bus doodles while gloomy

[egypturnash]

No, I'm not going to share what has me down right now. Not until it's resolved one way or the other. Don't bother asking.

[ edit: It's been resolved. The angsty entry's been made private. It was a false alarm to which I over-reacted. Thanks for the good vibes from the people who saw and reacted to that entry. The word of the week is "fragile"... ]

Bad mood scrawls look like this, nowadays.




Vaguely inspired by something from Sterling's Schismatrix. Might be a character design suggestion for Ralph's noir show, might not.


A more underwatery-inspired Peggy. Might end up a new basic description on Furry.

Comments

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

The water-peggy's very sleek and graceful. The upper two are scary and look far too real in a way, which is a good thing!

-T'

[mandrill.livejournal.com]

I like these drawings a lot! (angsty or not). Thanks for posting them.

[martes.livejournal.com]

Middle one at all inspired by the Construct Council's avatar in Perdido Street Station?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Not consciously; I was thinking more of the supposed head of the Geisha Bank in the beginning of 'Schismatrix', who is actually long since brain-dead, and puppeted by her superbright "servant" Kitsune.

But making it more blatantly corpselike might've been subliminal Perdido reference. I read Schismatrix more recently than Perdido, so it's closer to the top of my mind.

is your right hand is showing(?)

[eselgeist.livejournal.com]

Have you noticed this?

Your angle seems to waver a bit, but it's there.

There's a local furry artist near me, Jill Czajkowski, and at one point I noticed that the majority of her art at the time had this exact lean to it.. like, 15 degrees off the vertical, to the left. It was really startling to see the same angular bias repeated over and over. She's taken down her old VCL stuff, most of which exhibited this, and her newer work is much more varied in composition.

I know these are quick and loose sketches for you, so considerations of overall composition might not come into play. It just occured to me, without knowing your handedness, that this innate angular bias would indicate that you're a righty? yes?

Many times, after I scan in an inked image, I'll flip it left to right and finish it that way, not only to check for errors, but because *poof* the picture has a whole new "look" to me. The angles are different, etc. But then a lot of times, I just don't care ^_^

This is just a spot observation. A quick glance through the thumbnails on your VCL page shows what might be another angular bias, but it's certainly not wholly pervasive. I wonder if everybody has one, and if there are biological underpinnings to it. If you work from photos, that's obviously different, because the angles are based on what you see, not what you generate yourself.

doop doo.. i hope you feel better soon, this is all very rough and rocky for you, yes? but you will pull through better for it, pretty wyrm.

Re: is your right hand is showing(?)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

hmmmm. I think the only one where that compositional theory is really valid is the first one; in the second, the lower head was an afterthought, added in the most convenient blank space to show the huge scary plugs in the back of the head, and the third one started with just the arm and grew from there into a variant me; the tail was one of the very last things I added. And added in the half-hinted figure eight swoosh that's become my formula for "I need to put in the Peggy tail but it's not doing anything in particular."

I think the major compositional thrust of the second is more of a /. and the third is more of a )- with a little flourish.

Most of my composition happens instinctively; I've always seemed to have a bit of an eye for it. While I've studied it a bit, I've never really done much deliberate practice. One of the few things I do think about consciously is that straight verticals or horizontals are boring; a diagonal is more exciting. When I want something serene, I'll use a lot of horizontals; when I want something dynamic, diagonals. And a lot of the stuff in my sketchbook starts as randomly-slashed semi-diagonals.

I am, however, a righty, and things do tend to lean a bit sometimes; when I'm doodling, multiple images on a page are often arranged so as to not drag my hand all over the previous ones. Even the grizzled old pros around Spümcø will have their stuff lean to one side, and look absolutely horrible when it's flipped... some of the quick John scrawls that become cleaned-up Flash stuff is especially bad in that bias, I've had to aggressively skew some stuff after flipping it. (Also, I think just about everyone there is a righty. So much for the "artist = lefty" idea!)

Re: is your right hand is showing(?)

[paka.livejournal.com]

Wow, I don't know if I do this - but I have this feeling I might, and want to look over some old pictures for it. Thanks for mentioning this.

Re: is your right hand is showing(?)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

oh, and yes, it's rough. Yay, hormones. It's like a roller-coaster in my skull!