Rat Creature's Journal

I don't often link to random stuff I've come across, but this dragon sand sculpture is very impressive. Here's a photo from another angle where you can see the baby dragon the big one is cradling.

Not fanfic, but art: Charles Schulz's Watchmen by Evan Shaner. Go look, it's great.

Though I don't draw professionally or even all that often, I still have a habit of collecting interesting visual things for reference or inspiration. Even with libraries and these days internet image searches it is not easy to find the exact kind of interesting picture you need when you need it, or sometimes you don't even know what exactly it would be you need to realize some vague idea. Or at least it is like that for me, so if I come across something that is visually stunning, unusual, interesting, seems like a good inspiration, or a possible reference for something I might draw some day I keep it.

Like, if I'm at a used book store, I habitually look if there's a bin of old cheap National Geographic or other travel magazines and leaf through them to see whether any have cool photographs, if I see an interesting picture on the internet I will safe it, and so on.

Obviously after a time this results in an organizational problem if you ever want to find anything again. So I'm wondering how others deal with this.

It's not so bad with the books, I just have a shelf with books I got for their pictures, like for example collections of photographs from the 1920s, 30s and so on, books of animals, places, people, cars, design... It's harder for the magazines because things like National Geographic aren't topic specific, so I never know whether I decided to keep some issue for pictures of some place or some animal, or even whether it was in the title article. Which makes finding things again a bit harder.

Digital stuff is the least problematic in some respects, because I have created a bunch of folders labeled by topic for photos (reference for buildings & cityscapes, landscapes, actions, clothing, animals, plants, objects, symbols, textures,... with some having subfolders) and some other folders for art by other people, and yet another set of folders for fandom character reference, so it's not hard to find which folders to browse. The main problem is that I don't always know where I got some image from, because it's so much easier to just save a picture than to save it and add something to its meta-info field. That isn't a big problem if I just use it as inspiration or reference some parts of it, but if say a landscape photo was to serve as main reference for a drawn background I might want to acknowledge that, yet often by the time I use something I have no idea where it came from anymore.

Photos I've taken myself before having a digital camera are more of a mess, because those are mostly in big boxes, and most are kind of boring holiday photos with some cool landscapes and animals scattered inbetween. But the worst are the boxes of, well I guess "junk" fits, i.e. stuff I've kept for because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Much of that is also paper, like exhibition catalogs, flyers that looked interesting, clippings from newspapers or magazines, posters, but there's also stuff like feathers with a nice pattern, stones, tins, even some bit of metal that rusted in an interesting way, and so on. I mean, I try to keep the non-paper junk down to one box or so, because I really don't need to go down the road of people who end up smothered by their packrat piles collapsing on them, but well, I'm not a very tidy person to begin with, so it's an uphill battle. I guess what I really need would be del.icio.us tagging for RL objects and/or a physical search engine, but I fear that level of virtual home and computer merging is still a way off into the future.

So, how do you deal with organizing your reference and inspirational collection so that is actually useful for you rather than a pile of messy clutter? Do you have some kind of system? Or just really good spatial memory?

( spoilers for SGA 4x20 )

Totally unrelated to SGA I learned a new piece of trivia today: I've always been vaguely puzzled by the color name "ivory black" because it seemed contradictory (ivory not being black and all). Then today I happened to look at the label on the back of a tube of acrylic ivory black, one that went into all kinds of technical detail that I have no idea what it means (it has some kind of numbers for hue, value, chroma and codes for the pigments and symbols for opaqueness and lightfastness and so on) but also had a list of ingredients and apparently that black is made from charred animal bones. Hence the name "ivory black".

And I get that historically, though I'd have thought that by now the color would be synthetic. I mean, it's not they are still grinding up lapis lazuli for ultramarine (well, I guess there might be people who are into restoration and such and make their colors themselves from scratch with pigments or specialty producers who still do that, but usually it's synthetic these days). So it's kind of gross that they still use animal bones, but that what the tube says in its ingredient list under the "vehicle: acrylic polymer emulsion" there's "pigment: amorphous carbon produced by charring animal bones". So I'm using the same pigment as my prehistoric ancestors, I guess, only in a prepared polymer solution rather than charring some hunted mammoth's bone myself. Still in my mind "gross" kind of wins out over "artistic connection across millennia of history".

I'm not sure whether there's even any interest, because the painting itself got less comments than usual for my fanart posts, so I guess there will be ever fewer interested in the unfinished inbetween stages. But I already made the photographs after all, so I decided to go ahead with the art process post.

( very image heavy )

Because some people find the production process interesting, I decided to do a sort of "making of" post. If you'd just like to see the finished fanart, go here.

( very image heavy )

Subject: some random dragon
Media: pencil, fine liner pen with waterproof indian ink, acrylic paint, a bit of color pencil
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: ( lengthy notes on my process, because this is the first time I used acrylics to color a drawing and felt rambly, feel free to skip if you just want to look at the picture. )

Preview:

( the finished drawing and a detail of the head in a larger size are behind the cut )

Subject: some random dragon
Media: only pencil so far
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: I deprived my rats of some of their usual hours of outside time and managed to finish the pencils of a dragon without anyone eating my kneaded eraser. I'm planning to ink and color it with traditional media, since my tablet suffers from rat damage-- as long time readers may recall from previous whining entries.

While I managed to tape the chewed through cable together, somehow this works less well for the strands of USB cables than for power cords, and it behaves oddly now and craps out on me frequently.

Anyway, I thought it best to preserve the pencils before I ruin it through inking without an undo function as safety net. I included close-ups of some of the details, seeing how I bothered to add the suggestion of scales and such details, you might as well see them properly.

Preview:

( pencils behind the cut )

I'm at home rather than at a party, mostly because I'm not much of a party person but it also has the advantage that I can soothe my rats through their first New Year's Eve explosions experience. So far they seem thoroughly unconcerned with all the loud noises and flashes outside, but then they usually are pretty good about distinguishing sounds outside that don't bother them and ones coming from the inside, that may pose a threat. Actually I'm wincing far more often than they at some of the sudden really loud fireworks.

So I thought I'd occupy myself with listing the stuff I drew this past year. Overall I have posted even less art in 2007 than in 2006, especially full fledged artwork. However I managed to draw a bunch of drawbles and such on request, and also did some drawing exercises, though the latter not as regularly as I intended to. I guess my New Year's resolution will be to restart posting exercise suggestions to slothsdraw, and to actually do them regularly myself this time around, rather than just one or two in a haphazard fashion.

Anyway, here's a chronological list of all things I've drawn this year:

( list of all fanart, drawbles, icon creature doodles, and exercises I drew and posted this year )

So in conclusion, if I extend "drawing" to include all doodles, icon sketches and drawing exercises, no matter how quick or lame, I have drawn and posted something almost every month. If I only count "proper" artwork, my output was far less, but at least I tried a couple of new things, especially digitally, and I made an attempt to practice more regularly, even if my slackerdom caught up with me again quickly.

So here's a post of all the monsters I've done for people giving me prompts in the previous entry, plus five more random monsters I've drawn.

( 13 monsters )

marinarusalka asked for "items accidentally left in the back seat of the Metallicar" after I already posted the other drawbles.

My rat Ben celebrated his second birthday today, which is a respectable age for a rat. His health isn't the best anymore -- he's gotten thinner and also he has a mycoplasma lung infection that is antibiotics resistant by now (last time the vet tried to push it back only one antibiotic of several even worked, and still his breathing sounds didn't get that much better, while on the downside at the end of over three weeks of daily injections he had skin lesions from reactions to the antibiotic solution, and he lost weight, I guess because the long progression of antibiotics wasn't great for the friendly digestive tract bacteria). So he makes ugly breathing sounds sometimes, but he isn't gasping for air or anything for now, and he still likes to come outside to run around a bit and snuggle with me. He also still hisses at Krümel when they see each other through their cage sections, so for now he's doing okay despite the mycoplasma, and I hope he'll be with me for a while longer still. Anyway, he is very sweet with humans, recently decided that likes to sleep inside my t-shirt while I'm sitting somewhere with my laptop, and would probably like me more if I cooked him his favorite foods (a tie between scrambled eggs and cooked rice) every day, rather that to expect him to eat rat food.

Here's a list of the drawbles I've completed based on the prompts you gave me:

• purelyironic asked for "John+Rodney kissing in a puddlejumper"


• _inbetween_ asked for "something having at least John Sheppard in it"


• thete1 asked for "a suggestive pile of discarded weaponry/accessories"


• lcsbanana asked for "a furry-creature-type Doctor"


• buggery asked for "J'onn wearing his 'John Jones' trenchcoat (but with at least some of his aaalien showing, either shape-wise, or with his skin being green, or the eyes -- or all three) caught mid-conversation with Officer Dick Grayson"


• imadra_blue asked for "Anakin and Obi-Wan art"


• pho999 asked for "a leprechaun squidbaby"

I'm vaguely dissatisfied that I haven't drawn in ages, but whenever I think about doing the actual fanart stuff I have ideas for I go "eeep!", hide and turn into a lazy sloth (more so than usual even). So I thought I could maybe do some much less intimidating quick drawbles and practice drawing with my tablet besides.

The last times I offered drawbles it was based on interests, but seeing that many (myself included) have deleted theirs since, I thought I could offer to draw from prompts instead (though I'll stop short on actually promising delivery, though I'll try).

Don't expect to get great quality art -- I mean if I was in the frame of mind to have the concentration and attention span for proper drawings I hope I'd work on some actual fanart -- more like doodles. To give an example, say you had prompted me with "teddy bear + tentacle rape" you might get something like this:

( possibly not worksafe, depending on your work place's policies on squids with teddy bears, but well, there's no naked *people* and no genitals, so make of it what you will, it's less explicit than Marvel's cover images anyway )