Proverbs 13:12

I'm not sure about this one.  The original sketch had the thirsty chap in the desert finding the dried-up well and, unseen to him, a cluster of rain clouds beginning to produce raindrops in the background.  However, I wasn't sure if people would get what was happening with the rainclouds, so decided to go with the more obvious idea above.  I'm not certain, however, whether the cluster of trees is a convincing enough explanation for why he's not spotting the lake full of happy bathers just a short distance away.

People - Aaargh!

I am trying to draw a picture to be used in Climbers (Sunday School) this Sunday, something to photocopy and hand out to the kids to colour in.  The subject is "Nathan Accusing David" - unfortunately a major obstacle is my inability to draw human figures.  It's been a pain in the neck forever - I can draw animal characters, robots, almost anything except people.  Every cartoonist/illustrator develops their own "visual language", a kind of shorthand to enable them to draw most things on spec as the story demands.  Charles Schultz, for example, had his own unmistakeable shorthand for children and you wouldn't mistake his round-headed, dot-eyed, virtually legless characters for anyone else's.  Yet somehow I've never managed to come up with my own solution to this visual problem.

btw I've also been attempting to make this blog look a bit more presentable, fiddling around with layouts, widgets etc.  So if it looks a bit of a mess for a while, that is why.

The curse of never finishing

I've been putting the creative pursuits on the back burner for a spell while concentrating on more pressing matters (I had a GCSE biology exam recently which was a bit of a stinker!) but now that it's out of the way I've been attempting to finish off the unfinished pics on my computer (and there are a fair few) and complete some of the unfinished models as well.
My creative process generally goes like this:

1. Start a drawing or comic strip or model.
2. Keep going with it until I hit a snag - for example, I'm making a model monkey and can't quite work out how to do the feet, or have done a cartoon but am really struggling with the colouring stage.  There is usually something that keeps the process from being straightforward.
3. Abandon it for a later date and start something else.

Very rarely do I simply sit down and see something through to completion in a single sitting.  As a result an awful lot ends up never getting finished, and this is one of the issues that keeps me from being properly functional as a creative person.  Also, one's failure to finish things contributes, in itself, to a general sapping of morale ("what's the point in starting anything?")

Anyway, a couple of pictures have seen completion this week, which has helped to boost my enthusiasm somewhat.

One is a business card.  I've been meaning to get around to this forever as I'm always meeting people, telling them about my work, and having nothing to give them.  Recently my good friend Mark organised an exhibition in his church to which several people contributed and some of the folks who saw the work expressed an interest in purchasing it.  This included some of my pictures and some by another lady, Barbara, and neither of us had left anything with our contact details on, so getting connected with potential customers was more complicated than it needed to be.

And here's another piece.  A big part of being functional as an illustrator or cartoonist is not only working when you feel like it, but keeping on going after the buzz has stopped.  If you only ever do it for pleasure, it should be left as a hobby rather than a career.

(By the way, the rainbows in the above picture were a complete nightmare to do!)

Blender

So I've started playing around with Blender again, only to find that they've changed the interface (which actually, looks a lot better but now that learning curve starts all over again!)  Blender is a program I've flirted with on and off ever since becoming interested in 3d but have always abandoned it because the interface is such a nightmare to master.  There are several factors that have brought me back this time, however:

1. Functionality.  They've built in all sorts of cool stuff over the last couple of years including sculpting tools and a new auto-rigging script.
2. My current, complicated pipeline: model in Wings 3d, texture in Blacksmith 3d, rig in Poser 6, create morphs/facial expressions in Blender.  There is so much importing and exporting and fiddling around involved and it would be nice to do everything in one program.
3. Cost of upgrading.  At $150 a pop it ain't all that cheap to upgrade Poser every time an improved version is created, while you can always get the latest version of Blender for nothing.

On top of all this, Poser has definite limitations, not to mention bugs.  I've just recently attempted to master rigging with it again, only to find myself running into issues, and not for the first time.

Work in progress - Penguin

I'm having serious problems with Blogger at the moment.  It appears to be having difficulty letting me post a picture and insert text from my laptop.  My recent upgrade to the newer version of Internet Explorer may or may not have something to do with it.  Anyway, I'm currently on my computer at work and am able to add some text to this post.

This little fella and his accessories were modelled in Wings, textured in Blacksmith 3d and imported into Poser.  The rocket pack is a work in progress which I shall have to come back to.  I've recently decided to have another go at mastering Blender, which may keep me occupied for the time being.

Zillatron

I did this picture years ago. He was meant to be part of a series of cute robot characters but he wasn't quite cute enough. I imagine his backstory being something like: A film director (James Cameron?) wants to make a movie about a giant robotic dinosaur destroying civilisation, but rather than using CGI, decides to spend billions of dollars building a 100 foot tall fully functioning robot prop. The robot prop then goes berserk and eats everyone.

Blue Guardian

This character has evolved gradually from a copy of Acroyear from the Micronauts to his current form. A while ago I became briefly fixated with modelling robots, partly because the process of modelling organic characters had become so frustrating. The nice thing with robots is that you just have to make a bunch of basic parts and then stick them together. Easy.