Gooey Sentinel Updated
Here's the final version of my 'Gooey Sentinel' (I'm terrible at names) that I made available for printing over at Society 6 and on my site.
Here are some mock-ups for what it looks like printed in a few different ways.
Here's the final progression .gif I made for the various stages of this project. I'd say it was successful for me technique-wise, but the reception from everywhere online has been lukewarm to say the least. I've been posting the stuff I'm making everywhere that I'm a part of and just can't seem to connect with any more than a couple people at a time.
I don't even know if anyone is even reading this right now. It doesn't matter either way. I'm just going to keep doing it - for myself more than anyone. I know if I keep making stuff and putting it up to share, and talking to other artists something will happen eventually- it's the time in between that's always the hardest with things.
Gooey Monster
Here's something I've been working on really hard the last few days. It's not done yet, but I think it's pretty rad. Plus I get to put gifs on my site and I like that.
I asked for a critique on the Internet and it broke me
I haven't properly posted here in a month. If you ask any type of person whose job it is to do things on the internet, this is not good. You're supposed to post something once a week at minimum. But what if I don't have anything good? What if I'm just trying things out and none of it really sticks? What if I'm having a little bit of a crisis (relatively speaking, in levels of crises).
I did something stupid. I did something really stupid. I went to Reddit.com, mainly known for 2 important things -anonymity and cat gifs- and asked for criticism.
There is a nice part of the site with sub-reddits about Android phones, Graphic Design, Illustration and Art Critique. The last one is where I went seeking a very misguided sort of criticism that sent me into an creative tailspin. I honestly really like creative communities on the site, and have gotten a ton of good feedback and camaraderie there. A month ago though, I went on and posted a link to my website and asked for "absolute and honest critique of everything I'm doing right now". Stupid. Stupid barely contains how idiotic of a thing this is to do. Without formal critiques, without professors and classmates to shoot down bad ideas, and without my artist friends, I felt absolutely alone. I knew I needed critique, and didn't care where it came from. I have pretty thick skin, generally, I mean I work in public service and deal with terrible people all the time. Vonnegut once said on writing:
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
The same applies to art, and boy have I been sick. I wanted to please everyone, and have praise heaped upon me with the guise of seeking 'honest critique'. I deserved it, I admit, but I learned some valuable lessons about my process and myself.
When you read things like "First things first: you are probably not a designer." Your heart sinks a little bit. Ok, a lot. I went to school for that, I worked really hard at that. There are other things and a lot of them true, but I won't post them here. It wasn't just one thing though, that sent my anxiety into warp-speed, but it was the little foxes, a death by a thousand cuts that wore on me. My confidence was entirely sapped away and every time I sat down to make- I had those words racing through my head.
The one that jumped at me the most though, and helpful to boot, was a critique of the amount of content I was putting up on the web. My approach since late last year was to blast as much as possible into my little ecosystem and try to get better. That's it. Make lots of stuff, put it on the internet, and get better at those things. The problem is that some of it is more appropriate in some places more than others. My Juxtamotion Facebook was only pointing to these blog posts, and my site is full of half finished sketches and ideas, but very light on finished products. For me a lot of it was making up for ground I felt I'd lost over the last couple of years of not really doing what I wanted, so I over-compensated. Every drawing went online, every idea was better than no idea in my mind. I think this was a mis-step, but one I want to learn from.
So, in that, I want to illustrate (heh) how I'm going to go about posting my stuff for the time-being and draw out a bit of a road-map of where you can find my stuff.
Sketches, Ideas, Works in Progress, personal stuff: Juxtamotion Facebook, @mattsmith_makes on Instagram and Twitter
This stuff is off the cuff, not always finished, and not always relating to artistic endeavors. Here you may find the following: photos of beerz, photos of cats, photos of sketches, ideas etc. Less formal-more fun. I like posting here a lot.
Finished Works, more serious ideas, written things: Here obviously, on my blog. My behance profile and dribbble.com (maybe)
Middling Ideas: the aptly titled "junkdrawer" here on the site. These ideas are in a sort of purgatory, with not enough to flesh out a finished piece, but more than just a sketch. This is good for showing process, I think, also that I'm working working working. I will be pruning it extremely harshly in the coming week and may turn it into a tumblr style blog thing with just pictures. We'll see.
A little bit of housekeeping here: I redesigned my site, let me know if it sucks! I bought a big ole graphics tablet and have been making more digital work. Here's some of that:
Thanks for listening to me whine and stuff! Things are looking up!
-Matt
Third Eye
"Third Eye" Final Art - click to enlarge
Here's another quick foray into digital coloring. My first version of this I went through and colored everything individually and when I was done I didn't like it. I did something a teacher taught me a long time ago I'm just now starting to practice-I put it away. I didn't throw it out, or delete it, or give up-I stashed it. Later, I had an idea -debatable if it was a good one or not- to make the main emphasis the exploding glass and the opening of the third eye. I put the exact center in the pupil of the eye and colored it flat and knew I was on to something. I don't really know this way or that about the spiritual aspect of the third eye, but the idea of seeing 'beyond' to something else -placidly- and moments before death, appealing. I'd like to expand on the idea in the future, but for now, like meat right off the grill-the best thing to do is let it rest.
"Third Eye" detail - click to enlarge
The Genie Experiment
So, in my newly found quest to become an illustrator, it quickly became clear that I was missing a very cool and mysterious toolset- the digitally colored, scanned-in, ink drawing. This whole thing was ,and still is very curious to me, because I've tried it several times, and each time, I've been bummed out by the results. The lines were fuzzy, and I could never quite get the process right, because mine looked like poop. So this week I decided to really dedicate 100% to something I wasn't very good at to...well get good at it- or better at least.
If you want to see the full res versions of the scan and colored artwork, you can look at them here.
So what I started with was a drawing I did pretty casually at work and in bed over a couple of days. I didn't hate it, and I've been interested in fleshing out something like it for a while.
So when I was happy with the pencil version, I taped it to some board and taped some Canson Graphics 360 paper over top of it. This, in hindsight, was a bad idea because the graphics paper, while amazing for markering, was terrible for rapidograph pens. Live and learn I suppose.
Unfortunately my stubbornness knows no bounds, so instead of being reasonable and switching to felt-tip pens, I stuck it out to the end with the rapidographs. The problem with these is that they just don't work with the paper as well, and bleed ever so slightly in weird ways, which you can see if you scan it at 1200dpi like I did. Bristol, this is not.
Here you can see the final scan. There's a really awesome crease there in the corner I made while being really careless in the studio. Life lessons abound in this project! I scanned it in at 1200dpi to try and get as much information as possible to start with.
Final coloring without a background. Click to enlarge.
After a lot of tutorials and starting over several times I finally got to the place where I could start actually coloring. The process from there was extremely simple-just picking my palette and carefully, tediously filling everything in. I wanted the color to add some volume and character without detracting from the lines I had made. I'm not sure how successful that was, but I enjoy the colored version more than just the lined one.
This is the kind of sort of final coloring of this guy. I didn't want to overwork things like I usually do, so I drew a stopping point and just stopped. I thew the purple in the background because I'm so used to just drawing characters floating in white space, and that just isn't that visually interesting for most people. I drew a lot of inspiration from Native American (specifically pacific northwest tribes) and ancient Egyptian jewelry for the genie's ornamentation. I really like the idea that a genie's power is derived from these symbol-laden, jewel encrusted, enormous jewelry pieces. At any rate, I have had a lot of advice to post my process on my site, and in doing so I really have been able to reflect on what I liked and disliked about this project. In the future I will definitely get sharper lines initially to avoid all my fuzzy scan in problems. I hope you enjoyed reading, or at least looking the funny drawings.