okay, this is for all you resident artists out there, no matter what the genre, what are the banes to your abilities, but you HAVE to do them.
(for example: for folks who draw, what do you hate drawing the most, for musicians, what song do you loathe the most, but had to play)
Mine?.... Trees, i hate drawing trees, building/cityscapes follow closely behind trees, however.
Hrm.. well I have my little fingers in a bunch of different artistic things right now >_< but I guess the one thing that pops in my mind is writting. I tend to be a blunt sort of person (at least irl) and having to write descriptively has been an on-going challenge >_<.
Eyes. I cannot get the little buggers to look right and keep having to ask Keaton to fix them :<
Drawing in general... and for writing, anything involving action.
Lines
Specifically, putting lines into shapes resembling a drawing.
:U
Landscapes of any sort- while I can actually do them pretty nice, I hate having to. My greatest weakness right now though is coloring- I have sooo much to learn about that, it despairs me.
Pretty well the whole digital side of art. Still have a long way to go on that stuff.
Hands. Freaking hands. Also, traditional inking. I have a nasty habit of royally screwing up anything that i like when i use ink.
Quote from: Teh_Hobo on August 06, 2009, 09:15:12 AM
Hands. Freaking hands. Also, traditional inking. I have a nasty habit of royally screwing up anything that i like when i use ink.
Actually, that is the opposite of my problem.
I have really steady hands with a marker/inking pen. But shaky as the economy when it comes to using the tablet pen.
I rarely have a problem with writing...
Drawing though: it's hands and wrists (though I think I'm slowly getting better at those) and most often legs and feet and how they're connected to the body. It's so some of my drawings tend to end somewhere just below the knee. It makes thinking of a pose and drawing it different things entirely.
Not to mention I hate drawing shoes as well. xP
Can those of us who don't have art on the web post as well?
Quote from: Forycles on August 06, 2009, 01:16:34 PM
Can those of us who don't have art on the web post as well?
From the wording, I don't think it was restricted to visual art.
Writing: Erm... I'm none too hot at writing to begin with, though I suppose my biggest problem is that I over plan. I don't want to finish the story once I already know the ending, so I barely even start mine. When I do, I only tend to get maybe a section or two before I've already planned it all out. That's why most of my RPs are freelance or member run, so I don't have the entire reins and quit halfway.
Drawing: Starting. For some reason, I can't start with an outline or stick figure. I have to start with the details straight off, which is murder on the picture itself. Then comes proportionality. So, in other words, I can rarely make a good finished piece.
And for anyone wondering about setting, I haven't even made a pencil stroke in its general direction.
Getting started :P
On a more technical note, I'm a writer, and for me, my achilles heel is writing effrevescant personalities. I only seem to be able to make the curmudgeons believeable. I either put way too much sugar in or too little.
Writing: I'm still trying to keep myself from falling into predictable cliches and stereotypes when writing serious plots, and I need to focus on a single project instead of leaping from whatever seems the most attractive on whimsy. Honestly, when it comes to writing, I can be extremely immature in that I'm still confined to my worldbuilding stage and I don't really have the confidence to do something serious with an intense plot because I'm always rewriting things and
preparing preparing preparing because I have no faith in my improvisation skills and want everything to be
fucking perfect. That's something I'm still trying to overcome.
Also, I have a tendency to ramble when going into very flowery descriptions because I just don't know how to spread such phrases throughout the prose. Ahaha. Metaphors and similes are my fuck buddies. I need to stop kissing Truman Capote's ass so I can develop my own style, but he has such a pretty and elaborate ass. :< Seriously,
In Cold Blood is fucking amazing. In a complete reversal, I've been so conscious of trying to keep myself from reverting to my old stage of using completely obscure words in every sentence that I sometimes come across as being extremely clinical.
ALSO ALSO, I seem to have some kind of fetishistic attraction to making all my characters utterly miserable.
Drawing: ANATOMY. BODIES. OMG HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE
Quote from: Tapewolf on August 06, 2009, 06:40:06 AM
Eyes. I cannot get the little buggers to look right and keep having to ask Keaton to fix them :<
Drawing Antidote: I love drawing eyes. That's why Tapewolf keeps asking me to fix them~ :3
painting gorram WEIGHT!!! :erk
My artistic banes?
Everything... :<
Except snow. I can draw a blizard very well. :B
I forgot to mention photography. It's not so much the fact I have the crappiest camera on the planet, but I always manage to mess up in some way or another. =/
Lately? Anything.
Shading, with pencil especially, has become the bane of my existence. I can never get it right.
Following closely are people.
Eyes I like to draw, same with trees/Backgrounds.
And then there's the digital banes: Crashes, Ctrl+Z too much, strange flat look, urgh.
My writing bane being my procrastination. In a term or so I have to write a 3000-5000 word murder mystery. I started already, got 500 words and have just stopped.
Getting anthro anatomy right. I understand why most people choose cats because of my own preferences. Cats are freaking EASY to draw. Getting muzzles right is a pain in almost every species but insect and rabbit (dogs and certain reptiles are hardest for me), tails tend to end up looking fox-ish the way I draw, and I still have trouble deciding exactly HOW animalistic they should look.
As for writing... well, I try my hardest to avoid using the same word over and over again most of the time. And because I know I usually do this, I try not to let my own personality infect the characters I write for unintentionally. Every character should and usually does contain a piece of the writer within them, but there's a limit, and her name is Mary Sue. :P The only other thing I tend to do, especially in RPs, is think wayyyy ahead with the plot. It doesn't ALWAYS influence my writing, but it can.
Characters.
I know what you're thinking. "Cog, you handsome devil. Characters are the foundation of good storytelling! You're telling me you can't do -those- very well?"
Well, it's true. I don't do characters very well. Believable motivations, reactions, origins, interactions, names, everything, I suck at it. I'm better (read, not as horrible) at description and exposition, but there's only so much of that you can do before you're writing national geographic instead of a interesting story.
Cameras. I don't mean drawing them, either.
Comic pages regularly take more effort than a simple comm for two (okay, three) reasons:
- A comm ultimately is approved by whoever bought the comm. I have a responsiblity to meet the commissioner's vision as closely as I can and not turn out an inferior product, yes, but ultimately, I can live with myself if the commissioner loves it more than I do. After all...
- Commissions are (usually) one-offs compared to a comic page, especially a comic page for LR where it's meant to actually make sense in context of all the other pages. There's a lot more worrying about drawing on-model (or altering the new model in a way that still makes that character identifiable)
- I don't have to vary the "camera" in a comm. I do in a comic.
Yes, it's ultimately self-inflicted in that I constantly try to do new stuff in an attempt to "broaden my skills" and try to make LR more cinematic et al., but I swear I probably spend / waste as much time in the "deciding what to do, how tight a shot to make it, and how to ink it" stage as I do with the rest of the comic.
We can argue how effective it is or how good it is that I spend as much time deciding what to do as I spend doing it, It's still my main angst-point.
I'm not much of an artist, but my main antagonist in terms of artfullness seems to be character bodies and ratios/proportions there in. Sure I can draw the occasional arm very well and draw exceptional eyes in my sleep, but I can't make two eyes that seem to focus on a target nor can I keep the body parts symmetric or maintain a set anatomy to it.
I also tend to stare for hours at a sheet of paper to get an idea of what I want to draw, only to start putting down lines and then realize how horrible it is and scrap it. My trash is full of such things...
Perspective.
Hooks. All my songs are hookless.
Right now colouring is more an issue for me than drawing, but my Muse is an awkward son of a gun and comes and goes just as it damn well pleases.
Basically its like this.... 75%-80% of the time my drawing is mediocre at best. I suck at hands, proportions, perspective, poses that are anything more than standard straight up and down arms by the side deals.
Then once every so often the Muse comes in whacks me with the Inspiration Shovel and I can turn out something pretty decent. But lately its rare. And especially with colouring. I've not coloured something digitally in so long I think I've forgotten the techniques I used to use.
I think largely my issue is lack of confidence. I used to draw/paint all the time and was fairly good. Then an EX-best friends friend who was about equal to me but didn't have as popular a DA gallery decided to wage all out war on me, posting EVERYWHERE on my art that my digital painting was just photo-manips and that I was an art-theif and reporting everything I submitted to the mods. And well the DA mods are tards who never really bother to read complaints properly they just go *Yawn* 'Deleted' so basically I was putting everything into artwork that was just getting binned everytime. So in the end I just gave up on DA for the longest of times and stopped submitting anything. Eventually this horrible stain of a person left the site to go harass some other poor fools on another gallery site and I came back. But since then I've lost faith in my ability to draw and colour and have become my own harshest critic. Everytime I draw something now I just look at it and yell 'NOT GOOD ENOUGH' and rip it up.
For this reason I really hate that person because they killed my ability to draw which was one of the things I really enjoyed in life :cry
Man, you have awesome friends. Mine are all nice and stuff.
Wasn't my friend. Was my friends friend. But you have a point seeing as she chose to believe his lies over me. Hence the now Ex-friendship. But I guess even places like DA have their fair share of trolls, which I'm fairly certain is what that guy was.
Quote from: Succubus_1982 on August 12, 2009, 08:01:08 PM
But I guess even places like DA have their fair share of trolls, which I'm fairly certain is what that guy was.
On DA, it's safe to assume anyone you meet is a troll until proven otherwise.
i've got another one.
and i'm sure EVERY artist that has so much as picked up a pencil knows this...
"Stupid Hands"
The experience of no matter what you want to draw, your hands can't seem to comprehend that much.
I think Ren's artistic bane is his job :B
Quote from: Tapewolf on August 16, 2009, 07:03:21 AM
I think Ren's artistic bane is his job :B
at this rate he'd be better off being fedex'd to your little corner of earth and live in your cupboards or something. :B
at least then he'd have reasonable internets. :U
Quote from: Teh_Hobo on August 06, 2009, 09:15:12 AM
Hands. Freaking hands.
The damnable hands! The shape of a finger, the location of joints, the angle of wrist, it's all impossible to get
just the way you want them. Most of the body parts, from hair to toes, I've been able to draw sufficiently except the bloody HANDS! I blame the anatomy for my short comings (or GOD, like I usually do). The complexity of an hand is way off the scale from any other body part (save the face perhaps) and it can twist and bend to much unnatural positions. And if that's not enough, the depth variety with hand versus body, ie. how large the hand needs to be considering how close it is to the character, is also something that I'm not good at. It's just pure pain! I try to leave hands as simple as possible, but sometimes the picture requires to draw attention to the hand. I've been trying to practice drawing hands, but it's just too damn difficult because there are so many different hand poses. Then do I draw with five or four fingers? Shading? gggaaaaaaaaarhghgh....!
Edit:
From what I've learned from some of the better artists than myself, is that sometimes the must be drawn unrealisticly to make it look realistic. This is something that I'm having difficulties with, since I can't just look from a mirror and mimic what I see. I might need to learn this by trial and error, which is very time consuming.
Quote from: Succubus_1982 on August 12, 2009, 05:46:03 PM
For this reason I really hate that person because they killed my ability to draw which was one of the things I really enjoyed in life :cry
You sort of got me intrested. Do you have any of the old drawings left?