Still Life (Charcoal)

I think I'd prefer any medium for still life drawing that isn't charcoal. Charcoal, in my opinion, is best suited for quick sketches or even longer sketches, but not finishes still life drawings.

I'm also far better at drawing geometric shapes. The milk carton, for example, is far more refined than any other object in this still life.

I was also set back by an accidental overuse of fixative. It turned my darks into liquid somehow. However, I did a little touching up after the fact. I still could have added a background and refined the table a lot more.

Observational Water Color

I wish I had done unrealistic colors for the second one. I really can't mix skin tones. It would have saved me time (thus the background would have looked more finished) as well as making it look more finished.

Graphic Novel: Master Plan

I kind of made this up as I went along. Everything took me 10x longer than it should have consequently.

I will make a link available to the download of the full PDF soon, but these images shall suffice for now:

PDF without dialogue: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9szc1hr8jtqihdo/Master%20Plan%202.pdf

[please notify me if it doesn't work]

Figure Drawing

This is probably my favourite of all of the (finished) figure drawings I did. At the very end, I got really bored and decided to make those black squiggly lines on the right side of the paper.

I think parts of her chin got lost in the drawing, as did the fabric she was sitting on. I really like the bright whites in her hair against the dark background.

I tend to prefer drawing dfab [designated female at birth] models to dmab [designated male at birth] models*. I am stating this partially just to make any cis male people reading this feel uncomfortable. Studies show that when cis males are singled out of a population, they are more aggressive than any other population when confronted.

*Assuming someone's gender from what one guesses to be the phenotypes of either the X or Y chromosome is rude because it ignores genderqueer, intersex, and trans individuals as well as many people who are simply androgynous**. As there is no good way to say "female-bodied" or "male-bodied" (as such terminology is often used to discriminate against trans women), the least oppressive terminology is dfab/dmab or estrogen-dominated body or androgen-dominated body. There doesn't seem to be any acronyms that I know of for the latter two but they could probably be shortened to EDB and ADB respectively.

**Human sexual dimorphism (the appearance of primary/secondary sex characteristics used to tell whether someone is most likely dfab or dmab) is actually very difficult to tell in many cases, as there are just a few genes (around 1000) separating dfab from dmab, those ~1000 genes being in the Y chromosome. Even though the "hourglass" body type is supposedly the most evolutionarily beneficial for giving birth, only 15% of dfab individuals have this body type. These and other so-called primary/secondary sex characteristics are more the exception than the rule for many. Thus, there are many people who do not seem to be either dfab or dmab at a glance.

Greeting Card Illustration: Happy Take Responsibility For Your Actions Day!

To be honest, I came up with the idea for the day without a clue as to what the illustration would be like.

Here's a photo of the front cover:

I had to do a little bit of research for the inside facts as well.

Looking up and replicating the font for the letters on the blocks was a lot of fun. I think I would have chosen orange though next time for the Y block (although I'm fairly certain that the Y block is often painted yellow because it is the first letter of the word "yellow," and not because people with the Y chromosome are associated with the sour and/or bitter taste of lemons, a yellow fruit).

Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud

The topics that I found interesting in the reading of chapters 3 and 4 were

• Negative space/Less is more
• Setting up a scene/The different ratios of types of transitions (moment-moment, action-action, subject-subject, scene-scene, aspect-aspect, non-sequitur)
• Time existing in comics as always present (the author makes a point of saying that this is the only medium in which the past, future, and present can exist all at once, but entirely misses that this is the point of always referring to literature in the present tense)

Less is more has always been a fascinating topic to me: what is the least amount of work that I can do that will still achieve optimal reactions? What is just enough that it leaves the reader satisfied, me unstressed, but still makes the reader wanting more? But then we get on to the point of what exactly DO I have to draw in order to get my point across but still make an emphasis on the reader? If I want to, I could just draw stick figures with :) faces*. But that would not capture what I want to achieve, or what the reader wants to see. Perhaps I could engage in minimalism in regards to number of characters and ideas present within the story.

Having never read "American" comics and only having read a few Japanese comics, I actually thought that this was an integral part of comic drawing. The aspect-aspect approach is what I really miss about modern literature which, frankly, is really poor in that area (very little description of surroundings and characters, which often just leads to them being all white when fanart or even an official movie is made. why all the white people). Currently, I'm reading Oyasumi Punpun by Asano Inio, a psychological slice-of-life manga. It centres around Punpun, represented as, but is not actually, a little white bird who is surrounded by various degrees of debauchery, abuse, and loneliness. His dad is abusive and in prison, and his mom is in the hospital, so his somewhat paedophilic uncle is taking care of him (luckily for Punpun, he is not a victim of his uncle's). The aspect-aspect approach in this comic allows you to see parts of Punpun's world, parts that may be normal but, added up to the rest, are signs of wretched or degrading or disgusting human behavior. I like that by revealing on parts of this at a time, you feel uneasy and very slowly come to realize what Asano is trying to assert in this story.

I think moment-moment transitions should be used more often. [from what I've seen of] American comics, television, and literature, the moment is not emphasized. The people on the screen have a deadline of 44 minutes with the opening and ending, so they have to make the most of their maybe 42 minutes of actual story time. However, in a comic that I can do whatever I want in, I hope to represent people not as just going-going-going-going, but go-stop-pause-hmm-go. People don't just travel in a straight line; we hem and haw our way, we get anxious, we feel doubt. Seamless dialogue is the biggest lie of television and literature.

Time has always been another question for me: how much time should a story take? Should a story be ten words or a hundred thousand? Should it be a page or twenty? Should I put this panel as going off the edge of the page, as to make this world seem more vast than what I am allotted to show? A story is supposed to have a set-up, a call to action, and response to that call, a climax, and then a resolution. Whatever story I do, there has to be an element of time. Unless I just juxtapose random elements in panels that will somehow add up to some sort of theme about love/sexuality/people/the social condition/I-hate-capitalism/who knows. There should be a setting, time, and place. This setting could be somewhere that could exist in the present. Or the past. Or the future. I could have periods of time where the future is presented via a flashback in the comic. Or period of the past. Or a parallel period of time that is taking place somewhere else, but presented to the character in the present. Time is fluid, and panels are just one way to break time up into some kind of pace.

*I just had an idea for making a graphic novella about people whose faces warp into emoticons. It would be of the horror genre.**

**spoiler alert: everyone dies. large piles of bodies.

Animation: A Bird's Tale

There is one thing to note about this animation: basically from the point where the bird is jumping up and down on the cat and on, I made that up at 3 am because I was bored, had already finished scanning everything somehow, and had done all of the lines for the traditionally done frames. I thought it was only going to be ten seconds...but nooooo....66 more seconds begged to be added.
The ending adds a little bit to the chase scene, which was the only one actually planned besides the window one.

The "tale" in the title is a pun. A very bad and kind of boring pun. In hindsight, it was felicitous for me to have made up about 40 seconds of my animation at 3 am for no reason because it gave me a title other than "Cat Chases Bird Aloft In Highly Unrealistic Situation."

Before attempting this animation, I knew that it was going to be hard, take many hours, and, overall, just be rather tedious. I don't want to go in to animation. Probably ever. There's too much work involved for something that I only appreciate as another art form. Animation is an amazing art, and I respect those that dedicate themselves to it. I, however, do not have the patience to draw versions of the same place or characters but at different times, some of those times being 1/24 of a second apart, just as some people would think painting a bunch of pre-sliced loaf cats to be gruesome.
Luckily, I started drawing traditionally on Saturday night, finished Sunday at noon, and scanned everything by Sunday evening. I went to bed that evening and woke up at 2 am and decided to go over all of the drawings digitally in Photoshop. I actually had to make a few actions dedicated to this process.

Given that I was still working on the animation at 6 am on Monday morning, I suppose I procrastinated a little. Would I have been able to perhaps avoid losing a couple of hours of sleep that I didn't really miss anyway?
In hindsight, I would not be as lazy with the digital-only part of the animation (ie. make more frames for it) and make other parts smoother, although there's only so much you can do at 12 fps.