yoyoyoyoyoyoyo
Bang! Synapses fire, neurochemicals get released, a whole bunch of steps in between, and then- blog! A place for thoughts if they happen, mostly ramblings, and the occasional good idea.
Ayup… a predictable turn of events.
So I knew I wasn’t going to use this blog if I restricted myself to “quality posts”. And that’s no fun! So I’m going to start dumping more stuff onto this one to beef it up. Here’s something originally posted on my old blog, dead sea blog.
Biker girls continued…
So I started doing a half-assed comic as of late, and it’s been pretty fun. Drawing comics is a whole different way of thinking than storyboarding. I really had a hard time before, with panel layout and page composition, but recently I think I’ve gotten a better grip on it. That’s kind of the part where storyboarding doesn’t help you, when you’re trying to direct someone’s eye across a page from composition to composition. When I started thinking of the page as one whole image, it helped.
However! There are other comic conventions that I’m not too familiar with, either, such as inking and “spotting the blacks.” In laymen’s terms (which is the only way I understand it) spotting blacks is when you lay down ink in solid shapes to indicate form, or to strongly direct the viewer’s eye to one area of your image. It’s that bold, high contrast that zaps your eyeline right to the page. Because there is no greater contrast than black and white, this can be very effective. But if used poorly, it can have a gajillion times the opposite of the desired effect of visual clarity. It can turn stuff into a mess.
I’m trying to figure out how to simplify these shapes and shadows in a way that’s visually appealing, easy to parse, but still makes sense and evokes some kind of lighting effect… I have to say, this is hard. Are there any books on this stuff? Anyway, I doodled another biker chick, and tried out two different approaches. One is definitely more bold and dramatic, but could be distractingly so. The other is flatter, and lacks a little oomph. I’ll have to keep experimenting. If anyone has any suggestions they’d be welcome!
The attempt at inking…
The original… 
a fresh start.
I’ve had my old blog, at the old standby blogger.com for some time now. The very first posts chart my humble beginnings as a freshman in art college. And although I’ve been tempted many times to commit blog-o-cide and just end it all, or go back and delete the archives from my school days (or school “daze”, it would seem, har har) I somehow cannot do it.
Partly because it’s a testament to my progress, partly because it’s tedious to delete every post, and partly because I don’t want to take the chicken way out and remove embarrassing drawings from the internet, that blog will stay alive as my garbage dump blog. In the same spirit as I’ve always treated it, it’s been mostly incoherent ramblings or doodles tossed off in a minute. And don’t worry, that stuff will still most likely end up on this one as well. But I wanted to take a chance and perhaps try to make more focused blog, both of writing and of drawing, that would present a challenge for me to clearly communicate my ideas.
So, here goes, fresh blog! And of course, the link to my embarrassing past after the jump.
