I think I have a lot of Andrew Belle lines as my blog subjects. Huh.
Anyway, I am going to use this half hour before “Bones” starts to actually try to produce a halfway decent blog! By the way – my squeaky folding table of a desk is *really* starting to bug me. Usually, when I say that I am about to do a decent blog post, what follows is some dozen pictures of a relatively finished quality. Unfortunately for this blog, being in school has meant more variety in the materials that I have around me when I suddenly get seized with the urge to draw. This means that the drawings I’ve been doing are scattered across any wide number of sketchbooks (it feels like I have, like, ten that I’m using right now). And I’ve got so many other things I’m thinking about that I’m not usually seized by a drawing long enough to want to do anything with it. Which means that I might not actually have been drawing as much as I feel like I have been, but I guess the important thing is that drawing is become more valuable to my life again. :D!
Oh, and I’ve been focusing on fixing up the first 3 chapters of Redefining Evil and writing a formal query letter so that I can send it into this October fantasy novel month competition thing for a small publishing firm, which for now shall remain undisclosed. 😀
ANYWAY, I am kind of excited about a few art-related things. I’ve been really craving the ability to utilize color as much as I value color, because really there’s been a large gap between those two since my crazy semi-queer color usage days. That probably explains why I tried to work on digital art so much – it let me get the colors that were in my head. But I also wasn’t letting go of my grudge against the precedence of digital art in modern artistry, so to reconcile that I wanted to try other media because colored pencils just couldn’t cut it. They were too much work for as limpid as the results were. I always brightness/contrast-ed the CRAP out of everything once I had it scanned, and even then I was only moderately satisfied with the color intensity.
That’s the direction that I all of a sudden found myself going for my Physics for the Fine Arts project. We’re supposed to explore the phenomenon within something related to our art emphasis, given that you must have some sort of art interest to stay in the course. I was looking at intensity early on the brainstorming phase because we’d spent SO MUCH TIME working on physical intensity. But then I started thinking harder about it, and all of a sudden I wanted to compare intensities throughout different media, and then all of a sudden I was seriously considering the things that I was starting to learn as far as what impact they have on my actual art. I’m including a digital art aspect to the project because of how the RGB color system (derived from screens, which are derived from old photography screen printing techniques, which are derived from Georges Seurat’s pointillism…SHABAM) allows you to rein in the purest form of a color…or does it? ;D I started on Sunday by making a few swatches of similar hues using colored ink, acrylic, watercolor, pastel, and colored pencil, thinking that pastels would give you the most intense hues of traditional media. But my professor, upon studying my swatches, pointed out that while pastels might have had the deepest red, you got a serious texture using pastels because of how thick the wax they use is. And I also noticed that watercolor and colored ink produced some seriously intense hues. That led me to weasel my parents into buying me some smaller paintbrushes so that I could try using ink. But when I started ink on (the picture that I’m putting at the end of this), I realized that not only was it not too different from watercolor, but ink didn’t seem to go as far as watercolor. I’d never thought I could use watercolor over lineart just because it’s so…watery. xD But I tried it with this picture and, in general, I am VERY pleased with the results. I saved an unenhanced version that I’ve been comparing to an untouched version of the maroon/gold layout from late last year (with all the hands). The colors are SIGNIFICANTLY more vivid. O_O; Watercolor took a lot longer and it was much more tedious because the color produced by a single brushstroke isn’t as predictable as with colored pencil. But that I can get results substantially nearer to what a digital piece would produce (and that’s without even touching the traditional piece up digitally) using traditional means THRILLS ME to death. One of my classmates pointed out that the fees for a digital painting product is better since it’s a one-time thing, as opposed to having to constantly restock when your supplies for paints or crayons or pencils run low. But I can’t ever see myself spending $1000 on my traditional materials no matter how many new sets I get. O_O;
I wasn’t actually expecting to find that traditional media can indeed stand up to digital media. I was pretty sure I was going to have accept that digital artwork produces a higher quality color range. It might – but definitely not as much as I would have thought!
