Wedding Present

Since my friend Purplycia is back from her honeymoon, and presumably has had a chance to open the framed copy, I can finally put the drawing I did for her and her husband as their wedding present up here:

It’s the first non-Second Life thing I’ve done in…  gosh, I can’t even remember how long.  Came out nice, I think.

Shark Attack

Jack’s second Flash movie:

(This is a silent film, but Jack’s really into audience participation, so feel free to add your own sound effects as you watch.)

Screening Calls

Asian screens are a dime-a-dozen in SL.  (Almost literally:  many of them retail in the L$30 range, which works out to about 11 cents US, and if they’re Copy, once you’ve bought one you can trot out as many duplicates of it as you want.)  I suspect it’s because they’re fairly easy to make.  All you have to do is be decent at creating (or stealing) textures, angle a couple of prims and BANG!  Good-looking Art piece.  Using a sculpt to do it may knock a prim or two off, and scripting it may make it more functional, but mostly it stands or falls on the art.

Anyway, here’s my hat in the ring:

The raw stock I used to created the art is a photograph I snapped right outside my apartment door, two days ago.  My neighbors caught me doing it, and then I had to explain why I was taking close-ups of snow.  :)

I haven’t decided what it will retail for yet.

update: I decided to retail it for L$30, since that was inside the target range of what one might expect to pay, and since the artwork is original, and since I am including both a transparent cloth and a fully opaque version in the shipping pack. Seems like a good deal for the money. At least to me…

Retro

But She Fell Off the Music Box

D’s no slouch in the graphics department herself.  And she does better sepia tone than I do.

The key must be an upgrade.

Hot

Dragonia, as the floor manager of a prominent SL fashion store, gets previews of all the new items created by the designer who owns the place.  And she has a gazillion tattoos and skins and articles of clothing in her inventory to begin with.  So last night while we were at the Skybase she was trying out the preview items, and then she put them together with some of her existing items, and then I pulled out my camera and started shooting, and then Photoshop got involved, and the next thing you know…  well, you can see what happened.

The flames were added, obviously, and I had to do some work on the right arm to fix the penetration inherent in cross-armed avatar positions.  But other than that, yes, that really was what she looked like.

The fashion store has a poster contest every month, open for public submissions.  I did a copy with the store name superimposed in the upper left, and we threw it into the ring.  (Being a type-hound, of course, I actually like the version with the store name better.  But I don’t want to create the impression that it was commissioned or endorsed by the store owner, so I’m posting the textless version here.)  Given the tremendous amount of diverse visual art talent out there, it’s never gonna be a slam dunk, but I feel comfortable saying we’re at least in the running…

Iconography

Speaking of Myst:  these are a series of buttons I made for an app my friend is developing.  I am not at liberty to divulge the nature of the app, nor the intended functions of the buttons, but I can tell you that after a long (pleasant, interesting) discussion about it, he decided against using them, as he felt that they were too abstract for inclusion in a GUI.  This, as we determined, was something that would never have occurred to me, since I have been playing video games with heavily stylized GUIs all my life-  and the series I’ve spent the most time playing tends to drop you in front of beautiful and complicated machines of unknown purpose, and require you to figure out the controls by trial and error…

Then and Now

One of the fascinating things about rummaging through the endless piles of paper I’ve accrued over the last fifteen years is discovering old drawings I did during that time.  Many of them are surprising to me, almost literally shocking, because they’re far better than I remember them being:  they possess either a diversity, or a level of energy, or a level of technical skill (sometimes all three) that I doubt I have anymore.

Here, for instance, is a random sketch that was tucked into a pile of notes on an anime parody/genre mash-up:

Here, by comparison, is the sketch I did sitting outside with Jack yesterday, at Starbucks:

(*laugh*  You know, I just realized, Cloak Girl there looks like a mellowed out version of Andréa from Daria.  Can’t imagine why that would be…)

Maybe those two sketches aren’t exactly the best choice for point-counterpoint–  I’m sure all five of you reading this will like the bottom one just fine, if not much better than the top one.  And the top sketch isn’t exactly random;  it still existed for me to discover NOW because I found it sufficiently likable THEN not to immediately crumple it up and throw it away.  Still, I feel like there’s a point trying to make itself heard there.  Something silly and weighty about how drawing is like life, in that it isn’t a straight line from A to B, where B is better than A.  You wander all over the place, gaining some things and losing others, and where you wind up in the end isn’t necessarily any better than where you started out.  Unless you think it’s better.  For some reason.

You Belong to Me

Found this while going through a pile of papers that was inside one of my boxes, dated 2002.

I don’t change much.

Well…  except maybe in one way.  After I scanned the drawing and before I posted it here, I used Photoshop to shrink her head down to the right proportions for her body. ;)

This Is Not A Pipe

Drawing is stupid.

OK, maybe stupid is the wrong word, in a global sense.  There must have been a point (or a long stretch) in human history where the ability to create two-dimensional line representations of three-dimensional objects seemed nothing short of miraculous.  And that can still be the case.  I’ve stood in front of classrooms full of fidgety schoolchildren who became transfixed, just bowled over by the fact that I could conjure up an army of their favorite cartoon characters with a piece of chalk and a few quick strokes of my arm.  That’s gratifying.

On the other hand, though, here’s a sketch I did sitting at the counter of a diner, while I was waiting for Gloria’s engine to be repaired:

Now, what the hell good is that?   It isn’t a terribly accurate representation of what the cup and saucer and spoon really looked like over those moments (which I guess you’ll just have to take my word for, being as how I was there, and you weren’t.)  It serves as a mnemonic for me of what it was like to sit at that counter at that moment, in front of that cup of coffee, but the greater part of that experience has nothing to do with the drawing (or the coffee) and is not communicated by it in any way:  you can’t divine by looking at that drawing what the smell and taste of the french fries with mayo that were sitting right next to it were like, or how I was starting to feel washed out because I was about to come down with bronchitis, or perceive what the head waitress sounded like bitching out the other waitresses about how the coffee in the pot was too old, or get the general sense of daily life’s minutiae that I did as old men ambled up and took seats on other side of me, placing small variations on the same orders they’d no doubt placed a hundred times before.  You can’t even really tell too much about the objects the drawing is supposed to represent, other than some bare suggestion of their physical arrangement:  whether the cup and saucer were white or beige;  whether the spoon was clean or dirty;  whether the coffee is hot or cold, flavored or not, or if it even is coffee.  If you think you can, it’s because you’re bringing your own experience to it;  reaching into your internal database of coffee-china-warm-beverage-related associations and calling them up in your own head, at the drawing’s instigation.

I can type this:

COFFEE ON A DINER COUNTER

…and it does the same thing.  With the same efficacy.  And that only took me two seconds.  The drawing took 10 minutes.  Maybe more.

—

On the third hand, I kinda dug these creamers:

Swish

Left to themselves, the women I draw always have an intensely sad chasteness.  They never look as if you could take them to a bar and get drunk with them, or have sex with them, or as if you’d really want to.

A long, long time ago, my friend Hawk was looking at a storyboard I’d done (it was a variant of the Daphne myth, for a private project I was thinking about), and said, “Dude, I’m so jealous.  Everything you draw goes swish.  Everything I draw goes THUD.”

I’m not sure if the two are related.

Blueprint

Since NOW I’m home…

“Bench Boom”

Jack’s first “animated” movie (make sure your computer’s sound is on, and double-click on the image to play):

Time Wastes Too Fast

Maira Kalman is my hero.

xkcd: “Useless”

From the utterly wonderful xkcd.com: