic is a work in progress intended to illustrate how it feels when you're trying to do something really really REALLY hard and a bunch of people with clipboards are standing silently in a corner recording everything that you're doing wrong to be used as evidence against you later. It's at least partly based on my experiences of trying to pass driving tests and watching teachers suffering through Ofsted inspections.

I'm still working on pictures of my Razorback characters, but have abandoned lead pencils for grey coloured pencils as the lead ones weren't working for the human characters (for some reason - they worked fine with the alien characters). Sometimes you have to go through several mediums before you can find one that works. The grey pencils are working a lot better.

I'm still producing textures for my American friend's models, and have two left to do. It's nice to be working on something for somebody else for a change. This is hanging in the air along with several other projects that all need to come to a point of completion before I go insane from watching all those plates spinning endlessly.

Pig

I've been getting the urge to go back to the 3d work recently and to finish off some of my incomplete models and pictures. The pig model, which I started quite a while ago (months? years?) is taking shape, although I have no idea of how to model a curly tail.

I've also been updating my website, which has been​ a little neglected of late.

King

I am currently reading The Wastelands, the third in Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series and, with certain caveats, I am finding it very enjoyable. The hopping between worlds and time periods is something I find very appealing, as is the mashing together of genres, and King is a terrific storyteller with an effortless talent for hooking the reader and keeping them hooked over even the longest of his books. As was the case with The Walking Dead, the characters are so well written and likeable that I could quite happily read about them taking a trip to the launderette or getting their cars serviced. What is less appealing is the ghoulish relish with which King lingers on gruesome details, occasionally sinking to schoolboy levels of disgusting-just-for-the-sake-of-it, and sometimes I wish an editor had taken some scissors to the more revolting passages. However, this is a Stephen King book, and I imagine that this carries certain privileges, not least of which is the right to write whatever he damn well wants to without any editor or publisher telling him what to do.
The other problem I have with these books is the flip side of what I find appealing about them; the mashing together of genres and disparate story elements - robots, mutants, dragons and wizards - occasionally cause the whole thing to feel a little overstuffed, as if the author just threw whatever he wanted to into the story without any particular rhyme or reason. The existence of seemingly contradictory elements in the same world is only vaguely explained with some waffle about the "beams" which support reality having been partially destroyed, causing time and distance to distort and the wall separating worlds having become "thinner" in places. Personally I think that if King had excised the magical elements and set the story in a post-apocalyptic version of our world (which he seems to be hinting that his books' setting is in the earlier instalments) it would have been a much stronger series, and would certainly come across as less self-indulgent.

Razorback update

I want my story to be readable by people of all ages, but there is substance abuse in the text, which immediately makes it unsuitable for a younger audience. I've tried to think of some way of presenting drug use in the story without exactly presenting it as such, but so far am struggling to come up with anything ambiguous enough. In Star Trek there was an episode in which a character used an implant in his head to release endorphins into his brain, but I'm not sure that would work as a "drug replacement" in my story.
What happens in the story is that one of my characters, Amber, gets caught up with a rough crowd and takes substances that alter her physically and mentally, enabling her to communicate with non-corporeal beings (whom she believes are angels, although they turn out to be far from benevolent). This is a fairly important development as far as that character is concerned, and not one that I feel able to write out of the text at this stage. One solution that has occurred to me is that Amber has undergone a bonding ritual with one of her new friends which involves an exchange of blood, and that addition of alien blood to her body causes the physical and mental changes that she experiences.
This idea is not unrelated to a development in the character of Amber's friend, Glinzel, who I see as a sort of charming, hedonistic cult leader/rock star type, a sort of cross between Jimmy Swaggart, Edward Cullen and David Bowie. My physical description of the character portrays a tall, slender young man with long silver hair and intricate swirling patterns drawn onto his chest and back. It has occurred to me that Glinzel is not exactly an alien, but a hybrid of human and angel - a Nephilim - whose ancestors escaped from Earth centuries ago and set up their own civilisation on a distant planet. This would explain why Amber's exposure to Glinzel's blood has the effect that it has.

Why not try...?

I have been using Poser and other 3d programs to make pictures on which to base illustrations for my Razorback story. Poser 10 includes an improved "sketch style" renderer which results in some of these reference pictures looking good enough to use as they are, to the extent where I wonder why I'm basing drawings on them.
Of course, this is what happened last time. When I first bought Poser (it was on version 5 at the time) I was fully intending to base drawn illustrations on the rendered pictures, but one look at the renders convinced me to try and do all the pictures digitally. Once that decision had been made, however, I ran into all sorts of problems. Mainly, the very simple images worked fine, but the more ambitious, complex ones slowed my computer down to a crawl, leading to hours of frustration. The "toon shading" feature in Poser was horribly inconsistent, the program occasionally malfunctioned, losing the pictures I'd been working on, and the models that I was using were mostly other people's, and were very recognisable as such. In the end the digital image route led to a dead end.

Writing

I hate the story I'm writing. I write and re-write, and run the thing through an online grammar checker and collate it into one document and then re-read it and realise how much is still wrong with it and break it down into chunks and re-write it again, and it never EVER reaches a finished stage. It's not that I can't write, and it's not that I can't write funny things, but producing something that says everything I want it to say and makes the reader laugh and moves the story along is really difficult.

Perhaps part of the problem is that I don't know what kind of book this is. At different moments I feel like I'm writing: a L'Engle-esque sci-fi book for kids; a Douglas Adams-style comedy; and a C S Lewis cosmic allegory.

Another issue is that my writing style is quite terse, and unless I make a conscious effort, my sentences come out far too short. When I try to pad them out a bit, I start repeating information and waffling.

Freebies

I'm feeling annoyed with myself. Just before Christmas someone asked me to do a couple of drawings of family members for them from photos that they supplied. They didn't mention a price for the pictures, and neither did I enquire, imagining that the subject of cost would "just come up". I did the drawings, ordered prints of them, and presented them to the recipient. The pictures were accepted and that was the end of the matter, with no offer of payment for the work I'd put into the things, and barely a thank you.

It brought to mind a conversation I had with a professional illustrator/designer a while back. He told me I had to decide what my work was worth and set a cost. At this stage I know that my pictures are not worth nothing, but I know also that there are people out there who are prepared to let me put my time and work into a project and take the output for free. I should have charged a fee upfront for the work, and will know to do so next time.

There was a reason why I stopped doing pictures as little gifts for people years ago. Generally I found the recipients quite unappreciative - not always the case, but most of the time the reward wasn't worth the effort. I also felt that giving away what I did for nothing was devaluing it rather than being generous.

U2 gave away their last album for free. Rather than feeling impressed with this gesture (free album!) I found myself questioning the quality of the album. Would these guys be giving away their product if it was any good?

Developments

I have put the coloured pencils away for the time being and embraced traditional drawing with good old grey lead pencils. So far the results have been encouraging. I previously ditched lead pencils because they didn't "grip" the paper enough, but I've recently bought a pad of paper from WH Smiths that has enough of a grain to provide the friction that I need to produce controlled lines. There are few things worse when trying to draw a picture than having one's control reduced by excessively smooth paper or excessively slippy pencils.

My evening yesterday was spent downloading models from the DAZ website. They were all models - characters, clothes, props, scenery - that I'd purchased or got free from DAZ previously but which I still have active download links for on their site. My plan is to make an ordered directory of models on my computer in order to have easily-accessible models to use as reference for pictures. I have more or less given up on using Poser to create 3d art and have fully embraced using the program as an artists' reference tool (the purpose for which Poser was originally created and for which I originally bought it before getting sidelined into producing digitally-rendered art). I've done a few pictures of characters from my Razorback story using modified Poser models, and am very happy with the resulting images, with the exception of the sole human character, who I can't draw for toffee, for some reason.

I also spent some time last night looking into an issue with one of my 3d characters. There's been quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with this one. A while back I sent a model of a monkey to my friend and expert rigger in the States. He produced a rig for the character, but then asked me to re-do the UV mapping for the model as the original texture map was fragmented and very un-user-friendly. This I duly did, only to get a message back saying that the material groups on the figure all now had their names prefixed with "monkey_", which caused him major difficulties in the rigging process.
I managed to find a way to change the material group names in Hexagon, but doing so appears to have completely wiped the texture mapping from the renamed material, which takes me back to square 1.

Writing quote

Someone (and for the life of me, I can’t remember who!) once said that whatever story you’re working on should be written as if it’s the only one you’ll ever tell—pouring all your thoughts, feelings, ideas, ideals, passions, philosophies, hopes and dreams...every iota of Who You Are...into it.  That’s what I did with Moonshadow.
J. M. DeMatteis

Transience

My much-neglected website needs some new pictures added, particularly in the cartoons section. I'm afraid over the past year most of my energies have been diverted into producing pencil drawings to be posted on Instagram, which returns instant gratification in the form of "likes" from other users, but is unprofitable in the long term. I saw a TED Talk last night on YouTube which listed reasons for not being on social media, and one of the reasons given by the speaker was that users of social media lose their ability to apply themselves to tasks that take time but yield long-term benefits.

Portraiture

I have been temporarily sidelined into doing portrait work. My brother asked for a picture of himself for Christmas, and a work colleague has requested pictures of himself, his wife and his newborn child.

So far, so good. My brother laughed out loud at my picture of him, which was his head on Bruce Lee's body (he wanted to be portrayed in a martial arts pose). He seemed pleased with the picture but said he felt it could use a splash of red somewhere, which I agreed with. I have taken custody of the picture until I can figure out a way to add colour without potentially ruining it.

Adults are pretty straightforward to draw. Babies, on the other hand, have different proportions and are harder to get right. Ideally, if somebody asks you to draw their baby, you want to make it look adorable rather than creepy (if you want to be asked again).