Old dog new tricks

By May 2011 I’ll have reached the end of my fourth decade on this planet and it’s strange to see how things have progressed and changed over the years but more so, how such an old dog could still fit in with modern society and more so, whether it could be taught some new tricks?

I believe elsewhere in one of my earlier blogs I’ll have mentioned how I started out with drawing and how my life has progressed into graphic design and so on, but now that I’m getting back into illustration and drawing again I’ve found YouTube among other things to be a great resource for things, as of course do most people, especially for different drawing styles that are around these days that weren’t so obvious when I was younger.

Although it’s generally something you don’t put in a portfolio when applying for jobs in the games industry, styles like manga/anime for example were things you’d see on daytime cartoons, but because it wasn’t something that originated over here it wasn’t something that was easy to find resources for, but most recently through watching various videos to get myself back up to speed with different techniques I started to notice more and more people seemed to have this single stroke technique down to a fine art and so I started to get a little disheartened by the fact that I was more the short strokes building up a line type of person. It was therefore quite refreshing to find a large number of tutorial videos out there, like above image which comes from a long set of tutorial videos by a guy called Mark Crilley (if you click his name there it will take you to the video of how to draw the inserted picture), but what I found most interesting was that his handling of the pencil was the same as mine. Not saying that my drawing is anywhere near his quality at present, but more the fact that he builds his lines up through short strokes.

So why mention manga/anime?

Well, with two of three kids watching cartoons like Tokyo Mew Mew among other manga cartoons (the youngest is still into Fireman Sam and Thomas the Tank Engine but does like TMM) it’s something that I tend to see a lot of on TV or ending up on YouTube when they invade one of the computers here, so you tend to look at these things and start to wonder what it is about the art style that differentiates it from other art styles (also can’t understand why so many of the characters seem to have feline properties?)

What does concern me at the moment is the fact that, as I’m getting on, should I still be refining and learning new techniques, or should I just stick with what I know and just hope that I can make use of it in an ever changing world?

Old dog… new tricks!

Well if nothing else I’ve been spending a lot more time getting used to my graphics tablets again, of which I now have two different size Trust graphics tablets, not exactly the best brand in the world but aside from some problems with drivers with the A4 tablet, both the A6 5300 tablet and the A4 4200 tablet have been very bizarre to get used to but thankfully I’m starting to get there with them.

Fortunately, because a lot of modern programmes, Photoshop CS4, Toon Boom and Autodesk’s Sketchbook among others  give you the ability to rotate your artboard while you’re working, for people like myself who tend to draw at an angle, and more often than not have a certain angle that they’re comfortable with for drawing straight lines and curves, it makes it that little easier to be able to rotate your canvas to suit an angle that you’re most comfortable with.

At the same time, I decided to splash out a little and bought myself a new set of pencils, although maybe not the most expensive set I’ve ever owned, it’s nice to have a new set of water soluble pencils, a range of H and B pencils, some standard colouring pencils and a set of graphites again. (if only tria markers were as cheap to replace)

Of course, I splash out on those and then spend the rest of my time character modelling in 3d studio max. Go figure.