Standards

I quote:

The point is, you must hold yourself up to the highest measure and accept the harshest criticism and you must always come back for more. And you better come back with something new every time.

Yes.

This is why I keep going back to my stuff and saying, while it might not be really, really awful, it is nowhere near what I would call good. High standards. Middleton level standards. If I could draw half as well as that ... guy, then maybe I would have reason to be happy. Until then, I am sticking to the position that I suck.

That's kind of the reason why I hesitate to comment on artists' blogs sometimes. The blogs I visit are generally good, but, you know, sometimes I find myself thinking how they could be better. It's not my place to tell these people what I don't like on their blogs, especially since I suck so much more badly than any of them, but I still end up thinking it. A lot of these blogs end up with a lot of compliments. Deserved compliments, yes, but I often can't join in. I don't want to sound like a goddamn wet rag and pretentious twit criticizing his betters, and I'm sure these people get lots of frank criticism elsewhere (most of them do art for a living, after all).

Cruise on over to Joshua Middleton's site and see some real skill. Jaw dropping skill. I want those clear lines and smooth colors, dammit. I don't want to be messy all the time! (But I know that right now, if I tried, I would take three thousand years to produce a boring, stiff picture, and the colors would still suck.)

Oh yeah, I also want to be able to paint like J. C. Leyendecker. Is that asking a lot?

The point is, I suck now, so that means I can keep getting better, right?

Bloody optimists.

Nanowrimo Extract 1

I would put this up on the Nanowrimo site, but I think it's on fire at the moment. I already expect to revise this heavily... in December.

White light, the color of innocence, the light of the dawn. White skin not yet darkened by the sun. She ran between the tree trunks, her feet leaving blue pools of shadow cut in the snow, her coat sweeping a wake behind her. She twirled and jumped, sticking out her tongue to catch the glittering dust falling from the branches overhead.

“We can’t stay long. You’ll catch a chill.” The nurse moved at a more sedate pace, picking her way carefully along the path. Her long coat of deep blue drank in the light. The gold threads on the cuffs and collar glowed with it.

The girl made a defiant face and bent to dip her hands, safely encased in mittens, into a smooth hill of white. She began to gather and press, but the air was too cold. Her sculptures collapsed into formless heaps before she could complete them. The nurse smiled indulgence. No harm done yet, and no need to assert her authority. She glanced behind, to the trail of their footsteps leading back to the gate, and the tower rising behind that. Her eyes were drawn inevitably to one certain window.

In the room lit by that window, the nurse knew, lay a woman. The woman was the girl’s mother, and she did not look out over the field to see her daughter play in the winter snow. She had not risen from the bed for many days. She lay there, on her bed, and waited for the black wings to come and take her.

The girl did not know. It was better that she did not know. A child should not be burdened so, not so young. That was the Lady’s will.

The nurse returned to watching her charge, and so she saw the visitor’s carriage emerge from the wood.

Nanowrimo

So, in a bout of foolish optimism I signed up for Nanowrimo, the "National Novel Writing Month". I'm not certain which nation, exactly, it is national of. I am, however, fairly certain of one thing: I'm not going to be able to participate in anything but a feeble parody of novel writing. But hey, it's really easy to sign up.

Blue and Yellow Make...

Yesterday, or was it the day before? Anyway, recently I lamented that all the colors in my pictures look washed out. Well, it turns out this is not a unique problem. Take a look at this page, and this one, particularly this quote:

Even if you hand pick and paint every color in your image, if you rely only on the luminosity slider, you'll have the same problems. You see this luminosity slider reliance a lot, especially in the skin tones of the work of beginning painters.

Bam! Hit the nail on the head there, friend. I'm not using the luminosity slider, but I am using opacity mixing a lot, and I'm getting dull grays when I mix. The solution, then, is to pick the correct color between the two I'm trying to mix and add that in, instead of over-mixing everything. Looks like I'm going to be experimenting with the color picker for a while...