Rat Creature's Journal

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 )

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.

With all the posts about yuletide and some fans pimping the newly created yuletart (a fanart holiday exchange for all fandoms except HP), I've been thinking about signing up for the latter, but then I read the rules for the sign-up, which ask you for offering to draw in at least ten fandoms, if I understand the sign-up correctly.

The form is a bit oddly phrased, it asks for "At least 5 fandoms you would like to get art of:", "At least 5 fandoms you want to get art of the most:" and then "Any other fandoms you would be willing to give art of:", which is unfortunate, since first, it assumes that I'm able to offer in all fandom which I'd like to receive, which has to be bad for matching too, because I'd be more than happy to get art in a dozen fairly popular live-action fandoms which I don't draw in, and second I have to come up with ten fandoms I can draw in, which is a high number. I mean, I think yuletide only asks for a minimum offer of three fandoms for people to write in, even if most people seem to offer more. At least that high number makes sense for better chances to match people, with the fandom choice being wide open like this, so I can understand it.

But I don't think I can reasonably offer that many. While I do have many fandoms, I don't draw in live-action fandoms, so those are all out. That leaves only my comic and book fandoms, and okay, the main universes of Marvel and DC comics I can do, and to fill this out a bit more I could maybe count Sandman as separate fandom, then there's Dresden Files, and maybe LOTR, though I never tried drawing that before. And I've drawn Muppets already at least once so I guess I could do that, though I'm not that familiar with all of the canon or the movies and such, but still that's only six. I don't do a manga-influenced style so that leaves out Avatar, too. Maybe Watership Down? I mean, I've never actually read the book, just watched the movie, though I've always wanted to, but I think I could read it and manage rabbits. Perhaps Temeraire, otoh I suspect I'd suck at drawing the dragons, and worse, period costumes and stuff would probably need a lot of research. I have no clue about that stuff and never even watched any of these Age of Sail movies, so offering that would probably lead to disappointing disasters as result.

Sigh.

I suspect I should really clean my desk more often. In a half-hearted attempt to clear some space I unearthed a notepad that apparently functioned as some kind of all purpose notes thing ca. 1994. When I started to read I found a weird mix of a dream diary, some fragments of comics theory, lists of library signatures, some lecture notes on Maria Medici(?) from something I can't even remember listening to, a draft for a comic, some to-do itinerary notes (I think) from a comic con, some notes on what must have been a panel at said con, but I can't figure out what it was about (something about deconstructionism and historical imagery and noir archetypes? wtf?), some notes for a high school thing on Nazi university and science politics, I think... It's kind of hard to make sense of because the random notes are all mixed, so you have sudden switches from dream diary to lecture notes to comic ideas... like a strange written time capsule.

...which of course conveniently procrastinates any actual drawing practice. *g*

Anyway, after my last post I thought a bit more about getting back into the habit of drawing regularly, and I don't think just looking for a random list of prompts somewhere is going to work for me. When talking about this in the comments of my previous post I realized that I'm kind of looking for the online equivalent of an informal drawing group.

( cut for length, to spare the uninterested f-list )

So I thought I could do a poll to gauge the interest in such a community (btw, if I were to create such a comm it would be most likely on IJ because of 6A/LJ's recent polices wrt artwork, that make me uncomfortable with the idea of creating a drawing community on LJ).

Since I can't create polls here, and prefer the results in one place as well, the poll is in the LJ version of this entry. (if you don't have an LJ account to vote but are interested just comment somewhere, sorry!)

After seeing all the IBARW icons around, I've been trying to come up with an idea for an anti-racism icon that would fit with my icon theme, but so far I've kind of failed. Looking at my existing icons I'm even conspicuously lacking in icons of my avatar dressing up as COC. I have only a Teyla!RatCreature, and I haven't yet done the Ronon one I planned to complete my SGA team set (+ Wraith!RatCreature). Maybe I could be generous and count my Che!RatCreature too...

I never really thought about this until today, but in my icon set COCs (okay so there's no plural warranted yet, but I mean in principle) are also white through the design, which is that my creature avatar for fandom icons generally dresses up as different characters rather than icons showing images of the actual media characters themselves. "Blackface" disguises wouldn't be an appropriate design, so the idea to give my Teyla!RatCreature a different skin color didn't seem right to me. Though I actually didn't reflect about it much when I drew her. So it's just clothes, and I guess potentially hair, but most other "ethnic" features are kind of out with my avatar not being really human.

Actually looking closer I have to revise that statement, I do change my avatar's eyes making them narrower and slanted to varying degrees to make it look "evil", which is of course a fairly common cartoon technique. I'm not actually sure how much of that is racist stereotyping, because of the way that "cartoon eyes" don't work like actual human eyes. I mean, it's not like Asian people's eyes are actually positioned differently in the face when you draw them, they just appear slanted because the epicanthic fold reaches lower and some Asian eyes have a single fold eyelid rather than a double-fold one, so the area that's visible of the eyeball changes a bit, but human eyes have obviously a "fixed axis" what with being in a bone socket, and what changes for expression is the eyebrows. However for *cartoon* eyes to convey expression their axis is often changed like that of the eyebrows (though more subtle) to make the overall expression more intense. So for an angry look you don't just change the eyebrows, but actually tilt the axis of the eyes (you can see that when looking at Donald Duck cartoons, his character uses the eye-axis thing to great effect, you can look at classic model sheets explaining this effect this entry in an animation blog), and of course you make them narrower, because humans narrow their eyes in anger, and for happy, laughing eyes you change the axis of the eyes in the opposite direction. But looking closely I actually do draw the corners of the eyes differently for the evil characters as well, if you look at my Voldemort!RatCreature, my Sith!RatCreature and the WraithRatCreature. Umm, well, I don't know.

However, the only times my avatar is a different color are the aliens, that is the "Roswell/Gray Alien" type icon, which I made gray for obvious reasons, and the Wraith one, which ended up gray, because I wanted its hair look really white in contrast. Anyway, apparently I have no trouble changing its color then, but all the "human representing" creature versions have the same "skin" color (or maybe fur color, to be honest in my design it's not quite clear how much fur they have). In the rare color drawing containing my avatar (like this card) that color is actually a light gray, sometimes a light blue-ish gray, because that looks better than no color, so it's not really any kind of human skin tone. (I'm just pointing this out so that you don't imagine my avatar some kind of horrible light pink or something in a color drawing when I say that it is "white", that would just be ugly on it.)

So do you have any ideas for icon anti-racist motifs that would work?

Since I've seen a couple of people getting accounts here, I thought I might as well. Besides, I just had to use this place-appropriate incarnation of my avatar as default icon. Not that it doesn't fit anyway, because, do I really need another journal? *g*

However, unless I can find a client that allows me to easily crosspost to several accounts, content is for now still going to be posted at my LJ.