Framing 2

It's been a good summer as far as drawing goes.  Despite the inconsistency of the weather I've still managed to get outside and draw the scenery around London and, for a couple of days, in Paris.  There is now a heap of pictures in a box in my room that all need to be sorted through, completed or scrapped.

This afternoon I went to IKEA to purchase some frames, and have got a couple, one to fit an A4 picture and one to fit an A5.  So one step taken in a forward direction.

Giclée (/ʒiːˈkleɪ/ zhee-KLAY or /dʒiːˈkleɪ/) is a neologism coined in 1991 by printmaker Jack Duganne for fine art digital prints made on inkjet printers. The name originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the late 1980s but has since come to mean any inkjet print.

Framing

I am in the process of trying to print and frame some of my drawings, with a view to possibly exhibiting them somewhere.  I have nowhere definite planned to exhibit, but people keep saying I should, and I can't exhibit without first printing and framing my pictures.  There are a number of considerations, however, and this is all new territory for me:

•  Where to print.  I tried one photo printing place online, and the colour of the pictures got lost a bit in translation.
• Framing.  IKEA list a number of different types of frame, all with funny names, and with dimensions given for each type of frame.  I don't know whether what they are giving is the size of the frame or the size of the picture each frame will accommodate.
• What to print on.  Matt or gloss?  Textured or non-textured?

Two figures

Two of my rigged characters - not great by any means, and certainly not figures that I'd feel happy about releasing to the public (the monkey's tail is particularly embarrassing) but with some postwork they could pass muster in an image.

Wix vs WordPress

I have just attempted to create a website for my pictures using WordPress, only to run into the same issues that I had the last time I used it.  It is terribly unintuitive, especially when compared with Wix, and even a small matter like creating a gallery for my pictures on WordPress is a headache.

Breathing Life 2

Work continues on the rigging of figures.  It has become something of an obsession now, and is beginning to eat into my bedtimes in the evening.  Which is probably a good sign.

The penguin is looking a lot healthier, as is the monkey.  Doing this is giving me fresh insight into what a time-consuming business rigging is: naming each body part, setting limits, assigning polygons to different bones, etc.  It is also teaching me a lot about the importance of good modelling.  I have discovered that my monkey's tail isn't anywhere near subdivided enough, and there is no way to fix this in the rigging process - it's just not going to bend naturally.  My only options are to start again with a modified version of the model or create a new figure for the tail and attach it to the monkey's bottom.

Piggy

My latest character-in-progress.

Rigging

I hate rigging.  It has always been the most difficult part of creating a 3d character, and something I would bend over backwards to avoid doing.  Few things are more soul-destroying than spending weeks on creating a model, UV-mapping that model, texturing that model, and then importing it into Poser's set-up room, only to find that the thing bends all wrong when you try to add bones and movement.  The biggest source of frustration is not knowing why a body part creases, bulges or distorts when you try to make it bend or twist, and not being able to find a single tutorial or forum post online that explains clearly how to remedy the issue.

Over the past week I have had another go at using Poser's setup tools to try and complete all the models that I started rigging years ago but abandoned.  Fortunately, Poser has changed its' tools to add weight-mapping, a process that highlights vertices that are affected by a bone's movement, highlighting the most affected areas in green and the least affected areas in red (or vice-versa, I can't remember which way round it is).  This makes it a lot easier to see what is going wrong when the movement is incorrect.  Also, rather than approaching rigging as a horrible-but-necessary job to be got over and done with as quickly as possible (and letting myself in for a world of exasperation when the job ends up taking much, much longer) I am trying to enjoy the process and take my time over it.  This yielding much more satisfactory results.

The theme here is "finishing", and it is something that has applied to all of my creative endeavours of the past two years.  I read recently that Stephen King had a near-fatal accident, which motivated him to accelerate work on his "Dark Tower" novels and bring them to a conclusion, realising that he didn't have all the time in the world to complete the book at a leisurely pace.  As morbid as it sounds, this awareness of one's own mortality is a strong motivator: you realise that bringing something to the point of perfection is no good if nobody ever gets to see it because you shuffle off this mortal coil before it can be released to the public.