I have no idea what second anon is referring to and I feel like I post my ugly mug on this blog way too much already but yeah okay here’s both in one shot
short sleeved shirts aren’t really my thing but they can come in handy (and I can still wear a tie if I want to :P)
Well, black and white is my absolute favourite colour combination, but the real reason is because I love Alice in Wonderland.
No I do not mean the Disney film, or the other one, or the Jan Svankmajer one or that other one with Martin Short as the hatter which is awesome and not enough people have seen or ANY of those. I mean the books. I love the books. I really really love the books and the language and illustrations and gosh, just the IDEAS in those stories. They were a huge part of my life as a child and they continue to inspire and affect me today, both as a person and as a story writer.
So, yes, that’s why. I also like Madness and a lot of Scar music too, and obviously I’m a sucker for the 1960’s and Op Art, so having those associations as a bonus is pretty neat.
Ironically I’ve never played checkers. I can play chess though (badly).
TL:DR- style and design stuff I guess
1) I have no idea. One day, you just find people are talking about ‘your style’, and you sit there and say you don’t have one and look confused. I have no real idea of how or when it happened to me, and I would say even now that I have several different styles. Also, the idea of 'sticking with a style’ once you’ve found it can actually be dangerous. Even if people like something, you mustn’t feel like you’re restricted to it- it will stagnate, and you will as well. My SKIP design method resulted from pushing the lines to their extreme, stretching and pulling and pushing everything as far as I could, to the point that it was uncomfortable, but only when I had gone that far could I see where it felt right and pull it back. If you don’t push something to the extreme, you’ll never know how far you could have gone.
Evolution and art go hand in hand; if you stop trying to change, to push yourself and improve, then you’ll go extinct. Change can scare people, and they might not like it; you might explore new methods and tricks that simply don’t work for you, but mistakes are the best way to learn. Some of my best pictures have resulted from mistakes- I remember during foundation year, when I was doing some very precise work with a dip pen, I sneezed and my ink spattered across the page. I almost cried, but then I saw it sort of looked like a cat freaking out. I finished it off as the cat, and started over again for the actual piece. Both were far better than the original would have ever been, and the cat was by far my favourite of the two. I still have it at home somewhere.
2) When I draw feeling I draw movement, and when I draw movement I draw feeling. Animators have to be constantly aware of what happened before and after the split moment in time that they are drawing- why is the cloth moving that way, how are they going to land on that foot, what vowel are they saying with their lips, how are they saying it, why? Why is the biggest question to ask when you are drawing something. You are drawing someone who is shy- why are they shy? What sort of shy are they? Is it gangling and awkward, are they curling in on themselves away from the world, or do they simply not want others to know that they are afraid? In one of my acting classes I was told that the best way to portray an emotion in a scene is to try to be the exact opposite- someone who is scared will try to look brave, and as a result seem even more scared. As long as you know the motive of a character- what the character wants, and why they want it- you can do anything.
Motive drives everything, and that includes lines and shapes. With Hare, I wanted to express menacing resentment- in other words, his prerogative is to look mean, but the drive is bitterness. So, imagine what that emotion looks like, feels like, then think about how humans express it physically and combine the two. The result is everything is hooked over and slouching with the chin jutting right out in the front, like a moody teenager trying to make a point that he plain does not give a shit about posture or anything else. The shape is curling in and around itself with hooks and snarls- even though it still reads as aggressive, when you analyze it an abstract way, it is still defensive. He is creating a barrier against the world around him with his own construct.
Silhouette is very important in character design, but it is equally important in character acting- if you can tell what the character is doing by their silhouette, it’s a good drawing, if you can tell what the character is feeling by their silhouette, it’s a great drawing.
Goodness yes, anon, of course I do. It’s very important that I do feel sad from time to time. There are times that I feel very sad, and sometimes I even feel very very sad, or even sadder than that. I get all wobbly and insecure on an almost daily basis, sometimes hourly, if it’s a bad day. I have crippling doubts and morbid daydreams and dreams that I suppose most would consider nightmares, only I find them more interesting than disturbing in retrospect. I’m in a constant state of flux between hating myself and my work and loving everyone and everything in the universe, but that’s how I am and always have been. It’s a bit like being on a pogo stick.
The thing is when you hit the ground on a pogo stick there’s that wonderful bit of spring underneath that’ll shove you back up into the air afterwards. Yes, it can get squashed all the way down, and sometimes you hurt your knees if you hit the ground too fast, but the more it gets squashed the bigger the push it gives you afterwards. That’s why you’re all so important to me- why anyone, in this world, is important. You’re there when people need to be pushed back up into the air- and it can be hard, very hard, being squashed, hearing all those negative things, and sometimes you don’t even know that’s what’s happening to them and to you- but if you weren’t there they would just plough straight into the ground and never get back out again. Springs can be made of kind words, good pieces of art, music, someone laughing at a joke that you made, but didn’t expect anyone to laugh at. Some of the best springs are the ones that are always there, regardless of whether you’re going up or down.
So yes I do feel sad, but not always, and if I didn’t feel sad I wouldn’t be able to be funny or positive. Not really. I wouldn’t be able to understand what funny is. I’ve always found that the people with the worst sense of humour are the people who’ve never been miserable; how can you know how precious and amazing food is unless you’ve starved? How can you fly if you’ve never fallen? How can you laugh if you’ve never cried?
Dawwww, shucks.
YOU ARE ALL ADORABLE AND I LOVE YOU and yeah get the heck off anon so I can high-five you bros, come on I know I’m British but I’m not evil.
…
Okay, not very evil.
Well I mean the two basically are the same thing ANYWAY YEAH YOU’RE ALL AWESOME. KEEP DOING THAT. LOVE YOU. NOW GO TELL MORE PEOPLE ABOUT SPG. BAHAHA.
1) Uh wow, yeah okay sure! Not like I can stop you anyway mate, but go for it if you like!
2) Nothing I can tell you that nobody else has said in much more elegant ways but, basically, draw everything, all the time. If you can get yourself to some figure drawing lessons that will be incredibly helpful, and reading anatomy books or even just biology dissection manuals like I did is a real foothold for learning to draw humans. I did a little lecture with some basic anatomy tips here a while back but I’m no authority on the matter.
3) OKAY SURE LEMME GET ONTO THAT uh what are wallpaper sizes agaskfsds I don’t even know any more…
