THE FLOOR IS LAVA

My mate made his first game in C++ (for uni, I think) and here it is;

http://shatcore.unospace.net/?p=49

If you've got Windows as your OS go on and give it a go, it's a fun little game. Really evokes some old memories of the early 90s for me, back when I was a boy and games were for men. Real men.

Anyway I'm posting it's here not only because it's a fun side scrolling platformer but also because I provided the background since I'm just the nicest bloke in the world. I didn't have a huge amount of time so I knocked it out rather quickly. I did everything I could think of to get it to repeat smoothly so I'm a little disappointed to see it very slightly misregister at the loop point. I'm not sure what I did wrong, I'll have to investigate that at some point because it's actually really annoying me.

Anyway, here's the background itself in all its glory. Don't forget to check out his game!

The floor...IS MADE OF LAVA!

Learning to paint "Alla Prima"

I didn't make the most of the facilities available to me at uni but if I had I would have still been annoyed paying all that money for tuition fees. Know why? Because you don't get taught a fucking thing. You get set work and it gets marked, suggestions might be made here and there but that's it. Aside from life drawing at no point were we ever pushed, given any guidance, told "Nope, that's shit, rub all that out and do it like this". So here I am and I've dabbled with paint here and there, I've got ways of colouring stuff and painting stuff if I need to but there's still so much I don't know.

And I want to know it. I want to learn. I want to be a good painter. So I'm going to have to teach myself. That's going to mean doing some shit paintings and sticking with it until they're not shit anymore.

What I want to learn at the moment is painting "alla prima", or all in one go, directly. None of this waiting for layers to dry bollocks. Even though the glazing method is more time consuming I think in some respects it may be easier...with that said, whilst the glazing method can produce amazing results I'm more interested in creating "painterly" sort of paintings, for want of a better word. I still want to strive for realism, but I want to see some brushstrokes, I want soft and lost edges, I want to work wet in wet and wet on wet and learn how to control this fucking paint, bend it to my will. I want to be able to paint like Sargent or Schmid, etcetera. That is to say, I like the results of their methods, I'd like to learn those methods and then paint like myself.

No opportunities to paint from life and to be honest I'd like to at least have my technique half figured out before I put myself in a position where people can actually see me painting lest I come across as some sort of poseur. So for now I'll work from a photograph, in this case a photo my brother took of our cat in the snow.

Laid in some very light, very turpy, colours in the background and started drawing in the subject with what I thought was Burnt Umber but was actually Burnt Umber. This was after poncing around for ages with charcoal trying to sketch it on.

I'm happy with the drawing stage. It ain't perfect but it's a start. Also scumbled in some cool background colours. I've laid down my darkest values in the figure...I don't really know what I'm doing but I was kind of happy at this point, though I think I may have gone too detailed too early. With that said I'm not really going to bother indicating any of the background details until the end. I reckon I'll put a lot of the grass and stuff in with a knife...If I'm going to learn, I might as well learn a lot, right?

I did go too detailed too early, it caused me all sorts of problems, and in my efforts to get the right colours I forgot all about getting the right values like a complete twat. So I got a rag and wiped it all back as much as I could. It's very obvious to me that I'm much better at drawing than  am at painting...but that's why we practice, so we can learn.

I decided to wipe back loads more. It's left a faint stain on the canvas but I can still wipe it further back if I need to. Even though it's lost a lot of the drawing and it's looking poncey and wishy washy at the moment I kind of like it; yeah I'll have to redraw in and re-establish some shit but I can see how this could work. If I laid in a very thin layer of paint as the overall local colour, then rub back at parts of it as I go to add different values.

I've noticed if you use the paint out of the tube as long as you haven't put a shitload on there, as long as you brush it on there thinly, really scrub it in, then you can apply paint over it without really disturbing the layer beneath.

I'll have to do something about that snout nose, it's looking well piggish.

At this point I'm angry and hungry. As ever when I'm learning something it's one step forward, two steps back. I'm going to leave it for now and pick it up again tomorrow...So far not off to a good start. But if I keep at it I know I'll get something out of it. I'm sure of it.

Old Drawings

As I mentioned in my last post, today I've been going through my plan chest and looking at some old drawings. Here's some of them. They're virtually all life drawings.

I quite like this one. Grey paper, layer of charcoal scrubbed in as a midtone, erased in light areas, overdid the white conté though didn't I? What a mug. ...I think that eventually became my modus operandi in life drawing sessions. Not on grey paper though, doesn't really make much sense to scrub in a midtone on a paper that's already toned. Having a look through these makes me really want to get back on the observational drawing.

There were a few times when we had "experimental life drawing" class with a different tutor. All in all I wasn't a fan of this class or the tutor, but one or two vaguely interesting things came out of it. It was more about messing around and doing shit quickly with different materials than it was about accurate drawing. In retrospect it could have been a good opportunity to play around and go nuts. Oh well.

More life drawing. I'm not sure how old some of these are, they're from various different points in time. Some are better than others, some are pretty shit, but I thought all these had some degree of visual interest one way or another. That's why they're going on the blog. I can't be arsed to write about all of them.

Heh, look at her tiny little legs. Dickhead.

Close up!

He must have been sitting on something that mostly obscured his other leg and I didn't bother drawing it, didn't establish any context to the figure so it looks like he's sort of squatting to take a shit. On one leg!

The last one was a location drawing from the Imperial War Museum..I think. I had a terrible habit of whacking tippex all over pen drawings at the time. Really fucking ugly, and my line quality was pretty poor at this point, sort of scratchy and unconfident and my perspective is well off... BUT, I reckon that's a pretty strong composition except for maybe the V2 rocket. I can't believe I had the patience to do this however many years ago it was.

I really want to get back into observational drawing. Location drawing, life drawing, painting from life. I really think I could push myself if I could find some venues to pursue these things. I didn't really take things as seriously as I could have done at Uni or make the most of the stuff available to me when it was all there, easily accessible. I look at some of this stuff with proportional problems and crappy drawing and bad choices of values and I just know I could do so much better now.

Eccentric Britain

I was going through my plan chest earlier today, taking photos of old drawings here and there and I stumbled across this piece of shit.

A little bit of background information; it's a little known secret that during my time at university I really didn't give a shit. I spent the vast majority of my time down the pub and projects tended to get done entirely in the few hours I could manage after beers the night before the deadline.

Well one time we had this project called "Eccentric Britain" and I was mulling over it in my head, down The Cocoanut between pints and between games of pool and I wasn't really sure about it to be honest with you. I'd seen what other people were working on and it was all shit like a collage of bacon, tomatoes, fried slice, sausages and then beans smeared over the top or a drawing of a load of people queueing, shit like that. Well, the first one's not exactly eccentric, that's what I call a good hearty breakfast and the other one, queueing? Is that really eccentric? That's just good manners, and let's be honest, you'd be as hard pressed to find anyone with them in this country as you would anywhere else.

I quickly realized my classmates, for all their diligence and ardour, had got the wrong end of the stick. They were pursuing an avenue of British stereotypes, but had failed to find anything truly eccentric.

I thought about it carefully. What was it that was really odd about our island nation? A uniquely British oddity. And then it hit me like a bolt of lightning.

The inordinate amount of paedophiles we have living among us.

And so I produced this little baby in a surprisingly short amount of time.

Head nonce, Gary Glitter, inviting you to join his gang of Eccentric Britons. I even incorporated pearlescent ink and glitter glue, making this one of my few forays into the realm of mixed media.

It didn't go down well. I don't really know what I was thinking at the time.

Why I think graffiti is shit

A lot of my mates are graffiti artists, a lot of them are very skilled and are very good at what they do, a lot of them are very supportive of what I do regardless of how crap it is and how little of it there may be...but I sometimes struggle to return the favour.

I just can't get into graffiti.

For a start many graffiti artists seem to have a problem with colour. They're definitely not afraid to use it, and that's a good thing but it's just that typically there's not a lot of thought put into how it's being used. So often you see some terrible, terrible, colour choices and from what I've seen, all in all, that's par for the course.

An example of this was when I saw a graffiti canvas being produced. Initially a background will be sprayed on; random colours, a few splats, whatever, and the artist might produce a few of these, stockpile them, and then just whack something on top of them later, regardless of colour, composition, etcetera. It's all very slapdash; sometimes it works, a lot of the time it doesn't.

I come from a background where you need to plan things out; you don't need to be totally anal about it, you can be loose when you're painting your final piece but at the very least you might have a rough thumbnail sketch or colour study to give an idea of what you're working towards, you've still got room for artistic flourishes along the way, but you have a plan, a clear idea of where you want to take things. And when you prepare a surface you do it with a specific result in mind, you lay down a specific ground colour knowing that you'll use it in translucent areas or that it makes up a massive part of a midtone or something; not just abitrarily chuck something on there so that you don't have to contend with a white canvas.

Arbitrary. That's how I feel about the subject matter as well. Names, adopted pseudonyms seemingly chosen at random, painted again and again ad infinitum. Why? What for? Why those names, why those letters in particular? I just struggle to see the point, maybe if all you care about is climbing into places, having a little adventure, and sticking your name up somewhere for people to see it, if it's purely a graffiti thing then fair enough, but when you identify yourself as an artist, as a craftsman..I dunno. It's not that I think that it's low brow or anything like that, we could all do without that sort of pretentiousness, it's just you could potentially be the greatest painter in the world but if all you do is paint the same handful of letters over and over are you really pushing yourself? Are you really challenging yourself? Stretching your abilities? Doesn't it all get a bit samey, even if you do mix up the styles a bit now and then? Don't you get to a saturation point beyond which you're not having to even think anymore; where you're painting on auto-pilot and just knocking these pieces out?

My last problem is a text one. Graffiti is, supposedly, all about the letters, about the text. It's something I generally shy away from myself but I respect good use of typography when I see it, love a good juxtaposition of text and image...clever, inventive, use of text can be a really beautiful thing. I don't generally see it in graffiti though. You get a lot of talk about letters and typography but half the time what you see is an impenetrable mish mash of letters painted by grafitti artists for the benefit of other graffiti artists. There's a definite language to it, but for anyone on the outside looking in it's all very cryptic and indecipherable. Personally I think any successful image, whatever the subject matter, whatever the medium, should be easily read. It should be a visual form of communication, something you can see and decipher at a glance...and for me, personally, a lot of graf fails in this area more than any other.

I like the idea of having art on our streets and big murals out where people can see them, I think it brightens things up, it can take a drab and dreary street and elevate it into something much more pleasant. But it would be nice if maybe some of the grafitti you see wasn't structured in this private code for the eyes and appreciation of other writers, but designed so that a wider audience could appreciate it.

That doesn't require a loss in style or technique, merely a shift in thinking.

Unsuccessful Job Application

This self employed artist business is great fun but what lets it down a bit, for me personally, is not selling any work or, for that matter, getting any work and basically being a bum with no money sponging off his parents. As I say, aside from all that it is great but I am a realist so I keep my eyes open for whatever opportunities may come my way.

Carpe Diem.

So naturally my eyes lit up like a magpie's when I saw a friend post this on Facebook;

More CV's please for the runners job I'm interviewing morons at the moment

Get in, not only am I not a moron, I'm one hundred percent capable of fetching things and making cups of tea and there's the friend connection too! Like they say, it's not what you know, it's who you know. I've got this one in the bag.

I chat to her about it a bit, get a bit of information just so I know what I'm getting myself into but really I'm already spending my runner's salary in my head, I'm looking on gumtree for rooms to rent, I'm imagining the parties I'm going to have in my new home, pondering the many sexual conquests that will no doubt follow my change of career and my sudden influx of money and freedom. I've already planned the entirety of 2012 around a steady £12k a year job. This is going to be brilliant. God, I might even buy a car! Might even learn how to drive it, too!

All I need to do is send her my CV. Well my CV's geared towards Art and Design and obviously time's against me here, I need to hand this in ASAP to secure my position and stake my claim. Knowing that time is not on my side, feeling like little baby Zeus about to be swallowed whole by his father Cronos, who consumes us all in the end, I knew what I had to do. I wouldn't be able to write a completely new CV but I could expertly slip a couple of extra lines into my personal statement to seamlessly transform it from an artist's CV into a budding runner's CV.

PERSONAL STATEMENT:

For the last year or so I have been working freelance as a self employed artist; I am passionate about my artwork and love to create pieces of art and design that I can be proud of but my real dream is to work as a Runner in a London based editing and production company. I yearn for the hustle and bustle of life in a production company, the cameraderie as I dish out cups of tea to all the team; I can envision myself on a packed train at seven in the morning with a smile on my face and a song in my heart, knowing that where I’m going, I’m going to make a difference. I am hard working, punctual and reliable, and above all else I am honest and trust worthy.

Job done. With that out of the way and feeling quite content I went back to the business of counting out all the money I'd soon be earning.

Six days later I discover that my application was not successful; no one tells me about it, by chance on Facebook I see an offhand remark that they've already got someone in! I didn't even get to the interview stage! Even morons got to the interview stage if that first status update is to be believed! I fall several rungs below morons on the employment ladder!

I can't even get a job making cups of tea for people, not even when it's a friend taking in the CVs and conducting the interviews!

I don't have to plan out my year again though, because with no real income I can't make plans. I won't name names but not only is this friend now solely responsible for my financial insecurity, I can't even see my friends' exhibition in Cardiff without that sweet runner dollar and though they're putting on a brave face about it I know I've let them down. How many times can I let them down before I'm ostracised completely? Relegated to life as a total social pariah because I can't afford to do anything!

So when I've fallen deep into a spiral of rage and depression, haven't left the house for months, have grown a big fat beard and gone half mad from isolation and spending all my time lost in an imaginary world of revenge fantasies because I can't even afford to go out for a pint and get some meagre contact with other human beings and maintain the tenuous hold on sanity that's kept me going this long, you know who to blame for all of that.

Ironman - Inked

So it was a fun little exercise. I ended up chucking more black in there than I originally planned to but sometimes I do get carried away, but I enjoyed it. Pen and ink, coloured pencil, and acrylic... I tweak the image a bit after scanning to compensate for winsor & newton ink being so shit and transparent and as a result some of the softness of the other mediums is lost. No big deal.

If I felt like colouring it, which I don't, I'd probably do it a bit like this;

Actually, looking at the colour study kind of makes me want to colour it. But I'm sticking to my guns. No means no.

For anyone interested, here's a Gif that ought to quickly take you through the image at various stages of progress...

http://www.simontaylorillustration.co.uk/images/ironmanprogression.gif