Farsong Blog-o-Matic

Fifteen-minute sketchcomics. On notecards.



My group totally owned the presentation. I had about fourteen notecards with points (the powerpoint had only three slides with quotes for me, and I actually referenced it only once, having it show different things than I was explaining). I didn't read the first half of the notecards and ended up tossing the last for or five on the table as I was talking. Apparently, I did so in a manner as if I were disgusted with said notecards.

The speech in the bubbles is actually apropos of nothing.

I should also add that the MacBook is awesome when I can control PowerPoints with its little remote-control.


I need to get a new Molskine notebook. And a new, 8.5" by 11" spiral-bound sketchbook. And some markers or something.

In six parts; the idea was to do it simply. Even then it took a while, but it was a great exercise, too.



Parts are perhaps a little dark, but it's supposed to be cheesy (perhaps the cheesiest ending evar), but not edgy; edgy comics are annoying and usually somewhat pretentious. I also tried to show it, not tell it. That's kind of the point of comics.

( The rest of the story )

So, I mislaid my blue pencil*. It was probably lost on the bus taken as tribute by the bus demons**. That's at least two useful things claimed by the bus demons, and that's probably more like three.

( I spent far too long searching for it to no avail )

Of course, after searching for it for more than a half hour, I realised — much to my own chagrin — that I spent more time than my time clocked at minimum wage would be worth to pay for the pencil + its blue leads.

The thing that irks me is that, inevitably after I purchase more leads*** I'll find the missing pencil.

Invariably.


Fortunately, the act of drawing is cathartic. Then again, so is House music.



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* It makes dropping pencil lines in scanning many times easier.
** I need to draw these fellows
*** And probably a new pencil as well. Probably a nicer drafting pencil — and at the very least, a different-enough drafting pencil so I can tell the one with the blue leads apart from my regular pencils. The lost pencil that I used with blue leads had a blue sticker on the end to mark it. It might be nice to get one that looks or feels somewhat different. However, I really do swear by these little Pentel P205 pencils — for the same reasons I'm a geek for Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball pens and the IBM Model-M.

Just a reminder that Public Transit is not always Sunshine and Pancakes.

In the future, I'm going to stick with the spiral-bound kind.

“It's like that one bumpersticker — well, it's not a real bumpersticker, but if it were real, and if I had a car to put the bumpersticker on, this is what it would say.”




I also ended up vectorising this from the other day (though I still need to make a larger version of the insert spacer):

There is still more to tweak, too.


Playing around in illustrator and seeing how to go about making things I like; I do find I like iconic things. I do like the type on the first thing; I'm a typeface geek. Of note is the fact that the lulz incurred are not malicious, but rather, awesome. I do things because they can conceivably be awesome. $5 also could be construed as an inside joke, but it's mostly an addition to the end of a boring story to make it worthwhile as well as awesome. Try adding it the the end of your boring stories and watch the magic happen.


Finals commence on the morrow. I have things to finish before then, and I was not the most productive today.

I spent the better part of the afternoon working on this. Some of the time, in a half-distracted manner. I drew it because I wanted to. No other reason. It's a drawing based off a film I acted in over the weekend.

This is actually a composite; the characters were sketched individually, and I pieced everything together in Photoshop. I thought about adding text in Photoshop, but I liked the look of the handwritten title better. I struggled with the face shapes, though. I have a hard time making extras, or even drawing a lot of different people. I am pleased with the coloring/shading. Actually, I'm pleased with the whole thing, though I do see room for improvement.

However, it has been said that I have a very distinctive style. I do deem this a good thing.


( There's a story here, and it's worth telling )


Also: I learned more about Mormons than I ever knew before. Ask me about it.


And the day was rounded out with a delicious Ruben, a tasty, refreshing Pilsner, and a fairly bland, not-so-tasty potato(e) salad.

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*This is after editing. We shot for 14 hours, and used about an hour of tape. The video is 7 minutes. Had I been shooting, more tape would probably have been used.

Badlydrawn Robot wishes you a Bad Drawing Tuesday.



This happened to-day:( Drawings and ramblings )


Also, the two random shirts I ordered from shirt.woot came in to-day, and neither of them sucks. When I say random, I do mean random--I paid $12 for two shirts, size medium, randomly selected by shirt.woot's shipping. It was a grab-bag, of sorts, and both shirts are cool.


Also, LCD Soundsystem's 45:33 has been on repeat for the last day. Guess how long the track is.

So, I've started sketching things again. What follows are crappy little pen sketches in my molskine notebook, done between classes, and drawings as things happen. These are from both yesterday and to-day. I think there has been undue influence from both James Kochalka's American Elf and Kate Beaton. They're probably illegible (I usually slow down when actually hand-lettering comics and their ilk), but at this size, the images are the same size at 72 dpi on my 19" 1280x1024 displays as they are in my molskine sketchbook.

( 5x Molskine sketches that are most likely illegible )

If they're amusing, I'll post more. Plus, I have actual comics to ink or something. And blue pencils should help make inks look better.

Also, I've found that I have 5Gb of network storage in my account at EWU. This is at least 4.825 Gb (number has one significant digit, effectively equalling 5 Gb) more than I had at PLU.

Because I've found I enjoy discussing design of things with people, here's a thing I just put together:



I think it's better than the last. I might tweak with it a little to-morrow, but this is pretty much it.

Also, Allen, I'll e-mail a higher-res file. Don't use the one here. It will look crappy.


Discuss!

There wasn't really a gash. More like razor burn. Also, panel two is clearly not a vampire. Here's what it looked like before cleaning it up.

In other news, I got new shoes. They were on sale, which is the proper time to get new shoes. Also, the proper time to get new shoes is when the old ones are starting to wear out. Unfortunately, I didn't find any awesome green sneakers (or really many brightly-colored ones at all). Fortunately, though, I did find a pair of Converse high-tops.

I'll actually admit to getting two pairs of shoes. In my defence, they were on sale at a deep discount (more than 2/3s off) and they're the spiritual successors to the green sneakers. Only tan and all leather. (It was either these or some that were the spiritual successors to the Børns I had--which were probably some of the most awesome shoes I've ever worn. However, the ones I picked were easier to put on and take off, though both were comfortable and I could have stood all day in either).


This whole job hunt thing is making me a little less picky about where I work. I'm thinking about restaurant/waiter/bartender/server/something/whatnot. Those might be fun! I'm not too keen on going into food service, though--McDonalds or likewise. I've heard not-so-great things about those sorts of places. I think I'd get burned-out.

Other places I will never apply: Wal-Mart. I'm vehemently opposed to said store and what it does to all the other stores in a fifteen-mile-radius.

I think pretty much anything else goes. I'm serious about that statement.


I need to find real people to socialise with. My brain is all "woo-ha woo-ha."

Did I mention that The New Pornographers are really awesome. The Electric Version is a rocking LP somewhere between Architecture in Helsinki and The Shins. Oh, and they're from Canada.


So, I put together a handy little flyer for ASPLU's Battle of the Bands--the kind that get printed off en masse and handed out all over the place. Sent it off as a four-up. Just black-and-white, for the sake of Photocopying.

I really am a wannabe graphic-designer!


Oh, and sometimes, I actually draw things.

I think there is a story here. As it were, this is the last panel of a would-be comic. Said comic is not drawn, but I drew the last panel anyway, because I'm cool like that.

I'm not to terribly sure what's going on here. My commentary doesn't really help at all.

So, I drew a thing.



Yeah, we think he might be insane …

Also, I think I might be getting better at this coloring thing.


( gripes about living at home )

"Earwyrm" is a corruption of the term "Earworm" or „Ohrwurm" (in German), which is a term for a song stuck in one's head. "Wyrm" is another term for dragon, though its often spelled "worm." I thought that it was a fun metaphor and immediately drew this. For some reason, the import into Flickr corrupted part of the image. I think the glitching looks cool, though.

( I'll start talking about the computer hardware I use for drawing; there is an accompanying illustration which I think is amusing. )

I've been listening almost exclusively the past couple days to LCD Soundsystem's newest album, Sound of Silver. I recently got it off of iTunes Plus (higher bitrate, no-DRM AAC files); partly, this was because I was looking for the new Vitalic album, V Live (which I might have to import). [If you don't know LCD Soundsystem, the music is straight-ahead rock with a driving dance underbeat.] Now, I had been listening to the remixes of some of the tracks a great deal because it was addictive, but let me tell you this: the remixes are crap, compared to the album.

( This is an album; a cohesive whole )

I need to find a place, somewhere in Spokane (preferably within walking distance of down-town) that I can hang out and draw, perhaps even doing such with other people.

You know why I put them here? Because I've been inconsistent with the up-dating.


Last night, I watched a really amazing movie called The Station Agent. Briefly, it's about a dwarf who moves into an old train station, and the people he befrends. It's comical, and bizarre in the way only real life can be. Additionally, the plot doesn't matter in the slightest, only the characters. I was also pleased by the awesome photography in many of the scenes — a lot of the shots are wide, placing the characters within the frame, but only as a part of the whole.


I'll start by saying this is the post that really got me thinking about my camera lenses in a serious way, specifically in regards to the photos I take and how I take them. Specifically, it talks about how the wonderful 50mm lens, which makes pictures look "real" and which took most of this past century's most-memorable photos, has fallen out-of-favour.

I would ramble, but instead I'll simply say that I need a 20mm or 28mm fixed focal length lens to take pictures with because it will have an aperture (ƒ-stop) of ƒ/2 or lower, as opposed to the ƒ/4 of my zoom at 28mm (a difference of two stops, which is the difference between blurry and awesome, even with the built-in image-stabliser — which is quite stellar). ( I continue on about photography, showing one of the differences between film and digital SLRs — it's pentaprismic )

Sometimes, I draw the things I see in the clouds.


This was the first day of real camp. I had forgotten how fun campers are. I also forgot how exhausted I can be.


Also, all the things that I kept on the PLU servers were wiped in some kind of purge. I assume that it is a regular, annual thing. This means, though, that any of the images hosted there are now gone. Not gone gone, but just not on my website or my laptop, though safe on the hard drives of the desktop, which is not here.

Also: my music library is not on my laptop, either. This needs to be ameliorated, post-haste, and sound effects need also to be added. I need also to set up a proper server (by proper, I mean a dedicated rig to do server-ing; this rig need not be a proper rack-mount, but it should be an amalgamation of at least two other computers and extra parts ).

I also suppose that if DJing is to be continued, a proper DJing program is needed and should therefore be acquired.

It’s interesting that, as one progresses in English, essays are less and less “structured” in the traditional sense, such that asking the question “how many pages” is not one that can be readily answered. At least not answered in any way but “as many pages as it takes.” The size and form of an essay matter less; the content and quality, more. It’s almost as if, by this time, it is assumed that one knows how to write the standard Five-Paragraph Essay™; even more so, it is almost as if one, knowing this basic form, now knows how to deviate from the established standard in the proper ways. Sure, one can write an essay without understanding the components of an essay, but the problem is that this then becomes hit-and-miss.

This is exactly like drawing things. One can draw cartoony characters, with their constitutions all skewed, but to draw them without understanding that there must be form beneath the flexible skin leads an artist to hit-and-miss drawings that don’t seem to work as well. Look at the masters of cartoons from the last century: while the characters were cartoons, and didn’t obey the proper laws of physics, the characters still had a basic form beneath their skin; a basic wireframe that allowed articulation and motion, however unreal; without this skellington, the characters would move in ways that the minds could not comprehend or relate to, and would be rejected.

This is why both drawing and writing start with the same basic principles: establish a form. In drawing, artists draw still-life and figures with realism, relating proportions and basic shapes to the forms of the solid objects they draw. In writing, authors write essays about solid objects and ideas, relating arguments and basic quotes, and structuring them rigidly into a five-paragraph essay. Both are rigid, un-yielding structures, and are carefully plotted out and executed with a conscious thought to form. As both practice their work, the form becomes ingrained such that the first thing an artist does is lay out the basic shapes of a form which detail can be added to; the first thing a writer does is lay out a series of thoughts on a topic which detail can be added to; this becomes a second nature for both.

Then, armed with this knowledge of form, an artist and writer can then “diverge” from the standard final form, though underlying structure is the same. A careful, thoughtful artist notices not just the outward layer and appearance, but the underlying form and structure as well. Someone haphazardly working can stumble upon a form like this with great success, but the mark of a true artist is the ability to re-create what happened, as it was no accident, but a purposeful, thoughtful, conscious decision.

The most interesting thing to note is that this essay does follow the conventional form: idea, supporting arguments, and conclusion. What more amazing, though is that it accomplished this while I was writing it. I had the ideas in my head of what to write, but these ideas also changed and evolved as I drew toward the conclusion as the argument its self grew stronger and more concise. In addition, the use of parallel structure was deliberate in the last two paragraphs, as a way to show that these two are really the same process, though the outcome is for the former, very specific, and the latter, quite abstract—thus is the nature of pictures and words.

Apparently, these two are also hard to reconcile, though they are, in fact, the same process, and indelibly linked. In addition, language and pictures sprang from the same representational nature, yet went in different directions. The have been reconciled in the medium of comics, though. Unfortunately, too few people (instead of the more negative “not enough people”) believe that comics can be art and literature; too many believe that comics are for children. It’s the same argument as being made for video games as art. I happen to believe in a rather broad definition of art, and am able to appreciate it regardless of whether I actually enjoy it. That’s not the real point of most art. Comics is art and literature, and the amalgamation of written and visual medias make for an even more immersive way of story-telling. The words enhance the visual stories, and the pictures make the worlds and action more physically real. It’s simply a more thorough way of telling a story, and it takes great skill. Not ability, but skill and though.