One day I worked up enough courage to show Glen Keane one of my books and he was kind enough to look. After a few flipped pages he stopped looking and told me that my images were hard to focus on because I had way too many small sketches on the page. He kindly spent time sifting through the book and looking for some sketches he liked, but I felt he was really stretching as he complimented. In the end his advise was to draw one drawing per page and really focus in on what that one pose was trying to say or do and really study it. He said, ”remember, each page is a piece of art!”
I’m sad how tumblr doesn’t let us talk much. Will you follow me on twitter? I’ll follow you back:
https://twitter.com/stephenmccranie
More comic essays like this can be read at:
Stephen’s comic essays get me so excited about drawing and thinking about comics…
“Your art makes me feel bad about my art” is not a compliment
when you see all the flaws in your drawing AFTER you post it
I mentioned to a fanfic author friend that if jack’s powers went haywire and people couldn’t touch him or they’d get frostbite, then they’d probably have to handle him with oven mits.
I still can’t tell if this picture is trying to be dramatic or not.
I love the Sandman. I have no idea how he would fall asleep, but I bet he’d be adorable doing so. I mean look at him even when not sleeping. I want to squish his cheeks!
When it comes to that whole ‘the guardians’ designs were based on basic geometric shapes’, I’m pretty sure Sandman was based off a circle. I tried to include the flow and the roundness of one in here, and it was very fun.
Again, no lineart beforehand. Go me!
I love the idea that each of the characters were designed with some geometric shape and thematic color in mind. Jack Frost, I understand, was designed with a blue hexagon. I started out with some vague notion of having him posed so that each limb stuck out into a corner of a hexagon, so I could add a vague background to connect the points and make the shape obvious, but I realized halfway through that with that bent-way-too-low knee and tucked-not-into-a-corner hand that it wasn’t happening. Oh well.
Look, ma, no prior lineart!
PS this is just in, I either need a new scanner or to make my pictures way darker or both. I’ll see if I can rescan this later so that things show up more. For now, enjoy!
Edit for that PS: tweaked the contrast and reuploaded. Everything is beautiful now!
tadeles:
clothes tips part 2 for the people who requested it! as usual, remember to take everything I say with a grain of salt. :’) x
More useful awesomeness!
Meet Corrie, the crab-shaped robot!
It doesn’t actually step from side to side—or, uh, step at all. It’s supposed to step forward and back, but it doesn’t. It did, however, answer a few questions, among which were:
1. Does this design walk?
No, though it wiggles if you chase its backside with battery leads.
2. Were any adjustments made along the way to get it closer to working?
In an original attempt, I tried to prop the metal pin between the back legs to keep them separate, as though it were a tied-on axle. That didn’t work because the pin kept falling, and the motor-butt didn’t reach far enough to rest on it and keep it in place by virtue of weight. When I added yarn to the mix, it occurred to me to sling some yarn between the back legs and have a sort of swing for the motor to rest on, and that helped distribute the weight to a more centralized area, so that the whole thing wasn’t trying to lean forward the whole time. The weight of the motor on the yarn tried to pull the hind legs together, so the spacer came in handy then.
3. Why did I stop?
I got to a point where the problem was clearly not something that could be fixed with more yarn, tape, or fussing. The servo alone probably outweighs all the rest of the materials put together. The thumb tacks that I used to put the popsicle sticks together poke through to the other side and catch on the tape I used to attach the legs to the motor. The yarn I used to try and keep the motor up sags if I don’t tighten it between attempts. If I tried to get this thing to carry its own battery weight, the whole thing promptly roll over and flail miserably.
4. What I plan to do next:
Try a different material for the whole structure. I’m hoping to buy or borrow some wire tomorrow, which should hopefully give me more control over the shape of the body. If I want to, I can also try to attach coins to the feet if I build a frame-draft and the structure is still too top-heavy.
Note: This technically doesn’t have any computerization or intelligence, so by definition I don’t think it counts as a robot, but rather as an attempted automaton or electrical toy. Even so, Corrie is the prequel to more that will come, so hopefully I’ll get to a robot stage with this soon!
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