The two hardest things you can do as an artists are 1) draw the same character from multiple positions, and 2) draw natural skin color (especially black). The latter problem has been solved by Photoshop, at least when drawing digitally. Just pull up a picture of a black person and extract the color. Puertorican skin tends to halve multiple tones.
But what about the former? Well, you're going to have to learn how to draw now. That is, if you ever want to animate your characters or create a comic book series. You have to be able to draw your character in all of his or her attendant moods, expressions, and states. You also have to be able to draw your character in all of the character-specific states of action. Think Heisman Trophy pose.
So how do I learn how to draw, you ask? There are three main ways to learn how to draw. There is tracing, the easiest and fastest way; reference drawing, which seems challenging at first, but can get frustrating; and my favorite method, freestyle, which is like trying to change the tracks on an Abrams tank during a three-way tank battle. You can use the first two "quick and dirty" methods if you wish, but you will soon discover that they don't make you better at drawing. That is, your images will only look good while you are actively using reference or tracing. As soon as the training wheels come off, so does your artistic ability. If you can't draw what you want to see with just a pencil, paper, sharpener and eraser, you're not an artist.
Since I was in the first grade, I have been obsessed with the concept of brain efficiency. That is, the optimum use of brain cells to achieve a certain goal. Using the least amount of hard drive space and processing power in your brain to do the most work. Naturally, this belief is anathema to universal educational concept of learning through repetition. It's probably no coincidence that I started using computers at the age of 4, in Rockwell Gardens.
The theory of learning through repetition, while novel, is extremely wasteful, wasting both time and brain cells that could be used for other things, or better yet, just conserved, like a protected wildlife habitat. Imagine if you wanted to play Star Wars Battlefront on your 5.0 GHz PC. Now imagine that you had to double-click the icon on your desktop 10,000 times to get it to load the program. Does that seem extreme? Imagine that you had to double-click the icon two times to get it to load. That would start one hell of a flame war in the forums.
Imagine that you had to buy thirty bananas a day to find three that were edible. Now imagine having to buy fifty bananas a day, for an entire month, just to find one that was edible. This type of waste is unprecedented, especially since knowledge has a shelf life, a scope and a category. What I mean by scope is that it takes a different set of skills to produce a retention arm for a CPU than it does to produce a RAM slot, or indeed the overall motherboard. The point is that we need a way for everyone to draw like Leonardo Da Vinci by downloading a program directly into their brains in five minutes.
Until then, we have repetition. Repetition is, regrettably, the only way to know how to draw. But there is hope. Since I was in the first grade, I could write better than Michael Jordan can write now. That was twenty-three years ago. When you're repeating every day, it might seem like it's taking forever, but just a few years of concentration can bring you decades of accomplishment. In other words, the wasteful practice of repetition does not pay for itself, but it gives you a sense of accomplishment, sort of like the U.S. economy.
But like the U.S. economy, learning to draw through repetition is extremely wasteful and must be done away with, or reduced. I have discovered my own way of learning to draw, called Hemistheory. It states that if you trace half of an image and draw the other half with no help at all, you will become more accurate and balanced in drawing more quickly than with any of the other three theories alone or in combination. Also, if you draw skewed like me, you will be able to see the skewed nature of your drawing if you practice by drawing half of your image with a home-made stencil (or tracing paper) and completing the rest in the Hemistheory style, which combines tracing, reference, freestyle drawing and deductive reasoning.
This theory is still in the early testing phases, but it's showing some promising initial results. We will probably never be able to download directly into our brains (legally), but I will look to reduce the amount of repetition necessary to learn the skills of an artist. What that means is that I will make many breakthroughs in the future, which should lead me to being a great artist. I do lift heavy weights during the week, and that sometimes decreases my artistic ability, so my results might be tainted by that fact. Some of the things that I've drawn look just phenomenal to me, but they come along once in a full moon. I need a bankable artistic skill set that will see me through.
My advice: let go of the training wheels of tracing and reference drawing and do more freestyle. My belief is that the human mind is precious, not a machine, and that hard drive space in the brain has to be preserved. Whenever you repeat something for memorization purposes, your brain tries to write in multiple places at once, but nothing sticks. 100 million brain cells hold a total of one tenth of the knowledge required to do work. It's like fishing with a nuke. Sooner or later you'll catch a fish, but also quite a few buffalo. I want to find a method so that all of the learned knowledge goes directly to the part of the brain that holds that information, and that the information is written to the brain with the most optimum amount of repetition, if any.
Thursday, February 4, 2016
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
The Fall of Facebook
I am aware that everyone and their mother says this, but the only reason why I ever signed up for Facebook in the first place is because I thought I was going to die. The year was 2008 and I was going through the most traumatic period in my life. Imagine walking to your car in an closed garage, alone, and being pounced on by an Asian tiger. There is no one around to help you, and you're pretty sure that this is the end. But for some reason the tiger gets tired of you and walks away. That's what happened to me.
At the time I was sure that I wouldn't make it through the summer. I had my affairs in order and I was already saying my last goodbyes to my mother and extended family. I played a few more games with my brother, and took my ledgers off the wall. My purpose for signing up with Facebook was twofold: One, It was a desperate last gasp for air in a sinking ship at Pearl Harbor. I was desperately looking for someone who might be able to save me (for I couldn't save myself yet). Even though no one could have possibly known how to help me, or didn't care, you think that way when death is staring you in the face. Second, I just wanted to see a familiar face before I died.
I wished to relive my glory days (as Bruce Springsteen plays) back when I was the grunge bench-warmer of 47th street. Back in the late nineties and early 2000s my family had made a major breakthrough. After a lifetime of shelter-hopping and wearing out our welcomes, my mother doubled down on work. We were now poor with real money, not food stamps. We went from a hot dog covered in sugar to 24 hours of a N64 Wrestling Game and Magic Carpet on Windows '95. My own personal breakthrough is happening today, however.
My days as an outsider looking in on Hyde Park were - by far - the most beneficial time of my life. Being on the south side teaches you how to be a man. And boy did my teammates and I ever get clowned for being the worst football players in Chicago. It was this history, also my impending doom, that attracted me to joining Facebook.
True to form, I signed up and put up my profile. I assiduously notified the entire internet that I was a virgin (at 23) in my bio and it was off to the races. Like a mother who's infant had just been kidnapped, I believed that there were only two people from Kenwood Academy that would have me contact: V and S. They were two sides of the same coin. The extent of my relationship with V was that she watched me flunk advanced Biology class freshman year, in the most embarrassing way. I was too much of...what you would call a cad, in freshman year, and had been demoted for not doing my homework. In my relationship with S, I was too much of a stereotypical bookworm and spent all of my class time trying to listen to mister P over rowdy classmates instead of sitting in the back, like S, and laughing it up with the freshman quarterback.
They didn't like me, but they would "tolerate" me (I still don't understand the meaning of that word). And as a desperate, dying animal, that was the best that I could possibly hope for: Just someone to listen to my problems as I slipped away, something to ease the pain. I begged them for different things, based on what I remembered about their personalities. They quickly shut me down, and then I calmed a bit. Soon I was addicted to Facebook and within two years I was sending friend requests to everyone I could remember from "The Wood," most of which didn't know me. I unfriended them all, including V and S and re-friended them again. It was a pornographic addiction - bingeing and purging (or more accurately, download, shame and delete). I would look at their pictures of hangouts and functions and children and imagine that I too could be a part of that world some day.
John Jenkins didn't die that year, and that was the problem (That's what she said. No pun intended). Time went on and I was inexplicably invited to a musical event through Facebook. And for the first time, I could actually go because I had real money to spend, not food stamps. T invited me. I, at least, resented her throughout high school because back then she was dating a white boy for his money, in the black part of town, and I was on a liberal racial unity kick. She also wore green contacts, hiding her natural brown eyes. Times had changed, though. She was now dating a black rapper/promoter. It was the first time that I could remember being invited somewhere. I was certainly grateful at the time, but my Facebook life never lasted, no matter how many times I came back.
Facebook preyed on my immaturity and desperation and left me feeling like a sucker. "It's like a high school yearbook, but with real people!" My adolescent power fantasy statuses and comments were legendary, but only to me of course. Generally, when people join Facebook, they're thinking, "Finally, now that I have a leased Honda Civic or some new makeup, the it girl or the jock will see me as desirable and I will be invited into the fold. I will no longer be on the outside looking in." That's not true. No matter what you do on Facebook, you will always be remembered as the one who came to school with the wrong sneakers on, or who wouldn't put out. They won't respect you because they don't value what you bring to the table.
The other problem with Facebook is that people don't age well. Most people's parents never prepared them for success in the real world, teaching them that their "good genes" would be enough to see them through. They get decimated after high school. It's like they've been through three World Wars, five train wrecks and a shark attack, and it's only been five years!
At the very least, I was wise enough not to put any picture of myself or my family on Facebook, Snapchat or Twitter (Youtube is another story). Up until 2014 there was only one image of me the entire internet (my family is very phobic about this as well). I can't do what I did before and just clear out my friends list, because it's pornography. I just have to know that my favorite "pornstars" are there. If I do clear it out, I'll make a mad dash to re-friend everyone within a few weeks, and I'll feel extra unwanted when half of them ignore said friend request. At least I don't use Facebook anymore. That's got to count for something. I can't believe this Zuckerberg guy got rich by providing pictures of isolated people for us all to jerk off to. -JJ
At the time I was sure that I wouldn't make it through the summer. I had my affairs in order and I was already saying my last goodbyes to my mother and extended family. I played a few more games with my brother, and took my ledgers off the wall. My purpose for signing up with Facebook was twofold: One, It was a desperate last gasp for air in a sinking ship at Pearl Harbor. I was desperately looking for someone who might be able to save me (for I couldn't save myself yet). Even though no one could have possibly known how to help me, or didn't care, you think that way when death is staring you in the face. Second, I just wanted to see a familiar face before I died.
I wished to relive my glory days (as Bruce Springsteen plays) back when I was the grunge bench-warmer of 47th street. Back in the late nineties and early 2000s my family had made a major breakthrough. After a lifetime of shelter-hopping and wearing out our welcomes, my mother doubled down on work. We were now poor with real money, not food stamps. We went from a hot dog covered in sugar to 24 hours of a N64 Wrestling Game and Magic Carpet on Windows '95. My own personal breakthrough is happening today, however.
My days as an outsider looking in on Hyde Park were - by far - the most beneficial time of my life. Being on the south side teaches you how to be a man. And boy did my teammates and I ever get clowned for being the worst football players in Chicago. It was this history, also my impending doom, that attracted me to joining Facebook.
True to form, I signed up and put up my profile. I assiduously notified the entire internet that I was a virgin (at 23) in my bio and it was off to the races. Like a mother who's infant had just been kidnapped, I believed that there were only two people from Kenwood Academy that would have me contact: V and S. They were two sides of the same coin. The extent of my relationship with V was that she watched me flunk advanced Biology class freshman year, in the most embarrassing way. I was too much of...what you would call a cad, in freshman year, and had been demoted for not doing my homework. In my relationship with S, I was too much of a stereotypical bookworm and spent all of my class time trying to listen to mister P over rowdy classmates instead of sitting in the back, like S, and laughing it up with the freshman quarterback.
They didn't like me, but they would "tolerate" me (I still don't understand the meaning of that word). And as a desperate, dying animal, that was the best that I could possibly hope for: Just someone to listen to my problems as I slipped away, something to ease the pain. I begged them for different things, based on what I remembered about their personalities. They quickly shut me down, and then I calmed a bit. Soon I was addicted to Facebook and within two years I was sending friend requests to everyone I could remember from "The Wood," most of which didn't know me. I unfriended them all, including V and S and re-friended them again. It was a pornographic addiction - bingeing and purging (or more accurately, download, shame and delete). I would look at their pictures of hangouts and functions and children and imagine that I too could be a part of that world some day.
John Jenkins didn't die that year, and that was the problem (That's what she said. No pun intended). Time went on and I was inexplicably invited to a musical event through Facebook. And for the first time, I could actually go because I had real money to spend, not food stamps. T invited me. I, at least, resented her throughout high school because back then she was dating a white boy for his money, in the black part of town, and I was on a liberal racial unity kick. She also wore green contacts, hiding her natural brown eyes. Times had changed, though. She was now dating a black rapper/promoter. It was the first time that I could remember being invited somewhere. I was certainly grateful at the time, but my Facebook life never lasted, no matter how many times I came back.
Facebook preyed on my immaturity and desperation and left me feeling like a sucker. "It's like a high school yearbook, but with real people!" My adolescent power fantasy statuses and comments were legendary, but only to me of course. Generally, when people join Facebook, they're thinking, "Finally, now that I have a leased Honda Civic or some new makeup, the it girl or the jock will see me as desirable and I will be invited into the fold. I will no longer be on the outside looking in." That's not true. No matter what you do on Facebook, you will always be remembered as the one who came to school with the wrong sneakers on, or who wouldn't put out. They won't respect you because they don't value what you bring to the table.
The other problem with Facebook is that people don't age well. Most people's parents never prepared them for success in the real world, teaching them that their "good genes" would be enough to see them through. They get decimated after high school. It's like they've been through three World Wars, five train wrecks and a shark attack, and it's only been five years!
At the very least, I was wise enough not to put any picture of myself or my family on Facebook, Snapchat or Twitter (Youtube is another story). Up until 2014 there was only one image of me the entire internet (my family is very phobic about this as well). I can't do what I did before and just clear out my friends list, because it's pornography. I just have to know that my favorite "pornstars" are there. If I do clear it out, I'll make a mad dash to re-friend everyone within a few weeks, and I'll feel extra unwanted when half of them ignore said friend request. At least I don't use Facebook anymore. That's got to count for something. I can't believe this Zuckerberg guy got rich by providing pictures of isolated people for us all to jerk off to. -JJ
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