I made a video. Of me. Technically I made a video of how I make links for chainmail, but it includes both my stupid face and my awkward attempts to be engaging and informative, so one could call it a video of me.

[You can tell how good I am at this self-promotion thing, right? Let me try that again...]

Hey guys! If you’ve ever wondered how I make all my own links for my chainmail jewelry (yes, I do make every one of those little suckers by hand) I’ve just posted an Inksplot Studios tutorial video! It’s part one of a series of three videos, (parts two and three are on their way) and if you follow along you can create your very own chunky chainmail bracelet!

[Hmmm. Better. It may be suffering from an infestation of exclamation points, but at least it's not self-deprecating. Self-promotion is hard. And I think it's particularly hard for makers/artisans, who inherently focus on the flaws in their creations in order to improve. If you have an artist in your life, you may have noticed that we are, as a group, kind of needy. That's because we're incredibly self-critical. If we weren't, we wouldn't have gotten to be as good as we are at whatever we do. Changing that mindset in order to publicize the neat stuff that you make is.... shit, is there a more forceful word than 'hard'?]

Don’t worry, we’ll get back to art soon. But for the moment, it’s time for eggs.

If you were interested in any deliciousness YOU CAN’T HAVE ANY.  It’s all in my belly.

Preparation requires a few bowls and some patience, but the difficulty level is approximately equal to cookies.

You’ll need:

-12 eggs

- Dijon mustard, 1 tablespoon

- 2 tablespoons mayonnaise

- 2 finely diced green onions

- 2-4 tablespoons pickle relish. Or in my case diced cucumber, red wine vinegar, black pepper and dill, totaling about half a cup. (I like pickles.)

- paprika

Hard boil the eggs. (If you haven’t done this before, put the eggs in a pot. Barely cover with water. Bring to a boil, and boil for ten minutes. Then pour out the hot water, and replace with cold. When this is warm, fill it up again. Repeat until the eggs are cool.) Peel the eggs, slice in half vertically, and pop the yolks into a bowl. Set the egg-boat whites to one side.

Add the mustard and mayonnaise to the yolks, and use a fork to beat into homogeneity. Add the green onions and ‘pickles’. Mix, then use a spoon to fill the little egg-boats. When this is done, dash paprika over the tops. Eat!

Side salad recommended, but optional. A lemon/olive oil vinaigrette goes nicely with the eggs.

Om nom nom.

The premise of this week’s exercise is going to seem a bit like some kind of artist hazing ritual, but I promise there will be no incriminating photographs.

This is a copying exercise, which is a long standing and honorable learning technique that makes everyone a little nervous in the day and age of twitchily litigious copyright law. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain gives the classic ‘copy this great work in order to learn how it was done’ assignment a little… twist.

Yes. You are supposed to look at the image upside down, and copy it as-is. No turning it over before you’re done.

That tiny screaming sound in your head? That’s your left brain going ‘Nooooooooo!’ Which is the point. You want your left brain to get so frustrated with the task that it fucks off to go get coffee and lets your right brain do the job.

Edwards suggests that you make a conscious effort not to recognize any parts of the drawing as you are copying them. (No ‘okay, finished the collar, time for the head’. Just adjacent lines.) She also recommends that you begin at one edge and work your way across, rather than outlining and filling in.

Here’s my attempt.

Though I tried, I did not entirely succeed in telling my left brain to sit down and shut up. Occasionally I could not help but know the parts as I was drawing them. (Part of the skill I have developed as an artist is to recognize familiar shapes regardless of their orientation, so a noob would probably find this exercise easier than I did.)

Interestingly, when I did flip both pictures over, the best parts were the ones that I copied ‘on faith’, with no idea of what I was describing. Which I suppose proves Edward’s point.

Just for comparison, here’s the original and mine in a more easily analyzed orientation.

The art is A Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, by Pablo Picasso. But really any reasonably complex line drawing will work if you’d like to try the exercise with something different.

I’ve redecorated! D’ya like it?

Well, actually it’s bit more than simple redecoration. Because it seems I actually update my blog (well, occasionally anyway) I’ve decided to fuse my poor neglected portfolio website to its more popular sibling.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to update that portfolio a bit, and to provide a more obvious link to my etsy store. If you haven’t visited the store, (or if you have) I’ve just posted quite a few pictures of new jewelry which you should totally check out. More will be coming as I finish processing the heap of photos I took this weekend!

That’s not his full name of course. That’s a long embarrassing story for another time.

Jack is one of three main characters for a little comic I’m working on. More on that later, as I want to spend this post primarily talking about character design.

I’m trying something new with this comic. It’s called *designing* my characters, instead of just making them look like the first thing that falls into my head and looks mostly okay.¹

To that end, I’ve been doing research. Internet research! (Don’t worry, all links in this post are SFW) Here’s a little list of things I’ve been reading to flood my brain with quality, with notations on what I’m trying to learn from them.

- Family Man: I’m showing you the introduction rather than the homepage/current page because A) I don’t want to spoil things for you and B) later in the plot there’s some blood and boobies, and the current page has boobies. But what initially drew me to Dylan Meconis’s work was a talent for suspending disbelief of a visual exaggeration. Her main character has a physically impossible nose in an otherwise realistic setting, and you (the reader) accept it. This talent is fairly common among what is euphemistically termed speculative fiction (We called is science fiction in my day. Damnkidsgettoffmylawn.) But you don’t see it done visually very often. Additionally she does drool-worthy backgrounds. I’m still negotiating with myself the level of detail I’m willing to commit to replicating throughout a comic, and Dylan sets a pretty damn high bar. Annoyingly she is *also* a good writer, and knows how to balance textual versus visual information in a scene.

- Hanna is Not a Boy’s Name: I’m continually re-reading this one as an example of economy. (Also, I like the story.) Tessa makes lush settings with what appears to be a damn good grasp of color and the texture possibilities of digital media. Her pattern seems to be to give you a fairly detailed drawing of a setting, and then just echo the color palette after that unless some physical detail is relevant to the story. Sneaky, smooth, and temptingly less time drawing backgrounds.

Also the face practice block is modeled directly after some face practice for one of her own characters she posted to her gallery. These ‘mixed’ expressions are much more useful than the ‘primary’ facial expression charts I’d seen elsewhere. At the moment Jack’s body shape owes too much to reading through the entire archive of Hanna Is Not A Boy’s Name, I expect it to come back a bit toward my natural style with a little more practice.

- Gunnerkrig Court: This one starts off cute and a little clunky, but rapidly improves both in artistic merits and writing. It’s an old favorite to read, but what I’d really like to pick up from Tom is his use of selective detail. Objects that are  further away are simplified in a way that strongly mimics how humans actually use their eyes to focus. It has an effect similar to watching a 3-D movie: he can make sure your attention to what is in focus even in a visually complicated scene, and when everything is out of focus the words take precedence.

- Indistinguishable from Magic: If you don’t know Dresden Codak and are reading this, stop reading this and go read Dresden Codak.

Indistinguishable from Magic is Aaron Diaz’s blog, and honestly I read it because he’s so very much better at this than I am. And he clearly loves it. It’s out of my league to try to emulate him, but trying is a good way to learn. I actually decided to try and build my characters this time instead of the haphazard technique based on one of his posts about character design. So, um, thanks Aaron. This promises to be interesting.

¹Although if I’m to be fully honest, that is how this story got it’s start. I think it’s okay to let your subconscious chime in from time to time or give you a jumping off point, but I’m trying not to rely on it. See, the subconscious isn’t terribly original. There’s a lot of overlap for people that grow up in the same culture and even if you do have a few original ideas you’ll find them continually coming to the surface. It happens with all sorts of creative people: When it’s an actor people will sometimes say that they play the same character regardless of what movie they’re in. If it’s a writer, they seem to be telling the same story in every book even if the names and places change.

Relying on your subconscious (or you can say relying on your subliminal cultural assumptions, if you’re anti-Freudian) shouldn’t be confused with being *bad* at something. People who are just not so good tend to improve with practice, people who rely on their subconscious get less interesting the more of their work you see.

TLDR: Holy God, I did not sit down meaning to write that much. Feel free to just click the pretty links and figure it out for yourselves.

This is not the greatest comic in the world. This is just a tribute.
(For J. Harker)

Something a little different for you this week: A photo restoration.

This photo had a sad, sad life before it came to me. It was well loved however, as it must have been put in its frame fairly shortly after it was taken.  It was sandwiched into the frame with the frontpage of the newspaper Club Life, dated October 11th, 1890.

For those of you without a background in conservation, the operative word in the previous sentence is newspaper. Newspaper, particularly old newspaper, is full of all sorts of nasty reactive chemicals. By the time I got my hands on it, the newspaper had begun to dissolve under its own power.

As for the poor photo: At some point, the photo had become one with the glass. I’m not sure exactly what the chemical process was, but removing it was synonymous with destroying it. And that was the state of affairs when someone dropped it, and shattered the glass.

The owner brought it to me, and asked if there was anything I could do.  I blinked at her for a minute, and said I’d give it my best shot. The first order of business was to get it scanned, which was impossible in its current state. The photo had snapped along with the glass in some places, but was still intact in others.  The glass grated against itself every time I tried to move it, causing more damage to the glass and the photo. Flipping it over in order to scan it was out of the question. Also it was spitting glass slivers everywhere.

Painful as it was, I had to use a razor to finish the process of breaking the picture into pieces.  I scanned each piece separately, then I assembled them in Photoshop, which gave me this:

Thirty hours of work later, I gave this back to the client:

There are a few interesting things about this photo, beyond the reconstruction work.

First, it’s pretty clear that not everyone had the same idea about how to pose for a graduation photograph. The guys in the back are posed and proper, hats in hand, while others sit with either genuine or awkward informality. Most people look in the direction of the photographer, but others seem to deliberately stare somewhere else. Everybody agrees that smiling is bad, but that’s about the only consensus.

The Union College of Law later became the law school of Northwestern University.

Also, where the hell was this taken? A construction zone? An alley? Wherever it was, the guy lounging in the front felt obligated to put his handkerchief on the ground underneath him to protect his suit.

People knew how to put letters in their names in the 1890′s. Boy howdy. Here’s the best example, before and after.

Lastly, there are two women in the photo. One would have been unusual, and two is really something of a surprise.

The registry lists them as L. Blanche Fearing (to the left) and Mrs. Fearing.

That’s right. She has no first name, not for the likes of you, anyway. She is Mrs. Fearing. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Just to be clear – I’m not this calm, cool and collected. I also don’t glow.

Balancing work time with everything else time is something all artists have to hammer out for themselves. Well, other than perhaps the independently wealthy artists with no family obligations and a particular gift for benign self-absorption, but I digress.

My balance is a work in progress. I have two part time jobs that are not art related, and one that is. None of this includes ‘just for fun’ projects, i.e. stuff that is not directly related to making money. Like, say, this blog. There’s also life, of course: Car payments and Thanksgiving dinner with the inlaws and watching the Perseids.

I do alright at leaving the work I do at a remote location where it belongs, but I run into trouble with work I do at home. Chainmail and some drawings are ‘work’, but they are also fun, which complicates matters. Sometimes, I want to make chainmail, as it is genuinely relaxing. And sometimes I have a show coming up, so I feel like I have to make as much chainmail as possible before the deadline, then I work myself into a slightly tarnished and blistered bag of twitch.

My problem is saying no in a rational way that also allows me to get done what I need to get done. If chainmail is fun, I shouldn’t balk at doing it a lot, right? But then I’m ‘working’ in my relaxation time. And if I only ‘work’ when it’s fun, then I’m not treating it like a job, which is the level of dedication that it deserves, and that my taxes sort of imply I should devote.

…

Oh, I’m sorry, did you want a conclusion? As I said, it’s a work in progress.

I used to draw a LOT of horses.

For about four years, I drew practically nothing but horses, dogs, and dragons. Understandably I got good at drawing horses, dogs, and dragons. But when I reached the end of that stage and developed an interest in drawing people, I suddenly hit a wall. Though I’d developed a great anatomical understanding of animals, little of it applied to people. (Look, I think that people are animals. But there’s a big difference in musculature and movement between a digitigrade quadruped and a plantigrade biped.) It was like I’d lost about a year’s worth of gains in drawing skill just because I switched subjects.

That was a bit depressing, as you might imagine. But I kept drawing people and anything else that I was in the mood to draw, and I got better at it. As I got a bit older and a bit more varied in my drawing diet, horses gradually dropped out of my regular drawing rotation.

Ten years on, and now I’m on the other side of the same wall. I’m now much better at drawing people than I am at drawing horses, and it’s a bit depressing. When I sat down to draw this horse, it was sort of like my hand contracted a sudden case of terminally stupid.

Le sigh. Tortured artist is tortured, I suppose.

Welp, I’ve gone and dug myself a hole again.

See, I have in mind to do a little project. I self-published *coughKINKOScough* two trades of a comic in college, but I haven’t done much with the form since then. Of course now I’ve got a comic idea in my brain, and it’s not letting go. Unfortunately, this idea is relatively specific about the drawing style it wants.  And it’s not a style currently in my repertoire.  Dammit.

So I’m going to expand my repertoire. (And yes, that does hurt, even if you go slow.) I’m going to accomplish this by the time-honored tradition of copying until I understand how the hell the artist does whatever it is they do.

Today, I’m embarrassing both him and myself by attempting to learn the ways of Mike Mignola. Well,  Fritz Leiber as done by Mignola, anyway.