Scorpion451

Title is referencing this (one of my favorite nerd-isms :bademoticon: )
So I've been a bit slow with the posting past couple months, and I just thought I'd do a journal to let people know I wasn't carried off by a flock of rabid pigeons or whatever. 
The short version is that addition to the usual holi-delays everyone seems to experience this time of year, I've been in a bit of a learning cycle (aka "okay, I think I almost know what I've been doing wrong, just need to figure out how to not do that" ), and I'm dividing myself between several major projects. This has been eating into the time I normally would devote to smaller commissions and just for fun stuff like the squirrel-elephant-toaster hybrid I owe ya'll. (its coming, I just decided I wasn't happy with the initial version and so I'm slowly working on a 2.0. )

To be honest I think these past few months have been an extremely productive period for me, even if my posting hasn't reflected that, epecially since I've been picking up a bunch of new tricks and refining old ones, and one of the mysterious mystery projects has potential for major long-term payoff.

I'm just trying to stave off burnout by not letting myself overdo it,  (All work and no play make scorp a dull boy and all that. ) while still getting done all the things I need to get done.

Tough balance to find, but I think I'm starting to zero in on a schedule that keeps me from both chasing too many white rabbits and from grinding myself into burnout.

So tagged me for this AGES ago, just in time for the start of the year long string of total chaos I had between then and now.   Figured it was high time I got around to posting journals again, and this was a good way to start back up.

1) What is your favorite time of day?
Late afternoon, no doubt about it. I'm always at my sharpest and most creative then. I'm a night owl, too; I usually go to bed after 1AM. I wake up early, but I'm not a morning person- I sort of plan my artwork for the day and catnap on the couch until the caffeine kicks in.

2) How do you dress?/What kind of clothes do you wear?
I think of my personal style as "nerd punk".
Typical outfit is a witty black t-shirt (see: things I collect), cargo shorts (preferably camo and well broken in to the point that I've done at least one major patch job on them), calf-high tube socks, and motorcycle boots. My hair naturally does a sort of doc brown/einstein thing (only a nearly black shade of reddish-brown). When I bother to comb it, I wear it either in a half-spiked sidepart or greaser style wave depending on how long its been since my last haircut. I'm very picky about the look of my glasses, too; I always go for 1970's-esque wireframes (think aviators without the tint and you've got the right idea.) If I have to wear a jacket, which isn't often here in Texas, its either one of those hooded jackets they always have the creepy stalker wearing on Law and Order:SVU (which I consider mildly insulting ) or my beloved duster.

3) Are you a fan of or do you play any sports?
Not really. Never was much of an athlete, but played soccer and basketball when I was younger and didn't totally suck, and I'm actually a fairly good bowler.

I don't really like watching sports of any kind (I get bored very easily) so I'm not really an (american) football fan of the watch-games-and-keep-track-of-player-stats variety, but I love the deep strategy that the game has... you could say I'm a fan of it on paper more than of the game itself. For those who don't get the strategic appeal, when you start looking at the options for building a team and designing plays, american football starts to look bizarrely similar to the Warhammer 40k Force Organization Chart and rules for initial deployment. Seriously! When I have something to keep me invested in the game (like when I was in marching band in high school and knew everybody on the team), as you can probably imagine I get quite into back-seat coaching.

4) Where are your favorite places to go?
Oh, thats a hard one. Zoos and museums of any type are awesome. One of my goals in life is to get to tour the storage areas of the smithsonians, where they keep the stuff that is too strange or fragile to put on public display. I also love ruins and rust; whether its a salvage yard, abandoned megastructure, or a mayan temple, its like crack for my imagination- for example, battleship island is another place on my bucket list. I also love places with a specific "vibe": like San Francisco with its awesome Victorian-Art Deco-Modernist fusion of architecture; the strangely enchanting mix of facade and authenticity, darkness and light, innocence and sin, and life where none should exist that is Las Vegas; the indescribable Carlsbad Caverns; or the breathtaking desolate beauty of the north Texas windmill farms. I have a lot of places left to go on my bucket list, too- the castles of europe, Shibuya Square in Tokyo at night, Venice, the abandoned districts of Detroit, Shanghai, the Minoan Ruins (aka Atlantis), Hong Kong, the Amazon Basin, Central Siberia, the spire-mountains of southern china, the ruins of the Khmer Empire... its a long list.

5) Favorite holiday?
Tie between Christmas and Halloween. Weird pairing that I'm pretty sure says quite a bit about me psychologically.

6) Favorite food?
Theres a lot of possible answers I could give here, but on a three week backpacking trip with my boy scout troop in high school, around the 15th day I found myself fantasizing about a greasy double bacon cheeseburger with jalapenos, lettuce, grilled onions, and mushrooms. First thing I had when we got off the trail. I'm also a massive fan of okra, pretty much any way you can cook it, including pickled, but I'll eat fried okra like popcorn, and I've literally driven half an hour out of my way to get it.

7) What do/did you think about school?
Love-hate relationship. The trouble all gets down to that I was a nightmare for a lot of teachers, but never really realized it until after I graduated. I was that one kid with WTF!? level aptitude scores in pretty much everything they tested us for, who asked endless strings of (actually pertinent) questions, and who was honestly enthused about learning stuff...but also would forget things (like jackets, homework, major projects, shoes...), and didn't quite get that not everybody liked dinosaurs as much as I did. I also get bored very easily, and so when there was somebody in the class that didn't get how long division worked, about five seconds into the third explanation I was two minutes into a doodle of a cyborg dragon fighting a sandworm- and I'd miss it fifteen minutes later when we moved on to learning how to deal with remainders. Some teachers were better than others, but others apparently took it personally and thought I was acting out or something when I would forget yet another piece of homework for the same topic. So I miss some of the good teachers and the good parts like my daily hour of not-boring GT class, but overall I have to agree with Bill Waterson that anyone who remembers childhood as an idyllic time was clearly never a child themselves.

8) Do you collect anything?
Oh, boy. Snarky/Witty t-shirts, rocks, magic the gathering cards (though its been years since I was an active collector and player, due to finances and lack of opponents), strange gizmos and spare parts, art deco stuff, dinosaur stuff, scifi and fantasy books, reference books, more books, seashells, cool picture calenders, when I was younger comics and trading cards (mostly stopped because of lack of access to them, really, one of the few things I don't like about living in the middle of nowhere- given opportunity I'd probably start again.)

9) Do you stand out in the crowd or blend in?
Well, that's a though one. I definitely am a bit of an odd duck, and aside from the way I dress I'm nearly 6 ft and 250 lbs so I'm kind of hard to overlook... (I'm a little chunky but not as much as you might think- I'm just built like an out of shape blacksmith. You don't want to be next to me on an airplane. ) But I'm also shy and I enjoy peoplewatching, so I've gotten good at actively avoiding drawing attention when I want to, something that is handy when I want to draw people at parties or in a crowded location.

10)Tell us something we don't know about you.
Hmm...well...oh, thats a good one! I'm catoptrophobic- thats the fear of large mirrors. If you've ever heard of the movie "Mirrors", yeah, all of that its what I have nightmares about.

As for tagging others, if you read this consider yourself tagged, but only if you feel like it.
My questions are:

1)Whats your favorite weird animal, and why?
2)What's your favorite song ever? Any story behind it for you?
3)Favorite movie monster?
4)The best book ever is...[fan-ranting encouraged!]
5)If you had to live in the world from a scifi book or movie, where would you want to live?
6)Same question, but for fantasy books or movies.
7)Cursed by a gypsy for traumatizing his prizewinning show poodle, under a full moon you turn into a...[insert something humorously fitting]. (No fair saying your 'sona, fuzzy peeps, you traumatized Mr Snufflebuttons, not saved his life. )
8) Best line ever from a movie, book, tv show; any particular reason you like it?
9)When you travel do you enjoy the trip or the destination you go to more, or just as much? Does it make a difference how you're traveling?
10)And favorite artist on dA? (not yourself )

Its called the Submachine Series, and it is one of the single most beautiful series of flashgames that I have ever had the pleasure to stumble across on the internet. Like most good games and stories, its hard to describe. If you crossed Myst, Limbo,  Lost (the tv show), and the Bone comics, you might get something like Submachine. Beautiful artwork with a goosebump-inducing and thought-provoking storyline that gives you more questions with every answer you get- particularly because, like in Lost, you frequently get answers to questions you don't even know yet! To top it all off, the series is crammed full of some of the most wonderfully frustrating "the answer is right there, you just can't see it yet" puzzles since the Myst series went on hiatus. All created by one guy, an artist from Poland named Mateusz Skutnik- he's just recently released the 8th Submachine.


If you like games like Myst, or just want to see what a genius of art and game design can create when left to his own devices and given unlimited time, heres your playable proof of games as art: www.submachineworld.com/

So I'm getting closer to having something vaguely resembling my old computer fully back online, and at the moment I'm at least able to work on commissions and post some of the traditional pictures I've been doing over the past few weeks.

I've been playing a lot with white charcoal, sienna, and charcoal on black and brown paper, mostly because I haven't had anything better to do, and I've been needing to do more traditional work than I have been lately anyway.  In a lot of ways, those little square sticks have sent me on a trip down memory lane, to the roots of when I first started taking my art seriously. I think its ultimately been good for me; reminded me of a lot of old lessons learned, and how far I've come over the past few years.

I was first introduced to charcoal and sepia ages ago in a "drawing from life" class. I hated those crumbly sticks and that stupid paper at first- erasers don't work on them, they smudge like crazy, there's little to no precision unless you know exactly what you're doing, and why in the heck do you want me to draw with something almost the same color as the paper I'm working on, anyway?

After cutting my eyeteeth on super-precise, greyscale media like pencil and later, ink-and-quill, the whole process of trying to draw with something about as precise as a broken crayon drove me up a wall. On top of that, I had no idea how to even begin drawing with colors other than grey. I hadn't used color since high school art taught me that watercolor and I do not play well together, and that acrylic was fun but tricky. And what was with the brown paper? How was I supposed to make highlights with that? (*gets handed white charcoal.* ) And then the professor totally turned my world inside out and made us draw in white on black paper. Mind. Blown.

I think the black paper thing was the big "welcome to the matrix" moment, because it threw out everything I knew about drawing.

The other thing that helped push me over, though, was gesture drawing.
We would set up easels in a circle, and all take turns either in pairs or solo posing in the most bizzare way we could think of, for 30 seconds each. If you've never tried to draw someone standing in front of you in under 30 seconds, you have never tested your drawing skills. It is impossible to do for any stretch of time without learning something, and we had to do it for 20-30 minutes at the start of every class. What I learned above anything else, was to ignore that little voice that tries to get you to draw something the way you think it should look, and instead draw things how they actually look- even if it doesn't look right at first.

Another thing I've been reminded of is the importance of not relying on erasers. Working in in white, seinna, and charcoal forces you to go with your gut with no revision or editing- something that helped me finally break through the "it has to be planned out and PERFECT" mental block garbage that was holding me back, and just draw. I had already begun to realize before then that the obsessive focus on ruler-perfect perspective and by-the-book realism I had been clinging to was giving me nothing but headaches, pictures with more eraser marks than lines, and stiff figures that all looked the same, but had no idea how to fix it. The trick, it turns out, was simple.

Those little square sticks brought me to a realization that I have since seen repeated over and over in contexts ranging from professional athletes to musicians to the "Book of the Void" in the "Book of 7 Rings", a manual of Swordfighting from Japan written by a master swordsman. The realization boils down to this set of thoughts:

1)You can do more than your brain and body tell you you can, because they don't like to spend extra calories.
2)If you think about what you are doing, you will probably screw up.
3)The novice works by trial-and-error and mimicry. The expert works by planning and rules.The master simply works.

I think Yoda summed it up quite well: "No. Try not. Do or do not do. There is no try."
You can also go with Ocean from Ocean's 11: "I think of what someone smarter than me would do, and do that."

If you want proof, just look at any extreme drawing savant- the ones who may not be able to tie their own shoes, but who can perfectly render anything you ask them to. Anyone can do what a savant can do, be that math, total recall, or replicating a scene from memory or life- its all in that tangle of neurons somewhere. That's why every blue moon someone gets a bad fever or a knock on the head and suddenly can multiply 30 digit numbers in their head but can't remember their own name, why meditating Shoulin monks can perform incredible feats of strength and agility, and why you can hypnotize someone and they can recall what color shirt everyone at a crime scene was wearing. That whole thing about only using 10% of the brain is partly correct- most people only consciously use that much. The rest has a use, but you have to learn to use it on purpose. Much like learning to fly in the Hitchhikers Guide universe, truly mastering a skill like art is all about learning to think without thinking, so that you can intentionally access those parts of your brain that you don't think about.
Its not magic, its just self-discipline and practice- or fortuitously placed brain abnormalities.

So anyone can create images with a little practice. What makes an artist, is figuring out what to do next once you can draw or paint whatever you want, however you want.
I think in my current enthusiasm for learning digital painting, I've been falling back into that bad habit of thinking about how I do things instead of focusing on what I'm doing. I realized it on some level I think, because I have been making more of an effort to focus on composition and such now that I'm starting to really get a grip on how to make photoshop do exactly what I want the first time, but the past couple weeks spent focusing on a completely different media have reminded me of that lesson.

And so this whole experience has kind of been a good thing ultimately, I think; forcing me into taking a step back and getting a breather, and coming back to digital art with a fresh perspective.Not that I'm not thrilled to have my computer back again- tricolor-handprints are hard to get off of, well, everything.