The Waiting Game

The waiting game is hard, but there are some exciting news on the horizon, I'm sure. All will be decided tomorrow or the day after, I think.

Didn't even realize it's been so long since my last update. I apologize for you loyal 12 followers... I've have very little time for art over the last 18 days.

People have the illusion of free will because they're conscious of their body making decisions for them. If you were unconscious (say, sleepwalking) your body would make similar decisions and behave in a similar way to your conscious state. The only difference is that you would not able to perceive your own behavior and remember it. Listen to radiolab.

No one person is better than another unless they are older (to a point). If two people are the same age, they have both done interesting things with their time, in their own way. Next time you try to criticize someone, chances are, you have something to learn from them too.

I may be repeating myself, or rephrasing old statements, but it's not like you read those anyway, so:
Design is about enforcing hierarchy in all elements of the picture: shape, value, texture, colour, etc. (Same with polycount and texture res in 3D) The better the hierarchy, the less effort the brain has to go through to make one while you look at the picture, and therefore the more pleasing you find it. At the same time, you have to retain an element of chaos to make the image interesting.

EXERCISE: Try simplifying the edge spectrum. For example: have only super hard and super soft edges in a picture, and nothing in between. See how that affects your colour pickins.

Fixing something isn't nearly a hard as starting it from scratch. Same goes for iterating. It may not be as exciting, because you already know what you're gonna get, but at least it's easy, and it will make your piece look better. SO DO IT!!!!

You can't draw for fun until you have the FUNdamentals ingrained in your brain.

On my intuos4, no matter how much you change the sensitivity, applying the full amount of pressure will always require the same force, which I thought was stupid, because the whole reason I wanted to make it more sensitive was so that it was easier on my hand. I recently discovered that this actually helps me when I'm using the round, pressure-sensitive brush, because whatever colour you pick will stay in harmony with the rest of the canvas as long as it's close to what you need and the opacity of your stroke is at ~80-90%. You don't hurt your hand, and the colour stays in harmony. It's sort of a failsafe device for choosing colour, because you can never get the right one purely by sliding RGB values around.

Also, I spoke about this before, but you can "overshoot" your target colour in saturation and value, but lower the opacity with the pressure on the stylus in order to get to the right place. This is how I usually pick my colours. More often than not, I move my RGB sliders wayy out of whack, and try to put down as much of the crazy colour I mixed as I can, without it looking jarring. Takes a lot of practice.

Anyway, the good news is: Daily Duels is coming back online! Soon. Probably within the month, but we gotta upgrade the website, introduce the voting system and do all sorts of polishing for the graphics. They are going to be tight.

Also I did this pantheon skin from League of Legends. It's not official.



yet.