Reileen van Kaile

Yes, there is a reason I re-used the title from this entry. And it's because, once again, one little thing after another kept popping up as I was trying to be productive and bit by bit it katamari'd my rage to levels over 9000 and I really wanted to maul someone.

Today, I woke up, intending to finish off my ART260 project. I...

1) Became increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of the last few pictures I had to draw and outline. "Well, whatever, this is just for school and it'll be at a smaller size anyway, and it fits the style a bit too, so it's not that big a deal."

2) Scanned the pictures in, played around with Illustrator's Live Trace function, only to find that it wasn't producing the kinds of lines I wanted - it looked more as though I'd just run all the sketches through a Levels or Curves adjustment on Photoshop. "Grr, whatever. Smaller size, fits the style, and I'm running out of time."

3) Took way longer than I thought to color in all the sketches. "Blah! No way am I going to get this done in time to head to campus and print out at the lab. I'm going to go to Kinko's and pay for a print so that I don't show up tomorrow without a project."

4) Went to the nearby Kinko's and got told that my 13"x19" color print was going to have a 24-hour turnaround. "OH FUCK NO!"

5) Went back home, proceeded to try and save my original .psd file as a .jpeg so I can resize it, only to find that Photoshop won't save my .psd as a .jpeg because of a program error. "WHAT IS THIS I DON'T FUCKING EVEN"

6) Saved the file as a .png, resized it, brought it to Kinko's, got it printed, found out that the skin tones on the people were wonky looking. "...I GIVE UP, MAN. I GIVE THE FUCK UP."

For what it's worth, here's the final project, although because it's on Photobucket as a resized JPEG, the quality is incredibly blurry, but you should still be able to read the text. I'm planning on revisiting this at some point to get smoother lines and better coloring, but that point is definitely not now. GRAR.

(Also, I found out later that I could, actually, have just saved my .png file as a .jpeg if I needed/wanted to. I think there must be something wrong with the .psd file itself, though fuck me with scissors if I know what it is.)

I find myself utterly baffled that nearly all of the American-based "how-to" anime style artbooks feature some of the most generic, boring, or just plain bad anime-styled art out there. Manga Madness by David Okum is the most recent one I saw, on the shelves at Michaels while I was looking for other stuff for my ART113 project. Christopher Hart's stuff is slightly better, and this chick's work is generally competent, but this is just horrendous, totally amateur. I just...what? What?

I have a couple different reactions to being confronted with this sort of mediocrity:

1) Shame. I feel ashamed that my primary drawing talent lies in the animanga style. What makes this even worse is that sometimes I don't even think I have any ground to stand on when I talk about how crappy some of this art is. After all, what's special about my art? Not much, really, at the moment. It's generic animanga, albeit depicting characters from small-ish fandoms and occasionally a couple of OCs. I'm not such a hot-shot. [/ blatant breakage of Ebert's Law; I plead guilty by way of low self-esteem and a generally pessimistic nature]

On a bad day, Shame eventually gives way to...

2. Despair. Again, I have no reason to think that I'm any better than this mediocrity that gets published. I should just stop drawing right now, because I have no hope whatsoever of getting better because I can never focus on a single pursuit more than a few months at a time, and therefore I'll never improve. Real True Artists draw from life, or are super-realistic, or have an uber-distinctive trademark style that absolutely makes them stand out from the crowd and you absolutely cannot mistake their art for anyone else's, or they're heavily conceptual and convey lofty Universal Messages and are Slick and Edgy. Et cetera, ad nauseam, rinse, lather, and repeat.

On a good day, Shame eventually gives way to...

2) Defiance. Fuck that shit; I can draw so much better than that! I'm gonna be one of the best damn American-based animanga artists out there, yessiree, no doubts about that, fo shizzle mah nizzle. I'll practice my anatomy and learn how to draw normal people (instead of just good-looking ones) and awesomely detailed backgrounds (instead of abstract, potentially impressionist swathes of color) and figure out how to color oh-so-prettily and the whole fuckin' nine yards! AND EVERYONE WILL BOW DOWN BEFORE ME AND RECOGNIZE THEIR QUEEN

Right now, I'm currently having a Pretty Bad Day, possibly because I haven't extensively drawn in a while and so my skills are seriously out of whack. Lately I've been heavily focused on writing and music, and I've been struggling - as I have been for the past few years and as I probably will be for the rest of my life - with how to balance out a journey of improvement in three different artistic skillsets, none of which I'm willing to give up. Is there a way I can satisfactorily balance this? Or do I just have to put up and shut up and learn to prioritize one over the other? No real answers, yet.

I didn't make a lot from Artist Alley this year, but that was about what I expected. I did, however, learn a lot, and will be better armed to take over the Alley next year. (Beware an invasion of Kirby pumpkins!) I think, based on this initial experience, that I actually prefer being in the Artist Alley as opposed to being a regular patron of the con, because at least that way, if I don't want to go to any panels, I won't be stuck in my hotel room feeling like I should be doing something. (It also prevents me from wandering the dealer's room for too long and dropping my cash on stuff. As my friend Lauren said: "Earn, not burn!")

Major highlights for me include seeing my two pet fandoms - Bomberman and Golden Sun - in meatspace, holy crap. I ran into this Bomberman cosplay and this Isaac cosplay, both of which surprised the hell out of me. I also found Gintoki and Neuro and Yako! There was also a bunch of Abyss and Symphonia cosplayers. And I discovered two other Bomberfanatics in the Artist Alley. We are out there, yay!



Here's the booty I scored from the con this year, which isn't much but which I am very satisfied with. Am trying to figure out where I want to put the Gintoki and Bomberman pins. Missing from the picture is a $2.00 Okami fanart bookmark that I got from Lydia's friend, who had a table in Artist Alley. The clips were made by another artist in the Alley who graciously let us hang out by her when we were in table limbo early Friday morning (long story short: there was a database error that assigned two studios to one table, and the other studio had claimed the table first, so we got shuttled to a free table that was in a dinky corner of the Alley).

-Sora G. Silverwind
I want to be awakened right now