RatCreature's Journal

Compared to 2010 there was a slight uptick in productiveness. This year I made six pieces of art, 36 drawbles/doodles, and seven icons, though depressingly there were three months entirely without art. In comparison 2010 it was four pieces of art, 28 doodles/drawbles, one icon, and also three months without art; 2009 five pieces of art, 20 doodles/drawbles, three icons and six months without art. Maybe at some point I'll have a year where I can do one of those memes where you need to put in one preview picture for every month.

January
I posted the 2010 Yuletart Merlin art, Fealty, to my journal (linked in this roundup because it wasn't yet in last year's)
Aragorn ratcreature icon
eight drawbles (DC, Merlin, SGA, SPN, original)

February
Nothing. :(

March
Nothing. :(
(Though I did make a baby quilt for my second niece that month.)

April
a Duncan ratcreature icon

May
another Duncan ratcreature icon

June
two Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto ratcreature icons
a sketch for snowynight's prompt Colleen Wing & Kendo

July
a Methos ratcreature icon
a Neal ratcreature icon
X-Men/Calvin & Hobbes fanfic illustration

August
XMFC art meme
three drawbles (ATLA, Iron Man, X-Men)
two more X-Men/Calvin & Hobbes fanfic illustrations
Gnome & Horklumps HP fanart

September
three X-Men/Sesame Street doodles: "Magneto and Super Grover explain the letter M", "Erik visits Oscar's trash can" and "Hank and Kermit sing a duet"

October
Highlander/X-Men fanfic illustration
an Elmo birthday card for my niece
eight drawbles: seven here and one (Edward Scissorhands, Harry Potter, Muppets, SGA, Star Trek, Terminator, original)
four Halloween drawbles (SGA, X-Men, original)

November
Nothing :(

December
six drawbles: two here and four (Merlin, SG-1, SGA, original)
a Cookie Monster Christmas card
my yet to be revealed Secret Mutant artwork

I gacked this from glockgal, but the original empty template comes from Kamaniki at dA. The time span for chronicling art in this meme fit me well, because I started posting fanart in 2003, so I took it as a sign that I ought to be a memesheep.

( a huge image behind the cut, it might be considered NSFW by some strict standards due to kissing and groping going on in some art samples )

I'm in the mood to doodle and haven't offered drawbles in some time, so prompt me in a comment?

As usual, I'll do my best for any fandom I'm familiar with, or random stuff (monsters, steampunk machines, animals...) or I can just pick prompts from your interests. I don't draw porn though, and I'm not good at portrait likeness. Also keep in mind that these are quick doodles, so for a prompt that is a description of some epic scene you've always wanted to see realized in fanart the results aren't going to very satisfying for you (or much fun for me).

If you want to see the quality (or lack thereof) you can expect, look at the drawble tag. I don't make any promises for results or a timely delivery, but the past I've usually managed to draw something for everyone who prompted me for these non-demanding, open drawble offers. So this isn't limited to something like "the first X comments get a drawble" or anything like that, which is impractical with the crossposting in three places anyway. (However considering the broken state of the LJ comment notification right now, I'm more likely to notice your prompt quickly if you comment on DW or IJ. ETA: Except that IJ seems to be down completely just now. *argh*)

My drawing activity this year so far has been largely non-existent. This is depressing me in a somewhat self-reinforcing, vicious cycle. And not even the added pressure of public commitment helped any. (Yeah, I have not forgotten that poll, I just suck.)

However, I have yet to fail a drawble meme. So as I'm obviously not achieving what I want to wrt actual fanart, I'm lowering the target from "produce a drawing" to "produce a doodle". (Kind of like shifting definitions around to get better looking statistics.) And I have decided to offer sketches based on comment prompts. I'll do my best for any fandom I'm familiar with, or random stuff (monsters, steampunk machines, animals...) or I can just pick prompts from your interests. I don't draw porn though, and I'm not good at portrait likeness.

Considering that I now crosspost to three places, it isn't really workable to promise things like "the first X prompts will get a drawble", so just comment with something, and I'll try my best. (In the past I've usually managed to draw something for everyone who prompted me for these non-demanding, open drawble offers, but with the way my creativity and motivation seems to have shriveled and died recently, who knows.)

If you want to see the quality (or lack thereof) you can expect, look at the drawble tag.

Also, I currently have five Dreamwidth invites in case anyone should still want one. (My flist was rather flooded with offers, so I'm not sure whether there's even still demand for them.) Anyway, if you want an invite you can comment, and I'll give those I have to the first five people in order of the comment notifications I get. I'll edit this post if/when I got five requests.

BTW, of course you can ask for both an invite and a sketch or one or the other, the two are not connected, I just didn't want to make separate posts.

P.S.: Why is the Dreamwidth spell check broken? Does anyone else get a "Spell checker not set up properly." response when they click the spell check button?

January
a dragon (original fantasy art)
February
Iskierka's hatching (Temeraire fanart)
illustration for Beth's In From the Cold (Snape/Shacklebolt, HP fanart)
a Sarah Connor ratcreature icon
March
illustration for Trinityofone's Dæmonology (SGA/His Dark Materials fanart)
April
Junkie!Roy (DCU fanart)
May
Sheppard & Steampunk!Puddlejumper (SGA fanart, done for the paintedspires fest)
Bowtruckle (HP fanart)
Teyla as Waterbender (SGA/Avatar: The Last Airbender fanart, done for the paintedspires fest)
June
Nothing. :(
July
Nothing. :(
August
Nothing. :(
September
a tentacle rape and a steampunk ratcreature icon
various drawbles based on prompts, some fannish, some not
October
a Linus ratcreature icon
November
John Sheppard Halloween '75 (SGA fanart, done for the paintedspires Halloween challenge)
Matthew sketch (DCU fanart)
Red Cap (HP fanart)
some doodles (an US election themed doodle, a werewolf, a dinosaur with a raygun, a baby cthulhu, a monster, a vengeful teddy bear)
a Minbari ratcreature icon and a nitpicking ratcreature icon
December
some sketches based on prompts (Travolta!furry, steampunk!Batmobile, dragons, Sheppard, 'cheese eats mouse')
Merlin and Arthur ratcreature icons
Christmas doodle (SGA/Merlin/Numb3rs fanart)
and finally the not yet revealed Yuletart art.

There was a sad lack of any art production for several months in summer, however overall I posted more fanart than in 2007, especially when just counting the fully fledged art. Also I started using acrylic paint to color, and found it much easier (and more error tolerant) than my sad attempts to use watercolors ages ago. And while messy and somewhat time intensive, I think my attempts with that look better than my digital coloring.

I tried doing this meme where you list your favorite work, your most surprising work and so on, but I couldn't come up with any answers for half the things, so I gave up.

Here's the drawbles I did yesterday evening:

( coffee + evil overlords for iamza )
( rat cuddles for astridv )
( dragons + necromancer for flykat )
( Pirate!Snape for penknife )
( SPN + sleeping + travel for sealie )

BTW, the previous drawble post is still open for requests.

I don't often link to random stuff I've come across, but this dragon sand sculpture is very impressive. Here's a photo from another angle where you can see the baby dragon the big one is cradling.

Though I don't draw professionally or even all that often, I still have a habit of collecting interesting visual things for reference or inspiration. Even with libraries and these days internet image searches it is not easy to find the exact kind of interesting picture you need when you need it, or sometimes you don't even know what exactly it would be you need to realize some vague idea. Or at least it is like that for me, so if I come across something that is visually stunning, unusual, interesting, seems like a good inspiration, or a possible reference for something I might draw some day I keep it.

Like, if I'm at a used book store, I habitually look if there's a bin of old cheap National Geographic or other travel magazines and leaf through them to see whether any have cool photographs, if I see an interesting picture on the internet I will safe it, and so on.

Obviously after a time this results in an organizational problem if you ever want to find anything again. So I'm wondering how others deal with this.

It's not so bad with the books, I just have a shelf with books I got for their pictures, like for example collections of photographs from the 1920s, 30s and so on, books of animals, places, people, cars, design... It's harder for the magazines because things like National Geographic aren't topic specific, so I never know whether I decided to keep some issue for pictures of some place or some animal, or even whether it was in the title article. Which makes finding things again a bit harder.

Digital stuff is the least problematic in some respects, because I have created a bunch of folders labeled by topic for photos (reference for buildings & cityscapes, landscapes, actions, clothing, animals, plants, objects, symbols, textures,... with some having subfolders) and some other folders for art by other people, and yet another set of folders for fandom character reference, so it's not hard to find which folders to browse. The main problem is that I don't always know where I got some image from, because it's so much easier to just save a picture than to save it and add something to its meta-info field. That isn't a big problem if I just use it as inspiration or reference some parts of it, but if say a landscape photo was to serve as main reference for a drawn background I might want to acknowledge that, yet often by the time I use something I have no idea where it came from anymore.

Photos I've taken myself before having a digital camera are more of a mess, because those are mostly in big boxes, and most are kind of boring holiday photos with some cool landscapes and animals scattered inbetween. But the worst are the boxes of, well I guess "junk" fits, i.e. stuff I've kept for because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Much of that is also paper, like exhibition catalogs, flyers that looked interesting, clippings from newspapers or magazines, posters, but there's also stuff like feathers with a nice pattern, stones, tins, even some bit of metal that rusted in an interesting way, and so on. I mean, I try to keep the non-paper junk down to one box or so, because I really don't need to go down the road of people who end up smothered by their packrat piles collapsing on them, but well, I'm not a very tidy person to begin with, so it's an uphill battle. I guess what I really need would be del.icio.us tagging for RL objects and/or a physical search engine, but I fear that level of virtual home and computer merging is still a way off into the future.

So, how do you deal with organizing your reference and inspirational collection so that is actually useful for you rather than a pile of messy clutter? Do you have some kind of system? Or just really good spatial memory?

I'm not sure whether there's even any interest, because the painting itself got less comments than usual for my fanart posts, so I guess there will be ever fewer interested in the unfinished inbetween stages. But I already made the photographs after all, so I decided to go ahead with the art process post.

( very image heavy )

Subject: some random dragon
Media: pencil, fine liner pen with waterproof indian ink, acrylic paint, a bit of color pencil
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: ( lengthy notes on my process, because this is the first time I used acrylics to color a drawing and felt rambly, feel free to skip if you just want to look at the picture. )

Preview:

( the finished drawing and a detail of the head in a larger size are behind the cut )