Art thieves beware!

Google have recently introduced a rather swanky new feature into their image search page that makes life more interesting for us digital artists. You can now drag and drop images straight from your hard drive into the search bar to have google search the web for that exact image (and similar ones).

If you haven’t already guessed it, the reason I find this so interesting is because it allows me to very easily find out out who’s been nicking my artwork and posting it elsewhere. It turns out some of my art is rather well travelled, turning up on Japanese video sites and russian blogs among others. I even found one cheeky …chap who had posted one of my pieces as his own on deviantART and was trying to sell prints of it. I didn’t like that very much.

So to anyone thinking of posting artwork you didn’t make, be aware that we can find you! That said, personally I don’t mind people reblogging or posting my artwork around the place, so long as I get credited as the artist or preferably linked back to. Sadly that doesn’t usually happen.

The problem with Corel Painter…

Ever since I started Digital Painting the question of which piece of software to use has bugged me incessantly. A poor workman blames his tools and a good workman can produce good work with just about anything (or so they say) but personally I think if you’re going to spend loads of money on piece of software and loads of time using it then it’s in your best interests to make sure you pick the right one from the onset.

If I recall correctly when I first started digital art I was using Photoimpact 10, which was like a dumbed down version of photoshop. After a while I progressed to Photoshop elements 2.0, which was a dumbed down version of Photoshop, but perfect for learning the fundamentals. After I got my first graphics tablet and started painting digitally for real (rather than just colouring scanned line art) I ended up using Corel Painter 9.

Corel Painter had quite a few annoying bugs but as someone that had been working purely traditionally until not lot long before, the traditional media emulation was much friendlier than Photsohop’s daunting brush system. So I used Painter almost exclusively despite the irritating bugs. So when Painter 10 came out I was pretty excited and downloaded the trial version straightaway. I was dismayed to find it was even more buggy than painter 9! So I stuck with version 9 and had my fingers crossed when Painter 11 came out that it would be good. It wasn’t. The chaps at corel had managed to make it even more buggy! (in my experience of using it)

So I eventually got sick of Corel’s outdated and under-tested software and when Photoshop Cs5 came out boasting a new brush system I decided I had to try it. The whole Photoshop painting experience was just so much smoother than painter that I’ve been using it ever since. I’d pretty much given up on Painter.

And now Corel Painter 12 has just been released! I was sceptical that it would be very good, and that the bugs would be fixed. So I downloaded the trial and gave it a go…

…And it’s still riddled with a pox of bugs and performance issues. Nice brushes, but it’s just not worth the tradeoff for any professional. Stick to Photoshop, that’s what I say. At least until Corel decide to test their products properly.

I wanted it to be good. I really did! 🙁

Crazytown

Today I present a collaborative piece by myself and my sister Ellie (aged 7) I have to say, it’s one of my better efforts.

Crazytown

It’s refreshing to work so directly with another artist, you get a wonderful mix of influences and approaches within the single piece. It was a hell of a lot of fun to do too, I reccommend all those with a younger sibling seek thier artistic expertise at some point.

The piece itself (titled Crazytown) is mixed media; ink, oil pastel and melted crayons. A1 in size on brown paper.

Nostalgia is a pain in the arse.

This collection of heads was drawn just last week to consecrate the beginning of a shiny new sketchbook. I just felt like drawing something, and so I went into autopilot and started drawing a head, it occurred to me that I’d unthinkingly drawn one of the characters from my old webcomic; The Box.

Since I’d already drawn the first one I decided I may as well draw all the others. The fact that I’d then gone and drawn all my old characters made me wish that I could start the old comic back up, after I suddenly dropped it midway through last year.

Technically I can start it back up, there’s almost nothing stopping me. Of course the problem is that I never really liked making the comic, and I never had the time to do it. One single (often sub-standard) comic page would take me an entire days work, which I could have devoted to all sorts of other things I’d rather do. I did however enjoy the reader’s interest in the story and the feeling of creating a whole ongoing fictional world to share. Comics are much more involving than an illustration, readers get attached to the characters and the places, and feel much more strongly than they would about a single piece of artwork. It was a great feeling, but It just wasn’t a strong enough drive to spend all that time on something I didn’t want to do. Instant gratification generation syndrome maybe?

The temptation is always there though, to go back and start again, or to redo something you’ve already done that you enjoyed, even it won’t benefit you in the long run or you know that you’ll get sick of it fairly sharpish. Video games are a great example of this. I absolutely adore the video game Morrowind, I played it when I was a kid and loved how original and open it was, especially the setting and the art design. I love it so much that I decided to play it again. I spent half an hour installing it, 2 hours playing it, 2 hours adding mods to it, and then I stopped and didn’t play it again. Because it’s shit.

Which is what I’m getting at, nostalgia is all very well so long as you ignore it. It so often turns out that the things you once thought were brilliant suddenly look upon re-examination; a bit disappointing. Time gets wasted and your naive wistful memories of something are corrupted by horrible facts. Even Banana Man is awful!? When did that happen? Maybe I’m simply getting more cynical as I get older, I do still love Morrowind, but that combat system is inexcusable.

Anti procrastination motivation

Try saying that title 5 times quickly.

I recently completed my latest uni project, the brief being to produce three elements of a visual campaign for or against an issue of importance to us. After some deliberation and sitting about not doing much I arrived at the idea of procrastination. It’s an issue that really is very close to my heart.

Anyway, the ultimate outcome of this project was three web pages designed to motivate the average internet user into doing something other than Facebook poking people or perusing pornography. The idea is that you set one of the pages as your homepage and every time you open your web browser are reminded that you should be doing something worthwhile with your time. I have no idea how effective it is to be honest since I haven’t got round to setting any of them as my homepage…

Do take a look:
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3

‘Indecision may or may not be my problem’

I’ve been fairly busy lately struggling over uni work. We’ve been given a brief to create a visual campaign for or against an issue we feel strongly about. My problem so far has not been anything to do with producing the artwork, but rather; what issue to choose as my campaign. I started like a good illustrator with a big mindmap of potential ideas that I made into a list, including:

  • creaky chairs
  • smoking
  • dog poo
  • religon
  • train conductors
  • tuna
  • procrastination
  • alarms
  • people
  • etc etc…

That’s a much shortened list, oddly it ended up only as a list of things to campaign against. No idea what that says about me.

In the end I decided to go with people. Yes people, and everything to do with them. Of course it was a strictly tongue in cheek idea, and I certainly couldn’t suggest a solution to the problem of people, save letting dolphins take over instead. This made it a wee bit difficult to approach seriously and objectively, it was just too silly. Much to my disappointment, and after producing several images, I was forced to change issues. My new issue is one I do feel very strong about, and one that occupies a lot of my time: procrastinating.

Alas, at the moment I can’t bring myself to do it, everything else looks so much more appealing. In the meantime I thought I’d salvage one of my obsolete “anti-people” ideas for your amusement. It’s an advert for a product I really wish existed…