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 Sunday, September 17th, 2006 - 3:48pm - [Direct Link] They've been teaching me some interesting things at DigiPen. I'm somewhat certain there isn't some law about me reposting in my own words some of the things they've taught me, especially seeing how it's common knowledge to anyone who's got enough smarts to figure it out for themselves. For those of you not aware, DigiPen is very intense. I thought I was taking 20 credits the first semester (which is their recommended schedule), but DigiPen is kind enough to give us two "free" credit hours of ART 101, so I'm actually taking something in the area of 22 credits. For those of you unaware of college, 12 credits is considered attending "full time." Doing 80 hours of work a week is an easy week. Since it's so intense -- or rather, the reason it's so intense -- is because they want to teach people to be experts. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me jump back. Why do people learn things? Because they want to, duh. But why do they want to? There's two basic reasons. First, people learn things to fit in, aka be socially accepted. If you wanna hang out with a certain crowd, you need to know how to do the things they do. But it's very important to not become better than them, or you won't fit in with them anymore. Second, people learn things to become an expert. This is very different, as you learn in order to become better than everyone else rather than simply fit in at their skill level. Ever heard people say you shouldn't compare yourself to others, but instead to yourself? That way, instead of going, "Oh, I'm better than everyone I can see. I'm happy," you can say, "Oh, I can still work on a couple things here and there." It also helps when you're in the early stages of learning so you don't slit your wrists after seeing how much worse you are than everyone else. I'll admit that I had high hopes of attending DigiPen to be an expert, but when they talked about this, I felt myself cringe a little. Despite my delusions of expertise, I think I was still doing it a lot to fit in. During my youth I've seen some great artists, and my thoughts were, "I want to be able to do that." That kind of thought related to expertise is, "I want to do better than that." But now I know. And knowing is half the battle. Geee Eyeeee Jooooooe!  Sunday, September 10th, 2006 - 5:29pm - [Direct Link] This is a modified repost of a comment on colonelwolf's DA Journal. --- My summer assignment for DigiPen, which was due the first day of class, was to draw 800 sketches. They didn't have a theme thing like this, but instead wanted us to draw real objects. Apparently drawing is a global skill. That is, much like riding a bicycle, once you learn to pump the pedals, turn the handlebars, use the brakes, and keep your balance, you've learned the global skill that emcompases all of these and is called, "riding a bicycle." The global skill of drawing is made up of the following skills: -The perception of edges -The perception of spaces -The perception of relationships -The perception of lights and shadows -The perception of the gestalt Edges is simple. Where two things meet, or where an object meets a "negative space," you have an edeg. Spaces are a little more complicated. Best way is probably to take a chair with curved armrests and look at it from the side. The armrests make a loop where there's no chair -- basically a hole in the chair. That hole is negative space. Rather than trying to draw the edge of the armrest, try drawing the edge of the negative space inside the hole. You can do the same thing for the outside of the chair itself. And you can do this for things like a face -- the shape of an eye can be drawn by drawing the outer edge of the whites of the eye, or the outside edge. Relationships are easy, but sometimes difficult for people to comprehend. Imagine you're standing in a hallway, and you have a friend directly in front of you. Now imagine you have another friend at the end of the hall. What is the size of each of their heads? "About the same," right? No, actually. The friend at the end of the hall is tiny. Depending on the length of the hall, the entirety of your distant friend could be smaller than your close friend's head. Relationships also deals with angles. There are two absolute angles: horizontal, and vertical. If you're trying to draw an edge of a real object, hold up your pencil vertically or horizontally and see what kind of trianglish shape it makes against that edge. Remember the shape, and put it on your paper. You can also do that with sizes and distances, measuring how far up the pencil it goes compared to another part of what you're looking at. Lights and Shadows, in their simplest form, have four elements. You have "cast shadows", which is when an object blocks a light source and casts a shadow onto another object or the ground. These are usually the darkest shadows. You also have "crest shadows", which are the object blocking light from itself. (ie, the back of an egg is darker than the lit side) "Highlights" are where the light shines directly on an object and makes that part brighter. The last, "reflected light," is most often seen in crest shadows. It's where the light reflects off the ground or other objects and lights up the object again. If you shine a light at an angle on an egg and pay attention to the crest shadow, you'll notice that it's not all a smooth crest shadow, as the light reflects back onto it. The last skill, gestalt, means "the whole picture." I've mostly ignored it, because apparently it's a "self-taught" skill that naturally occurs when all the other skills are learned. Beyond these drawing skills that make up the global skill of drawing are two advanced skills: -Drawing from memory -Drawing from imagination I find this order interesting, because most people start on "drawing from imagination," which the author of the book I took all this from, Betty Edwards, says is the last and highest/hardest skill. If you're intersted in the book at all, it's called The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It's a third edition book. You'll want the third, as the first two apparently aren't near as organized. And hopefully you can get past her condescending tone, her severe bias against both the English language and any "left brain" activity, such as math or basically anything involving sequential or linear activities, and her ramblings that seem completely disjointed and unnecessary. I'd recommend the book for what it teaches, not what it says. Anyway, from DigiPen's courses, memory and imagination aren't even going to be handled the first year. We may start practicing it the second year. Then again, I could just be misreading or misremembering the class descriptions because it's convenient to say such a thing.  Sunday, September 3rd, 2006 - 10:42am - [Direct Link] I'm going to DigiPen, right? Yeah, I can't really forget that anymore. I'll be entering their Bacehlor of Fine Arts in Production Animation degree (hereafter referred to as "BFA" when needed). The summer assignment before one enters the BFA program is to fill up a 100 page sketchbook. I won't bore you with the exact details of the instructions, but it involves drawing no less than 800 sketches. So there I was, at last Friday, and I had approximately half the assignment done. Ok... maybe closer to a third. I sat down and did the math -- because, after all, I almost entered the Bacehlor of Science in Real Time Interactive Simulation degree (hereafter referred to as "RTIS" when needed) and sitting down and doing the math is second nature to me. The math was not very happy. It said it would take me about 45 and one half hours to do all the work involved. As many of you know, I happen to be a Mormon (aka LDS), and one of our creeds is to observe the Sabbath, which means no school work on Sunday. Also, each day has 24 hours in it. Exclude Sunday, and you have what's left of Friday, Saturday, and Monday. School starts on Tuesday, so there's not too much hope of getting stuff done on that day. The math is simple. Saturday + Monday = 48. Add the six hours left of Friday and that's 54. Subtract the 45.5 it takes to get the work done, and you have 8 hours and 30 minutes I can sleep for those three days. Here I am, on Sunday, and my eyes hurt if I look in a direction too fast, and my hand aches. BUT! I am on schedule for getting the homework done on Monday. I had no idea drawing could be this fun. So what's school going to be like when I actually get in? Well, the BFA has only existed for two years so far, so one's actually graduated yet. But a couple students entering their third year were kind enough to talk about it to us newbies a little. They said 80 hours a week is an "easy" week. And the worst is finals and midterms, where we'll be working around 160 hours a week. Just so you know, there are 168 hours in a week. School starts in two days, I've got over 200 sketches left, plus color exercises. I'm going to enjoy today, resting my eyes and hand, and prepare to work my hide off tomorrow. Oh, did I mention there's also a 50 page sketchbook due every week at DigiPen? For the first couple weeks, at least. It goes up from there.  Thursday, July 13th, 2006 - 7:32am - [Direct Link] I'm closing up both my comics. They'll likely be down for at least four years (college, remember?), perhaps forever. You never know what'll happen on Christmas or summer breaks, though -- but there's no way I can make any promises at this point. Just for the record, I don't want to do this. I'd love to continue drawing these comics forever. But in truth, I should have given up in the middle of last January when I started having a lot of trouble updating them. I just never know when to quit, so I keep making promises to myself and others I can never seem to keep. However, I believe it's more important to have hope and goals that may never happen than to have none at all. The hard part is getting back on the horse every time you fall off, because it seems to happen a lot. There's a "closed" filler up for the Trivium comic. I'm sure the transparent symbology used will be visible to anyone who sees it (lol, motel6). I'm still trying to figure out what to do for the Morrowind comic.  Thursday, June 15th, 2006 - 6:44am - [Direct Link] We've had three people join Gimpystick since I last made an announcement, bringing the total active members up to 11. To be honest, I never expected Gimpystick to get, in a year, as big as it is now. I guess there's more demand for this than I thought. The new members of Gimpystick are Smight, sunshine_ley, and Kagrenak! Welcome to our little community! I have also just given Gimpystick an update. By popular demand (well, one friend threatened to do it himself if I didn't), I have released the ability to leave comments earlier than anticipated. I've also redone the way the date displays work to hopefully be more readable and useful. Feedback is appreciated. Up and coming features include: -"non-artist" accounts so everyone can leave comments -more features for comments, such as notification when new comments or a reply to one of your comments are received. Further-out features include: -private messages (PMs) -upload preview -Gimpystick showcase  Sunday, June 11th, 2006 - 7:52pm - [Direct Link] Gimpystick has been updated! Hooray! Current artists should be able to use their old names and passwords to log in. If I screwed up and it's not working, please drop me a line with the password you'd like me to set your account to and I'll get it fixed. You will notice a difference in the way the addresses are formed -- they're much easier on the eye now. Also, uploading is now done through logging in to the actual site and is integrated with everything else. Next on my list of things to do is actually get the upload preview working, create a new date scheme for the main page (so the times say "today at 5pm" or "one week ago"), and get comments/non-artist accounts working.  Friday, June 9th, 2006 - 1:48pm - [Direct Link] I'd like to welcome Lady Rose and Zingara to Gimpystick! The new Gimpystick engine is nearing completion, and will be done as soon as I find enough time to finish working on it. Initially, the only change you'll notice is the way the addresses look and how you upload pictures. Next will be the comments system. After that will be PMs, or "private" comments as they be. The last thing I want to get done before I start school in September is Gimpystick Showcase. And now I have a question for Gimpystick members. Should I rename Gimpystick now that it's not Gimpyboy/Stickman centric? If so, what name would you like to see?
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