As I continue to trudge through the website which I'm now onto laying out in "2D Characters" page in Photoshop, stressing through the process of weeding through my most dominating collection of work by far... I dug through piles of my oldest preserves, some dating back to pieces as early on as 1994. Some, I'm SURE, were from even before then, but were left without a specific date (I've always had a very bad habit of intentionally not dating my work). This is one of them:
I could swear two years afterward they made a video game featuring lemons and limes, but I probably just dreamt it. I'm still googling to see if I crafted this in my head. Someone please let me know if you can recall a lemon/lime video game --serious! (By the way, if they didn't produce a game of this theme, I do consider this entire blog, both ideas and artwork, an unofficial proof of copyright ... I consider this blog a foster parent to some of my temporary orphaned works). Copyright is expensive, but I will be making it happen! What's up with this 'orphan law' anyway? It feels wrong, but what can you do? I hate to think of some of my work as orphaned anyway... Feels like bad parenting.
So, yeah, no defined date on that one... Definitely before '94, Definitely very young, but still had my mini game designer cap none the less. ;)
Young work? I was an honest fair but non-certfied art hustler. Each day when I was in 5th grade, I used to take requests from the other kids in my class, go home, draw, and then return the following morning with a stack full of custom cartoons. I used to sell them for a quarter each. And I used to sometimes go home with about $7.00 a day. My friend, Vicky, then joined me, and then it was both she and I leaving with arms empty of drawings and pockets full of change.
We followed a system of style that my friend was able to pick up fast-- but mostly my usual distinctions-- big interesting eyes mostly and wild-looking smiles. The designs were simple enough to hash out in under two minutes--- or atleast it felt that way... and I guess they were entertaining enough for a kid to shell out a quarter.
I forgot about that up until now. It's funny the stories that begin to surface sorting through everything. I wonder if any of my classmates still have any of them. One of them I remember in particular for some reason-- It was a Frog named Goober. It seems the harder I try to visualize the curves of the character to remember how to draw it, the farther away from me the memory feels, but when I don't try so hard to rememeber, the experience of seeing the image as a whole is so vivid still. Wild. I wonder if other artists go through that. A teacher once taught my to study the lines, then close your eyes and continue to try to see those exactly lines in your head, working down the image piece by piece: studying, then shutting off your eyes and turning on your brain. Great piece of advice. Another one that stuck. And a lot harder to do than one would think.
So, to close up this here is another valuable lesson for me... In bringing in my old traditional work for this never ending website capsule of mine, I became familiar with how to mimic some of my traditional design techiniques digitally. Coming from a traditional background and confessing to not touching a computer for graphics until I was 22, I still find it very diffcult to get comfortable "free" drawing on the computer and I yearn to draw again-- painting digitally would be pristine if I could just encompass the same components in my strokes and shadows that made my designs unique. And tonight I felt I found some resemblances.
My Test: To Match up areas where strokes were lacking, parts of the bodies were blurry, the page was discolored, the leg or arm was distorted or needed to be moved... All of those replacement areas in photoshop had to be the same as my drawings. Making one match to the other was the key component to matching my traditional paper style. Corel Painter I heard was easiest to embody the realism of traditional work-- One day, I hope to play in it. I heard it's great!
But back to where the challenges that come in for ALL the elementary shcool hustlers out there... The moral of my story or the drive behind it?
The sense of learning, comfort, and confidence that one wants to feel as an artist determined to be an true artist, digital or the latter, and the amateur determined to be a success climbing on and UP the ladder.
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