Project Updates

Just some more pictures to share before I snuggle off to bed. My new girl got herself a wig:

I also worked on the doll boots for Rienna today. This involved a sort of moccasin stitching on the sole. I've cut some cork to glue on the bottom later. I'll be painting the cork silver first though.

bottom view of soles

boots with sewn bottoms

I know picture quality is kinda PBBBTTTT but I'm always snapping low light pics with my tablet in my dungeon of a bedroom. When I'm more awake, I might take the time to post a tutorial on how I'm doing these boots. Not that I'm an expert, but it might help someone else brave a DIY.

Last pic is the white clay mold of the shoulder guards.

Hoping I can work on the breastplate sometime this month, but it's tough picking a day where I can work on it. Or that the cats won't mess with it...

So that's all for now! Off to bed! I'll keep everyone updated on the projects when possible.

Write What Will Never See the Light

I took a long hiatus...

From ambition, from discipline, from the ever-growing list of rules. Over the past month, I've indulged in reflection. I roughly sketch out ideas and doodles and steered clear of major projects with big goals. I carefully shopped for pieces of my doll project and contemplate what I might still need but they sit in a myriad pile of boxes unstaffed while the way I want to tackle them actually changes bit by bit with new inspiration.

I dream of changes to UnHeard's draft. Some I've added, some I'm still uncertain of and become notes. There's been no look at word count, no minding the words for an audience just yet. I reverted to private journaling because there is something stilted about many of these public posts that I couldn't quite place. Whether I was holding something back or struggling with the inability to keep to a topic, I'm not quite sure, but I do know that I needed to change gears.

I bought a second doll without finishing the first. As Rienna grew in my mind, I saw Talia warring for space to grow a physical form. No, not literally. I haven't decided to jump ship and talk about my characters as if they have a mind of their own. I simply thought of my early drawing of her, the wild flame of her dancer costumes, those blue eyes and fire engine red hair and knew she'd be cropping up in the scheme of things. 

I'd love to do a doll version of a male character but I find too many of the affordable male dolls are generic if not crude builds. The female bodies and faces are many and the males, if having any muscle detail at all, tend to be boyish. While some of my male characters are young, I want to realize the string mass, stubble and broad strength of my oldest characters more. I see Corvus or Eredin or the mercenary, the hardened bitterness of Melchior.

I might have loved the boyish characters when I was younger, but my scars have been more drawn to those creased and mature faces, those eyes that squint in caution and swallow light rather than wide-eyed and reflecting it. The female characters are their own enigma. They war with their youthful appearance, sometimes determined to show the strength of femininity, sometimes striving to be androgynous or childlike so that gender isn't the way people assume their roles. 

In a way, that's a piece of my struggle too. I didn't play with dolls because it's what girls were supposed to do. I don't exactly play with dolls now. I try to evoke from them all the forms womanhood can take in pain and triumph. To enjoy an aesthetic rather than model myself to it. To separate and join with a construct I still struggle to understand.

So things are moving much slower, but I haven't been fighting to catch a fast wave. Like all good things, it's not as wonderful when all of it is forcing the effort. In all my journaling that will never see the light of day, I find a few shiny bits that may after all. And remember not to treat every word so sacred.

Double Post Time!

I was going to think of some eye-rolling, groan-worthy pun for dolls to hint at the reason for jumping into another post, but pretend I did, just enough that you're not actually irritated but still motivated to keep reading.

I got one of my doll parts today for Project Rienna! In case you're just tuning in to my aimless blog, I'm going to attempt to make a doll version of my cover art character on my second book, The Truth about Heroes: Two Sides to Everything. In case you haven't read it, which is more likely true, it's a series that explores an array of magical themes, intertwined with the all-too-human struggle for truth and happiness in a world balanced between grotesque realities and prevalent hope.

Damn, Gina, why can't I blurb like that when I actually need to?

In any case, Rienna isn't exactly a favorite, unless you count her being a sentimental first since she was the reason why I started it. She's not particularly exceptional in deed or spirit. This wasn't made to be a hero character, already sure they wanted to save the world or right some wrong. She seems awkward, sometimes reckless, all to certain, as most young adults are, that the world just needs to be taught how to treat her and everything would be simple.

When Rienna starts to begrudgingly take on more, it has little to do with a moral sense of justice. She simply concedes to taking on burdens on her single-minded mission. She'd sooner go through or around obstacles and be done it with, but her cold resolution does clash with aspects of her character she isn't consciously aware of. She hefts another weight and continues on, if only for fear that inaction will make her face the consequences.

So yes, I have a soft spot for her, but I could say the same about any of them. For me, the decision to make a doll of her came from that cover art. While I'm never actually married to what my characters 'should' look like, I truly enjoyed creating an aesthetic for her cover art and it's that aesthetic that I wanted to carry over into another medium.

I'm not much of a painter so I did order a face-up for the head. It wears a softer more neutral expression than my cover portrays, but the lips, minimal makeup, and silver-grey eyes on the doll head were just too perfect. The eyebrows and eyelashes even have that hint of copper I wanted. Show, don't tell though, right?

I haven't yet liberated the head from the protective packaging since the body is still in transit, but I lifted the face guard to steal a quick picture of her.

So many doll heads tend to have the sad orphan look so I love that this one is just a neutral expression that isn't forcing a mood. It's easy enough for me to take pictures and digitally modify expressions to enhance a mood so an easily editable expression is preferred.

I don't have plans to be exactly faithful to the source image, of course. I'd like to get more detailed with ornamental work. While drawn armor can be physically unlikely, I'll have to design the clothes and armor to actually stay on and not hinder the body, as well as be removable as necessary. It will take a lot of critical thinking and adjustments. I'm no fashion designer and my sewing skills are only passing, so I'll have to learn a lot as I go.

Either way, I'm excited. A hands-on project is always an exciting prospect for me. I hope to be able to post some progress shots, maybe tutorials, as I go. At the very least, a project can always help people learn what not to do.

The Love Affair with Digital Drawing

I'm not sorry that I'll probably gush about my new display tablet high for a while, but I'd also like to continue to talk about the pros and cons I come across, as well as how I make lemons into lemonade.

I've talked before about how Macs, while often perfect for my needs, aren't exactly flawless. For one, any lingering updates often gum things up. My Macs are also almost a decade old so they're not exactly spring chickens. My display driver got temperamental with me a couple of times, but the fixes were easy enough that it was only a hiccup. So here are a few of those incidents:

1.  Pen stopped working, mouse worked fine- this actually wasn't just from the pen running out of juice. I switched pens and it persisted. I keep the driver option in my Dock so it's always accessible and opened it up. Without doing anything else, the pen decided to work again. I got this.
2. Mouse left click not working at all- couldn't figure this one out, even with mouse settings. Restarting fixed this one.
3. Mouse left-click works but drop menus don't stay open- this only seems to happen on the display screen. It don't want no mouse telling it what to do. Using the pen seems to be the only way it works properly. Not a huge problem, but when I'm flipping between the display and the Mac screen, it's a little inconvenient to switch around.

Not a problem if you're good at wrestling computers, but calling this a beginner's tablet is deceptive. There are some other issues I've seen people mention before but, again, nothing too distracting. Because of the extreme angles of the display as it spreads towards the edges, the parallax (that fancy word for the gap between the stylus tip and the cursor's actual place) starts to wander a bit. I don't often get anywhere near the edges anyway, and it's less than an inch of screen all around where the change is noticeable. If you're used to digital drawing, it's not unfamiliar. Hell, if you have a small mouse pad, you already know the unconscious lift and adjust fix. In this case, zoom out if you need more room for a fluid line or drag and recenter.

It's nothing like drawing on paper. However, using a digital display, especially a big one, teaches you how to adjust for that. Using a screenless tablet, I was constantly trying to turn it like paper, which does the exact opposite you think you want it to. There are certain motions in your wrist that make perfect circles more attainable, certain gestures you get used to that will need a different solution. You absolutely can rotate a digital page, especially easy if you set a rotary slide key to do so, but I've found it's better to simply train your digital hand differently, or make use of tools to utilize shape. Learn how to use vector shapes alongside freehand.

If you're a beginner, a new learning curve will usually feel like it's just making things take longer or is more difficult. The tutorials you watch will take ten minutes to show you the ins and outs of what should take a few seconds. And for an advanced user, it actually does go quicker. The things that you must do to accomplish it become auto-tasks but it takes a lot of practice and trial and error.

Artists aren't necessarily bragging when they call a complex looking piece a 'doodle'. Given, some are badly lying about how quick it was done, but a good deal of them have taken months, years, decades to achieve that kind of result. It wasn't just the ten minutes they threw down to do it, but the discipline and practice that connected the quickest routes to the problem.

It used to take me several hours just to color a picture digitally, and I'm talking just the base colors with little shading. Color basing typically never takes more than an hour for a full page piece now. The line drafting, again, generally takes me anywhere from five minutes to an hour, depending on the complexity. Shading and detailing is where artists tend to camp out most; looking at two to twenty hours for most pictures but can easily pile on to hundreds if they choose to keep playing. Customizing tools, filters and textures is another place that can wind on for a long time.

The time crunch is pretty inconsequential to how well it's done. The demands of the problem and the workflow can help, but a deadline can help or hurt the turn-out. I often toggle layers just to experiment, but don't keep them around for the final presentation. Sometimes I just want to try something out without risking the work already done. I'll duplicate shading layers if I'm tempted to overwork them, just because it's hard to come back from a shading experiment gone wrong without starting over. Best to preserve it at certain stages then hide the evidence of overwork elsewhere. Sometimes the difference is just between wanting a soft blend or a darker, starker version. I can switch between the two and decide which I like better.

Of course, there are brave artists who blend it all on one layer like you would with an actual painting. I'm never that brave. I'll keep my alternating blends separate but also flatten out the layers in a duplicate to do the final blend (catching anywhere the overlays do make multiple layers too obvious). Print will inevitably punish any of your glaring mistakes. Obviously, print only has a flat dimension so all digital paintings can't escape that one.

There are always 'better' ways of doing things. There's nothing wrong with being secure in your knowledge while maintaining an openness to learning a way better suited to the task. Beginners often get discouraged because they aren't instant prodigies. Or if they do start out successful, they don't improve because of overconfidence and rigidity in their workflow.

Being open to possible issues is a very important part of enjoying and improving digital painting. You can't just look at the big picture. There are so many steps, so many techniques, so many reasons why it's better to honestly assess what you don't like in order to avoid doing that again and again. I'm not sure why some artists are so shy about mistakes or formative work. Sharing them is a better opportunity to gain insight into taste and technique.

I'm not one for organizing videos but there are already tons out there to display the amount of work that goes into solving and optimizing a visual. Watched a particularly interesting one from a YouTube Channel called Jazza where the guy goes on Fiverr to commission people to draw particular pieces of art based on his quick sketch and it's quite interesting how some artists undersell their talents while others might be a bit overpriced, especially when they exclude certain elements asked for. It gave even me some insight into how important it is to consider the market value of what I produce. What someone pays should advertise what they can expect in the quality of work. Making that too unstable makes it more difficult to justify how much time you'll spend on a project.

Anyhoo, enough digital babbling. More to work on this weekend, both reading and drawing, but crossing my fingers it fuels my urge to write as well.