art questions

[egypturnash]

One of those surveys that creeps around LJ. Like most of them. I suspect it reveals as much about the person who wrote it as the person taking it...

Maly's drawing-tastic art survey

What is your favorite subject to draw?

Monster dykes.

What is your most common choice in 2-d media?

Adobe Illustrator.

Anything you refuse to draw?

Obsessive detail.

Real anatomy or cartoon physics?

Somewhere between the extremes of "every muscle" and "rubber hose".

Which is more important - solid inking skills or solid color theory?

Which is more important, eggs or elephants?

The truth is that "solid inking skills" are a need that grew out of the need for imagery that could be easily reproduced with really shitty production methods. If you want to be able to reproduce your art quickly and cheaply, you need to learn how to make stuff work in black and white, without fiddly detail that'll blur out.

I've never had any formal color theory training. My inking is modelled either on Steadman or Hergé; I've never learnt to do bold, weight-suggesting inks. I'm more interested in the shapes than in the edges.

For what I do, color is far more important than inking. I never much liked inking, and have evolved a workflow that avoids it whenever possible. That 24-hour comic attempt was the first thing I'd done in ages as inks over pencil underdrawing.

Photoshop or PSP? Illustrator or Painter?

Wait, wait, wait, how is Illustrator some kind of either/or option with Painter? Eggs or elephants again.

Paint Shop Pro isn't an option for me because there's no Mac version. Mostly I only use Photoshop for scanning.

I've dabbled with Painter and enjoyed it, but I'm really addicted to infinite scalability.

Markers - Prismacolor or Tria?

Whichever is on sale. All I ever buy is black; I've never warmed to markers as a medium. Too damn expensive.

Paints - oils, acrylics, or watercolors?

I've never tried oils, but I suspect I'm too impatient. I keep wanting to grab some gouache and go wild. Acryllics are a bitch to keep from drying on your palette; I used to like watercolors but it's been years.

Have you ever done a stippling project outside of art class?

No. I'm not sure I had to do one in class.

Ever imitate a popular style of art? (anime, disney, comic book...)

Not as the whole of "my style", but yes. Mucha, Hirschfeld, Batman:Animated... oh, and I've done it when trying to find work on TV shows, too. Couldn't do the Simpsons style well enough to get a gig as a designer on "Futurama", for instance.

How would you define your "style?"

"Cartoon noir" is the label I've fallen into, but it doesn't really fit. If anyone's got any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Mostly I try to avoid putting a label on the way I draw. It's very minimal and sparse, but done with a realistic, solid feel - I don't use exaggeratedly "cartoony" proportions much, and try to counter the flat colors with dimensional shapes.

What is one area of drawing that you need to improve in?

Finishing things Musculature.

When did you start drawing as a hobby? (we all drew when we were little)

It's never been a hobby for me. It's always just been something I do; eventually it became one of the major things I do.

When does it become a hobby for most people?

What kind of sketchbook do you have? Brand? Size? How old is it?

Hardbound black covers, white paper. Canson 8.5x11, 216 pages. About a week old; I just started a new one.

How many sketchbooks have you had previous to this?

I have lost count. 29 going back to July 1993, plus many more in a box in the bottom of a closet at my mother's place. I think it's a cubic foot of horrible old sketchbooks.

How many sketchbooks do you go through in a year?

Four, nowadays.

#2 yellow pencil or a clicky pencil?

Whichever. Mechanical, lately, because I need new batteries in my sharpener. Also Col-erase, also fountain pen. In the original pairing, I prefer a #2 Ticonderoga, but just haven't had a sharpener with me lately. I also need to find something that'll fit in my purse...

What kind of eraser do you use?

I don't, for the most part. Whatever's on the end of my pencil. I carry around a Mars white plastic eraser for bigger chunks, but that gets used maybe three times a year.

Who are your artistic influences?

M C Escher, Fleischer cartoons, Phil Foglio, Edward Gorey, Matt Howarth, George Herriman, Al Hirschfeld, Carol Lay, Winsor McCay, Mike Mignola, Ralph Steadman, WB cartoons. And an assortment of my friends, too, though that's a mix of borrowing tricks and deliberately not borrowing tricks. And other people I'm not conscious of.

What books would you reccomend to aspiring artists?

Lord Dunsanay, The King of Elf-land's Daughter.

Do you have any favorite online tutorial sites?

No. By the time they existed I'd learnt the basics.

What is the most money you've ever made on one drawing / illustration / painting?

I never really have. I should remedy that. Fifty bucks, I think. Maybe a hundred. There's a couple commissions I need to sit down and do that'll bump that up.

What do you hope to accomplish with your art? Do you want to go anywhere with it in life?

Make a living with it, somehow. Tell some of my own stories.

Finally, why do you draw?

Because it's got less sticky clean-up than masturbating.

I couldn't stand all that table-ology of the original results, so I recast it as a definition list. Much better. Turns out the whole thing is stored as hidden form values, so I just tossed the button, too...

Something about the undercurrents of the questions leads me to suspect the original author's a mid-teen.

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Just a cardboard box with a fish in it. Packed in styrofoam peanuts. No ice or anything. Just... a tuna in the mail.

Or why bother with the box?

Tuna, stamps, address label.

[lediva.livejournal.com]

It's been done. (http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/postal-6-4.html)