Do you guys have any ideas when it comes to 'first time painter' exercises I could suggest to my friend who wants to start painting? He's kind of frightened to take up a brush and put it to canvas. Beyond telling him JUST DO IT, are there any specific exercises that you guys might recommend?
There's a lot of ways you can start to learn to paint, the best thing to start with is a still life with a limited palette. Lay down a simple, solid colored sheet under a single lightsource and start with just one or two easy objects. Use an apple or a simple colored vase to start.
For oils it really depends on how comfortable your friend is with color in order to give a recommendation for colors to start with. It sounds like he's less than gung-ho so I'd limit him to just using one color, burnt sienna or burnt umber, and to just wipe away the pigment to create light tones. The step after that is to use a limited palette of yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, titanium white and ivory black. For a medium make sure to get cold-pressed linseed oil and bristle brushes to start with.
For acrylics start with ivory black and titanium white to make a griselle study instead of the wiping technique. Both these methods are good segues into painting if you're familiar with charcoal drawing at all.
Well basically, I have this idea for an extremely sandbox, top down multiplayer roleplaying game (think dwarf fortress, but with artwork and stuff).
I've been playing with this for a while, trying to decide what my actual design philosophy is and attempting to determine what, if anything, will really set me apart from the hundreds if not thousands of other games out there fitting this description.
I stumbled on an idea last night that I could use for character advancement. To my knowledge, no roleplaying game has ever used this kind of a mechanic, so it's terribly exciting. I totally want to tell you guys what it is, but I can't. It's that fucking exciting.
In other news, my unemployment ran out prematurely. Soooo. Fuck.
augh this may be old news but I've been bonerin' over this dude's stuff/art a lot recently. http://junkgallery.over-blog.com/
bed bugs phenomenon over toronto, the first time I moved into the city back in august (from oakville) whenever I got an itchy skin my paranoia got cranked up to 200%.
In terms of painting: It's been a long battle between me and acrylics/opaque paints, how the hell do you guys can mix colour consistently? I either mix too much or too little and it's near impossible to get the same colour twice! or is it the beauty of it?
Do you guys have any ideas when it comes to 'first time painter' exercises I could suggest to my friend who wants to start painting? He's kind of frightened to take up a brush and put it to canvas. Beyond telling him JUST DO IT, are there any specific exercises that you guys might recommend?
Set him up with a medium and a large flat chisel brush, some burnt umber and some titanium white. Have him paint a ton of still lifes in just umber and white.
Umber is among the cheapest pigments, so he can get his bearings with basic brushwork and values before he starts wasting truly expensive paint.
a high power red stapler. The main charecter's name is Milton.
Okay, this is kind of brilliant.
meowmix on
0
Options
amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
This isn't really a question for the tutorials and discussions thread so I thought it would go well here.
I want to do more with my comic site. Right now it's the cookie cutter wordpress/comicpress setup (with a little customization so that it's not like everything else) but I really want to focus on the blog.
I feel like I've got some stuff to say that would be worth reading, and I wanted to change the front page to post one blog entry and update daily. So the comic would be twice a week, and five to six days a week I'd blog and do some sketches or something, just to give readers a chance to come back daily, because I'm getting around 200 unique hits per comic, but the days in between I get nothing.
I guess the question is do people still read blogs? Is it worth my time to invest in that or should I focus on the art and maybe do more with a livejournal or work on a new strip that updates once a week, on a different day.
Just looking for a little guidance from some of the pros. : )
amateurhour on
are YOU on the beer list?
0
Options
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
As a reader, I'd say keep your blog and webcomic separate. Penny Arcade has been around forever, and works because both the comic and the blog work together and people care about what they have to say.
No one knows you, or cares about what you have to say. Yet.
Nothing makes me less interested in a new comic than having one image a week augmented by a giant essay. Once you have a large following and people interested in asking you questions via email or whatever, then start posting things. Gunnerkrigg is a good model to follow. His "blog" is just a sentence or two, unless it's something important, and then it's maybe a couple of paragraphs. The importance is that when you actually say something, the reader will notice it as different.
But if you are wanting to write a full on blog, just do that. The draw for blog readers versus the draw for a comic are two different communities. Don't mix the two unless you have one very well established, IMO.
Amateurhour, I tend to read the newsposts that come with comics. A once a day blog entry in addition to the comic could be cool, but don't let it take away from your art.
amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
Glad to get two different but equally good opinions on the subject. The problem is that I've ran a blog and a comic separate in the past on two different sites and it basically splits my audience down the middle, plus it's a good deal more work on my end to update both sites and make them look different.
The problem is that I'm equally interested in both. I write the news feed for this zombie site and do reviews for them and I love to blog and I'm trying to pick up freelance writing work here and there for local sites and alt papers in my hometown, and I love to do the comic strip. I just feel like if I could put both in one place it would be a better overall media hub to attract both kinds of readers, I'm just unsure of how to do it. I don't want to have the strip on a second page like PA but I don't want to have the blog buried under the strip so that no one ever reads it.
keep them on the same site if you can... but I would say you might want to organize it so that the most recent comic is the first thing your fans read.
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
I guess I'm just biased from back when I trolled ComicGenesis for a while, but most webcomics/websites that don't go anywhere have epic sagas of personal blog stuff and not nearly enough content. It's a shame, because a few of the comics that fell into that rut were fairly good with humor/story telling, etc.
If you are writing content-based material rather than simply personal opinions and the standard "I didn't get my webcomic updated on time, funny story..." paragraphs, then yes. I would be interested in reading it. But most webcomics that add the blog don't do that, and before long they fall into the trap of making their webcomic site into facebook.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel product should be based on actual content first, personal drama second. Keep that and you're golden.
Enc on
0
Options
amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
I guess I'm just biased from back when I trolled ComicGenesis for a while, but most webcomics/websites that don't go anywhere have epic sagas of personal blog stuff and not nearly enough content. It's a shame, because a few of the comics that fell into that rut were fairly good with humor/story telling, etc.
If you are writing content-based material rather than simply personal opinions and the standard "I didn't get my webcomic updated on time, funny story..." paragraphs, then yes. I would be interested in reading it. But most webcomics that add the blog don't do that, and before long they fall into the trap of making their webcomic site into facebook.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel product should be based on actual content first, personal drama second. Keep that and you're golden.
This is what I was gonna do. You can check out the link in my sig if you want to Fortune Pancakes, but that was my blog. It was movie, tv, and game reviews, editorial pieces, comic book reviews, stuff like that. Just interesting news media opinions on stuff because my comic isn't a PA or Hijinks Ensue style comic, but it's still stuff I want to talk about and/or make fun of.
The problem is that I'd get like 200 views of my Limbo or Scott Pilgrim volume six review, and 200 uniques on last Monday's comic, but the two groups of people would never meet because no one wanted to click a link from one site to the other.
I think I'm going to combine the two and focus more on the comic, but update daily on the blog.
So I'm reading the book Force by Mike Mattesi. This guys is obviously talented, but the layout of the book isn't very logical, and the drawings would be much easier to understand if there were some color highlights.
All of a sudden I don't feel so bad having a pretty average body with a touch of flab on me, because a lot of these specimens of human fitness are actually pretty damn freaky looking with all their muscley bits. Also apparently if I want to meet my extremely modest fitness goals, the sport I should take up is...table tennis. That dude looks ok/not physically weird, even if he does appear to be waaaaay too smarmy for a guy who plays table tennis for a living for fuck's sake.
But then, maybe I'd be smarmy too, if I got into the Olympics by playing table tennis while every other competitor around me had had to put their bodies through ungodly things for 20 hours a day everyday since they were 6 just to be there.
augh this may be old news but I've been bonerin' over this dude's stuff/art a lot recently. http://junkgallery.over-blog.com/
bed bugs phenomenon over toronto, the first time I moved into the city back in august (from oakville) whenever I got an itchy skin my paranoia got cranked up to 200%.
In terms of painting: It's been a long battle between me and acrylics/opaque paints, how the hell do you guys can mix colour consistently? I either mix too much or too little and it's near impossible to get the same colour twice! or is it the beauty of it?
That is awesome. Some of his finer lined peices remind me a hell of a lot of Dragonball or Dr Slump. And "Damn Feminist" lol
Edit: Also about the bloggy comic stuff, by "keep it separate" I don't think they mean keep them removed from each other. I think the PA model is pretty unique in that the article sets up the comic. They are separate but equally important [groups, The police who investigate crime and the District Attorneys that Prosecute Offenders].
...just kiddin'. I'm repairing my earrings...which are awesome, but the crystal/glass has a tendency to come off the stud. I don't mind repairing them once every few months - I'm actually amazed I've been lucky enough to have never lost the crystal part...I always manage to pop them off the stud by accident when taking them out of my ears.
They look like this (only brighter! Also they're clear crystals when you look at them from the side):
Metal is one of those genres I've never really listened to all that much of, but I've decided I'm gonna give it a try. Problem is most metal music sounds pretty terrible to me still. Occasionally I can listen to viking metal stuff, but I listen to that because it's camp, not so much because it's metal.
Anyone got any suggestions?
Some tracks I've found:
Mastodon - Sleeping Giant
Baroness - Wanderlust
Russian Circles - Carpe
August Burns Red - Mariana's Trench
Gojira - Flying Whales
Cult of Luna - Leave Me Here
The Ocean - Stenian Mount Sorrow
Metal is one of those genres I've never really listened to all that much of, but I've decided I'm gonna give it a try. Problem is most metal music sounds pretty terrible to me still. Occasionally I can listen to viking metal stuff, but I listen to that because it's camp, not so much because it's metal.
Anyone got any suggestions?
Well, I'm no authority, but I like some metal when it's more over the top to the point of silliness (you'll have to ask someone else for the hardcore stuff with the grunting and 'look we're like evil and stuff' horseshit):
Metal is one of those genres I've never really listened to all that much of, but I've decided I'm gonna give it a try. Problem is most metal music sounds pretty terrible to me still. Occasionally I can listen to viking metal stuff, but I listen to that because it's camp, not so much because it's metal.
Anyone got any suggestions?
Well, I'm no authority, but I like some metal when it's more over the top to the point of silliness (you'll have to ask someone else for the hardcore stuff with the grunting and 'look we're like evil and stuff' horseshit):
Yeah, that's generally what puts me off metal, I can't take that crap seriously.
NappuccinoSurveyor of Things and StuffRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
So my friends aptment wont let her have a dog, but says any other animal is fine.
so... she picks a rabbit. Really? I'm guess she's never owned rabbits before but I don't want to try to talk her out of it if that's what she really wants.
NappuccinoSurveyor of Things and StuffRegistered Userregular
edited February 2011
Its just... silly. My sister had a couple rabbits but they mostly just pooped everywhere and had to be in cages all the time because they pooped everywhere.
Rabbits can be trained to use a litter box, I think. The bigger concern is that they will chew on basically anything they can. Wires are especially tasty.
DirtyDirtyVagrant on
0
Options
NappuccinoSurveyor of Things and StuffRegistered Userregular
So my friends aptment wont let her have a dog, but says any other animal is fine.
This is the kind of thing that would really tempt me to push the limits on.
Surely it's possible to rent a horse for a week, just long enough to get the landlord to really regret uttering this sentence.
Oh man. Imagine how awesome a miniature pony would be as an indoor pet.
@DDV: yeah i googled that- they said "rabbits go in the same place so let them pick a place and make the box there" Which... would really suck if, say, it picked her closet or foot of her bed.
I dunno what I really like. It seems like the guitar is the focus of it, but a bad vocalist or bad lyrics can ruin an otherwise passable song. I can't listen to Metallica for this reason, but Pantera is among my favorite bands. If you're into foreign metal at all, I'd also suggest the Sex Machineguns. They're pretty over the top sometimes.
Lately I've found that I'm gravitating more toward instrumental and electronic music. Specifically cello solos and orchestral music.
I'm trying to nail down what kinds of electronic music I like, but since there are about 900,000 subgenres, it's kind of difficult.
Posts
There's a lot of ways you can start to learn to paint, the best thing to start with is a still life with a limited palette. Lay down a simple, solid colored sheet under a single lightsource and start with just one or two easy objects. Use an apple or a simple colored vase to start.
For oils it really depends on how comfortable your friend is with color in order to give a recommendation for colors to start with. It sounds like he's less than gung-ho so I'd limit him to just using one color, burnt sienna or burnt umber, and to just wipe away the pigment to create light tones. The step after that is to use a limited palette of yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, titanium white and ivory black. For a medium make sure to get cold-pressed linseed oil and bristle brushes to start with.
For acrylics start with ivory black and titanium white to make a griselle study instead of the wiping technique. Both these methods are good segues into painting if you're familiar with charcoal drawing at all.
I've been playing with this for a while, trying to decide what my actual design philosophy is and attempting to determine what, if anything, will really set me apart from the hundreds if not thousands of other games out there fitting this description.
I stumbled on an idea last night that I could use for character advancement. To my knowledge, no roleplaying game has ever used this kind of a mechanic, so it's terribly exciting. I totally want to tell you guys what it is, but I can't. It's that fucking exciting.
In other news, my unemployment ran out prematurely. Soooo. Fuck.
http://junkgallery.over-blog.com/
bed bugs phenomenon over toronto, the first time I moved into the city back in august (from oakville) whenever I got an itchy skin my paranoia got cranked up to 200%.
In terms of painting: It's been a long battle between me and acrylics/opaque paints, how the hell do you guys can mix colour consistently? I either mix too much or too little and it's near impossible to get the same colour twice! or is it the beauty of it?
Set him up with a medium and a large flat chisel brush, some burnt umber and some titanium white. Have him paint a ton of still lifes in just umber and white.
Umber is among the cheapest pigments, so he can get his bearings with basic brushwork and values before he starts wasting truly expensive paint.
Okay, this is kind of brilliant.
I want to do more with my comic site. Right now it's the cookie cutter wordpress/comicpress setup (with a little customization so that it's not like everything else) but I really want to focus on the blog.
I feel like I've got some stuff to say that would be worth reading, and I wanted to change the front page to post one blog entry and update daily. So the comic would be twice a week, and five to six days a week I'd blog and do some sketches or something, just to give readers a chance to come back daily, because I'm getting around 200 unique hits per comic, but the days in between I get nothing.
I guess the question is do people still read blogs? Is it worth my time to invest in that or should I focus on the art and maybe do more with a livejournal or work on a new strip that updates once a week, on a different day.
Just looking for a little guidance from some of the pros. : )
No one knows you, or cares about what you have to say. Yet.
Nothing makes me less interested in a new comic than having one image a week augmented by a giant essay. Once you have a large following and people interested in asking you questions via email or whatever, then start posting things. Gunnerkrigg is a good model to follow. His "blog" is just a sentence or two, unless it's something important, and then it's maybe a couple of paragraphs. The importance is that when you actually say something, the reader will notice it as different.
But if you are wanting to write a full on blog, just do that. The draw for blog readers versus the draw for a comic are two different communities. Don't mix the two unless you have one very well established, IMO.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=137680
Amateurhour, I tend to read the newsposts that come with comics. A once a day blog entry in addition to the comic could be cool, but don't let it take away from your art.
The problem is that I'm equally interested in both. I write the news feed for this zombie site and do reviews for them and I love to blog and I'm trying to pick up freelance writing work here and there for local sites and alt papers in my hometown, and I love to do the comic strip. I just feel like if I could put both in one place it would be a better overall media hub to attract both kinds of readers, I'm just unsure of how to do it. I don't want to have the strip on a second page like PA but I don't want to have the blog buried under the strip so that no one ever reads it.
...grumble
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
If you are writing content-based material rather than simply personal opinions and the standard "I didn't get my webcomic updated on time, funny story..." paragraphs, then yes. I would be interested in reading it. But most webcomics that add the blog don't do that, and before long they fall into the trap of making their webcomic site into facebook.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel product should be based on actual content first, personal drama second. Keep that and you're golden.
This is what I was gonna do. You can check out the link in my sig if you want to Fortune Pancakes, but that was my blog. It was movie, tv, and game reviews, editorial pieces, comic book reviews, stuff like that. Just interesting news media opinions on stuff because my comic isn't a PA or Hijinks Ensue style comic, but it's still stuff I want to talk about and/or make fun of.
The problem is that I'd get like 200 views of my Limbo or Scott Pilgrim volume six review, and 200 uniques on last Monday's comic, but the two groups of people would never meet because no one wanted to click a link from one site to the other.
I think I'm going to combine the two and focus more on the comic, but update daily on the blog.
Not really sure where I go from here. Anyone want to buy a warehouse and make art?
ME!
http://ninamatsumoto.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/athletic-body-diversity-reference-for-artists/
All of a sudden I don't feel so bad having a pretty average body with a touch of flab on me, because a lot of these specimens of human fitness are actually pretty damn freaky looking with all their muscley bits. Also apparently if I want to meet my extremely modest fitness goals, the sport I should take up is...table tennis. That dude looks ok/not physically weird, even if he does appear to be waaaaay too smarmy for a guy who plays table tennis for a living for fuck's sake.
But then, maybe I'd be smarmy too, if I got into the Olympics by playing table tennis while every other competitor around me had had to put their bodies through ungodly things for 20 hours a day everyday since they were 6 just to be there.
Twitter
That is awesome. Some of his finer lined peices remind me a hell of a lot of Dragonball or Dr Slump. And "Damn Feminist" lol
Edit: Also about the bloggy comic stuff, by "keep it separate" I don't think they mean keep them removed from each other. I think the PA model is pretty unique in that the article sets up the comic. They are separate but equally important [groups, The police who investigate crime and the District Attorneys that Prosecute Offenders].
http://i.imgur.com/32q6p.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdx3UA7M8Bs
Also:
That is fuckin amazing.
mon dieu! magnifique!
Especially this one:
...you know. Ironically.
I also enjoy this new Dan Black song feat. Kid Cudi
My Portfolio Site
Also: holy EFF this town + these surrounding towns are BOOOOORING.
One of the few coffee shops around (aside from Dunkin Donuts) closes at TWO PM on Saturdays. What the hell kind of a place am I living in?!
Can't wait to move to P-townnnn
...just kiddin'. I'm repairing my earrings...which are awesome, but the crystal/glass has a tendency to come off the stud. I don't mind repairing them once every few months - I'm actually amazed I've been lucky enough to have never lost the crystal part...I always manage to pop them off the stud by accident when taking them out of my ears.
They look like this (only brighter! Also they're clear crystals when you look at them from the side):
Anyone got any suggestions?
Mastodon - Sleeping Giant
Baroness - Wanderlust
Russian Circles - Carpe
August Burns Red - Mariana's Trench
Gojira - Flying Whales
Cult of Luna - Leave Me Here
The Ocean - Stenian Mount Sorrow
Well, I'm no authority, but I like some metal when it's more over the top to the point of silliness (you'll have to ask someone else for the hardcore stuff with the grunting and 'look we're like evil and stuff' horseshit):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxQZsW0H7LU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn6-XqmkKUA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LDmEVtGF0g
Twitter
Yeah, that's generally what puts me off metal, I can't take that crap seriously.
EDIT: Oh man I had forgotten about speed metal.
so... she picks a rabbit. Really? I'm guess she's never owned rabbits before but I don't want to try to talk her out of it if that's what she really wants.
This is the kind of thing that would really tempt me to push the limits on.
Surely it's possible to rent a horse for a week, just long enough to get the landlord to really regret uttering this sentence.
Twitter
Oh man. Imagine how awesome a miniature pony would be as an indoor pet.
@DDV: yeah i googled that- they said "rabbits go in the same place so let them pick a place and make the box there" Which... would really suck if, say, it picked her closet or foot of her bed.
I dunno what I really like. It seems like the guitar is the focus of it, but a bad vocalist or bad lyrics can ruin an otherwise passable song. I can't listen to Metallica for this reason, but Pantera is among my favorite bands. If you're into foreign metal at all, I'd also suggest the Sex Machineguns. They're pretty over the top sometimes.
Lately I've found that I'm gravitating more toward instrumental and electronic music. Specifically cello solos and orchestral music.
I'm trying to nail down what kinds of electronic music I like, but since there are about 900,000 subgenres, it's kind of difficult.