On Tumblr, I am always surprised to get followers. It baffles me why anyone who isn't my friend would follow me. I say this because I post a lot of things that relate to me, not fandom. To put this into a physically tangible ratio, Tumblr is like a tube of chapstick: original posts are the part that's smooth, fandom posts are the rest of the tube that has the hole in the center.
...Let's move on.
Whenever I get new followers, I assume it's 'cause I post Doctor Who things. So when someone decides to add me to their watch list, I post up a disclaimer on just what they'll find. It typically goes like "warning, this blog contains lots of pointless doodles, Whospam, things nobody cares about, and pointless .gif memes".
It's the kind of thing I don't think about with theOtaku. I assume people follow me here because they're people I know, or maybe the like reading about my inane life, or just maaaaybe they like my art. Above all, I just think it's people I call my friends, given the much more social atmosphere here.
Regardless, a disclaimer for Oh My, Plotholes is as follows: This World contains a bright color scheme, talks about about art and art school, rants that are regretted two hours later, pointless introspectives, random moments from life, lots of egotism, and occasionally momentous things. Also contains a hefty amount of blackmail if you care to go back to myOtaku.
Oh well.
Holy crap. This is what I get for going to school and not answering these fast enough. First page is from TC, second page is SomeGuy, third page is Aceburner.
Rules schmooles, and I ain't tagging anyone.
1) If you could self-...
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This one requires reading. Do I know this person? No. They're someone one of my friends follows on Tumblr. But I'm better at writing out responses here because I feel like more than two people will read them. :P
If anybody ever got crap for drawing anime, it was me, and it was during high school in an angsty post I've made time and time again. Guys, it is not fun to be mocked just for the way you draw. This goes doubly so for when you are a teacher and tell your students that what they're doing is "wrong". This does not motivate them to re-learn how to draw. It makes them just plain stop trying to show what they do because they are ashamed.
One should never be ashamed of what and how they draw. Humble? Yeah. And forever will artists get cold feet when presenting a picture, even if it is to close friends. But one should never be so bothered by what they have created that they'll never present it, ever.
When people say things like "what you're drawing is crap", it is synonymous to "you're a bad person and you should feel bad" even if the speaker doesn't think that's what they mean. They don't motivate, they deter. It is only through the artist can they decide where to take their art. Is this influenced by others? Yes. But it, by and large, a personal decision that is typically reached subconsciously.
Evolution takes time, and it happens over time. Yes, one can make huge leaps and bounds through study (I've noticed such from being in art school), but it still takes time. A snap of the fingers won't make you better.
If you want to end up drawing anatomically correct humans, anime is actually one of the better mediums to start in. You know why? It is user-friendly. It is an eye-catching, entertaining, inviting medium that gives you characters who look more human than most animated fare. Yes, they are still wrong, but it's plausible to envision these characters in real-life, at least easier than seeing, say, the Fairly Oddparents crew.
You know, mostly. I have allergic reactions to screencaps from Precure and all.
Drawing realism won't make you a special starwhale either. Rather, you want to move to a style that is you. Styles are influenced by multiple sources, even if they are subtle. You want to make something that makes you happy but also recognizable.
My advice? Ditch the books. Ditch the "how to draw" tutorials. Use them to learn techniques, but not how to draw. Once you start staring at a page with a figure on it, that becomes what you draw. It doesn't become you. Look at the world around you and see how your hand renders it. Even when I do mirror portraits, I notice my style bleeding in. That's what my brain decides to do, and I'm not going to fight it.
I don't believe I made a post about it, but I did do some tweets on the matter that, in my Photography class, we use PCs. We use the most awesome PCs that are not for hardcore gamers. They were built from scratch by my professor and the head of the Time Arts department and have 16 GB of RAM, terabyte harddrives, and gorgeous screens that can pivot to pretty much any angle or degree. Also, they run Windows 7, and not in the crappy school mode (the mode where you can't search for things, you have to menu-scroll for them).
Which basically means I am in love with the computers we get to use for class. And when you're handling images that are now breaching into the "crap that's a big file" territory, you need this stuff for that nice, almost zero-ping effect.
For assignments, we have to take a certain number of shots and actually print a small number. This past assignment was 4 prints, with 144 shots taken. We then copy-paste those shots into a folder on one of the computers, so everything in that area is digital. Now, I use the method of "take a bunch of pictures, narrow it down to a certain amount, turn those in" because a.) not all my shots are good, or even "meh", but b.) my professor does not want to look at 600 pictures. Also, c.) transferring that amount takes a long time and makes the others waiting in line not like you.
So like the first girl who was submitting her images. We were wondering what was taking so long, and she was like "Oh, I'm giving him all my pictures". All 400+ of them. Oi.
The line narrowed down to two girls ahead of me, and lo and behold, they are both Mac users who apparently have no idea how to use a Windows interface. Neither could figure out where the first one's flash drive was, despite the fact that when you plug in ANY sort of storage device into a PC, a rather intrusive box pops up saying "hey bro, I found this device, what do you want to do with it, you want to look at the stuff in it?" Thankfully, the one figured out how to get to Computer and locate it there, but was then uncertain how to transfer the images.
I also wondered how she did this two weeks ago and then completely forgot, but whatevs.
But at that point, I was getting annoyed, so I rattled off "control A, control C, control V" to get her moving along. I must also remind you, they are the same controls on a Mac, except with that command key.
Then the transfer began, but apparently it wasn't moving fast enough, so the two started to complain about how slow the PCs were, and how much they miss their Macs, and how they wish they could use them all the time, and blah blah blah...I turned to this other girl standing in line and mumbled "I like my PC...", which she agreed on. We proceeded to share mutual liking of the computers in the lab, and then discuss the prejudice a Windows user suffers in the Vis Comm department (her major, my former major).
I grew up on a Windows computer. We've had a computer in the house for as long as I can remember, and I remember when Windows wasn't set up the way it is today. It's all pretty intuitive to me, and I understand that it's not that way for everyone. But I also remembered that all of my schools only ever had Windows-running machines, because if your school could afford Macs, I didn't go to it. Nearly all of the computer labs at the university are Windows, with the exception being in the art building. So I figure that, at some point in your life, you've used a PC before using a Mac, or at least in conjunction with one, and should not be so damn clueless with them.
Also, you have no idea what you're talking about, because I doubt your laptop can compete with the beautiful machines we have in the lab. :T
I think it's pretty well known I like coffee. I mean, it's in my introduction and all, but the people I tend to hang around know I like my java. It's just sorta my thing.
It's better than binge-drinking, right?
Anyhow, coffee. Trip brought it to my attention that today is National Coffee Day. While fixing up my morning brew, it got me to thinking about the connotations that coffee has and what it has come to mean to me.
There's obviously the side effects, like the fact that I've become relient on it in the mornings. I blame this on my parents, and that is actually a legit excuse this time. I have been drinking it since I was three, though for the first chunk of my life that meant it was milk, sugar, and a drop of coffee. I loved the taste of it. As I got older, I gradually drank it as mostly-coffee, though I still consume it with ridiculous amounts of cream and sugar. (McDonalds medium? Five creams, four sugars.) Jiaqi will never drink my coffee (if I offer it) because it's too sweet.
Coffee, to me, has always been a drink, a beverage of choice. It was never my "oh God I need energy" device until I hit college, and even then it was only that when I needed to pull late nights. I drank it a lot as a freshman because I had a larger meal plan than needed, so when I cut down the plan my sophomore year, I rarely drank coffee outside of breakfast.
Living in my own place has also seen a weird habit birthed: decaf coffee. I was never a fan of decaf because it has this weird taste, though I sometimes drank it if we went out to eat really late at night (like midnight). To solve this problem, we bought Mexican decaf coffee, because that stuff tastes basically like espresso. Awwwesome.
Coffee is whatever I want it to be. It gets me energized or mellows me out. It gets me thinking and creative but also get focused. And it's one of the best sources of inspiration for projects, bro.
So here's to you, coffee.
