Mantalings

just arrived in inkopolis to check out these "turf wars" her friends keep talking about

I've noticed that for an art blog most of the posts I make don't focus very much on displaying art - but are rather excuses for me to ramble about philosophy. I think it's because I usually just ship my best work straight to the specialized tabs up top rather than blog about it (and risk it getting lost in the archives). It also may be because I just like to talk about art nerd jargon to the precious few of y'all who actually read this thing (we happy few! We band of brothers!) But today is something different. Just some art! Enjoy! This is a cute little Splatoon original character (OC) I made for Nicholas Kole. He had a "draw this in your style" thing going for stingray-themed Splatoon characters and I wanted to join in. She was a struggle to do. From finding her character through sketches, to trying to draw decent looking legs and hands, to final color and render, she was a toughie. I also had the additional pressure of making it look good enough for Nick to want repost it. And repost he did! :) But that pressure did help me finish it instead of throwing it in the bin when the process got difficult.

just trying to restrain the inner fanboy right now

It's cool that God's placed me in a time where my biggest art hero can see my work instantly, and we can talk about puns in the comments. Perhaps cool is kind of an understatement.

Woomy.

-dh

The Strange World of Olympic Mascots

I can't even begin to describe the train of thought that brought me to this place, but I've been fascinated by Olympic mascots recently. It started when I first discovered Sam the Eagle, who was designed by Disney artist Bob Moore (not to be confused with another famous Robert "Freddy" Moore, who also worked at Disney). Sam is charming, very Disney-y, and a good fit for his 1984 Olympics in LA.

what is he wearing? Is that a vest? An apron? A tank top?

Olympic mascots are a strange branch of character design, and their importance to pop culture is both everything and nothing. An Olympic mascot is a character the whole world will see. It is an ambassador and personification of a city/country to the rest of the world. It is a symbol for peace and the triumph of sports and humanity. An Olympic mascot is important.

However, Olympic mascots may be among the most ephemeral and forgettable characters ever. Ask anyone - they will not be able to name a single one. No one remembers these guys. The committees who commission them are incredibly distracted by actually running the Olympics. These characters get lost to history faster than my motivation to exercise. An Olympic mascot is not important.

I assume this paradox must make designing one of these guys very difficult. And may account for why so many of them are so dang strange. Here's some of my favorites.

This is Waldi. Waldi is great. Waldi sets the bar very high as the first official Olympic mascot ever, at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. He's friendly, and a very clean design. The stripes represent the Olympic ring colors, with red and black removed (due to their association to the Nazis).  A great start to Olympic mascots.

Here's Misha from the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Very cute, and more illustrative. Nice round shapes with a soft fuzziness not seen in other mascot designs.

Another one of my favs. Hodori from the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Maybe a bit close to retro Tony the Tiger, but still a nice friendly, clean design. Being an Amur tiger and wearing a traditional hat called a sangmo, Hodori symbolizes his country of South Korea without feeling too cluttered.

Cobi represented the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in a boldly naive and avant-garde style. He's fun to look at and reflected trends in Spanish art prior to the 1992 Olympics. One of the most memorable designs, if you can say that about an Olympic mascot.

Cobi's flair was immediately tanked by Atlanta's 1996 mascot, Whatizit, then renamed Izzy. Izzy is delightfully '90s but doesn't have much going for him besides that. He was incredibly unpopular during his Olympic run. He's abstracted in all the wrong ways. No one can get excited about a blue blob with sneakers. How did this happen. 

Two years later the world got this at the Nagano (Japan) Winter Olympics. 

Things got a little better at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, though Millie's human body kinda creeps me out a bit. Note how all three characters share three colors (orange, yellow, blue) which unites them as a group. Yet each character's primary color is never more than an accent on the other two. 

My favorites of the recent Olympics are Vinicius and Tom, mascots of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics. Fun fact - their names are a reference to the composers of the jazz song "The Girl from Ipanema." The one on the left is Vinicius, although he looks more like a cat (which are sometimes called Toms in America).  

If you thought this trip into Olympic art history was fun, there's more mascots out there to discover (and even ones from FIFA tournaments!) Next year two more from Tokyo will join this strange crew - these mayflies of the character design world, who burn brightly for a couple weeks and then are never seen again. Except by art nerds like me, and now you.

Thanks for your readership!

-dh

Heroes

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. Oscar Wilde

I've been thinking a lot recently about style, about being good enough, and about my sources of inspiration. As I've been creating materials for a prop design portfolio, I find myself constantly referencing portfolios of The Ones Who've Gone Before - in other words the people who have made it in the industry, and who I hope to become someday. Referencing other artists has been a part of my art-making process for a while now, and I felt it was the time to make a proper post about the importance of "art heroes." And to do that I need to talk about Joshua Gibbs. 

Joshua Gibbs is not one of my art heroes. But he is a philosopher whose work I enjoy reading from time to time on the Circe blog. He writes about current issues with an ancient perspective (that's not a bad thing). His posts are often insightful, humorous, and vaguely smelling of old books. To put it briefly, I think he's a pretty smart dude. Gibbs doesn't talk too much about the visual arts (though he does have the most reasonable argument against modern art I've ever found). He mostly talks about writing. But I find that many of his points about what makes good writing and writers can be rather seamlessly translated into what makes good art and artists. He recently published this post which talks about the making of a good writer/artist. You can read it if you want, but here's the summary - each of Gibbs' points talks more about the importance of an aspiring artist's heroes than the talent or motivation of the artist herself. Here's an example from his first point: "No one may become a good writer [artist] until he wants to sound [draw] like someone other than himself." 

Now this might strike you as odd - isn't art supposed to be about being original, and sharing your unique view with the world? Doesn't this directly contradict the quote I started this post with? Yet at the same time it strikes me as profoundly true. I'd wager that no one who got into art wanted to draw like themselves. They wanted to draw like someone else, and that's what moved them beyond stick figures and into the world of creating compelling images. I don't really want to draw like Daniel Haycox, cause Daniel Haycox is new it this art thing and mediocre at best. I want to draw like Nicholas Kole, like Aaron Blaise, like Celine Kim, like Peter de Seve. Those guys are the pros. They are the guardians of style. And it's through the careful assimilation and compilation of heroes like these that you find your style, and your voice as an artist. It's kinda paradoxical, no? And similar to a maxim that's very important to my heart: to save your life, you have to lose it. To be the best version of yourself, you have to imitate someone else. You are what you eat. Funny how things work out like that. 

I don't really take any issue with this. Cause for me, having heroes is a way to ground and define my art journey while still having so much room to grow. Heroes are both my anchor and my finish line. But to some of you who may have never thought this way before, or have avoided it, I hope I can be at least a little like Gibbs in this way and remind you that this is a valid way of art-study, and of finding originality. It's probably something you're already doing, even if you don't recognize it. This goes for any art field. C.S. Lewis probably wasn't thinking about animation when he wrote 

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

While heroes may not give you the truth, they can give you the skills you need to find it and express it eloquently. In the imitation of someone else, you accidentally find originality. And now we're back to that big old paradox we started with. Which all goes to show we're on to something big here.

Even so, heroes are something we don't usually talk about when it comes to the "good artist equation" (which usually only involves talent, hard work, and maybe focus). I guess having heroes is so inherent that it hides in plain sight. Yet heroes may be the most important part of the artist equation, and the secret to how some artists progress faster than others. Consider this - which would be more destructive: being told your art is bad or that you have the wrong heroes? For me, it's the heroes. Somehow, your choice of heroes seems even more personal and foundational than any particular work of self-expression. 

so much of this episode is about the topic of art heroes, but I don't want to clip the whole thing

I know I'll be able to collaborate well with someone when we have similar heroes, even if our actual drawing styles are different. Cause on a bedrock layer of principles and vague sensibilities, I know we're both drinking from the same well. And I have to try really hard to hold back my pride and/or judgement when I see someone venerating what I feel to be the wrong heroes, or bad art. When I came to art school, one of the reasons why I was able to grow relatively quickly was that I had friends recommending good heroes to me all the time. And I hope that the Roost can be a place where I share those with you, and where I can evaluate whether they're worth following. Over the next few months I'll be doing deep dives into the work of my favorite artists, and analyzing what makes their work so compelling to me. I plan on posting them here on the Roost, in case you'd like to take a peek at my notes. That's no substitution for actually doing some digging yourself though! The podcast I mentioned above has some good places to start. I hope it's an enriching time for the both of us!


I feel like I've said enough, and am feeling an increasing sense of redundancy each time I type the word heroes. So I'm going to call this post here.

But not without some music recommendations!

Vulfpeck has already been one of my favorite bands for a couple years now, but I was recommended this hidden gem, Animal Spirits, recently. It's got some Jackson 5 vibes that are very nice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTUnDV3MgVQ

And another update from my incredibly niche love, video game jazz covers. Although this group isn't straight jazz (kinda a pop-y, orchestra, jazz blend) I enjoy their covers and their rendition of the DuckTales Moon Theme is a *ahem* duck-blur. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GewpSQMFvbw (Man I want to work on DuckTales SO BAD)

Thanks for your support! Stay cool -
-dh