I've been slowly but surely learning how to draw. Lately I picked up a wacom creative pen tablet and am downloading the art program Krita right now. I'm pretty excited and Kiki the Cyber Squirrel is pretty adorable:
I've been a sketch artist all my life and have become a fairly decent landscape painter. As for your art program, that's great! One fun way to explore its possibilities is to start up a web cartoon. I did that for a time several years ago and had a great deal of fun. Instead of a tablet, though, I sketched on paper and then scanned that into my program and then finished working on it there, adding word balloons and text and special effects.
Actually I am planning on starting a web comic It will be based on Mush, a casual online game I've been playing: The game only lets you log in and play maybe 2-3 times a day, though you can log in to chat, so it's a good casual game or office game. It's kind of like playing mafia if you have ever played that, where you have X people and then 1-2 are the "assassins" and they get to kill one person each night. The way it works is, you have 16 players, and then 2 are the "mush" which is an alien mushroom monster. It's pretty silly stuff. Everyone is on a spaceship and you try to determine who is the mush based upon who does their spaceship job badly because the mush don't want the spaceship to reach its destination. That's how it goes in theory, in reality there's always boneheads who do their job badly even though they aren't the mush (that's intended, though) and so unless you're really clever and/or lucky you will end up having the humans killing each other while the mush are off snickering in a corner somewhere. I'd also like to make a political web comic, but it's a lot harder than just drawing up some random stuff that you like about girls with swords or whatever. So, what was your webcomic called if I may ask? I used to read Bigger than Cheese, Penny Arcade (still read that one actually) and a bunch of other random ones.
The Mush-style approach to a web cartoon sounds intriguing. If you are looking for a place to host it I enjoyed working with the Drunk Duck site http://theduckwebcomics.com/ but that was a long time ago. I haven't kept up with them and so I don't know if their helpful and friendly attitude has remained the same. I do recall that their software system for hosting cartoons was pretty much fool-proof and that their forums system was a blast, though. About my webcartoon, I would actually have to go through some notes at this point to remember what I called it. I know that it was an ensemble character piece, plot driven with the occasional one-off gags; but that's about it. I ran it so that I could improve my free form sketching techniques, trying to get better at the pure imagination stuff. I do know that I ended the run with a sequence showing how a SpongeBob SquarePants knock off character stumbled into this alternate universe and bumbled his way into the position of mayor of a city, driving the residents so crazy with his insane antics that someone finally hired a hit-woman to take him out, which she finally managed to do . . . and then just before her secret identity was going to be revealed, I lost interest in the thing. I have a vague memory of intending to make her a Brittany Spears knock-off just for the shock value of the thing. Anyway the demise of my webcartoon was hardly any great loss to the field, but I did gain a fair amount of valuable free form sketch practice with it, and so that was good. The political cartoon idea is good depending on how you want to approach it. I hammered out a rough approach to that once bouncing between a one or two panel gag concept in which a cynical clown in full makeup was an over-the-hill national level politician always either being interviewed about hot topic national or world issues or running for an unnamed political office while issuing acerbic observations based on the issues de jur. The idea though was to also have a nominal three to four panel strip ongoing with this premise that was populated by regular characters dealing with the day to day idiocy of covering for the cynical political clown's idiot observations or assertions and his chronic corruption and the fallout from his countless lies and his cheating on his wife with really cheap hookers. I was going to pull out all the cliche stops . . . but then couldn't be bothered. Feel free to adapt the concept to your own thoughts on the subject. My gift to you, such as it is. By the way 'Can't Be Bothered' would probably make for a dynamite title for a webcartoon. You can use that too, if you like. So far as I know, nobody else is using it . . . The thing about running a web cartoon that takes down most newbies is their absolute refusal to start off with a large enough buffer of strips. They start off figuring that they will produce them whenever and then discover that if they do get any fans -- which is a heady ego stroke, believe me -- that those fans want a steady schedule of strip production. So they settle for three times per week but find that in the beginning the ideas are gushing and the enthusiasm is such that they actually produce at least five strips per week and then the ideas don't keep coming so easy and so they cut down to four and then to three and then to two, one . . . and then one strip every other week . . . and so they began losing their fan base, which hurts. But if you make sure to have at least one month's backlog of already finished and ready to go strips set aside before you submit the first one to the public (a buffer) you find it much easier (psychologically speaking) to start off with a set routine of only three strips per week . . . and then sticking to that production schedule no matter what. That's all I can recall about web cartoon work, though as it was several years ago now. Good luck!
one of my daughters is a professional illustrator and I'm told by others is very very talented...she was approached a number of times to do comic illustration but turns those offers away as they have a poor financial return for time spent, a web design company saw her work and created a position for her illustrating apps....there are many good artists out there but coming up with a storyline concept that you can cash in on is very difficult...
I've been drawing comic strips since my childhood. In school I would draw a short two-page story every week, based on that week's funny or interest incidents with my classmates and teachers as characters. They were very popular. The original page would usually make its round through the whol class and come back to me after a few days. I neglected drawing when I discovered playing music, but when I come across old classmates today, they always ask me if I still draw those comic strips.
Bumping my thread... I just realized that "digital painting" is a nice way of saying that computer art programs can't shade worth a dang.
Ditto! Drawing is one of my ways to relax - faces, landscapes, full-figured people......I remember when I was around 10+, I designed a lot of clothes...... But the artist in my family is my son. Fantastic! He'd look at a pix, like a cartoon, then sit down and draw it. I encouraged him to go into art work as a business, but he chose construction and he's good at it. Knows everything about houses........ He was born ambidextrous, left side pretty much took over, but can still do pretty much whatever w/both hands if he has to.......
Faces fascinate me. I love drawing faces that is my favorite and the next would be horses or any animal. India ink washes are also fun to do. My time is limited and I don't have a lot of time to spend drawing and painting anymore, makes me sad.
My "aunt" - a very close friend of my foster mother - grew up in pre-Tsar Russia and was a ballerina as well as an accomplished artist in pastels. I fortunately have one of her pieces but am waiting to get it properly framed. There is something special about pastels.
Growing up around entertainers and artists, I desperately wanted to follow their lead. I dreamed of being able to plain the piano like my foster father but only learned to sight read and stumble through simple pieces. I could draw landscapes and buildings but have never been able to draw animals or people. My stepson, on the other hand, is pretty good with pen and ink. He did a couple of things for a book I wrote and they're somewhere on my hard disk. Will try to find them.
the only drawing that I have ever done is with my pistol, but that's been done over million times, and I am not exaggerating one little bit, either. Nowadays, I mostly use Airsoft, instead of doing all the work involved in loading primer only (no powder) wax bulleted ammo, for quiet indoor practice.
Gimp is good freeware and has a lot of tools. Some are clumsy but hey its free. I am more a photographer than an fine artist but I enjoy attempting to draw paint and sculpt. I admire good art and music, both can bring my emotion out. reva
No, Never have, I belonged to an art group once on the internet but haven't logged on to that in a while. There is a group of artists in Texas that do outstanding art work. Google them and look at their work.. Texas outdoor artists. Beautiful work.
Cool, i will. Draw something is an app you play with people all over the world. www.drawsomething.com
