So much inspiration

It has to be said that thanks to modern digital technology, coupled with some brilliantly creative people, there is just so many inspiring pieces of work out there it’s hard to know where to really begin.

When I was in my late teens I knew someone who was heavily into fantasy roll play and for all I was creative and imaginative at the time, I somehow couldn’t get my imagination to work in order to get into the whole scene that was being described to me. In stark contrast I did read a lot of books, Terry Pratchett being one of my favourites at the time and somehow, reading those to myself I would often find that my imagination used to wander and through the descriptive writing I could imagine the scene he painted in vivid detail. (Maybe the highly detailed cover and the fact that it wasn’t someone else reading and describing the scene to me made it that much easier for me to conjure up the make believe world? who knows….)

Still, at the time I was also into mythical creatures among other things and my all time favourite was the Minotaur. I saved my money for a few weeks to be able to buy a pewter Minotaur and other figures from Games Workshop in the MetroCentre and spent many hours copying the shape onto paper and drawing the creature from different angles. But back then illustration was done on paper, it was done using paints, pencils, pastels and sometimes airbrush, but with the exception of published works, many artists around the time who spent all their time drawing some fantastic pieces went undiscovered.

As time has moved on, the internet started to take shape and most recently, social networking and sites like deviantarts, cghub, hire an illustrator among others have started to pave the way for artists of many varied backgrounds to be able to express their creativity and above all, show it to the rest of the world.

Of course, with the increase in popularity of the computer to create digital art along with increasing power and performance, more and more art is being created digitally using a graphics tablet and a whole host of programmes including Photoshop, Painter, Sketchbook Pro and more. Even traditional cell animation started to become more widely available to anybody with a computer with the advent of applications like Toon Boom and Flash, so right at this moment in time there are so many things out there that I want to play with that I honestly feel like my head could explode at any given moment.

Also, thanks to this vast wealth of creativity and advances in both TV/monitor resolutions as well as advances in consoles for the games industry, a lot of people are now starting to put almost feature film quality computer generated movie sequences into games and of course, from this artwork you can also get books dedicated to the art of the game.

One such game that took my fancy (even though I’ve never actually seen or played any of the games) is God of War 3. Not so long back a friend of mine from the Train2Game forum sent me a link to some “making of” videos on YouTube which I was really impressed with, and later I found a book published by Ballistic Publishing which wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the fact they put a low resolution preview of the entire book on the site, but also upon entering the homepage of their site you’re  greeted with a wealth of other books that are just begging for you to part with your hard earned cash.

All I can say is Roll on the lottery (note to self, must start playing the lottery to improve chances of winning!)

Ultimately, this post follows on from an earlier post where I’m tinkering with my little graphics tablet again and seriously looking to see if I can find a stockist somewhere that has wacom tablets on demo so that I can try one out. I know everyone goes on about them and at first I thought that the difference between a 17″ monitor and a 6″ drawing surface on the tablet I have at present would be hard to get used to but once you get the hang of the difference in the on screen display it’s not so bad, but for me the hardest part is trying to rotate the artboard to suit the way my hand moves as it would on paper. Something I know would be resolved if I had a Cintiq but given that I’m not up to the standard of the two images shown on this page at the moment (and because I’m not currently illustrating for profit) it’s sadly something that could be classed as a luxury item.

If I could justify the expense and could see that I was going to put it to some serious use then I’d be off to the nearest Wacom Cintiq dealer like a shot…. One day though….

There’s always Christmas, and Santa CAN NOT tell me that I haven’t been good this year!

Anyway, in closing you may notice that I’ve left comments open for this post. I normally don’t include comment submission but I’d be interested to see comments on digital art, changes in the industry, opinions on how digital media (even scanners) and websites have opened opportunities for everyone to demonstrate what they can do.

(if it gets abused by spambots and nobody has anything interesting to say then I will remove it again, but we’ll see)