Arctic Light

Three Sentence Ficathon! I had a lot of fun with this last year. Let's get some Agent Carter and Defenders prompts in there! :D

idproquo is an idfic exchange with signups open 'til Feb. 12. Ao3 collection | Tagset. This exchange uses freeform tags as well as the fandom/relationship tags. I am currently dithering on signing up - I think my odds of being easily matchable are low, and a good 50% of what I request/write is idfic anyway (I mean, it's not like nobody following me knows what my id is like by now; "self-indulgent hurt/comfort" about sums it up).

Non-fandom:

If you're into art process, I really enjoy James Gurney's blog. He's best known as the artist on the Dinotopia books, but he is, in general, a very talented artist who does a lot of field sketching, mostly in watercolor and gouache, and also has a charming, affable persona that is really enjoyable to spend time with. Plus, really pretty New England scenery, and daily updates. Today I watched this Painting a Farm Road in Gouache video; it's very soothing.

I mentioned in the Kavalier & Clay post that I have a mental list of things most writers get wrong about artists. I decided to go ahead and elaborate on that. The #1 thing on my pet-peeve list is: ARTISTS USE REFERENCE MATERIALS.

Yes, even good artists! Even professional artists!

I have absolutely lost track of the number of times I've run across scenes, on visual media like TV/movies especially, but also in books, of an artist drawing a spot-on, detail-perfect representation of something (portraits of people are a particularly common thing, but also an object, a scene drawn from memory, and so forth) straight out of their head.

This is not impossible. Some artists (though not a lot) are especially talented at drawing out of their heads and can actually come pretty close to what you see on TV. But it is a particular talent! And it's kind of a rare one!

Possibly the reason why non-artists think that all artist can do this is because most artists have a limited repertoire of objects and sometimes people which they've drawn a lot and can therefore draw reliably from memory. This is usually not real-life people -- like, most artists probably COULD NOT draw a photo-perfect sketch of their spouse from memory, unless their spouse is also their main model and they have drawn them frequently in the studio, and/or they are a particularly talented caricaturist. The kind of things artists might more commonly be able to draw accurately and quickly include things like characters (for comics artists), particular kinds of cars and planes for people who like drawing vehicles and have drawn them a lot, ditto for guns, etc. I can draw pretty good spruce trees, certain objects (especially ones my characters carry around on them, such as Fleetwood's bomber jacket), and most of my own characters without needing a reference. I have also drawn the human figure enough that I can draw a number of poses without needing visual reference (but I have to resort to it if I get into complicated foreshortening and so forth, and I think my figures almost invariably look more natural and 3D when I use a reference). Some people are really good at buildings, scenery, and perspective.

What you see on TV, though, is more like people drawing photo-realistic representations of their first boyfriend, street they grew upon, particular model of car they only saw once, etc. Like I said, that IS a thing some artists can do, but most can't.

Instead, most artists are going to have photos taped around their drawing surface of whatever they're working on (or, in a modern context, on their phone/computer). That is how the process WORKS. The particular scene that made me think about this in the book was one bit where Kavalier (the more talented artist of the two main characters) starts to draw a particular kind of war plane on his drawing board, sans reference. Okay, I can handwave it as: he's drawn it a lot, so he doesn't need to open a book and look up details. And Kavalier actually is the kind of person who would spend a ton of extra time drawing a particular thing over and over in order to get good at it (which is just about the only way you can end up being able to do this, unless you have a rare talent for visual eidetic memory, which some artists actually do). But in general, what you'd see in real life is Kavalier, or his RL comic-artist equivalent, drawing the plane from a photo taped to his drawing board.

Similarly, there's a bit in the book that mentions Sam Clay, the other character, is a lousy artist when he can't refer to his swipe file (collection of cut-out pictures he uses for reference material; the book doesn't call it that, but that's what it was called by the comics-industry people I knew). This is accurate up to a point -- some people are very heavily reliant on visual references and can't easily do the little alterations to make the drawing their own. However, what the book leaves out is that MOST people use a swipe file. The book gives the impression that Sam's portfolio of clippings is a crutch, rather than a tool that almost everybody, in the pre-computer era of the book, would have kept on hand.

(This should not be taken as a condemnation of the book, because I think it's something that's so common in pop culture it's one of those things people literally don't think about unless they actually ARE professional artists. If all you ever see on TV is people drawing things out of their heads, then of course you would think that's how artists do things! And it's exacerbated by the fact that SOME artists can draw MOST things out of their heads, and MOST artists can draw SOME things. But in general, artists use reference.)

I'm trying something new with my sketchbook. One of the big reasons why I've never been terribly successful at keeping an actual sketchbook (as opposed to drawing on loose sheets of paper) is because I feel terribly inhibited about what I draw. Rational or not, I feel like my sketchbook drawings should be good, or at least suitable for public consumption, because other people might look at them (and if you're sketching in public, people do totally look over your shoulder; also, friends like to flip through each other's sketchbooks, etc). I feel kind of weird doing a nice artistic drawing of a flower and then having the thing right before that be an entire page of superhero legs.

... so I'm flipping it. The front direction is my "public" sketchbook: flowers, seashells, trees, etc. Then, flip, and the other direction is for experimental stuff, fanart, copying random bits of other people's art, badly drawn stick figures on which to drape Kismet costume designs, pages of experimental eyeballs, etc. Not that I would never ever show anyone the back half, but it'll at least save me from having to show it to curious grandmothers when I'm sketching in public.

I'm not sure if this will work, but I've tried having separate sketchbooks for different subjects and that doesn't really work either - it just results in even more mostly-empty sketchbooks with a few drawings in the beginning. So we'll see how this goes.

In other (comics-fandom) news, I have a brand new tentative prediction for Age of Ultron -- not based on any particular spoilers, just speculation due to the comics and various actors' general caginess about what happens to their characters in the future.

( Not actually spoilery, except somewhat for the comics )

So I went and created a Tumblr. :D Everything that's on there right now is experimental -- I'm just figuring out how things work, playing with the available tools and so forth.

It'll probably be a mix of fannish and original stuff: fanart, "fine" art, comics, photos and such. I don't know how much I'll actually end up using it, but I'm certainly having a lot of fun playing with it so far! Anyway, feel free to follow me if you like, though things might be a trifle disorganized until I figure out what I'm doing. :D