For more than a year Congress has been holding hearings for the drafting of a brand new US Copyright Act. At its heart is the return of Orphan Works
What does this mean for artists? it means it will make it easier for infringers to steal artists works and harder for people who are making or trying to make a living out of art more difficult. This will effect every artist and all the artwork they have created, are creating, and will be created. Corporates, Big businesses, and publishers want this to pass to make money out off artists works without paying us artists for past, current, and future artwork.
Basic Facts About The Law Being Proposed
- “The Next Great Copyright Act” would replace all existing copyright law.
- It would void our Constitutional right to the exclusive control of our work.
- It would “privilege” the public’s right to use our work.
- It would “pressure” you to register your work with commercial registries.
- It would “orphan” unregistered work.
- It would make orphaned work available for commercial infringement by “good faith” infringers.
- It would allow others to alter your work and copyright these “derivative works” in their own names.
- It would affect all visual art: drawings, paintings, sketches, photos, etc.; past, present and future; published and unpublished; domestic and foreign.
** Ways to stop this or preventing these changes from happening**
> > > > > > > DEADLINE IS NEXT THURSDAY: JULY 23, 2015 < < < < < <
- share, reblog this post, spread it for other artists to take notice and action.
- You can submit a letter on how this law can be an issue for you as an artist here.
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Non-U.S. artists can email their letters to the attention of:
Catherine Rowland Senior Advisor to the Register of Copyrights U.S. Copyright Office crowland@loc.gov
“Right now nobody has to understand copyright law because you’re protected by it, but under the law they are proposing, copyright law wont protect you anymore.”
- Brad Holland (Quote from the video - at 1:23:30)
They are working with big corporations who I will also not name who stand to gain big time. Think about a company that has the largest search engine on the internet…they are putting lots of money behind this because there is a ton of money in controlling and selling all of our work. (x)
Which may explain why Googling the Orphan Works and Next Great Copyright Act yields so little results. Please add any extra information if you have access to it, because I couldn’t find much.
I can’t do much as a foreigner, but I sure as hell can bring it to your attention.
Anonymous asked: Uncle Mod I am having trouble! I want to be able to draw things touching each other (like people holding hands) but it never works! Can you help? Thank you for drawing so much I hope you are not hurting because of it any more!
Drawing things touching is super hard! So don’t feel bad for struggling with it; I am still learning to do it myself, but I have found that there’s a trick in the lineart stage that you can employ which helps a lot.
Real life doesn’t have outlines, but we use lines in drawings to show where objects begin and end. Where things touch the spaces between them are reduced or eradicated, so thinner lines can help to enforce the idea that they are touching;
thicker lines emphasize distance between objects and the solidity of objects. If something is really pressing against another thing, you can completely break the line or sometimes remove it altogether! Try it out and see what works.
A simple way to think about it is that when two masses are pressed together they are making one mass overall. You use lines to separate objects, so it follows that if you want to ‘join’ two objects, you remove the line!
Remember that soft objects mesh more easily, so you can break and thin the line much more with flesh or fabric, while if you have a hard object it will maintain it’s form (and therefore outline) even when pressed against something else, and will even force a softer object to change shape!
Also thank you, polite anon, I am not hurting per say but my elbow and wrist still feel a bit funny, so I am trying to rest them and do my stretches as much as possible. Keep your hands healthy people!
Anonymous asked: hello mod, I am having trouble- I always seem to draw very slowly, and my friend says it is because I listen to music, do you think that's true? should I not listen to music when I draw?
Interesting problem, and the answer is that the answer depends on each individual; Richard Williams gives that same advice in the Animator’s Survival Kit, and while I do see the benefit (no noise = no distraction), I actually disagree and do listen to music and find it helps me. Sometimes if something is complicated or I have a headache I turn it off, but not very often! I do, however, have some rules about the music I listen to;
1) Do not listen to sad, slow music! You will draw much slower than usual- my digital ink and paint teacher taught me this, and would even go around pulling out our headphones to check we weren’t listening to slow music. Listen to tragic music all you want when you’re coming up with ideas by all means, but it will slow you down when it comes to doing stuff!
2) Listen to music without lyrics, or at least music that you know so well that you don’t have to ‘listen’ to it. If you start focusing on the words you will stop focusing on your work! I find that film soundtracks in particular are great for drawing.
3) Try to match the mood of the music with the mood of what you’re making! If you are drawing something exciting, get some epic adventure music, if you are drawing something funny, try something upbeat, if you’re drawing something sad, go for something big and powerful rather than slow (see above). Music affects our emotions, so this is where my argument for drawing to music comes in; it can give you just that little extra inspiration in what you’re looking to visualize.
Art and music are inherently linked, experiment with it! Don’t feel that anything I’ve said or anyone else says is the law; these are just things I’ve observed myself, try things out and find the path that’s right for you.
Anonymous asked: I was wondering, you get a lot of comments and asks about the comic and your work, but are there any that you get a lot that you dislike? just want to avoid any pet peeves or words you don't enjoy :'D
What an interesting question! Honestly most of the messages I get are unique and very lovely, and really just anyone taking the time so say a nice thing in whatever way they choose is amazing so I’m always grateful even if I can’t get around to answering them all.
If I really had to pick one thing that people say/have said which irritates me it would be the classic “what kind of drugs were you on when you wrote this/you must have been high to come up with this stuff” comment. It’s not just when people say it about my work either; it gets said about a lot of surreal art and imaginative things in general, and it just makes me incredibly sad to think that a person would suppose you have to be influenced by drugs to come up with anything remotely wild or unusual.
It says more about the commenter than the artist, I know, and I guess it’s largely meant as a joke, but it still sucks the innocent fun out of the work and takes the credit of having an independently functioning brain away from the artist. It also kind of makes me worry that some people really do suppose that the only way they can make something wacky and imaginative is to take something, which is nonsense and for the record I have never taken anything stronger than ibuprofen. Heck I don’t even like the taste of alcohol I am literally a giant goober child- you want to see me high just give me some sherbet and a box set of cartoons that’ll do it.
So yeah TL:DR I ain’t hating on anyone’s lifestyle choices just don’t say that junk it cheeses a lot of us creative types off
Yeah, I’m not your mom & I can’t tell you what to do, but I had multiple conversations with various classmates this weekend about art related pain & a lot of it is avoidable.
whitchboreart asked: I'm currently reading up on comic page construction and since I love how your pages turn out, I was wondering if you have any recommended reading or certain rules you follow?
Ah geeze, my page layouts are all pretty standard, actually. Most of what I know I picked up from comics I’ve read, and advice from friends.
I like to follow the KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid. 95% of my Fritz pages look like this:
Things I think are important:
Big panels feel like they have more time passing in them, while smaller panels feel very quick. Open panels can create a great scene of lingering or slowed time (don’t put them too close together, it can get confusing when they’re touching.)
Establishing shots to open new scenes, so the reader knows where the fuck we are and what characters are there. If you’re going back to an already established location, you can fudge it and rely on ‘land marks’ of the location.
Gutters, they separate your panels and give them room to breath, and clarity. I like to avoid black gutters for this reason.
Breaking the panel should be used sparingly, but is a great way to make the action really ‘pop’.
Every page should have at least one background, to ground the characters and setting.
Word bubbles from different panels shouldn’t be too close or touching. Most people read the words on a page first, and this can mess up you panel order by leading their eye wrong.
Keep dialog short and sweet, don’t cover your characters in words. Save large amounts of text for large panels.
Show don’t tell. Comics are a visual medium, have fun with your art.
Now, all rules can be broken. I wing pages a lot, and go with my gut when it comes to a lot of my decisions in layout. Comics are visual art first, so if something doesn’t follow the ‘rules’ but feels right/looks good, I’d say go for it. Experiment and have fun! The more comics you draw, the better they get.
Read lots of comic, from different artists, and think about what you like about their work. Movies are great, too, for figuring out tricks for visual transitions and scene layouts. I have a habit of imagining how I would draw some transitions/scenes to get the same feeling in still, black and white pictures.
Anonymous asked: Mod do you have any tips for getting better at inking? Im quite poor, so using what little good ink/inking pens i have to practice feels wasteful since i don't really know what I'm doing...
Actually I had the same fear of wasting materials in school when using ink and paint, and using ink with a brush can be pretty scary because you have to trust both it and yourself- you’re going to make mistakes that aren’t reversible! You have to learn to go with it and adapt those mistakes into something better, or just start over, but it’s hard to do that when you’re using something costly. What I used to practice was super concentrated black coffee. All you need is some cheap instant coffee and hot water to make it (best to let it cool down before you use it though, or it can warp the paper); the trick is to use a tonne of granules and not much water, just add it bit by bit until all the coffee is dissolved. The less water, the darker the liquid. Make yourself a little dose of it in an egg cup or something and away you go.
Try to get the solution as saturated as possible, and use a decent water colour brush- a good brush can make a good picture out of almost anything! You can also use beetroot juice, but it kinda stinks and the colour changes over time. Experiment with what you have available! It’s difficult to make a liquid as dark or permanent as ink, but this is a method for learning how to use a liquid medium; the important thing is to make your liquid medium about the same consistency as ink or watercolour, so it will get you better and more confident at using a liquid medium with a brush. That way when you want to step your game up you’ll be more familiar with the methods and less likely to make simple mistakes that could have been avoided with a little practice.
Anyway, that’s the method I used, and hey you can make some pretty great pictures using coffee! Go have fun :D
SUPER EASY SUPER SIMPLE PRETTY LEGIT glitchy image effect. kinda like VHS tearing.
select a bit of it, all the way across
shear it kind of like this - play with the curve!
that’s it! you can do it per channel to get cool color tear effects, and once you’re done you can use things like lens blur with a bit of noise and specular highlighting to get a more organic effect. i’ve seen other glitch / screenshot / VHS-effect tutorials and none of them have looked even remotely organic to me, so have this!
Well, I’ll actually go at this one backwards- because trying to increase your skill level is much harder than being inspired… but of course, being inspired makes it much easier to increase your skill level, so… I’ll shut up and just answer the questions.
Looking at things and drawing them is one of the best ways to get better- but looking at something and figuring out how it works is a much better way to get better. When you know why something looks the way it does; when you really know how something works, not just looks, but works, you’ll be able to draw it from the inside out. That makes an enormous difference, and then afterwards, when you imagine it, and when you imagine new, crazy, impossible things, you can take those things you know about real things and make your impossible things much more real.
Draw the things that you find hard to draw- I used to find drawing hands and feet really annoying, because I wanted to draw them well, but I couldn’t. I can’t say that I draw them well now, but I enjoy drawing them because I understand them- I basically spent a solid two weeks of summer just drawing hands and feet, from the inside out, bones and muscles and gloves and socks and shoes, and eventually I’ve got to the stage where I can do it and enjoy it. I’m not great at it yet, maybe not even good- but that’s the fun thing about learning, you never stop, and you can always improve. Some people seem to find that discouraging but I find that terribly exciting :D
As for what inspired my style, I still don’t know that I have one, and if I do I have a few different styles, but some of my biggest artistic influences are Hergé, Eiichiro Oda, Dali, Hogarth, Steve Bell, Robert Valley, Albert Uderzo, David Sutherland, Brad Bird, Tove Jansson, Spike Milligan, Milt Kahl, Dave McKean, Al Hirschfeld, Carl Barks and about a million more who I will kick myself for not being able to think of immediately later.
Basically the best advice I can give you is to keep trying, keep learning, and keep asking questions. Never think that you know something; that’s a very dangerous trap to fall into because then you’ll stop trying to learn, and that’s just about the worst thing you can do to yourself, as an artist and as a human being.
