When you boil it down, all art is really about butts

     Remember the National Film Board of Canada?

     A long time ago, people saw the utility of funding the arts.  We got some really interesting stuff out of it, and if anyone tries to tell you Canadians don't have a specific culture, you can drop some of this stuff on them.  It's great because usually, when we try to create some sort of national identity, it's by contrasting ourselves to the United States.  "Oh!" we say, "we aren't like them!", even though we are almost exactly like them.  "WE EAT MAPLE SYRUP AND LOVE HOCKEY AND TIM HORTONS!" we yell, as if  Americans don't like sugar, sports and coffee.  If we could calm down for a few minutes and stop insisting that CanCon laws serve a purpose in a world with the internet, we could separate the wheat from the chaff and see something that feels so Canadian it almost makes me want to choke-slam a beaver. 

     You see, when we aren't culturally mandated to produce Nickelbacks and Corner Gasses (yeah, I know, low-hanging fruit Nick, try something challenging) we actually turn out some really interesting things that I don't think could come from any other country.  Want to check some out? Of course you do, if you're reading my blog you're clearly a wonderful and intelligent human being with varied interests. 

The Big Snit - If you've ever been awake at five in the morning,  you've seen this.  It's butt-ugly and a little bit upsetting, but also kind of heartfelt.  Watching it as a kid left me tired and confused, which as an adult is more or less exactly what I'm looking for .

To Be  - An existential crisis brought on by ontological arguments? THIS ISN'T FART JOKES AND RACIAL SLURS, I WANT TO GO WATCH FAMILY GUY.  Real talk, I know it's becoming increasingly rare for people to insist animation as a medium is only for children, but how could that argument have ever been valid when things like this existed?

The Cat came back - I don't think they allow you to be born in Canada until you've seen this, so it's no surprise to any of you.  However, since you probably haven't seen it since you were a kid, it might surprise you that you never realized how friggin dark it is.  Look at how many sacks there are in that lake! Jesus Canada, you used to be so cool, until RAAAARR CONSERVATIVES SMASH THE ARTS RRAAAAARRRGH

Every Child - Just in case the magnificent stache at the start didn't make it clear, this is from the Canadian seventies.  I swear, we are a nation of goddam weirdos and I really like it sometimes.  Little bit of bonus rotoscoping at the end, I fucking love rotoscoping.

The Blackfly song - This is a great example of what I love about Canadian folk music.  It lives somewhere between American and Irish folk music, and it takes the absolute best of both worlds.  I dare you to listen to this and not bop around smiling.

Lady Slayer - This one is great; it's just chaos and violence, and you feel like it's giving you a hard stare the entire time. 

The Log Driver's Waltz - I don't have to tell you about this one, every Canadian knows it inside-out, upside-down, underwater and in their sleep.  It's got some of that saucy rotoscoping and a little bit of moose pud tossed in for good measure.

     Ok, that's enough for now.  I could keep going but I think by now you've got the point.  On to my own marginal work!

     I tried to back off of specific detail and just focus on form.  Usually things look fine until I get to the detailing point, where everything reverts to looking like it was drawn by a bored teenager. 

    
      This one started with a line-of-action, which is a not really all that fancy way of saying you draw a smooth, flowing line and build the anatomy around that.  I have to admit it really did help.  It also helps that the hands look like hands and the feet sort of look like actual feet!  Does that count as a personal milestone? I think it does.

     It's Owl man again!  This one didn't turn out great, but at least the pose is a little different from my usual.   I feel like I didn't do enough butt detail. 

     I know most artists that are good spend a lot of time drawing from reference.  I also know that I should really start doing this.  In the meantime, this was my best attempt at drawing the human form from my mind's eye.  It worked out pretty well except for buddy's arms.  I also feel like maybe I should make this into a PSA warning folks about the dangers of horrendous rap-rock (redundant, I know) and how Fred Durst might actually be a worse human being than Pol Pot.

     Sometimes I ask myself if it's lazy that I put stuff up while it still has so many clear flaws.  I have to remind myself that that's sort of the whole point;  by putting it all up here for anyone to see, I have a record of the mistakes I used to make, how (if) I've made progress on them, and get an idea of where I need to go from here.  Even as I make this update, I can see all kinds of little things that could be fixed, but if I waited until those were finished, you might see maybe one or two updates a year here, and I can't bear to be that Dursty to you.  I hope you continue to enjoy the mediocre ride!

Thank god it isn't another cartoon

     Hey, I'm back! That certainly was a month off.  I hope you've recovered enough for me to start bombarding you with my requests for attention again, the pressure is building. 
     So clearly, if I'm going to make cartoons that are watchable, the drawing has to improve.  It helped a lot just to learn the basics of flash; it gave me a point of reference for how I can do things, and what kind of work I would need to do ahead of time to prepare.  After the two I put up so far, the next step is using frame-by-frame animation, which is not only an imperial bag-load of work, but it would look like total garbage if I didn't first put in another bag-load of work into learning to actually draw better.  I know the actual program you use isn't as important as just practicing and developing skills, but I feel like things have gotten better since I started using photoshop.  For those of you that have been reading this crap since I started, remember what those drawings were like?  It hasn't even been a year yet, and I'm really pleased with the improvement.  This, in spite of how lazy I am and how difficult it is to convince myself to actually sit down and do it.  You know how turds are basically horrible, and if an unexpected one turns up it can totally ruin your day?  That was when I first started.  Now, it's more like horse manure.  The smell hits you and you're all "Yep, horse shit.", but it's sort of tolerable and you might not even get PTSD from it. 
     I don't have any issues burning on my mind to talk about right now, so I'll skip spamming your monitor with a bunch of suggestions for cartoons you probably won't watch.  I've said my peace about that kind of thing and now it's ON YOU.  Since this update is fairly short after having been away from it for so long, I'm hoping I'll get enough done to slap another one together in fairly short order.  In the meantime, try your best to enjoy these.

      Still not so shit hot at feet.  Hands, not too bad?  At least the proportions are getting there, no stretch-armstrong bullshit weighing everything down.  This final product couldn't be more removed from what I set out to do; I wanted to visualize a character and then actually draw it.  For the most part, all the drawings I've done so far have been totally haphazard, I just start scribbling until something starts happening.  This one was going to be an attempt at a character for some giant manchild nerd comic idea I've been working on.  Think Conan the barbarian adventure-style story, but holy goddam it's all cold and icy and shit.  Well, about an hour into it I thought "this is more of a fun-times dancing party girl."  and then NOTHING. WAS. THE. SAME.

      At this point, you would be completely justified in accusing me of laziness.  I used this exact pose very recently, but at least this time it's slightly better.  Maybe this woman has some kind of horrible leg-ruining condition that makes one longer than the other and makes her look like a metronome when she walks.  Other than that I really like how the hair and face turned out.  Son of a bitch, hair and faces are SO HARD.  So, let's take stock: hands? hard to draw.  feet? hard to draw.  faces/hair? super goddam hard to draw.  It's almost as if I'm still terrible at this. Look at that middle finger, though.  That's what I call artistic expression.

      And here we have my depiction of my ideal self.  It was down to ninja turtle or ghostbuster.  It was a really tough call, because I couldn't decide who I had the bigger childhood crush on; Janine Melnitz or April O'Neil.  Honestly ghostbusters almost won because of Janine AND Peter Venkman, but in the end, it was the soothing bass of Uncle "Shredder" Phil that swayed my heart.  Godspeed you, Black Emperor! And may the flight of angels assist you in tossing Jazz out of heaven.