Rat Creature's Journal

I'm wondering what other people do with their preliminary sketches and stuff. For each actually finished piece of fanart I end up with a pile of more or less awful and hideous half abandoned sketches, rough composition doodles, sketches to work out body parts, perspective, color, textures, sometimes just a couple, sometimes dozens and more. I have packrat tendencies in general, so it is hard for me to throw things out, but otoh, what do I need a pile with failed sketches of mishapen half-finished stuff for, once I have finished the work?

So I'm curious what other people do:

Once upon a time -- as reckoned in internet years, in reality in September 2007 -- I started a community called slothsdraw on IJ as a place for regular drawing practice, especially for people who have trouble sticking with their resolutions to draw more often. The reason I started it on IJ was that this was in the wake of LJ's Strikethrough debacle, and LJ's policies over what counted as unacceptable artwork (then even murkier and unclear than now) made me uncomfortable with the idea of creating a drawing community on LJ. Anyway, it never really took off -- I guess in part due to the target group being people who lack motivation *G* -- and has been inactive for a long time now.

I still thought that some of the exercise prompts and resources posted there might be interesting for others, however IJ has a policy to delete inactive accounts and though I reactivated the community there last time this happened, that's less than ideal to archive stuff. So I reposted these to a comm on DW, also called slothsdraw, for a more permanent home. (Obviously for all past responses not made by me you need to head over the IJ comm.)

I actually have no concrete plans for slothsdraw on DW, but the last days people joined (I assume they did an interest search or the like and the comm came up), so maybe activity there could revive. In any case for now there are seven sets of drawing prompts to pick from, so people can post responses to those if they like. And if there is some actual activity there also could be new prompts or discussion of a more open format as just a place to post practice drawings.

Anyway slothsdraw is present on DW now. Maybe it will be less dead than the IJ counterpart. Or not. But at least it won't get into trouble for its sloth-like inactivity. Membership is just moderated so that posters who prefer to show their practice drawings locked can have that option, without immediate and open joining undermining this, but anyone can join. More details are listed in its profile.

My Open ID got picked in their invite code lottery, so now I have a proper Dreamwidth account.

I'm going to crosspost everything just like I have been doing to LJ and IJ (and my occasional fanart also to my art blog and dA), and you can follow my stuff and comment wherever you like and won't miss anything that's not a result of site options differing for me (e.g. as I have a paid account on LJ, I can post polls here but not on IJ, so I can only link in these cases, also icons may differ). As of yet I'm still undecided whether I'll pay for a premium paid account on Dreamwidth after it really opens to keep the extras (not so much because of the money as the money transfer logistics).

Because the DW layout options are still so limited in their closed beta (the easy ones anyway, I've seen arcane tutorials, but haven't tried those yet), I currently much prefer reading my f-list on LJ, and also to comment on LJ, because I can't actually follow the threading in the styles easily on DW either.

The importer however worked fine for me, so my past content is now mirrored on DW. Though I have no idea why the number of entries on the profile differs from the ones in LJ. I just spent ages manually cross-checking my archives, trying to figure out which entries had been skipped, but they seem to be all there.

Does anyone on my f-list speak French and could tell me why this LJ entry has one of my HP drawings hotlinked? (It's one of illustrations I did for Beth's In From the Cold.) I noticed this a couple of days ago when I looked at my website referrer logs. Unfortunately my webhost doesn't let me disable hotlinking in the usual ways you see in anti-hotlinking tutorials, and so I tend to just ignore the occasional random hotlinking from outside fandom (usually it's some jerk that includes my stuff in their "ew, someone draws superheroes gay" lulz, so there's no hope of fixing that) but this seems to be from within fandom, and somehow that makes it different for me. So two days ago I commented there and asked the poster in English to not hotlink my artwork, but it had no effect so far, and they posted in their LJ after this time, so presumably it's not a matter of internet absence over some prolonged holiday break or something. Sigh.

From what I gather the entry seems to be some sort of meta fiction in which the poster talks to the characters about a WIP and the poster is using my art as some sort of story illustration? But I'm not sure. (Gah, why has all my French knowledge vanished? I guess that happens when you don't use a language for a decade.) Anyway if it's used as fiction illustration it would be doubly annoying, because I drew this specifically for Beth's story, and don't really want to see it with random fanfic, meta or otherwise. Also, it's just rude to hotlink.

I guess I could move the file, but that would mean fixing links in at least four places (my own website, LJ, IJ, and my art blog), and that is annoying. The profile has messaging enabled so I could try that on top of my comment, or would that come across as nagging and I should just give more time? OTOH it can't take two days to get an LJ entry edited.

Anyway, this makes me cranky. I'm not even mentioned by name or got a link in the entry, so besides my sig on the art there's no credit given either, nor any way for me to hear if people who see my art there like it. *disgruntled*

I have been awfully quiet lately for no particular reason except feeling somewhat down and uncommunicative, and incapable of producing interesting content. Also, public commitments to fanart projects -- now already ages ago in internet time -- don't really seem to counter sloth sufficiently in my case, sorry about that, I kind of suck wrt creative output right now.

Anyway to come back to my subject line, besides squeeing over the SCC finale -- but feeling too much like "flail!!" to produce any interesting or coherent thoughts about it, but there better be a third season or at least a lot of long fanfic exploring things -- and playing online flash games, I have also rewatched a whole bunch of Joan of Arcadia episodes recently. I've never read fanfic for the series when it first aired, but now I'm wondering whether anyone on my f-list knows where to find good JoA fanfic or has any recs. I looked at crack_van but don't see any there. I thought it can't hurt to ask before I venture on my own to look whether any of the JoA on ff.net is good.

First, the sticksandsnark challenge entries have been posted. So there's lots of good Rodney and Teyla stuff. This year's masterlist is here. In particular I want to point you towards Your Mouth As Some Surprise by Siriaeve (Rodney/Teyla, 9,400 words), which is an awesome story with Rodney and Teyla stranded in a Pegasus monastery for a while. It's my favorite of the entries I've read so far. Also check out Astrid's gorgeous drawing.

Second, because compiling lists is a great way to procrastinate while still giving yourself the illusion of accomplishing something, I posted yet another SGA thematic list, this time of all SGA wingfic I could find. I also listed some art, but it's not yet nearly as comprehensive for that, because I don't bookmark fanart as much. As usual if you know of stuff I missed, please link me. I've also updated several of my other SGA thematic lists recently.

Third, I did not actually forget about the results of my previous "what should I draw" poll from a while ago. The results when I last checked were a three-way draw between the SGA/Avatar fusion option, the gothic/steampunkish SGA mad scientist AU, and the Dresden Files illustration. Of these I have the clearest idea about the SGA/Avatar fusion, so I've decided to go with that first, and draw Ronon as Firebender. I'm just (unsurprisingly) kind of slow making actual progress on this (and procrastinating via thematic list compilation, as seen above). Anyway, this is my public commitment to that project, still following my theory that public statements about WIPs might help in overcoming my lazy inertia.

With my last drawing committing to a fanart WIP in public to overcome my inertia seems to have worked, so I thought I'd try it again. Only I haven't started any of my other ideas yet, though I have some very preliminary, scattered scribbles for a couple, and have mulled over others for a while. Anyway, I thought I'd ask which of these ideas I should pick next (there is a poll below, but some of the descriptions for my ideas were too long for poll fields, so had to do that separately):

• the next portrait in my SGA/Avatar fusion series which was supposed to be a set but never got past Teyla as a Waterbender. Options would be Ronon as Firebender, John as Airbender, or Rodney as Earthbender
• Bug!John
• John as Athosian
• a sort of gothic/steampunkish SGA AU idea I have, in which the Wraith experiments are somehow more technological (like Frankenstein) and Rodney is sort of a mad scientist, or maybe Carson and Rodney working together. The problem with this is that I like the creepy steampunk science idea, but am not really clear what underlying scenario would work
• drawing a canon scene from the Dresden Files books, possibilities would be Dresden calling Erlking or riding the dinosaur (from Dead Beat), the ritual preparation, with Dresden kneeling (from Proven Guilty), Dresden and Ramirez preparing for battle, or the scene with Dresden and Michael fighting the baboon monsters at Union station (from Small Favor)
• a canon illustration Elemental Magic series, from early in Earth Magic, Zanja by fire light reading her cards
• an injured Daredevil, possibly in a Catholic church

You can comment or vote in this poll (though as usual with these things, there's no guarantee that I really stick to the poll results, or even produce anything):
(The poll is only at my LJ, because I can't do polls here, you can vote there or just comment here.)

Two months of the year over, and I have yet to finish any fanart. This is very dissatisfying. It's not that I don't have ideas or time, but more that my mood and motivation have sucked like a black hole recently. :(

That I tend to browse news sites to procrastinate probably doesn't help this, seeing how these usually put me in the mind frame to hide under a blanket in a miserable ball of anxiety and dread. (At the very least I got to stop reading business news. Case in point, last night I dreamed about a ton of squalid discount stores opening in some former luxury hotel, followed by a rain of fire from the sky. My subconscious has not heard of "subtle".) And of course not finishing or posting anything only makes me feel worse in a downward spiral.

Anyway, I thought I'd try mentioning a fanart project in public for added pressure, because some sort of commitment to stuff sometimes works to overcome my sloth. So: I have actually started working on the next picture of my HP series of magical creatures, a diricawl because that got a vote in the poll I did, and I already drew the redcap that was the only option with two votes. (It turns out not many people have an opinion on which HP magical creature I ought to draw next.)

So far I just have the basic idea for the scene, and some rough sketches. The plan is to draw a diricawl as it looks at the puff of feathers that is in the place of another one that has just vanished, and some predator or predator's eyes visible in the undergrowth in the background. And like the rest of the series in done in ink as book illustration.

Now I just hope the public commitment works...

January
a dragon (original fantasy art)
February
Iskierka's hatching (Temeraire fanart)
illustration for Beth's In From the Cold (Snape/Shacklebolt, HP fanart)
a Sarah Connor ratcreature icon
March
illustration for Trinityofone's Dæmonology (SGA/His Dark Materials fanart)
April
Junkie!Roy (DCU fanart)
May
Sheppard & Steampunk!Puddlejumper (SGA fanart, done for the paintedspires fest)
Bowtruckle (HP fanart)
Teyla as Waterbender (SGA/Avatar: The Last Airbender fanart, done for the paintedspires fest)
June
Nothing. :(
July
Nothing. :(
August
Nothing. :(
September
a tentacle rape and a steampunk ratcreature icon
various drawbles based on prompts, some fannish, some not
October
a Linus ratcreature icon
November
John Sheppard Halloween '75 (SGA fanart, done for the paintedspires Halloween challenge)
Matthew sketch (DCU fanart)
Red Cap (HP fanart)
some doodles (an US election themed doodle, a werewolf, a dinosaur with a raygun, a baby cthulhu, a monster, a vengeful teddy bear)
a Minbari ratcreature icon and a nitpicking ratcreature icon
December
some sketches based on prompts (Travolta!furry, steampunk!Batmobile, dragons, Sheppard, 'cheese eats mouse')
Merlin and Arthur ratcreature icons
Christmas doodle (SGA/Merlin/Numb3rs fanart)
and finally the not yet revealed Yuletart art.

There was a sad lack of any art production for several months in summer, however overall I posted more fanart than in 2007, especially when just counting the fully fledged art. Also I started using acrylic paint to color, and found it much easier (and more error tolerant) than my sad attempts to use watercolors ages ago. And while messy and somewhat time intensive, I think my attempts with that look better than my digital coloring.

I tried doing this meme where you list your favorite work, your most surprising work and so on, but I couldn't come up with any answers for half the things, so I gave up.

After years in fandom I finally got my very first anti-slash flame. It kind of feels like a milestone, because I've never before been flamed for artwork that I recall (only trolled in discussion posts). Though I guess it's not surprising, considering how non-prolific I am. Also not actually drawing slash all that often.

Anyway the flame is such classic too, all capslock and typos with profanity accusing me of disrespecting the characters (as far as I can gather amidst the typos and incoherency). Though I guess I can't actually take full credit, as it was for my illustration of Lucy's Nightwing/Superman story Secrets. *waves* I'm almost tempted to let it out of the moderation queue (it came via my wordpress fanart blog) to commemorate the occasion, but not quite.

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.