On trying too hard

     There's nothing worse than someone who's clearly trying too hard (of course there are worse things, it's just that I'm a white guy living in eastern Canada in the 21st century, so this is the kind of shit I have the luxury of wasting my time complaining about).  I catch myself trying too hard more than I would like the admit.  Lately, I've been thinking it's actually an integral part of the process.  You start off by wanting to do really well, come up with all sorts of ideas that seem great, and get to work on making them happen.  If you have any sort of ability to self-criticize at all, you invariably realize the bulk of your ideas are complete garbage and try to salvage whatever you can.

     I can usually help this process along by having someone look at what I'm doing, so that even if I disagree with their opinion, it's at least an opinion that isn't blinded by my own prejudices.  Look at the last animatic I posted, for instance.  When I first recorded the audio, I spent maybe...no time writing it, and just started riffing into the mic, hoping for the best.  I was pleased with myself, but after giving it a few listens I almost totally hated it.  So, naturally, I re-recorded a lot of it.  Great! It was objectively better.  Still terrible.  This process took me several weeks, whereas I'm sure someone other than me would be able to give it a single listen and proceed to give a lot of valid criticism.

     Now, this isn't just crocodile tears in a vain attempt to fish for compliments.  I don't need people to tell me that I'm getting better, I know that for a fact.  Right now, it's a week shy of one year since I've started this blog, and looking back, christ on a crutch, the first drawings I put up were bad.  Right around June was where things started to improve and I think it's been getting better since then.  I have to admit I slacked off a lot in the December-February stretch, and I could sit here telling you why, but it all amounts to one stinking pile of irrelevance.  What is sort of relevant is my discovery of my own process; try way too hard for a while, and then relax and do better.

     The first thing that happens when I try to hard is a complete stripping of what I was actually trying to do.  I try to make something I think people will like instead of what I wanted to make.  This ends up being completely unfunny since I don't usually understand other people in the first place (not in the "listening to Joy Division nobody understands me YOU JUST DON'T GET IT" kind of way, I just get more confused in general as I age).  The most recent series of drawings I made are an excellent example of this whole idea, LET'S HAVE A LOOK.

     So, what was I thinking here? I can explain, sort of.  Sometimes I entertain this fantasy that I could draw comics.   One of the comic ideas I had involves a certain amount of MOOONNNNSTEEERRRRS! I don't have any experience drawing things that aren't people; I thought it would be a fun challenge to branch out a little and see what happens.  So, I had this vision in my head of a sort of cave-troll kind of thing.  Well, about 20 minutes into that endeavor I noticed I was drawing a gorilla, pretty much one step removed from drawing a human.  Rather than scrap the whole thing as an aborted gorilla drawing, I tried to salvage it by maybe making a monster head? Then, of course, my lack of skill/experience in this area jumped in and snatched the tablet from my lap, saying "ha HA! Good luck, asshole!".  It was at this point that the caption came to me in a moment of clarity/hilarity.

     With the first drawing out of the way, I got the trying too hard out of my system.  When that happens, everything changes, even the methods I use to put down the foundation.  This drawing probably took me half the time I put into the first one, and I'm much more satisfied with it.  I even did a little better than I usually do with foreshortening; that one elephanty foot doesn't look nearly as bad as my drawings in the past have.  Still a little fucked up, but not laughably bad.

     And finally, the one thing I'm always excellent at, making fun of assholes.  This was a mad scribble and took even less time than the first one.  Look at that fuckin hand, I'm getting way better at this.  I don't know if this is the kind of lesson people should be learning, but it really seems that less caring = better results.  So please, stop giving a shit, for your own benefit and ours. 
    

Eleven months of minor progress

     I've been at this for about 11 months now.  I can say with confidence that it's gotten better, and I can also say with confidence that it's still pretty silly.  That's ok though, it's not as if anyone expected I'd be some mad artistic genius.  I'm still plugging away at making another cartoon, but it's more than a little hamstrung by my near inability to draw non-human things from any sort of perspective.  I've had to scrap and restart nearly every asset for the cartoon half a dozen times, but at least it gets slightly better each time.  Have you ever tried to draw an easy chair? It shouldn't be as hard as it is, it's right there in the name.  Perspective is a motherfucker, as you might remember from an earlier update where I first experimented with it.  Looking back, fuck, that was some terrible work.  Remember when I said that part of the reason I was putting it all out there was so that I would have a metric with which to judge my progress? It's a good thing I'm nearly incapable of being embarrassed, because those drawings are on a "getting pantsed in front of your entire junior high class" level. 

    So! As I screw around with drawing nude people, watch cartoons made by amazingly talented people and lament the fact that I can only dream of being that funny, I can't help but constantly criticize myself.  The first thing I thought after my last update was that the audio in the animatic was generally terrible.  By that I mean the actual recording itself, which was all muffly and hissy.  Some of the voices and acting was ok, but I went back and re-recorded a lot of it.  You know how you can tell when someone is trying way too hard?  I can, but only after I've tried way, way too hard.  I do enjoy the process though, because it's when you're honest with yourself about how the first idea vomit you lay down is mostly garbage that you can really start finding what works.  Well whatever, that's enough fishing for compliments, here's some of the stuff I've been cranking out. 

      It seems like I have to have at least one major problem at all times.  In this, the hands and feet are actually sort of not horrible, but the face makes up for it by being goofy as heck.  I don't know why this guy is wearing swim trunks in a bar, I figure maybe this is The Palace.  Sweet action pose, though!  He's the T-1000 of chasing down dudes who deny the high five.

      Not safe for work, I guess.  I'M DELIBERATELY AVOIDING DRAWING GENITALS.  This is the internet and I'm sure there are people finding creative ways to jerk off to this kind of thing,  but I'm in the business of making it as difficult as possible.  One of my methods is giving the women mannish faces.  Look at that; she looks like a male character from a 1980's anime.  On that subject, I'm sure I've said this before, but it really isn't my intention or desire to draw anime style characters.  It's just a thing that keeps happening.  It probably stems from my being a long time horrible nerd and the constant exposure I had to it during my childhood.  Fucking hell though, look at those feet and hands! They're so good I might be getting a little randy myself.

     I will never get tired of Owl Man.  He's not creative, original, interesting or anything like that, but he's a good excuse for me to draw nude people.  Speaking of which, I didn't draw a single butt this time.  I don't know if I'm just getting old or what, but it doesn't bode well as far as I'm concerned.  Anyway, that's pretty much it for now.  Closing in on a year since I started doing this, so maybe I'll have to have a tearful retrospective of how far I've come.  Or maybe some kind of party.  Or just drink a bottle of wine and throw things.  Whatever, it's my anniversary. 

Urgent matters and idle chatters

     There are two shows I've been watching recently that are both pretty new and pretty goddam sweet.  I say that about a lot of shows, but we're in a little bit of a golden age for this sort of thing.  You would think that with all the different cartoons I rave about, I must be pretty easy to please.  This is the opposite of fact.  I'm insufferably difficult to please, and sometimes I think I take pleasure in that fact.  With that being said, the two I'm about to show you are the best new ones I've seen in at least a few years.  I'm not going to do a huge preamble here because there's something else I want to do with this post, but you really need to know about these.

China, Illinois - A lovely deuce dropped on us by Brad Neely, who, if you are at all familiar with, you will know from the Washington song.  He worked on some of the best seasons of South Park while maintaining a pretty deadly youtube channel.  The video I linked is on the youtube channel which only has promos for the Adult Swim show alongside the original youtube shorts, and it's one of those things where people are really divided over which one is better.  I say those people are idiots because they are missing the point entirely.  The point is, fucking enjoy this god damn it, smile for once in your empty life.

Rick and Morty -  Have you ever heard me talk about Adventure Time? It's a thing I do ONCE IN A WHILE.  There's an actor on it that just so happens to have been doing internet animation for years; Justin Roiland.  Years ago he blessed us with House of Cosbys (which might actually be why the internet was invented in the first place).  He also did Doc and Marty which HOLY SHIT NOT SAFE FOR WORK DAWG.  Rick and Morty is a way cleaned up take on Doc and Marty, and as it turns out, is the best animated show I've seen in years.  It's as if a very, very dark Futurama smashed into The Venture Bros.  That sentence alone should tell you everything you need to know if you know anything about me at all.  I've been pushing this show on everyone lately so I hope you trust me enough to check it out.


     So, as far as actually making cartoons goes: I'm working on it.  The last two I made were both made up as I was going along, and I think that kind of shows.  This time, I'm putting more effort into it.  There's a step in animation called animatics; they're used to block out the action and interaction before the real effort goes into animation.  I still didn't really do this the recommended way, not because I'm such a rebel, but because I still don't really have a great grasp of what I'm doing.  Currently, I'm only a small portion of the way through the new cartoon, but I have a first draft audio recorded and did a really basic animatic.  Consider this a progress report, since waiting for it to be finished would mean not making any posts for three months or so.  Here's what I have so far.

     Ok, so, pretty crude.  I know anyone out there with audio engineering training is cringing pretty hard right now.  Sometimes I think the whole reason I do this is so I can record silly voices with a sub-standard mic.  Anyway, there are still a lot of problems, like the audio needs to be redone at least a little, and I'm not really satisfied with a few of the lines.  It could end a little better, for sure.  Well, whatever.  This weekend I plan on starting the actual asset creation (i.e. actually drawing some things) which I'm excited about because I actually did a little bit of learning on how to do colouring that isn't atrocious.  This is the most ambitious of my cartoons to date, which is funny considering how simple an idea it is.  I've had some ideas for other cartoons, but I like those ideas so much that I don't want to waste them by churning them out when my skill isn't where they deserve.  Hopefully within a few months I'll be making stuff that I'm actually proud of.  This one should give me lots of practice with character/background design and maaaaaaybe when it's finished it'll look good.  

     Anyway, by this point you're probably tired of both my actual voice and my metaphorical typing voice.  Stay lovely kids, and frost those tips.

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.

The most minor of incremental progress

     So in my last update I just posted my horrible video and complained about how tired I was.  I kind of want to do that again but that would be a cop-out, so let's RAP about that one for a minute.
     That was my first experiment with Adobe Flash, and it was only the most bare-bones example of the kind of functionality it has.  There was no real movement, just single frame changes using what's called keyframes.  I made the catastrophic mistake of making it five minutes long, which, in animation time, is more or less eternity.  As I was making it I was learning from my many, many mistakes, but didn't want to have to scrap the whole thing and start over every time I figured something out (something I'm sure a chimp would consider pretty obvious), and decided to make one project at a time showcasing a certain ability of Flash.  With what I learned from the first video, I started on a second one aiming to make it better.  I...succeeded? I stepped up from simply using keyframes and made use of what flash calls "tweening".  It's a trick for the lazy animator, where you essentially set certain criteria and waypoints and let the program figure it out for you.  There's a huge trade-off to be made here over traditional frame-by-frame animation, it takes less time and is very smooth but looks robotic and doesn't offer much flexibility.
     The quality of the drawing still isn't very good, as I'm still learning how the brushes work in flash.  I'm awash in a sea of settings that don't make much sense to me yet, and I'm thrashing around desperately trying to cling to anything that looks as though it may float.  For my next project I plan on using Photoshop for the actual asset creation, since Photoshop is a drawing powerhouse and even I can make decent stuff in it. 
     So, if you can forgive my horrible drawing, voice acting/editing/mixing, and general awful sense of humour, please attempt to enjoy my latest offering.

Where once there was just bad art, there is now terrible animation.

     I'm not going to bore your ass off this time, I'm too wiped out.  I finally started screwing around n flash and learning how it works.  For the sake of getting it done faster, the drawing in this took a massive hit.  I wanted to get a feel for what's going on in flash and the next thing I do will probably be a lot better.  For now, though, you get to suffer through what might be the worst video on youtube.  Go ahead and maximize this, for the full effect.

     You can kind of see me learn a little more as the video progresses; it starts off childishly bad, and slowly upgrades to just really bad.  Luckily though, every time I made a mistake that ended up causing way more work than there had to be, I learned something.  This took an embarrassingly long time to make.  I really need to sleep.