Digital Alterity

“You draw good!”
“Well, thank you.”
“That’s really good.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Do you draw comics?”
“Not yet.”

Technorati Tags: Art, Drawing, Pencil, Comics, Sketch

I would swear that I was smoking by the time I came inside from my lunch break today. The heatwave here in Florida is nothing short of appalling.

Technorati Tags: Comics, Art, Index Card, Heat, Summer, Humor

I’ve started sketching again for the first time in months. Pretty much as soon as I got my GTD lists back in order, I felt like drawing again. Thus far, I’ve only been doing quick, rough pencil sketches on the back of index cards, but I’ll probably work on something a bit more detailed soon because I feel like doing so for the first time in probably three months.

I did this sketch while I was waiting for my pizza at Satchel’s:

And then I doodled the pencils on this stupid comic-like thing while waiting on my computer to do something at work:

It feels good to be sketching again.

Technorati Tags: Art, Sketches, Pencil, Index Cards

I might kill for the invention mentioned in this Planet Karen comic strip.

Though, admittedly, only non-sentient life. Maybe a bacteria or a plant or something.

Technorati Tags: Art, Invention, Engineering, Reference, Comics, Planet Karen

I’m making myself do a comic every week without any regard for how crappy the results may be. I’m not even forcing myself to make them funny or entertaining. This is purely a mechanical exercise to get me comfortable with my tools, confident with visual storytelling, and able to produce work on a regular basis. I don’t know that I’ll share every one of them, but I rather like this first effort.

And, yes, this is how many mornings go here at the Bactroid.net hacienda.

Technorati Tags: Art, Coffee, Comics

1. Being obese. I’m making positive progress, yes. It just gets overwhelmingly frustrating from time to time. I have been obese for the majority of my life, and I’d like to be a normal, healthy weight for once. I’m upping my physical activity again soon. I intend to start commuting to work to help reduce my carbon footprint/reliance on fossil fuels, so when you pair that with running (which I’m still sporadically doing), I should continue to be in the best cardiovascular shape of my life. What I really ought to do is start up food journaling again. I manage my calorie intake much better when I’m writing down every piece of food I put in my mouth. It would be nice to get back to losing 1 kg/week again. I’m not sure how realistic that is at my current weight though. A kilo is now over 1% of my body weight though. I need to remember that my current 0.3-0.5 kg/week net loss is much more realistic.
2. Talking and dreaming about making comics while being too scared to actually make them. I’ve successfully reached the point where I draw something in my sketchbook pretty much every day. I spend idle moments doodling in my moleskine instead of just fiddling with my Nintendo DS. Sometimes I do realistically rendered figure work. Most times I do very cartoony faces and poses. Something about actually doing sequential art in frames on a piece of Bristol Board apparently freaks me out. I think I’m going to force myself to do a whole series of comics that are solely for my private consumption. If I can force myself to regularly do comics to the best of my ability—even if they’re really shitty—I’ll definitely improve.
3. Living in an apartment. I have no particular desire to be a homeowner, but my current subwoofer-loving neighbors have successfully reminded me why I shouldn’t live with shared walls my whole life. I also have a real limit to the amount of “greening” I can do to our home since we don’t own it. I can’t replace the windows with double-paned glass. I can’t do anything about the (lack of) insulation. I can’t fit it with solar panels to help with the electrical load. I’m doing just about everything that I can, but I look forward to doing more. Also, while I don’t give two craps about a lawn and patently refuse to care for one, I wouldn’t mind having a little victory garden and a compost pile. My dad always grew his own tomatoes, and I really miss walking outside to gather my own fresh produce.
4. The lack of story summaries in DC comics. I appreciate that DC has a big emphasis on continuity right now. I appreciate that they have some really awesome artists and writers working on their sequential books. I would love to read more of them, but it takes so much money/effort to get into most of the titles. (DC’s tendency to publish trades as more expensive hardcovers only makes this worse.) I’m positive that I would double the amount of DC books I’m currently reading if they would provide me a paragraph summary and a brief character description on the first page of every single comic book…just like Marvel is currently doing with every book I pick up at the comic shop. As it is, I’ve spent a lot of money catching up on Green Lantern, but otherwise I’m safely sticking with books like Detective Comics and All-Star Superman.

Technorati Tags: Weight Loss, Comics, DC, Gardening

I was most displeased that the Marvel Ultimate Alliance downloadable content wasn’t released on Xbox Live this week.

“Where the hell is my Marvel Ultimate Alliance downloadable content, bub?”

Technorati Tags: Comics, Marvel Ultimate Alliance

I find myself fearing the inking process even though I have great tools that I’m excited to use. I’ve got two different sizes of bristol board. I’ve got a crow quill pen. I’ve even got a brand new #1 brush to try out. I want the nice finished look of an inked and scanned page. I want to “finish” something. Nonetheless, I seem to be pencilling lots of random drawings without inking any of them. I’m not even drawing on the bristol board. I’m just continuing to sketch in my normal paper sketchbook and then pondering how I could transfer the image to bristol board for inking.

I need to force myself to just draw on the bristol board for a week and then attempt inking every one of the things. I need to fix in my mind that none of my initial efforts need to be actually good enough to show anyone. You know, that whole permission to suck thing.

Technorati Tags: Art, Ink

It might seem strange to some of you, but I rarely think of myself as an artist. I’ve done more than my share of writing and even gotten a story published. I’ve done a fair number of illustrations and even had one of them used to promote a musical revue up in Illinois. Nonetheless, I tend to just think of myself as some kind of random goof-off rather than a content producer. I’m so liberal with distribution rights that I don’t often remember that I actually have copyrights and intellectual property.

A reader emailed the other day to note that she found my site by looking for moogles on Google Image Search. After checking out some of my wallpapers and illustrations, she went over to eBay and started looking around for some moogle merchandise. One of the items she found was a cigarette case using my moogle wallpaper with no alterations and absolutely no permission. I emailed my thanks to the reader and then sent a missive over to eBay customer service for help.

eBay customer service had me download a Notice of Copyright Infringement for their Verified Rights Owner program and then fax all that paperwork to their claims office for review. About 12 hours later, they had removed the auction in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And suddenly it dawned on me that I really am an artist. All of the stuff in the first paragraph paired with this notion that someone dug my art enough to rip it off to sell on eBay for ten dollars just made it all clear that, no, I don’t have to become an artist. I’m already there. I’m just working to get better at skills I feel are too weak right now to properly execute my current ideas. I mean, hell, people are apparently lining up to buy my merchandise already. How cool is that?

Technorati Tags: Art, Ebay, Copyright, Moogle, DMCA

The lighting in our apartment is terrible. Now, given my cave troll nature, it’s actually rather impressive that I would notice this and somehow also consider it worthy of declaration. Our old apartment at the former Covered Bridge Apartments was a dream of light. This place, however, has almost no outside light and only a handful of overhead lights. We’ve supplemented with an army of lamps, and while just fine for most purposes, it’s just painful for drawing and (I’m told by Allyson) painting.

Now the result of this is that I don’t draw every day on the weekend. I know it isn’t a true motivation problem because I draw for hours when we visit Starbucks. I also spend my whole lunch break drawing outside during the week. Here in the dungeon, drawing is just harder to accomplish.

Now admittedly I’m overemphasizing the lighting problem for narrative effect. I also only have one drawing surface in the house—the kitchen table. This problem, however, requires $150-300 for a decent drafting table. The light problem, it turns out, was an easy and cheap fix.

I bought a twelve-dollar adjustable clamp-on light for the kitchen table. Right now, I just have a regular CFL bulb in it, but I’ve already ordered a full-spectrum CFL to really nail the lighting. Even with the regular bulb, it’s already a tenfold improvement. I just did some blind contour sketches at the kitchen table and then sat reading a book there just because of the wonderful task lighting.

So, yes, there are probably things that will require much effort or cash to fix, but there’s usually a quick and dirty hack to keep you moving for now. Don’t mortgage your present artistic productivity for a future that you might procrastinate right out of existence.

Technorati Tags: Art, Productivity, Lifehacks, Light