I am an absent mother and wife in order to keep up the pace at school. My daughter, who is in the third year of her Bachelor's degree does not understand why we have such a heavy workload. Ours is much heavier than her full-time university studies. During reading week, we had assignments and she did not. Reading week is supposed to be a time to get away from school. It’s supposed to be a time to put our minds at ease, so we don’t feel as if our brains and our bodies are being overworked.
When Brock, among other universities, introduced the Fall Reading Week back in 2013, the underlying reasoning was the prevalence of mental illness among university students. They said this one extra week off was to allow students to get away from school, spend time with family and just come back with a clear mind. We have no had that kind of reading week this year, being that we had assignments due during Reading Week as well as the first Monday back.
I am exhausted and seriously considering not returning for my final year at Mohawk wholly due to the scheduling. I am exhausted, have double vision, miss being Ginger Owl to my Spark and Brownie troupe, my kids, my husband, and my sanity. I am also grumpy. Here we go…..
Digital painting is the main focus of my integrated art class this term. Despite this, finding good beginner level tutorials on the subject is still not that easy unless you have endless hours to shuffle through less than helpful resources to find a decent piece of advice or two. Since I started out painting digitally this year, I find the learning is coming very slowly and randomly. I only have so many hours in the day, what with my fakakta class schedule to work creating personal digital artwork which I am sure is part of pace I am learning at.
Recently I hit the downtown public library and found a book on digital painting was by an artist named Don Seegmiller. Admittedly, though the publication is old, it was a little advanced for my skill level right now. The pictures were fabulous, I’ll say that.
Getting past the technical hurdle of learning software I find to be time-consuming and frustrating. I am fully aware that it is worth it in the long run. That said I am still struggling to find the right brush after the extensive lesson of “just experiment”. It does not help that I have serious trouble with Photoshop to start with so the experimentation creates more chaos than clarity.
This makes it hard to blog about the steps I took to create a piece of artwork. I fall down so many Photoshop rabbit holes I feel like some modified, pixilated Alice who perhaps is "going out altogether, like a candle"; at least that’s how this semester has felt. So once again I am tasked with including some written description of my process with this blog post other than:
-I screwed around with the brushes so long I lost track of the one that I thought was working
-I deleted in excess of four layers of work because it was such a mess.
-I invested about 9 hours on this one blog post
-There is no joy in 1313 Mockingbird Lane, never mind Mudville.
STEP ONE: Find some subject matter like choose a sequence from a favourite book, film, video game cut scene or TV show - so long as it involves 'live action' human-proportioned characters.
STEP TWO: Brainstorm. Figure out what frames you want to include in your storyboard and use them as inspiration. That is interesting and has movement
STEP THREE: Draw it all in simple lines. These will be your Thumbnails
STEP FOUR: Use all the digital drawing and painting techniques you’ve gathered so far to show both line art and shading in greyscale, to create a more developed version of storyboard line work.
STEP FIVE: Count how many more sleeps until this night school semester of vision killing classes is over.
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