About Health and Safety

I’ve finally watched the BBC and Disney’s excellent documentary “Earth”.

For some reason (babies, dogs and life in general) this wasn’t my first attempt. To be precise, I saw the first 30 minutes about four times before I managed to get to the end of it, learning by heart all the lines of the commentary.
Although I actually loved it, I couldn’t help frowning upon the deliberate cuts at the end of the action whenever a predator actually got hold of its prey.

Don’t get me wrong, they were all done in an elegant and unobtrusive way, it’s not like, say, Darth Vader going “No, I am your f-”.
Nonetheless all the (few) chasing scenes ended up being some sort of outdoor activity in which no one gets hurt, very Disney-like so to speak, and after the wolf eventually gets hold of the terrified gnu calf you almost expect them to change roles. “Ok mate, my turn now, I chase, you run”.

It’s not that I can’t see the point of all this, my daughter was kind of upset as the lions chased an elephant calf down, however I was actually trying to remember when All This began. I mean the politically correctness, and the moment when we designated people to remove the nasty bits from the environment.

I’m not proposing to introduce gore and sex in children’s TV programs, and I have to admit that – although it didn’t turn me into a murderer – the sight of a rabbit hanging head down, bleeding to death over my grandma’s bath-tub was a bit disturbing when I was my daughter’s age. However, I’m not sure that this level of “protection” is any healthier than the things it’s trying to hide.

I’m still convinced that there’s nothing wrong in seeing the reason why a wolf would pursue another animal, and I still think that knowing what happens to animals when they’re not fast enough, in the detached environment of a television set, helps realise that food does not come from plastic boxes in supermarkets.

We take other animals’ lives to survive: acknowledging that is a matter of respect.
I don’t want to get into any of the well-known corporate-bashing arguments.
But I do think that by trying to keep everything as harmless and sterile as possible you risk getting rid of some parts that are not necessarily bad, such as most of Real Life Out There.

So I now declare my quest to figure out who exactly said that products for children needed to be all fluffy bunnies and pink unicorns.

In my next visit to the library I would like to look at some picture books and see whether there are any particularly daring dealing with what are considered inappropriate topics for children.
Oliver Jeffers, for example, talks about love and loss in his last book The Heart And The Bottle , not exactly a popular theme in picture books, thus confirming himself as one of my favourite authors ever.

As for myself, I understood three things today:

The first one is that, in general, safer equals more boring.

The second one is that, even if you’re as big as an elephant, travelling trough a pride of lions is never quite safe enough.

The third one is that gnus are the bloody pickiest animals on earth. They walk thousands and thousands of miles, through planes actually covered with edible plants, only to get to the grass they like best. How fussy is tha

Illustration Friday: Detective

This is the entry for this week’s Illustration Friday, done in five or six coffee breaks.
This week I also tidied up my photoshop brushes folder and got rid of about the 80% that have been sitting around for years, unused.

I eventually ended up with the handful I’m more likely to use, and I know it’s quite a nerdy thing to say but my brushes are all well ordered now and that makes me happy.
Among the few brushes I saved there’s a lovely one I forgot about, which gives a nice water-colour stroke. It’s the one I used for the background.

I’d like to thank the guy I stole it from, but I honestly forgot where I got every single one of them: colleagues, other artists that shared them on their blogs and such.
I feel kind of guilty, brushes are quite a personal thing to share and I’ve been using other people’s stuff quite lavishly without the chance to give any credit to their creators.

So now I’d like to share a few of them.

This is the one I used for the Background. Download

This one I used to give a bit of texture to the tree. Download

I use these two pretty often for painting in general, they are “watery” and soft at the same time. Download

There, Internet, you can’t say I always take without giving anything back.

Illustration Friday – Linked

This week’s topic is “linked”.
I didn’t have much time so it’s just a quicky.

Alchemy and a Lunch Break Speed Painting

Well, for one reason or another I haven’t been to the gym for three weeks, which kind of sucks.
On the other hand this gives me the chance to do some speed painting during the lunch break.
It’s vital that I finish what I start within an hour, because I noticed that my tendency to get bored with things in general has gotten worse, and that includes my own works as well. The ones done for the sake of it, of course.
This means that I can’t give too much thought to the speed painting and I just have to start scrawling.

For this reason I’m loving this software, which I found thanks to my friend and colleague Dave. It’s called Alchemy, it allows you to spawn one random shape after another and, most importantly, it’s free. Oh, and it’s both for mac and for pc.
Of course you have some input on the shapes, as you can find out after two minutes of fiddling with the settings. When you come up with a shape that for some reason you’re happy with (and which makes sense to your eyes), you just have to start with the random sketching and colouring over.
I started with this

and ended up with this.

Again, another sci-fi-ish subject, so what?

THE EVIL GOAT OF DEATH

As I said, I couldn’t help doing it.
Also, I can’t help writing its name all in caps.
THE EVIL GOAT OF DEATH scares me a little.

Michelangelo, Bouncing Crotches and THE MIGHTY GOAT OF DEATH

Last weekend my wife and I went to London with our friends.
I am completely in love with London, the amount of inputs your senses get just through a simple ride in the Tube is beyond words.
All in all it’s been one of the best weekends I can remember in a long time, and the fact that my memory can normally stretch as far back as a couple of days doesn’t diminish that.

The only downside of the whole thing is that our friends are really tall, and most of the time I’m with them I think I’m sitting while actually I’m not.
The weekend has been a long constant struggle between one half of the brain trying to suggest “hey, we’re so low compared to other people’s eye level, we have to get up!” and the other half pointing out “you’re wrong, we’re already standing – I think”.
In between several of these silent conversations by the two tenants in my head I sketched these people on the northern line.

There may have been more interesting faces around, but these were the least likely to punch me in the face if they caught me drawing them. The old woman was my first pick, then I got bolder.

Since we don’t go to London every day we tried to squeeze as much awesome stuff as possible in just two days.
The Dream, an exhibition of some rare Michelangelo’s drawings at the Courtauld Gallery, was the first on the list.
Michelangelo made those amazing drawings for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, one of the most important figures in the artist’s life and allegedly his lover. According to some of their correspondence, displayed along with the drawings, I don’t think there was any doubt about it, but I was too stunned by the artwork to investigate any further.

However, I was pleased to ascertain that the knowledge of the Italian language hasn’t been a complete waste of neuronal storage space. I was able to read Michelangelo’s beautiful handwriting with ease, although I wonder how they were able to communicate to each other in those days, with all those flourished words and grammar.
“Withhold thy step my beloved friend, a behemotic palanquin is on the verge of cruising across your path and by doing that probably annihilate your body with… WHOPS too late, I’m displeased!”.

Anyway, my friend Dave and I took our time copying a few of the drawings. If the result is too far from the original I can always say that it’s not easy to draw while a crowd is shoving its way around you.

In the evening we went to see the Swan Lake at the London Coliseum.
It was my first time at a ballet and I was hugely impressed.
I won’t talk about the beautiful ballerina with probably disarticulated arms and hip, or the dancers who could have cracked a hazelnut with the mere flinch of a muscle of their ass.
I tried to sketch a few of them without looking at the drawing pad, just to put down the main lines. I mean, they were jumping around, it’s not like they were posing.
On the second page of unintelligible scribbles I eventually came up with something more interesting, then my wife started complaining about how bothersome the noise of my pencil was on the paper and I had to quit.

Anyway, after a couple of pubs in Soho, a few hours of sleep and a huge hangover we headed to the Natural History Museum.
Unfortunately half of Europe had the same idea and was queuing up for the dinosaurs exhibit, so we had to skip the most interesting part and spend just an hour in a less busy part of the building.
We definitely plan to go back there because it’s one of those places I would personally spend long hours in.
In the meantime we took a few interesting and inspiring pictures, I didn’t realize living beings actually displayed such a variety of hooves, horns, fangs or general means of surviving their environment.
Also, I didn’t realize goats could look so mean and menacing.
I’m going to draw something related to this picture pretty soon, probably calling it EVIL GOATS FROM HELL or something like that.

Flythrough

I don’t know exactly why, but when I sit down with the intent of drawing something random and quick I always end up with something that involves spaceships.
It must be all the sci-fi I’ve been watching in my childhood, if I let my mind wander it goes straight to a galaxy far, far away, possibly at Warp speed.
Plus, I’m still pissed off because of all those broken promises film-makers made in the 80s, full of flying cars and silver clothes and so on.
Anyway, yesterday’s quick drawing.

Drawing Tools and a Couple of Sketches

Well, I’m stuck on the sofa, again.
And my daughter is around so I can’t give vent to my frustration by fragging scary mutants on Fallout in a mess of blood and guts. How sad.

On the other hand, being forced to keep a horizontal position gives me the chance to experiment with two things I saved for a situation like this.

The first one, maybe the less incredibly awesome of the two, is Posemaniacs, a resource for nude sketching. I actually tried its online version yesterday on my computer, but since today it’s hard to sit down for more than two minutes I gave it a go with the iPhone app, called Random Pose, while laying on the couch.

Random pose is pretty basic but functional. It displays the 3d model of a human in a random position, textured with muscular anatomy. You can zoom in and out and pan the model but not rotate it, and you randomly get either a male or a female. It’s perfect if, as an exercise, you want to draw someone in an unusual position but you haven’t got any naked people at hand. Or if the bunch of visually interesting people around you look more likely to kick the crap out of you if you even rather then appreciate being sketched onto your pad.

I have a wonderful pocket Paperblanks sketchbook (get one for yourself, they’re beautiful), which is about as big as an iPhone. This means that you can hold the left side of the sketchbook and the iPhone together with one hand while you draw with the other one.
This way – hypothetically – someone could even draw while sitting on the toilette. Hypothetically.
Anyway, the online version is pretty much the same thing, with more choice on the kind of position plus and a nice feature called “30 seconds drawing”, which – guess what? – displays a new model every thirty seconds and forces you to be really quick.
The only flaw is that you only have one kind of body build displayed. No fat, thin, young or old people. But hey, it’s free, you can’t be picky.
In order to force myself to draw on a regular basis I’m going to post a small sketch on my sidebar. There, I said it, I have to do it now. These are the ones I did today.

The most awesome thing I tried today is Sketchbook mobile. It’s another useful tool for drawing when in a potentially boring situation. Say on a train, on a bus or stuck with a back ache.

It basically works like Colors for Nintendo DS, but it has lots more features and you draw with your fingers rather than a stylus.
The good thing is that it’s in your phone, so you no longer have to carry any gear for the eventuality of a casual sketch session.

It allows up to ten layers with a good number of options to manage them; a fairly high number of undos (haven’t checked the limit yet); a decent number of brushes; eraser and mirror mode.
The cool thing is that you can also email yourself the psd file with all the layers if you want to fine-tune it, or export it as a jpg to your library if you’re happy with it.

All in all I love it.
There’s a free version with a few basic features, while the full one costs a risible amount.
I saw on their website that the pc version might be pretty cool, but as I have Photoshop I didn’t really care.

I guess it’s ok if you don’t need a pack of features for an incredible amount of money but still want to mess around with digital painting.
Anyway, this is what I did in about half an hour.

First Few Monsters Sketches (and a boy)

Again, I’m kind of stuck because of my back ache. Well, not as stuck as I have been a few times before but I’m still as agile as my grandma.
Anyway, because of it I had to devote a couple of extra hours to the sofa this weekend, which gave me the chance to scrawl a few concepts for the characters of my picture book.

They are still rough experiments with volumes, I’m still at a really early stage.
But I’m starting to see something peek out of the chaos, and I’m happy to have started.
As you can see there are monsters. They are a pretty tricky thing to do. I do not want to fall in the usual monster cliches (a monster, look! Fangs! Hair! Claws! Funny-coloured skin!) and at the same time I’d like to keep a healthy balance between being monstrous and being cute. Not too cute though.
Here they are. More to follow this week, then I guess I’ll start with some colour sketches.

The bestest solution to the lack of time

The other day I drove my wife to a visit at the super-awesome laser eye surgery. We stayed there for more than three hours drinking tea, so at a certain point I had to go for a wee.
When I got back I realised the door I had to go through had one of those combination-electronic locks that need you to input a code. I made a couple of timid attempts at opening it anyway, failing, then I entered another office – thankfully with no electronic locking device on its door – and asked for help.
The woman behind the desk looked at me as if I were an idiot, then she got up, went all the way to the infamous electronically-locked door and she pushed it open with the sole aid of one finger. Because, you know, it was open.
I muttered something about me being an idiot (her contempt wasn’t misplaced after all) and carried on with my business.
Then this morning I took my daughter to the nursery and when I tried to get out – tadaan – there it was, another awkward door with complicated-looking locks and bolts.
I started fiddling with one of its hundred handles, as confident as I would be trying to disarm an exploding device. I went on for a couple of minutes with no success, shifting involuntarily into full swearing-even-if-you-are-technically-still-on-nursery’s-ground mode, when a pious woman eventually helped me out.
She pushed the door open with ease, her face full of the benevolent smile you give a toddler you’ve just helped tie his shoes. Again, I apologized for my dumbness and went off.
So while driving to work I thought that I should find out more about doors and their secrets (doors are not as straightforward as they seem) and I put “learn about doors and their secrets” in my mental things-to-do list.
This is when I realized that my things-to-do list is pretty long at the moment.

There’s The Book, the one sitting in my drawer that I enounce in capital letters and is only waiting to be illustrated. Then life-drawing classes, the gym (which apparently is the only solution to my backache) and my newly found social life every now and then. I’m craving to finish The Fall of Hyperion and start with the next in line (The Graveyard Book). Then, after I received this for Christmas I became a fan of Robert Sabuda and now I’d like to study paper engineering. Oh, then there are the signatures I have to draw – which I’ll be posting soon – and Supernatural, Desperate Housewives, House M.D, Lost, How I Met Your Mother, The Office, Cougar Town and Scrubs season 9 that I really need to watch, plus Fallout 3 that I really need to finish. I won’t mention the 60 new feeds I receive every day from blogs and forums, but if we add the fact that it would be polite to spend some time, daily, with my wife and kids, it becomes apparent that I have some time issues. But I found a solution.

At first I thought of doing some experiments with polyphasic sleep. You have to follow your naps schedule carefully to avoid the risk of going insane, but if mastered it could add up to four hours to your waking time. Unfortunately nobody has as yet solved the issue that most people have with other people dozing off in the middle of a conversation.
There’s an acquaintance of mine who bragged about the fact that he could manage to sleep only three hours a night, no problems. What he really did though, was fall fast asleep while people were talking, and I can’t deny I did find it, at times, quite inappropriate.
I’m confident that society will eventually get rid of this illogical social taboo, however I doubt my boss will ever be happy knowing that I go unconscious at regular intervals during working hours, possibly drooling over my expensive Wacom.

Then a friend told me about this interview to Varg Vikernes in which, contrarily to every misconception about jails, he sports quite a comfortable room that looks Ikea furnished, complete with computer, broadband and everything.
So I read a few articles about the penal system in Norway and I was amazed at how advanced it is. It would definitely deserve some more debate but, as I said, I have no time, so I’ll have to add it to my things-to-do list, right after “learn about doors and their secrets”.
Meaning no disrespect towards those unfortunate enough to be confined in an Ikea cell, I find the whole thing as the best solution to sort out all the things I’d like to do.
Now I’m trying to figure out how to get jailed in Norway (this is actually at the top of my list at the moment) without causing too much trouble to other people.
I know in some countries peeing against walls or smelling paint can be considered a felony, so I could go for one of those.
The more I think about it and the more it looks like a brilliant idea. I haven’t spoken to my wife about it but she always supports me, I’m sure she’ll agree.
Although, thinking about it, I doubt anyone in jail will teach me how to open doors without looking stupid.