Creative

On artists suffering for their art

I’m pretty confident that the person who came up with the expression never fully understood the subtle interplay between the pain and discomfort of, say, a prostate infection, and the creation of art. In my sample1ew of one, suffering does not lead to art, it leads to wanting the suffering to stop. I could draw a big happy face right now, then splatter it with Jackson Pollock-style blobs of colour, and it would not make my prostate infection go away.

If it could make my prostate infection go away, I’d be up to my pits in art as I typed this. I’d be typing from on top of my giant pile of art.

Instead, I’ve been taking antibiotics and resting. Neither of these produces art, but they ease my suffering.

When the suffering ends, I will draw a Gum Gum Person.

Drawing: Night probe

This is riffing on Chris Silverman’s work, which you can see here: notes.art

I tried to decide if the probe thingie should be drifting over:

  • Mountains
  • Trees
  • Water
  • Urban scenery

I went with my original pick (trees), but I struggled to get the trees looking like they fit the rest of the drawing. I also futzed with the probe a lot. Overall, I think it’s not bad. If I keep doing these, my own style will eventually emerge. Probably with Gum Gum People.

For reference, the brushes I used in Procreate were:

  • Artistic Crayon (mainly the probe)
  • 6B pencil (mostly for the highlights)
  • Dry Ink (fill)
  • Technical pen (fill, some outlines)

Bonus! Here’s a second version, with tweaks to the moon and with the starry backdrop greatly simplified. I think the ideal might be a cross between the two, but I’ll probably leave this for now and move onto something else.

The Devil wears tighty whities

There’s a social media account called Comics Outta Context. You can probably guess what it posts.

Today the account posted this, which raises questions:

Why is Shaggy in Hell? Why does the Devil have a pitchfork that looks like some $2 plastic job he grabbed from Spirit of Halloween? Is the Devil wearing a unitard or is he naked?

I decided I need to address at least some of this:

Thank you and good night.

Big dog comic, but darker

I’ve edited the comic from the original post, changing the sign on the booth and, curiously, the amount the kids have earned. The original was riffing more off the original, but was creepy enough that even I couldn’t abide it.

This one is just dark.

As an aside, we had a challenge years ago to “Make Marmad*ke funny” and my entries were invariably creepy or dark. The creepy ones tended to be very creepy. I think I’m good with dark now. And yes, I am deliberately not spelling out the giant dog’s name. You can probably figure it out, though!

Inktober 2024, yay or nay? Or neigh?

HORSE is not one of the prompts, but for the sake of my headline, pretend it is.

As I pondered whether to take part in Inktober 2024, I looked over the list of prompts (they reveal them all in advance now) and whoever came up with the list really likes exploring/camping and the like, because almost the entire list fits these themes. It’s actually easier to list the prompts that don’t fit:

  • Grungy (though an argument could be made for it)
  • Scarecrow
  • Jumbo
  • Violin

Here’s the full list:

Looking over the official blog, the list was unveiled on August 26 with no additional description or anything, but ain’t no way words like expedition, hike, roam, trek, uncharted and backpack are a coincidence. A lot of these words would even inspire the same sketches, which is kind of weird. Maybe the idea is to inspire some “outside the box” thinking by including so many similarly themed words.

In any case, the first prompt, BACKPACK, is not inspiring me, so I probably won’t bother this year. But that’s OK–I’m still drawing! In fact, I’ll post something later today.

A quick enchanted frog

During Inktober 2019 I did a sketch of a frog wearing a crown for the prompt ENCHANTED:

It’s perfectly cromulent for a quick sketch, but it exhibits one of the issues I had when I started drawing again after many years: uneven, wobbly lines.

There are two things I did to change this:

  • In the primary drawing program I use, Procreate (iPad-only), I have turned on smoothing, which automatically smooths out lines as you draw them. The smoothing effect is kept low, because it gets weird and laggy as you crank it up, and I only need a little smoothing to balance out my hand’s natural wobble.
  • The other thing was just draw better. I used to draw lines in segments, then fix each segment if I erred, resulting in ugly, blobby lines. You might generously call it a style if it was intentional. Over time, I learned to just draw longer, more balanced lines. If I messed up, I’d redraw the entire line, not just a section of it.

I recently did a simple coloured version of the same sketch and ended up redoing all the line work, so it’s effectively ENCHANTED 2.0. Because I was rushing, there are a few little bits that should probably be cleaned up, and I may do that at some point. Mainly, this is just another chance for me to take an older piece, and show how just a few minutes with a more practised hand can make a noticeable difference. To my eye, anyway1Yes, in a way, this post is the world’s longest way of humble bragging about how much better I think I can draw now than in 2019..

Colour frog (I lost the original reference, so the colours are just my best guess for something frog-like):

Eventually, I’m going to try more experiments in line thickness, so I can get a result somewhere between the wonky lines of the first sketch and the rigid uniformity of the colour update. Still, progress!

Bird art: Brown creeper

Based on a photo I took at Burnaby Lake this summer.

This is the first time the background1I’m still not sure I’m entirely happy with it, either, but it’s pretty close. I may tweak it, I may not. took longer to do than the actual bird. Much longer!

A haiku to the heat

Today it got up to 30C or something. I was not expecting this.

Wear your shorts and tees
And seek shade under the trees
Pray for any breeze

Not great, but better than an AI could do, and I’m pretty sure I burned less energy coming up with it (especially brain energy).

(I do like the scandalous use of rhyming each line, though.)

A quick purple onion

I started about three different drawings, and they were getting too complex, so I started again with the idea of keeping it super simple. I drew a swoopy line and it turned into a purple onion thing. It took less than five minutes Ta-da!