Woke up at 2:45 am realizing I hadn't drawn today. Same idea as two days ago, informed by the comic-book style from one day ago, but done in a consciously cartoony style that abstracts away the details, like a Bill Holbrook drawing. I like how it turned out, though it isn't a substitute for planning for success.
The drawing at the top took not much longer than the drawing at the bottom left, even though it looks way more like the drawing at the bottom right.
Drawing every day, even if I've forgotten to.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Cinnamon. It took about as long to draw this one
Technically, still a quick sketch, but this shows the difference between drawing in the late evening at a leisurely pace set by the drawing, and drawing at 2am at a pace set by exhaustion.
Literally fell asleep twice trying to finish the blogging today before I got to the drawing, here's as fast a sketch as I could do of Cinnamon, goodnight.
Got interrupted twice when finishing this drawing - once when I tried to finish it before the trip, and the second time when the plane landed and I had to pack up. So, it is what it is. Might tackle this one again.
Drawing every day is a discipline. I wish I was better at that.
SO! Our Kickstarter for the Neurodiversiverse is live at neurodiversiverse.com (which just links through to the Kickstarter page for the duration of the campaign). And I'm proud to say that we are number one of projects if you search for neurodivergence!
For this project I had to create about fifty images in Photoshop - mostly by remixing other imagery we had, admittedly, but sometimes it took a bit of cleverness to make everything work out, as in this physical picture of most of our books and flash fiction postcards - not all of which I had on hand for the picture, and some of which don't even physically exist yet, like the softback of The Neurodiversiverse:
Liza and I (with the help of Betsy and Keiko) put a lot of time into this and I'm proud of the result:
So, please check it out and back us ... we have reward tiers everything from $1 for token support, to early bird ebooks at a discount, to the book and the ebook themselves, all the way up to getting your name listed in the acknowledgements at the back of the book:
And, while I hope to get in some real drawing today, I am unabashedly using this as my Drawing Every Day post, because I spent hours and hours on art today and that should count, dang it.
More stick figure studies from "Wizard: How to Draw". They look simple, but part of "planning for success" in drawing is creating rough sketches to help find the right composition of the piece - and you can't do that if you have to do a full drawing every time, or if you don't know how to draw a simplified sketch.
Another study from Goldman. It's interesting how different the structures are INSIDE the body from the landmarks they create OUTSIDE the body. So much complexity, in something as simple as a heel and its joint to the rest of the foot - a joint that enables you to waggle your feet independently of the positioning of your ankle and the wriggling your toes (try it). Yet all that complexity must exist inside for us to achieve something as simple on the outside as stretching your feet a little bit.
Drawing (on average) every day, posting every day if I can.
Alright, one more not-drawing drawing while I am scrambling to get ready for Clockwork Alchemy. If you're not using the Internet in its most basic form, it resembles a countryside where roads to infrequently-visited towns frequently get torn up and you have to either reroute - or build your own.
Case in point, link shorteners. Google used to have one called "goo.gl" - used to have, before Larry Page took over at Google and led it through the Google Plus debacle, where Google really started to get the reputation for killing products that ultimately led to it being called the Google Graveyard.
But, before they killed it, I used it on the book cards that I hand out at conventions! I had been using that shortlink to point to my Amazon "Anthony Francis" author page, but I don't trust link shorteners anymore. So I created a new link, dresan.com/blog/books, which has all my books on it (now in the top menu):
But, that means my book cards needed to be updated. I of course updated the link, but also took the time when I was in there to enhance the contrast on the top title so it was more legible. Hopefully these cards will arrive in time for the Clockwork Alchemy convention next week, where I will be Author Guest of Honor.
Drawing (or graphic design) every day.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the back of the "book cards", and the "book page" which also shows the book card fronts.
So, no drawing-drawing today, as we needed to complete the Kickstarter for The Neurodiversiverse, which goes live early next week - and we (and by we, I mean I) had to ALSO complete the graphics for the book cards we will be handing out at the Clockwork Alchemy and Con Carolinas conventions. Have a look!
While Photoshoppery isn't the artistic skill I wanted to refine when I started Drawing Every Day, it is a skill that also needs to be perfected. I had to generate a LOT of graphics by today so we could submit the Kickstarter, and then these two cards - by TONIGHT, to get the order into Moo in time.
But, we did it! Hopefully the cards will arrive in time. Cross your fingers!
Drawing (or Photoshopping) every day.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Front and back of the Kickstarter cards, based on a draft of our cover, itself based on art from Barbara Candiotti, one of the contributors to The Neurodiversiverse. More information on The Neurodiversiverse Kickstarter will come shortly before it goes live next week.
What a long fricking day. No real drawing for you ... just sketches of a proposed Jeremiah Willstone logo. I created these as feedback to a fellow artist I'm working with who will design the actual logo in a form suitable for putting on pins and stickers. We started with an old logo idea I had a few years back:
But that's kitbashed together from a number of different public domain images and my own quickly hacked logo designs in Photoshop and Illustrator. However, Kimchi Kreative did such a good job with the Neurodiversiverse logo I asked her to apply some of her magic to Jeremiah. We're iterating on it now, with super rough sketches to bounce ideas back and forth.
You know, it's great to learn to do things on your own - and I focus on doing most of the work that I can myself, especially for my own creative projects. But when you have access to an expert, it's foolish to forego that for things in their area of expertise - and learning how to work with others on creative projects is a skill all its own.
Back in the day, I felt embarrassed about practicing with stick figures, always wanting to move on to the actual drawing. But now, I see real value in learning an approximation, so you can test ideas out and get proportions right with rough sketches, rather than ending up with an unbalanced or malformed drawing.
More Goldman studies. Interesting how many fiddly bits there are in something as basic as the heel of the human foot, much less all the bones that make up the rest of it.
How much of this do you really need to know to draw? Conversely, how much does knowing this at a muscle-motion, stone-cold sketching level give you an invisible substructure that helps you get the shape of the outer structures correct?
A comparison of hand and foot bones from Goldman. Interestingly, the big toe and thumb both seem to have lost one bone compared to the other fingers / toes. I wonder whether that happened as an evolutionary convergence, or whether they're controlled by the same homeobox or something and were both lost at the same time.
Did I get that word right? Huh, homeobox is the right concept. But, strangely, I remember last thinking about it in a place which I thought was a dream place - a road leading to a bookstore - but now I recall several visits to that bookstore, including a visit to a nearby mall to eat. Huh. I wonder if that was real.
I know from experience how relieving it is to have a big buffer of artwork in my Drawing Every Day queue - I couldn't have gotten through GDC without it - but I also know it takes time.
More time than you expect; it was already getting dark by the time I finished this (compare with Day 97). Though, now that I think about it, I took a call with a potential sponsor for the Embodied AI Workshop, so I guess it is to be expected for it to get later if thirty minutes gets snapped out of drawing time like that.
Trying desperately to get ahead prior to the eclipse. More Goldman studies.
I really think these methodical studies help, and so does the mobile studio, but I also feel that a solid series of practice on ink rendering, also done in a larger format, would do me good as well.
Ah well. One (sub) project at a time, or even three at a time, but not five or ten.
So I don't completely burn out on arms and legs, I'm building out my buffer with sketches based on a completely different anatomy book, which has very good planar breakdowns to help analyze shapes:
Well, I guess you can't see it well in that view because I put a clear plastic library-style cover over the book to protect it, but I also guess you'll start seeing more closeups from this book as we move forward, so you'll get the gist eventually.
Out of time due to working on Camp Nano and lots of other stuff, so here's a quick sketch of Viv from Legends and Lattes. It was surprisingly hard to get the hands right without prior pencil sketches, so that's still an area I need to work on practicing.
