Bright Star

I was very literal as a child.

So, naturally, it always bothered me when people started singing during a musical, because people just don't do that in real life. Cause we all know that art is supposed to be just like real life. ;) I've since gotten over my childhood skepticism about musicals, but I wouldn't call myself a musical kind of guy - still haven't seen Wicked, or most of the big pop musicals of our era. I usually like what I do watch, but I just don't watch ... very many.

So it may come as no surprise that I've never attempted musical-based fanart. However, Lipscomb’s production of Bright Star was so good that it felt like a perfect place to start! I’m already a sucker for bluegrass music and sentimental 20th century Americana, but the Bright Star builds on that with powerful performances and intertwining love stories. I'd felt this fanart brewing during the couple days following my viewing of the show and finally allowed it to spill out over the past couple nights. 

billy and alice

Perhaps due to the brew, perhaps due following a strict sense of style, or perhaps because I had real people to base the designs on - this was one of the smoothest and most successful pieces from start to finish. I wanted to follow fairly closely to the style of Saira Vargas, and borrowing someone else's sensibilities helped me to make choices more consistently and in a way, not all by myself. I find that these kind of style steals tend to end up better for me - some of my favorite pieces from this year so far (this one and the Key West chickens) were strict style imitations of other artists. I tend to feel a little guilty about this - like I always need to give credit to the other artist when someone likes my piece. Like I'm just a perpetual coattail-surfer. But maybe that's just how you learn to draw well. And it's fun to draw like your heroes. So I'm going to keep on doing that.

This month has had its fair share of ups and downs so far - this looks to be my lowest finals workload ever, but motivation to do them has also been pretty low... And with Thanksgiving break so late this year I don't have that post-break panic setting in yet. Everything that's not fanart just seems kinda bleaaugh. It's kinda funny to talk about this Bright Star piece when it's most definitely not been the norm when it comes to my work's quality recently. Personal stuff and heartache have come up and made getting to the drawing table a lot more exhausting (though usually a lot more therapeutic once I'm there).  I've been really thankful for little jobs that don't feel as overwhelming as finals but still useful in some way, like doing official Instagram sticker/gif designs for Lipscomb Admissions. Which are now live on Instagram! Which is super cool! So maybe use them sometime? ;) Here's a couple in a much more high-res version than you will find on the gram-

I drew these a couple weekends ago when I was feeling pretty bad, but something about bisons in varsity jackets just makes you feel better, you know? All in all, I think just need to get home for a week and re-center, and then come back and finish strong. I'm pretty excited about what I'm working on for finals, but it's much easier to be excited about an idea than actually putting that idea on paper with accurate perspective and anatomy... :P

What say you, bloggerfolk?
-dh




PS - Daniel here, again. I've been editing this post for over a week, and since I initially wrote this post my feelings have changed (as they are wont to do).  Starting last Sunday I decided that since I don't have very much work for finals, then it would be better to get that work done before break rather than wait 'til December. I've stuck to that plan and now I feel like I'm actually ahead on most of my projects. :) And I think getting back to work really helped with my overall emotional health - I feel more like myself, I'm getting more excited about my projects, and I'm finishing strong now. I wanted to be honest with the sad parts of this post, and leave them in there, but I also wanted to note that things haven't stayed that way! 

Thanks for stickin' around, bloggerfriends - I'll see you closer to Thanksgiving.

Late Halloween Fanart and the Not Busy Weekend

Hello Everyone, and Happy Halloween!

A few days late.

Already my mind and the mall are quickly shifting into Christmas Mode, but before the ghosts fully depart from our mortal plane I wanted to share a few pieces that I made (or at least started) in October. That one up top is some Halloween Day fanart of one of my favorite Pokemon, Chandelure. Love its color palette, its Fire/Ghost typing, and (laugh all you want) the fact that it's a gothic haunted CHANDELIER. This piece took a few extra days to complete cause I wanted to try some new things with the coloring. Just one more step in my perhaps eternal journey to capture the playful simplicity of Louie Zong's work.  These next ones are some Harry Potter doodles I did while watching the movie with some RA friends. I usually don't draw during movies, but I've seen Sorcerer's Stone a fair amount and drawing also helps me to feel a little more comfortable in new situations and friendgroups - kinda like a security blanket made of scribbles. Also I haven't drawn a lot of HP and now felt like the right time to draw some cloaks and capes.

 a dumble

a snep

I decided to keep just the initial sketch layer with some color underneath - I've found myself doing that an awful lot recently. One critique I've been commonly getting is that my clean-up line loses a lot of the life and spontaneity of the sketch and becomes too noodley. I can't see it as easily, but I agree. So the obvious solution is to ditch the clean-up line entirely, right? Right? But I also have a fair amount of construction lines in the initial sketch that shouldn't be in the final image. Oh bother. 

. . .

I'm in a comfortable calm-between-two-storms moment in the semester. Last week was crazy with RA events and Halloween socializing. If I wasn't working an event, I was attending one. There were chili and ghost stories on Halloween, and an intense dodgeball tournament in a dorm courtyard the next night. But now Halloweek is over, I've been given a time of rest, and finals are just far enough away where I haven't started to worry about them yet. Which meant that this weekend I had only ~3 hours of homework to do. An absolute rarity. I didn't have a lot of motivation to draw, so I just did nothing. Which felt very wrong, yet also kinda needed? Everything I've read from animation pros in the industry talks about their insane work ethic and willingness to hone their craft in seemingly every possible moment. And so as an animation student with a lot to learn and a lot to prove, any quiet moment feels like a wasted one. Even when homework is minimal, there's still books I could be reading, sketches I could be completing, personal projects I could be progressing - you get the idea. So to do nothing, even for a weekend, feels a little like a hit to my future career. Like I'm being lazy. But that can't be the way people are supposed to live. I believe in the importance of stillness, solitude, of things other than animation. So where do those fit into the get-a-job-in-cartoons plan? It's a balance I've been trying to discover since I showed up here at Lipscomb. 

But for better or for worse, I put art on the backburner this weekend. I spent hours talking with friends. I sat outside and looked at trees, and talked to the people who stopped by. I played Splatoon 2. Made muffins. Got kinda lost with friends in the woods after dark. Things happened, but they weren't art things. Career things. Or resume things. 

Of course, if I did this every weekend it might create problems. But perhaps those hard-workin pros have weekends like this as well? And maybe it's not just a rat race scramble out to a Hollywood job, but a journey with time for rose-smelling and side-quests? Maybe it's more like Ecclesiastes suggests, where there's a time for everything? A time to draw, and a time to not draw. 

What do you think, bloggerfolk?

-dh