I’ve had a crush on Spock since I was something like thirteen years old. I LOVE the direction the Trek reboot has taken the character in.
This is the very first music video I’ve ever made, and clearly I need to work on my pirating skills some more because WOW, that picture quality is crap. You almost need to have seen the movie just to know what you’re looking at.
It has Tony Bennett though, so there’s that.
Check it out and tell me what you think:
When I first started using my Wacom drawing tablet, I was positively delirious with the joy and sense of unlimited creativity it inspired. I immediately embarked on an elaborate Christmas card project that was going to be the most splendid image I’d ever produced.
In retrospect, I wish I’d given myself a bit more time to learn about the software before I started a large-scale project. By the time I realized that there were some things I should have done differently, it was too late to change them without having to scrap the whole image and start over.
Also? It turns out that drawing and painting digitally rather than with actual pencils and brushes does not magically make you a better drawer and painter. Quite the opposite, actually. In other words, if you have never drawn or painted a stone bridge before, and you’ve never been much good at drawing people, you may not want to start off your digital career with a “painting” of a couple sleighing merrily over a stone bridge. Ahem.
My personal forté is drawing horses, so that was the easy part. Look at my pretty horse!
I just wish the rest of the card were coming together so effortlessly.
A few weeks ago a friend from church asked me if I’d draw a tattoo design for him: a lion laying down with two lambs, a sort of metaphor for himself and his two sons. That was a fun little break from trying to learn how to paint stone bridges, and when it was finished I asked him if I could use the basic lion-and-lamb design for my own purposes. He said I was welcome to use it for anything except another tattoo, so that became my second digital Christmas card, and the first one I’ve actually completed:
Alas, creative drive is a fickle thing. The new Star Trek movie has just come out on dvd, and I have this awesome idea for creating a music video with some clips from the film. Learning how to draw people has suddenly been unceremoniously shoved to the back burner of my creative mind, even though the Christmas card has the potential to earn money and the video is just me goofing around for free. That’s the trouble with the artistic brain — it’s so freaking undisciplined. You don’t even get to choose what it’s going to get all worked up about.
So…my goal is to have both cards finished and printed up on high-quality cardstock by Thanksgiving, to give away and to offer for sale, but this cursed video thing has taken over my head and I may or may not get the sleigh pic done in time. Which would be a shame, because it really is going to be quite lovely when it’s finished.
At times like this I really sympathize with all those great artists who died broke and alone in rat-infested garrets. I think creativity must be a form of insanity, the way it skews your priorities and hijacks your brain for its own passing whims.
But I can pretty much promise that at some point I’ll be posting a Star Trek music video to YouTube. It’s gonna be sweet.
It’s a few days late, because the gorgeous autumn weather has been luring me outside and away from my computer. Didn’t want to miss sharing this, though!
Elizabeth built a “haunted train ride” so her toys could have something fun and spooky to do for Halloween. It ended up sprawling across two bookshelves, the entire window seat and the dining-room hutch. It’s too big to show all of it — the page would take forever to load — but here are my favorite parts (click on any image for a slightly larger version):
This reawakening of my artistic drive has been an incredible experience for me. As long as I limit myself to short 30-minute bursts of working on my Christmas card project during the mornings and early afternoons, and make sure to get plenty of fresh air and exercise in between sessions, the whole thing is one big joyous renaissance of creative bliss. Seriously, it’s like a drug.
But I have learned something about myself: I cannot be a good artist and a good parent at the same time. When it’s time to drive to the bus stop and pick up the kids after school, I have to shut down my computer before I go and leave it off until after they’re in bed. Because as a Solitary Artist I am joyful and inspired and full of happy, but as an Artist Who Keeps Getting Interrupted By The Needs Of Children I am cranky and impatient and snappish. Apparently art mode and mom mode are mutually incompatible frames of mind. Hunh.
So anyway, my Christmas card. I’m creating it entirely from scratch in Photoshop, which means it won’t be quite as polished as what I could make with the Corel Paint program, but it will still be quite lovely. Eventually I will get my Mac’s memory upgraded and then I can get all fancy with Corel Paint.
This is the beginning of something big. I can feel it.
Last November (holy timewarp Batman, was that almost a year ago??) I posted a retrospective of my artistic styles and mentioned that right before I had kids I was making a little money painting portraits of peoples’ horses. I thought maybe now with the Wacom tablet I could get back into doing that, but in a digital medium.
But I’ve realized modern technology has made that too easy to be profitable. Thanks to the magic of Photoshop, no painting skills are needed to turn a plain old photo…
…into greeting-card-worthy art…
…in just a few minutes. Why would folks pay for something they could do so easily themselves?
No, if I’m going to make a living at this I’ll need to create my own unique style, something that can’t be duplicated just by adding a few filters in some art program.
Right now my artistic hero is Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli — his breezy, joyful animation first caught my attention in “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and absolutely won my heart in “My Neighbor Totoro.” I watch his movies with a kind of wistful admiration, studying his images, trying to figure out exactly what makes them so appealing, hoping someday I can be even half the artist that guy is. BUT, his style is his own, and I need to find mine. I have a basic idea for a Christmas card I’d like to create this year; it’s the sort of design concept that will allow for lots of playing around with different looks. I’m hoping by the time it’s finished I’ll have a better idea of where I want to go with my art. Also, handing out Christmas cards with your own artwork on them is practically like handing out business cards and free samples, right? That’s the theory, anyway.
Have I mentioned how unbelievably good it feels to be back in the artistic saddle? Even the dreams I have at night are tossing me ideas!
It is good.
An Invincible Summer 