The benefits of taking a hiatus

I stopped drawing for a long time. There is a time and season for every activity under the sun, and in the late 90s/early 00s it was time to put the pencils and paper to one side and give the drawing a rest. During that period I dabbled in other forms of creative expression - writing and 3D/digital art - and in retrospect, this was a good thing; it enlarged my repertory of skills and enabled improvements to the work in traditional media when I came back to it. Because I knew how to use graphics software, I was able make alterations to scanned pictures, such as digital repositioning where the composition was screwy and making alterations to the brightness and contrast of a picture, turning partially-completed pictures into more finished ones.

Also, and perhaps more significantly, because I'd been unable to draw for a long time, recovering the ability was a gift, making me more grateful for what I could do and less ungrateful for things I couldn't. I struggled, and continue to struggle, with rendering the human figure, but while the twentysomething me would have continued grappling with this problem and ignored other subjects, the fortysomething me is able to put the people pictures on the back burner and concentrate on what I'm actually good at, which is scenery and architecture.

The other thing I've acquired is the patience to see a picture through to completion, even when it seems not to be going well. There are still unfinished pictures in my pile at home, but the ratio of completed to incomplete pictures is better than it was twenty years ago, and every once in a while I fish out pictures that haven't gone so well and try to find an alternative approach to make them work.

The reason for this break from traditional media? I was drawing from an early age and continued to draw right up to my mid-twenties. As a young adult, finding myself surrounded by more gifted artists at Brighton University and knowing I had to make a career out of this skill very soon, I pushed myself to get better and attain that professional standard. And then I got my first job, which involved drawing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and I... broke. It was too much.

Drawing became painful. Not physically painful, but inwardly painful in a way that I have never been able to adequately explain to anyone. It had ceased to be enjoyable long before, but now there was a debt to pay off even after drawing just a couple of lines and I had to stop, find something else to do, and find some other way to discharge the creative energies that built up and up over time.

After much dabbling in using Poser as a reference tool and (in my darker moments) actually *tracing* over Poser renders, I've come across a professional comic book artist who also uses Poser. This is very surprising as I was under the impression that Poser was more of a hobbyist's tool. This artist, however, works for Marvel and I've come across his work in a couple of graphic novels. The use of Poser figures as the basis for his characters is unmistakable; Reed Richards is Michael 3, Miss Marvel is Vicki 3, and the Drax the Destroyer is the Freak.
The problem? These images lack life, for one thing, all the characters looking a little bit stiff and over-shaded. The other is that

Blood from a stone

Writing a story is really difficult. I'm just coming round to the fact that you can't simply sit down and write something great as easily as talking. I'm not a genius at this and even geniuses need to work at what they do.

I read through my story last week and thought the first few pages (the bits I rewrote after realising the story needed more humour) were pretty good but after that the thing went downhill and never recovered. This left me in a place of despair.

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.