How I draw hands!
Read MoreFeatured on the Clip Studio Paint website!
Clip Studio Paint has featured one of my tweets on their Artist Testimonial page. The art is a sketch for a book I am working on for author Laurel McHargue. Laurel is awesome, one of my favorite books by Laurel is this one, Waterwight.
I love Clip Studio Paint and my ultimate dream is to bake a Clip Studio Paint appreciation cake and mail it to the software developers who made it. Clip Studio Paint understands artists and what artists need most!
Related blogs:
Clip Studio Paint for the iPad Pro (2017)
Fan Art Friday - The Watchmen, Earthbound
I wanted to make a drawing of the artists on Veidt’s island in Watchmen. Ms. Manish and Mr.Shea only show up for a couple panels, but I could draw a whole comic just with them in it.
It’s unclear what Veidt has them doing exactly, but what is clear is that they’re out there on the island playing some creative role in creating a monstrosity. On the first readthrough of Watchmen, these episodes make less sense than Dr. Manhattan creating his own Citadel on Mars.
Earthbound
I’ve been having too much fun playing Earthbound or Mother 2 on the SNES classic. The SNES was the Nintendo I never had while growing up. I could only play it at friend’s houses down the street. I missed Earthbound completely.
So, I’m playing it as a 32 year old and it gives me so much hope for the world. The best part of the game is that it’s not neat and tidy - characters say things that make no sense, motivations are all over the place, and there is no clear exact goal right away. Doesn’t that sound a lot like … life?
I made this painting of the guy who sells Hints in Earthbound. I love this guy. He has a house and sets up an outdoor booth .. inside his house. Hints cost money. Or should I say HINT$? ? It was fun to paint this guy and chat on Instagram livestream with a couple folks. I wish I could do more livestreams, maybe that could be something for 2019 8) .
What’s funny about Earthbound though is every time I play it, I want to paint it again. I started over-making Instagram stories about it, recording every little bit of the game, and as I posted video after video, I asked myself, Is this too many videos? It was all coming from a place of wanting to capture this game and show it to the world and project it from the mountaintops. This game makes me want to invite people over to my house to play it for days on end. That’s how I feel about this game. I can’t wait to paint more of it.
Much more art on the way!
The Punishing Truth of Art Critique
Haters are always there for you
You’d hang a painting on the wall, and 30 people in a room would make comments on the painting. You couldn’t say anything while the other students were offering critique.
“I hate it.”
“It reminds me of my mom…”
“I don’t get it.”
“You could have worked on it harder.”
Ask anyone who has been through an art major or art school and they’ll probably talk for miles about the drama of critique. Usually, artists hate critique sessions. It drives deep seeds of unhappiness into artists, and it’s hard to say if it works as an educational model, but I will say that it’s an honest experience.
Critique is painful, but it is the most true-to-life moment of art school.
Once your art is done and out in the world, you can’t possibly defend every piece of criticism lodged against the work. It’s done, and you have to stand behind it, or be convinced to abandon it.
If 1000 people see the art and 200 people think it’s terrible, it’s impossible to argue and defend against 200 individual people.
You have to let it be.
A lot of people hated the paintings I made in school but I showed them anyways.
The peace of critique is that there will always be people out there who don’t like what you do. Haters are like McDonalds - always there for you and always the same service, state after state, country after country. The sooner we accept this and move past it, probably the better.
Once when I was young, my family and I went to a swimming pool park in Florida and I made a sand sculpture of a turtle. An even younger girl, probably three years old, walked up to the turtle, looked it over for a few seconds, and ran her foot through it. I remember feeling sad for a second, and then realizing “It’s sand, it would all have washed away anyways” and “she’s a three year old, what do you expect?” and then feeling the liberation of letting it all go.
Most art disappears or gets destroyed. A lot of people hate art. A lot of people don’t get it. Do it anyways.
Related blogs:
What Makes a Helpful Art Critique