Drawing Strangers on the Internet: The Sequel

If you recall, in my last post about drawing strange people on the tubes, I mentioned that I had found two resources that were helping me practice a bit. The first one was a specific part of Reddit, and I neglected to mention the second one. Since I'm sure you were waiting with bated breath, wait no more!

The other really cool resource that I have been using to hone my meagre skills is a website called Selfless Portraits. The idea is that you submit your Facebook profile picture to be drawn by someone, and you draw one that is randomly assigned to you. The results are sometimes awesome, sometimes silly, and... well, sometimes it just doesn't work.

I'm not so great at likenesses, so I thought doing a few of these might be some good practice.

I am not really happy with this one, but doing the relief thing turned out to be way harder than I thought. My original idea was to draw him with a big creepy smile, a la A Clockwork Orange, but I think this is creepy enough.

This is definitely the one that I am happiest with, out of the portraits that I have done on this site so far. The face could be narrower, but I think the photo might be squashed, so it evens out. (That's what I am going to tell myself.)

This was the first one that I did, and man was I ever mad that my first one was a duckface. Turns out that they are really hard to draw, in addition to being weird looking!

And lastly, I of course must share the ones that others have drawn of me! I think it's a good likeness, no?

Star Trek: Into Darkness

I finally got around to seeing Star Trek: Into Darkness this week. My overall impression is that I really enjoyed it! It was pretty action-y, which usually isn't my cup of tea, but I found that there was always enough going on that I didn't get bored.

I understand that the hardcore Star Trek folks have some gripes about it, but I think that being a little less knowledgeable in that department may have worked in my favour. I didn't have any rage out moments related to inconsistencies or anything like that, but I am well versed enough to understand the role reversals near the end, and a bunch of the throw backs to the original series. It is a different timeline; things don't have to be the same. I can accept that as an explanation for any differences from the original series. At the same time I appreciate the parallels that they draw while keeping it fresh.

One minor gripe that I did have is that, as much as I love Benedict Cumberbatch, is he REALLY the right person to play Khan Noonien Singh? (Admittedly, the original actor that played him was Mexican, so who am I to judge?) Although, I do suppose it is possible that in the distant future names that we currently associate with a particular area of the world would probably not have that same association.

One MAJOR gripe that I had was that I had to watch it in 3D. The theatre that we went to had stopped showing the regular one. I should clarify that I hate 3D movies. A lot. Particularly ones that are done the way Star Trek is. The viewer is pretty much constantly bombarded with lens flares and light effects in the extreme foreground (that I probably wouldn't have thought out of the ordinary in 2D), as well as extreme foreground objects at the edge of the screen that cause your eyes (or mine at least) to start trying to focus past the edge of the screen. Another pet peeve of mine was rampant in this movie: switching focus between the foreground and the background. I know that this is a common technique in film, but it really messes with me in 3D, and I find it really distracting. If you are going to force 3D on me, at least let ME choose which layer I want to look at. I feel like 3D is rarely done well enough to not detract from a movie, let alone improve it. I would personally have preferred to watch the 2D version.

To change the subject and music-nerd out for a moment, I REALLY enjoyed the score of this movie. It stayed in the background when it needed to, and was super moving when it was called for. I particularly enjoyed the ending where they worked it into a revamped, epic version of the theme from the original series. I didn't think that I had ever heard anything by Michael Giacchino before, but upon looking into it, he also did the soundtrack of Up, which was wonderfully done as well.

As a whole, I really enjoyed the movie, when I was not being distracted by awkward lens flares in the front of my vision. The score was excellent, the pacing was good, it was not entirely guns and explosions as I suspected it might have been, and it was generally a very fun movie. Although, I will be the first to admit that cerebral it was not, and I feel like that is probably a flaw in a Star Trek movie, but you've got to please the masses with these things, I suppose.

Drawing Strangers on the Internet

Hey, I'm still drawing! Occasionally! Look at that!

I decided to bust out the tablet a couple of days ago and fight with the drivers and wrestle with GIMP long enough to actually get something done, so maybe I will have some things to post.

I recently discovered a couple of really good resources for practicing drawing people. One of them is r/redditgetsdrawn (or r/redditgetsdrawnbadly, depending on how I am feeling) where people post pictures of themselves or their loved ones and people draw them. I've done a couple of these, and they are good fun. Not a ton of work, but good practice for working on either likenesses or styles, or likenesses in different styles. The next few images are the product of some of those adventures.

This one was a person (who was really wearing a puffy sleeved dress!) who asked to be made into a Disney princess. I make no claims to be an animator, but I gave it a shot.

I got adventurous with this one and tried out colouring Questionable Content style. Turns out it is WAY faster, but I still need to get the hang of cell shading. And making line art that makes sense.

The mods made this guy promise that he was not going to use the product of this thread for an album cover. It was all a dark background and super moody looking... So I just drew his glowery face and it turned out looking kind of like Zachary Quinto.

This one is probably my favourite, since it is adorable. The person asked for her and her "Majestic Unicat" to be drawn. I really felt that the cat's expression could only be one thing.

Learning to Play... Again

I picked up my violin again today for the first time in a very long time. Months. More than months, maybe. To be clear, I don't know how to play the violin. That is a big part of the reason why I haven't played it in so long. It is frustrating and hard and does not make me happy. It hurts my fingers, and I never feel like I am making any progress because I have no idea what I am doing and I don't seem to ever get any better.

I have distinct advantages in the learning process: I know how to read music. I have a good pitch sense. I know, theoretically, how most instruments are supposed to work. I can pick up most any brass or woodwind instrument and be able to play twinkle twinkle little star in a matter of seconds. (But we're not going to talk about double reed instruments.)

But for some reason, stringed instruments completely elude my musical sense. The way they operate, the movements and positioning required, the idea that both of my hands are supposed to be doing something totally different... All of these things make stringed instruments totally foreign and confusing to me. And it is INCREDIBLY frustrating.

I put down the violin today after spending a solid half hour trying to figure out how to make a bow stroke that doesn't sound like a dying cat, with little to no progress. I am not used to this! I know that back when I first picked up an instrument I sounded like crap and my progress was slow and my tuning was awful and my sound was a disaster, but I had the patience for it back then. I was new; I was SUPPOSED to sound like crap. Since I have got good at what I do, I've been spoiled with being able to pick up an instrument and go with at least rudimentary skill. I've forgotten how to learn from scratch.

I think I may have just regained an insight into how people feel when they try and learn an instrument from nothing. I've just forgotten how to learn from the beginning. I think I will find a beginning method book and muddle through, ignoring the boredom and the frustration with the slow progress... Because most times you actually have to DO the hours of rudimentary crap in order to have any idea what you're doing.

If Money Were No Object

Jim Tigwell, over at Concept Crucible published a blog about what he would do if money were no object. He talks about why that was hard for him to consider, and why it's relevant at all. He mentions that, once you have done away with all of the things that you do because you have to do them to live, the things that you would choose to do are your big and outrageous dreams. If you don't ever think about the crazy things you would do with all the spare time and money in the world, you don't have any sense of what it is you really want to be doing. Once you have answered that question, you can then work towards it in a more everyday way than winning the lottery or becoming immediately independently wealthy.

This of course got me thinking about what I would do, and I, like Jim, found it a very hard question to answer, though probably for a different reason. The reason that I found it hard to answer is because I would want to do ALL THE THINGS. Everything. Systematically.

I agree with what Jim said on creating things; I am also a creator, so I would write despite incompetence, I would make bad art and  play great music poorly, I would make inane videos and sing constantly, and I would get better at all of those things. But rest assured, before I was done getting any good at any one of them, I would decide that now is the time to learn French. Before I was halfway fluent I would decide it's the time to go on a walkabout and spend a month walking a trail alone. (Since that one is hard to bail on in the middle, I would probably finish that one.) After that I would become obsessed with yoga for a while and then realize that I had forgotten all about my passion for knitting, and start doing that again. Then maybe I would start working my way through my veritable library of a to-read pile. Or I might learn to joust. After that: Who knows? Maybe I would take hang gliding lessons. Or visit Mozambique or Bangladesh or Ireland or Antarctica. Maybe then I would enroll in a dozen University classes just because they sounded neat.

Anyway, the point I am getting at is that there is a big part of me that just wants to absorb every experience imaginable and learn any skill that I can get someone to teach me. I just never feel like I have the time or the resources. So maybe I should just find a way to do all of these things, one at a time, at a more reasonable rate than I would if I had all the money and time in the world. A part of me also wonders what it says about me as a person that I would flit from one thing to another indefinitely, if given the opportunity, but that is a bit of pensivity for another day.

I'll end my little babble here on the same note that Jim ended his: Think about it. What would you do? ...Well, maybe you should work on that.