Dragonbones and Rusted Armor

The Idea:
I realized that there's about a million and one tutorials out there for the visual arts. Enough that I'm not going to link to anything here - a simple Google search will handle that nicely for anyone who cares to look.

The problem is the fact that it seems like 75% of those tutorials are on How to Color Using Cell Techniques or How to Draw Anime Eyes. Now don't get me wrong - it's perfectly delightful that folks are creating tutorials on these subjects, but it got me thinking: there's got to be stuff that people want to know, but can't find online.

The Question:
Is there something that you would like to see in a tutorial that you haven't seen already? Is there some aspect of drawing or painting? Composition? Perspective? or something that I haven't even thought of that you would like to know more about by way of tutorial?

If so, just reply here and I'll see what I can do about that. :)

I have two new 'things' that I'm working on artistically:

1. Meet my Inner Skeletor. For those of you familiar with Iron Maiden's character/mascot Eddie the Head, I was having a discussion with xtingu and the IJG's intrepid leader Andrew Durkin about said character. As Andy notes in one of his posts, we were thinking that it might be entirely amusing to create a ghoulish character mascot of the band. I'm going to let you just mull that one over. Updates coming in the near future.

2. Randomization and art. So I was sitting in a Borders book store tonight. Yes, I normally am a Barnes and Noble kind of guy, but I felt like 'mixing it up' a bit. Don't try to stop me - I'm a madman like that. Anyway - I was thinking about fantasy art and looking through the latest batch of "World's Greatest" magazines which promote the better fantasy artists and illustrators. It's been said that art is the creation of something with the intent to illicit an emotional response. I kinda like that summary about as much as any other, so I'm always looking to see what kind of emotional response the artist is looking to pull from me. As I was doing this, I noticed that a number of the artists in these magazines were using a tool I hadn't realized they were using before.

Symbols. Okay, sure - I knew that other artists use symbols all the time, but I had really thought about it in this light before. Namely, the artists were using archetypes to garner certain emotional responses to the image. Robots, dragons, faeries - people who would be looking at these images have a certain emotional investment in these standards. The artists in these magazines are using that investment to gain the emotional response that they're looking for.

This got me to thinking.

About a million and one years ago, I discovered the website www.Mythosa.net. For those of you who do now, or did at one time, do the RPG thing, Bruce Gulke (as creator of the website) has created one of the best, most fleshed out, and all round 'slickest' campaign worlds online that I have come across. While most of you may not know this, that's saying a lot. Campaign paroozing is a hobby of mine. Anyway - that's not all Bruce does. He's created a program called the Tablesmith.

The short version of the answer to "What is Tablesmith?" is this: It's the architecture needed to randomly generate responses based on data in tables created by the user. Or randomizer+database=fun. It's designed for gamers, but I've always thought that the Tablesmith had a broad spectrum of uses outside of direct RPG stuff. Writers, developers, game designers - the list could go on for quite a while. It's not focussed on fantasy or sci-fi or anything else really. Bruce designed it in a way that is usable by all of the above and more. If it seems like I'm going on because I'm impressed it's because I am.

Anyway, tonight, while sitting in said cafe I was thinking to myself: wouldn't it be a fun sort of 'game' to use Tablesmith to generate random subjects? I could create tables to generate the topic that any number of images would focus on.

While I just don't have the kind of background (or brains) to create something like deeptape's SandCastle Project, this seemed like a good way for me to mix technology with art. I've created a ridiculously simple version of the table already, but I will post more when I refine it.

Just a quick heads up kids - Page 3 of 1100 is uploaded and should show up tomorrow. I'm going to try to stick to a Monday - Wednesday - Friday update schedule for a bit.

So you've probably all forgotten the little experiment that I started back in February.



Well I didn't. It was driving me nuts that I never did finish the portraits that I had promised. I had plenty of steam to do an hour on lafemmekatia's image.



I slowed down a bit and lost a bit of drive while working on theseitz's image of Rodney Dangerfield. I sucked it up and worked on him for a little over 1/2 hour. Poor Rodney. You've looked better buddy.



I have just finished (at long last) the image I promised for anisette_toast. I actually found this one coming together fairly quickly. There was a lot going on here tonight, and while I would think that should be an 'excuse' for why the image didn't turn out the way I wanted, it actually seemed to be the reverse. In just 1/2 hour (ok - maybe a touch more) I felt comfortable calling it a night.

I was thinking about doing some t-shirt designs. Mostly, I'm probably going to stick with my forte - tribal designs and the like. However, I have some pretty damn clever friends, so I thought that I would put the word out:

If any of you have an idea for a funny (or serious for that matter) shirt - let me know. If I like the idea, and I put it on a shirt, I'll (at least) buy one of the shirts for you, and you can brag to all of your friends that you came up with the idea!

Did some more work on lafemmekatia's image for my portrait experiment. There are ways that I see improvement, but I also think that I screwed a couple things up, and have to go back and fix them. Fortunately, this next stage is a one hour long session, so that gives me plenty of time to gent into the flow of things.

I'm trying not to jump the gun here. Part of this experiment is to get me to stick with an image until I've done what I set out to do, and I have to say that I'm fighting that urge now. My instinct is to do quick sketchwork, and if it's not where I want it to be? Drop it and move on. Hopefully I can get through a simple one more hour, and then I can sink my proverbial teeth into the next image.

As always, I would love to get all of your comments/thoughts/recommendations.