Homage to the Ball-Point Pen

Ah, the ball point pen. So cheap, advertisers find the advertising worth more than the pen, so many of my drawings have been done with a freebie. How many drawings have I done with a white plastic bic, emblazoned with the blue text of a bank or hotel? Many. There are so many things I could say about the simple, humble ball point pen. I prefer it to an art pen, because I can control the value of the mark and because it is cheaper. I love the feel of a simple ball point writing on the most basic sketch or printer paper. I like the smell of the ink. Accidentally, I've even tasted ball point pen ink. So intensely have I looked at a ball point and it's ink, taken them apart, studied the blobs coming out of the little interior straw that holds the ink, I can tell you the black ink is actually a very dark red or occasionally a dark purple or blue. I prefer the ball point to pencil as well, because with pencil I know I can correct my mark, so I'm less free, I think too much, I get intense, I make too dark a mark. It's a leap of faith. Life is like drawing in ball point pen: You can control the value, but you can't erase.

I would like to spend an artist residency with nothing available to me but simple sketch paper and as box of black bic pens. The cheap, simple ones, not the darker, smoother ones that are more expensive.

If I were to go back over the entire arc of my art career, even back to my childhood, I would find drawings in pen or pencil of characters. I've been doing character sketches since I was 12, maybe earlier, but only lately decided to recognize that they were character sketches. The following is scarcely 5 of the most recent character sketches selected from my sketchbook. I added them to my website and will continue to add them as I find some of the old ones and create new ones.

Recently I decided to start filling my sketchbook using the medium I love to make the drawings I love. It's so fast and relaxing that I hardly consider it a distraction from the rest of my work. It can be a relaxing and productive replacement for decompressing on a video game or Facebook. At best, the drawings may be preliminary sketches for future puppets and animations. Or become comics or animations themselves. I'd like to do an entire graphic novel in ball point some day. No pencil pre-drawing. Just a leap of faith.

Here are the best of the last week of drawings. As I find dig out more or draw more I'll add them. Hope you like them!

Little test animation

Ok so this video is pretty jumpy. It's a test sketch of a new puppet I manufactured over the last couple weeks for school. It's also a little faded looking due to the experiment with a makeshift fabric "filter" I put over the camera, which I think may have an application for the other stuff I want to do.

I'm intending to animate the puppet coming out of a chrysalis. Kind of a predictable video perhaps, but I'm new at this and it's an easy set. the best thing I can do is make something simple the best I can, so I understand the nuance. Later I can do something more complicated.

The set was too small so I zoomed in too close to see the wings in all their glory, and the puppet is honestly too big, so the process of animating her takes some awkward support systems (I bought a microphone boom just for that purpose, and you can actually see the little thread on her left wing.)

All in all it was a great and informative test but as a video itself it's not much of a product... more part of the process!

I loved working with "breathing cycles" which I don't see much in 3 dimensional stop motion, but it's pretty much standard in 2-d analog animating.

2 New Animation Tests

So, I've been sick recently. Probably the flu. The kind of sick where you stay in bed for a week, only dragging yourself up for the barest necessities. Unfortunately, I was sick when I had final projects to work on. I missed a couple really important classes, fell short on a project I all but abandoned, and didn't get into the studio at all. What I did do, however, was make a short 2 dimensional animation using a graphic tablet and GIMP. It's very short. I use iMovie to add sound to my animations, and I've found that it lowers the quality of the images, so I need something else to use. But this is a test, so I'm ok with it.

I did it from my bed on my laptop in short spurts of energy before I got delerious and went back to sleep.

Today, I did another little animation, now that I'm feeling better. It's my first time lapse video and the first animation I did with my new Canon Rebel connected to an intervalometer. It's not impressive but it's kinda cool. I decided to let myself be in the picture, because the outdoor long term project I want to do, I will be in the picture. Kind of like a puppeteer, only in an animation. I hope that while the puppet will move smoothly, I will pop in and out and jerk around. Maybe I'll be in black so I'm more of a shadow. That would be kind of cool. Anyway here it is. Enjoy!

5 Day Animation Challenge

I'm posting this a week later than I expected. I did it. I did a whole... or most of... an animation in 5 days. It was suggested that I do a couple more 5 day animation challenges. The sound was much longer than the animation, and I had to loop sections to make it fit the music and it was pretty much a failure. Oh well.

Here is the short, soundless version. It's a sketch, and an experiment. I don't expect to win any film awards for this. But I think it's got some cool stuff going on.

Next, I'm going to play with some armatures that are not wire, make something bigger, possibly with natural materials, and use a found setting instead of building a set. I have some interesting ideas to play with. I'll post them when they are done! It was suggested by my mentor that I do a couple more 5 day animation challenges, and I agree that it would be more productive than going back and finishing this one

Animation Adventure Begins!

This is my first attempt ever at animation. The paper figures took about 10 minutes each to make. It's just a test, to work out how this animation thing works!

I decided to make another very fast, thrown together animation of about a minute or less. I gave myself a deadline of about a week. I know that deadline is insane for animating, and I like that it's insane, but the above 3 second animation took me about an hour to make and half of that was learning the software, so I think I can do it. It's like the animation version of gesture sketching. When you have a very short amount of time to finish something, you really hone in on what is important. Here is a sneak preview of the storyboard and sound:

This little animation is the first part of a longer story. The story has elements from mythology, like the ferryman that takes the dead across the river styx. The girl will have archetypal elements of Persephone and Orpheus, and the story will be somewhat inspired by the ancient myth of Ishtar's descent into the underworld. This scene might not make the cut, as it's a little unoriginal.  

P.S.: sounddogs.com is awesome, and where I found all the sound and music for this piece. Next time I'd like to use at least some of my own sound. 

Figures In The Dark

Puppets, or dolls, soft sculpture, call them what you like, posed and photographed in the dark at night in a slightly eerie and possibly somewhat dangerous part of town. I haven't settled on how to make the puppets yet. Long exposure and the simulation in digital form of 1600 speed film lend a raw, grainy, mysterious texture. I'm not afraid to use photoshop for effects.

In person the figures are somewhat barbie and ken doll like, which has prompted me to continue to explore the possibilities of how to make them. Questions that haven't been answered yet are: Keep to 12" or go up to twice that, or even make them tiny? Realistic or not? Wire armatures or marionette style with strings and a scaffolding? Face or faceless? Should I worry about how they are in person? Should I make sets or props or only use what's in the world? What would happen if they were life sized? (That sounds like a huge job, but it's not as hard as you think. Sometimes smaller things are harder to make because the details get too small to work with.) And since when was I ever afraid of things taking a long time?

Oh, and I'm a few months into my graduate school experience. It's a pretty awesome and unique program. http://acd.pnca.edu

Hello again!

It just occurred to me that maybe 3 or 4 people are actually going to read this. Still, one never knows, so I write as if it is a public blog, because hey, someone might stumble on it or something, or the blogs I follow might do so back.

Anyway enough of that. I have started another many drawings in a month project. I feel like I'm the world's least motivated person right now, but obviously I'm not. So to kick myself into gear I gave myself an assignment: 200 creative things in a month. I've already started and I think I'm up to 35 or something, and as predicted, the project is inspiring new ideas and either fleshing out or dumping old ideas. I might write a comic based on some of the drawings, which I've yet to do. (Let's see if my ADD can handle a comic.)

This time it's not just drawings that I'm doing, as I have a business making stuffed animals and dolls I'm working on. I have some cats to make for my grandmother, and I need to get the packaging together for the stuffed version of my "make your own superhero" dolls.

Perhaps I will give up on making stuffed animals for a living though. It's a big thing to say but I am not good at keeping up with the boring part of the production, and would rather make patterns. Patterns that can sell. Patterns that can sell as a PDF that I email to me, that take up no space and little material and will continue to sell even if I'm not working. It's maybe a bit sad as I bought tags for my stuffed animals, and I do plan to try one more push with selling the actual plush. But after this Christmas, if I don't get some good sales, I'm done. I'm gonna change over to patterns, coloring pages, and paper dolls. Things that are printed or printable. Perhaps an ebook or even, who knows, a real book.

On another subject, I've lived without a painting studio for about 4 months, and I just cleared out a bit of the garage. All I have to do is haul up my supplies from the basement and get rid of the boxes that don't belong in the garage, and I have somewhere to paint again.

When I was a kid I wondered about my lack of motivation, the difficulty I have finishing things, my "laziness" (I put in quotes because my therapist tells me not to call myself names, and lazy is one of the worst.) I thought that I would overcome it when I grew up. I thought somehow it was just a kid thing, later maybe just a teen thing, as a young adult there were a few brilliant moments when I was in school and working full time when I got my homework done and went to work and also had to take care of my mom. I don't really miss those 80 hour weeks, but I never felt this horrible sinking feeling that I'm wasting my short time on this earth away.

But I wasn't cured. I've been diagnosed with ADD, and all the books I read show the same kind of behavior, so though I hesitate to use it as an excuse, at least it gives me a model to work with, and shows me that it's not all my fault.

I think this blog post is sadly lacking in images, so I'm going to post a pic of the printed sew in tags I got for my plushies