Do or Do Not.

More process experimentation tonight, and I don’t have the energy left in me to finish it, so you get an obviously not-done piece. Which is fine, I suppose. Not like Cyclops needs hands anyway.

This one’s another all-digital piece — I did the original sketch in Illustrator, followed it up with the “inks” in Illustrator (and learned quite a bit about how I might pull that off), then switched to Photoshop for the colors, which I’m not sure I’m gonna do again. As much as I love me some Photoshop, I think Illustrator works much better for me for what I’m wanting to do. I might go back and do some more work on this one later on.

(Estimated time: 2 hours or so for everything. I’ll get faster as I better figure out my process. I hope.)

OK, something a little different tonight. This one’s another one where the results themselves aren’t particularly important, because I was trying something new. And that something new is part of some new rules I’m putting in place from this point forward for the project.

Starting tonight, I’m allowing myself all-digital “cards.” Tonight’s the first of those. Since this project is to allow me to learn new things and practice new techniques, and I believe digital artwork to be my medium of choice, then it doesn’t make sense not to allow myself to do digital pieces when I feel like it. So I’m not gonna not allow myself to work digitally.

I do intend going to keep to the spirit of the project: small areas of artwork, intended to be done somewhat quickly and allowing for trying out ideas or techniques. Tonight’s quickie “card” was drawn and colored in Photoshop; I wasn’t concerned with the what of what I was drawing (which is probably obvious from looking at it) as much as the how. I’m not all that happy with this how; I drew this at too small a resolution (72dpi), and I think I’ll be doing future digital drawings at a higher resolution, even if the end result will still be no bigger than 300px by 500px, the same dimensions all previous entires have been.

Anyway, yeah, the result here isn’t anything to write home about, but I wanted to put this one out there to introduce this new wrinkle to the project, and to get back to working on stuff after taking a few days off. More (and hopefully much better) tomorrow!

Well, hell.

I want to get this out of the way first: the Patriots did not lose that game — the Giants won it. Period. The Pats were simply outplayed; most specifically, the Pats offense was outplayed by the Giants’ defense. That wasn’t lousy officiating (the officials didn’t even have that much to do tonight), that wasn’t crappy play by the Patriots, that wasn’t any other lame excuse. It was just superior play by the Giants. New York deserved to win that game, and if I wore hats, I’d tip mine to them.

I originally picked the Pats to win this game in my initial thrush of excitement after beating San Diego in the AFC Championship game, but over the last few days I was starting to re-think that decision. The Patriots were themselves tremendous underdogs to the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl 36, and they stunned the team that they supposedly had no chance to beat. That fact had been tickling the back of my head, apparently with good reason. I still thought New England would win, but my confidence in that victory shrank slightly as the days went by.

Over the last six weeks, I’ve watched every game played by both the Patriots and Giants, and over the last six weeks, the Giants have been the better team. The Giants nearly beat New England in Week 17; they went into Dallas and beat the Cowboys; they went into Green Bay and beat the Packers. Everyone kept saying this team had no chance, and yet they kept winning game they were supposed to have no chance to win. And then over the last two weeks, being disrespected and trivialized that way by almost everyone, telling the Giants that they were just a speed bump on New England’s expressway to history… well, that can have an awfully powerful motivating effect on a bunch of professional athletes.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Tom Brady take that kind of beating before. Even with three Pro Bowlers on their offensive line, New England could do almost nothing to stop New York’s front seven — hell, I think I could count on one hand the number of times anyone from the Giants’ secondary was even mentioned during the broadcast, that’s how dominant a performance that was by their D-line and linebackers. Even a quarterback as tremendous as Brady isn’t going to be able to do all that much when he’s under constant pressure, especially when the running game has also been totally shut down. Brady’s going to be having nightmares about being chased by Giants for quite awhile, I’d imagine.

Win or lose, that was a helluva game and the Giants deserve all the credit in the world for a damn impressive win. And I hope that this loss doesn’t minimize what an amazing accomplishment it was for the Patriots to make it through the regular season undefeated (though of course it will). My sincere congratulations to the New York Giants, a deserving, if surprising, Super Bowl champion.

OK, so I have a confession to make.

I’ve been holding out on you.

During the last two or three weeks, as I’ve been steadfastly sticking to my post-a-card-a-day schedule (current couple-of-day break excepted), I’ve been working on the side, too, without telling you about it. It’s not that I was ashamed of the other stuff I was doing; quite the opposite, actually. But it sort of went the opposite way from the entire concept of the card project: it was fewer pieces that each took longer to do.

See, I’ve rediscovered my love for doing computer-based artwork, which I’ve been doing some way or another as long as I’ve been using computers, which is most of my life. At this point, I truly believe digital art is “my medium” much more so than paper and pen/pencil, as much as I love using those tools. I didn’t want to bring this up yet because I didn’t want to seem like I was abandoning my project after only a couple of weeks — even though the project is directly responsible for re-igniting my passion for digital art. So I kept up the cards daily — and seriously think I might well continue to do so — because I was trying to embed into my brain that sticktoittiveness I’ve been lacking for so long.

I have a number of pieces up at my deviantART page. I’m still learning what I’m doing with Adobe Illustrator; I’ve been using it off-and-on for eight years or so, but am only now really getting into the guts of what it can do. I’m also practicing drawing in Photoshop — there will be more and more pieces I do which won’t have any paper component involved at all. Yes, a couple of these pieces so far were started from photos, but I plan to do more pieces that originate entirely from within my skull — right now, I’m still learning, and using photos as starting points helps me get right to the “these are the things I’m working on” point.

I was feeling a bit strange about doing this work I was actually kinda-semi-proud of and not sharing it with you while continuing to post quick works I wasn’t at all happy with. The more I work digitally, the more I’m starting to see where I can go with it in the future: I can see myself illustrating a children’s book, or putting together a comic book or webcomic, in a way I’ve never quite been able to see before. It’s pretty exciting, really. Here’s the piece I just finished this morning, to give you a taste of the kinds of things I’ve been trying to do:

(Click on through to deviantART for a bigger version.)

I’m still not where I want to be. I’m still learning. But I’m happier overall now with the kinds of things I’m able to put together, and more excited about what I’ll be able to do in the future, than I’ve ever been before.

More to come.

My desire to start working on some more illustrative drawings + the audition round of American Idol = tonight’s post.

(Estimated time: 20 minutes.)

Terry tells me I shouldn’t focus quite so much on the things I don’t like about these drawings and try to focus more on the things that I do — so I’ll say that given how quickly I did this one, I think the body shape and proportions came out pretty well, and I think (I hope) it’s pretty obvious who it’s supposed to be. I’ll keep the things I don’t like to myself for this one. :)

(Estimated time: 20 minutes.)

Just some more experimenting with some cartoony faces tonight. This kind of cartoony is difficult for me because I’ve my entire drawing life I’ve been working hard to make faces more comic-book-like, which is a different kind of abstraction with different sorts of exaggeration and much more complex ciphers for facial features — at least that’s true of the kinds of comic-book-like I always tried to achieve. But I want to gain some facility with this sort of look, so expect to see some more experiments along these lines as the project progresses.