Tonight’s model was the model we’ll be working with next in the long-figure sessions starting next week. I won’t be getting to too many more of these short-pose sessions in the near future, but I got the itch tonight.
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Going to need more practice on this black-into-white method… it seems like if you’re going to do it this way, you need to put down a mix of black and white everywhere, otherwise you have differences in opacity and transparency, and that can create some odd effects. I need a little more practice before starting next week’s long-pose figure session.
Still very much alive. Experimenting with looser initial approaches and blending white and black into each other against a toned paper, instead of just blending them up to each other without mixing. A lot more subtlety is possible, but I think doing it on gray paper would probably be more effective. Still, it’s interesting. This one was started very loosely, just massing in darks with a brush, then gradually adding to them, wiping the whole thing down, adding, wiping down, a few rounds of that, then going over the top with pencil and no blending on the final layer. This approach would probably work better on bristol or card stock. Still, there’s something to it, and I’m far from done exploring it. Clutter is very much on my mind these days. I don’t know how anybody can think clearly when disorder and clutter dog their every step. It’s the insidious accumulation of things, which gradually take over your soul. Frequently, the right thing to do is get rid of stuff. Sometimes, it’s enough to get it in order. I would like some props, please, for the following transformation (which actually happened a couple of weeks ago, but this is part of a series):
This did actually involve gutting the back of the TV with a good-sized box of cables that were disconnected at one end from whatever they were once connected to. And I would like to point out that the PS3, Wii, PS2, GameCube and Nintendo64 attached to this TV all work fine, thank you. The SNES, NES, Odyssey and Atari 2600 are upstairs in bags, but they work too. Finally installed the EnableRootSSH and apt mods on your ReadyNAS? Ready to take control of it? Being stuck with Vi making you want to claw your eyes out? Ah, so YOU’RE the other one in this situation. Well, good news! You can get emacs going pretty easily and get back to being civilized.
There needs to be a “staff” group or emacs21 won’t install, so go ahead and create it. Say “yes” to everything from there, and you should be good to go.
Too bad the actual head and hands in the final piece will be about 1/10 this size. Maybe I should be more ambitious size-wise in the next round. I need to get better at drawing things larger than I see them. About 6 years ago, give or take, I found my way back into comics again, for the first time since the mid-80s, which was the last time I stopped collecting. I never fell out of love with them, but the direction the writing and art took in the late 80s and through the 90s didn’t interest me very much. It was the discovery of Adam Hughes’s Wonder Woman covers that brought me back. They were stunning, and they inspired me to give art one more try myself. I started collecting again, reading my standbys of The Avengers and, when it finally restarted, Thor, my mainstay as a kid. And all of the various spin-offs too; and more to the point, I was following artists whose work I liked: Hughes, Mike Deodato Jr., Drew Johnson, Ed Benes, Pete Woods, Alex Ross, Jim Lee, and Lienl Yu (an acquired taste). This led to about 10-12 titles a month. Since comics are now $3 to $4 a pop, that was pushing $50 a month. Or $600 a year. Look, guys, I know the industry is in trouble, but still: that’s just too much. When I was reading as a teenager, comics were 30¢ up to around 60¢ by the time I stopped in the mid-80s; you could still walk into a comic shop with $5 and come out with one to two dozen comics. I know $5 in the 80s is more than $5 now, but inflation hasn’t been tenfold since then. I know that the internet is fundamentally changing things, and that the industry as a printing-on-paper thing is probably not going to last all that much longer, and people like me dropping out is only hastening that. I’m sorry. But it’s just too much money. It was with a little wistfulness that I told my local comics shop to cancel my pull after all these years. But like cutting back cable TV and cutting the land-line, it just feels like a sensible paring-down to do financially. Simplifying. It’s time. It was a fun ride – again – to get back into it and taste that memory of childhood, but it’s time to move on now.
This was at twilight; auto-focus didn’t work, again, and so I switched to manual focus and shutter priority mode. I found it surprisingly hard to get good focus, especially without a tripod, and I manually set the shutter to 1/60 of a second to get this shot. It’s the best I’ve managed yet, but I think a tripod is the next step. (Beyond a better zoom lens, of course, which is firmly in the “someday” category.) Still, this is already way better than I ever managed with any other camera I’ve had.
I built myself a hackintosh. Out of a Dell Mini 10v that cost a total of $300, with tax and shipping, and the wireless upgraded to 80211.n. It took a few hours in total to squeeze down (but retain) the Windows XP partition and install OSX over the rest of it. Yes, Apple doesn’t like that you do that, and for good reasons: it’s rough around the edges. Some apps (like Quicksilver and Little Snitch) misbehave a bit with kernel extensions being added, and it’s missing some buttons and overall it’s not a smooth customer experience for non-techies. But for anyone who doesn’t fear a command line, this is a great way to get a $300 mac that is perfectly functional for most things. The whole point of a netbook is portability, though, not power. This is a tiny machine and once I’ve encrypted the filesystems, I really don’t care that much if it gets lost or damaged. It’s the closest to a disposable mac I’ve ever been. And the important thing is: I can do web, mail, terminals, ssh, and remote desktop with it. In XP, I can access the VPN (no more ridiculously expensive VPN Tracker upgrades, Equinox, when the SonicWall GlobalVPN client is free on Windows). That’s about all I need to do. And I can plug it in to a monitor, and use a USB mouse and keyboard – although the keyboard itself is surprisingly usable. It might end up knocking the macbook pro out of the middle. This can be my terminal/gateway machine, my portable machine that I can lose without crying too much. And I have the 8-core mac pro for actual computing. I don’t need the power of the macbook pro most of the time, I’m just carrying it around because it’s portable. This little cheapie is now my portable and it does 90% of what I normally do with the macbook pro anyway, at about 1/8 the cost. I could probably buy 3 more of these things with what I could sell my macbook pro for. Hmmm… CLUTTER.
Dutiful consumers like we of Western Civilization are constantly bringing things into the house. We do not often remove things from said houses. And yet we are surprised and annoyed when clutter builds up and builds up and builds up. Where did it come from? Today I spent almost the whole day just trying to get one half of my office organized to give me space to organize the other half with so that I can have room to do my taxes. Along the way, and symptomatic of the whole issue, I found a plastic bag full of pens that I hadn’t touched in a good 5 years. Now that bag was finally in the way. I dumped it out and got some scrap paper and tested them all and threw away the ones that didn’t work. Those that remain – the good ones – are pictured above. What on fucking earth do I need so many pens for? This is the problem: unconscious accumulation of things. What I should be doing is: every time I acquire a new pen or pencil, I have to get rid of an old one to make room for it. If I did that for all of my possessions, my life would be much more manageable. Never bring a box into the house without also planning what you’re going to remove from the house to make room for it. Of course, if we all did this, we’d be much less likely to accumulate more stuff in the first place, which would cause the world economy to collapse into anarchy and ruin. But there was a time in my (early) adult life when I could carry everything I owned on my back. Despite five years of what feels like very aggressive possession-shedding, I still feel it bearing down on me overwhelmingly. Even just my art supplies would fill a good-sized car. Let’s not even think about my books. I took one cup’s worth of pens from the above pile – and even THAT is probably too much. The rest are going to the swap shed at the dump. Let them clutter someone else’s life. |
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