Righteous Creative

Ran across this lecture by comic artist  Lucy Bellwood

will get you pumped up to go create. 



and her notes from it

and then notes I took listening


no aspriring, you're doing it or you're not doing it

(ala yoda do or do not, there is no try)
and business cards are secret validity, Joe Schmoe comic artist on a card proves that you are

pay attention to the stuff the consumes you and you lose track of what you're doing,

that's what people will be into when you bring it

like razor scooters, they had a phase in the 90's but if you are super passionate about
it you can bring it back with your passion

lack of time, fear of failure, lack of energy, I'm not good enough
vs
don't wait until your ready or good enough, you will never be good enough or ready

enough, do it now do the best with what you have

when you feel down about your work right now, think about what 9 year old you would think of you now

done is beautiful, don't nitpick it and try and make it perfect, just get it out in the world

easiest way to finish is to make it small

it doesn't have to be perfect or beautiful, it just needs to be done

don't overinvest in people who give advice, just do the work

ways to trick yourself into work:

micromovements
break it down as small as you can (day one get a pencil and put it next to the piece of

paper done for the day) you trick yourself into getting going because you are frustrated

at the stupid slow pace

pomodoro technique
egg timer for 25 minutes, choose a task with no interuptions and just focus, work on this

comic page for 25 minutes, when timer goes off stop what you're doing set timer for 5

minutes and goof off, then another 25 minutes

boxsheets
grid of the steps you need to do, basically a check off list for everything
includes milestones for "celebrate"

limits
work with limits hourly comics day or 24 hour comics day

consistency
if you have a lot of stuff happening make a boxsheet really easy like "have to do 1 thing

comic related everyday" to give yourself a way to start checking off boxes, once you have

a line of checked boxes you'll find yourself wanting to keep it going, you're building a

postive comic creating habit

community
find a group of people trying to do what you do to keep yourself inspired
meet people, find people, be friendly, you never know when someone who knows someone has

a thing that'd be an awesome project for you

omnivore
be an omnivore, the more you bring all the different facets of your life that youre

passionate about into your work the more interesting your work will be

Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon  (being creative in a distracting digital age)

How do you get Money at this?
get a website presence, if they look for you on google you need to be findable

do good work and share it with people
people die from "exposure" don't do work for it as payment

talk to your peers, raise your rates (if you do you'll get more work,weird stuff)


resources comics expirience, behance, illustrators market,

stop doing stuff you hate, you can make just as little money doing what you love as what you hate, you can actually make money doing what you like


Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille (one of my favorite quotes of all time):

    “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others”

(which is why the 9 year old perspective is good to have to so keep 'em both)

What makes things funny?

funny=benign violation

no wonder I have such a poor sense of humor, I have far out boundaries

25 essential expression sheet by Nancy Palmer

Ran across this, seems pretty useful for getting a character locked down. Created by Nancy Palmer as part of a larger tutorial.

Kong extra cast

Too UGLY gotta figure out a new solution

here's a paint over of the extra characters for the Kong thing. Chorus girls and then cops (the plan being to shoot the chorus girl scenes first then paint off their hair and boots and put them in cop outfits.) The pelvis and hips are plumbers epoxy, then covered in sculpy, limbs are sculpy. Planning on covering the gaps between the limbs with liquid latex (ala Jon), and using paste on mouths. I was almost ready to finish Kong's fingers but having only bought a little bit of latex I thought it might be wise to do all my latexing at once. Not sure if these guys are going to work, they're pretty ugly, but they're background characters and not supposed to be the main point, also they're smaller than kong. Don't even know if these sculpy limbs are going to work. We'll see. I feel like I'm getting close to the animation part (sets are just going to be cardboard so don't think they'll take that long) so I'm excited. But knowing how projects go all of sudden I'm wondering if there's a way I could knock together in a night a character I could get to animating and trying to act on, wonder how hard it is to make a frankenhole style?

Ted Ty Masterclass

  Ted Ty - Genuine acting from iAnimate on Vimeo.

 some notes I jotted down while listening to Ted Ty doing a masterclass

what I felt like I was close to understanding was the difference between a test shot that is solid animation and physics wise, but lacks anything to make it stand out. What I think I got from it is that you have to imbue authentic feeling into your scene, and the way to do that is to catch it in vid ref, and the way to do that is to really try and use your emotional memory to summon it and always run the camera.


volume change signals accent

physically difficult to make a deep vocal sound with head up or high pitch with head down

as if: thought process   walk up show badge,  think, channel specific emotion that you need from specific true moment from your past  when you think of a situation you've been in it adds the drop of reality to change the same ol same ol reference you've been doing before 

your'e trying to make it real enough for yourself as you're acting that you are authentically broadcasting the line so well that you are broadcasting it nonverbally (facially or physically) make it so real that you could drop the audio and still feel it strong enough to see what's happening

it's very fleeting because we're not actors so we can't turn on the juice for real

watch your takes that don't work and figure out why they don't, compared to the takes that do

every shot has some gold in it, closing  a car door can be a great shot if you think about the why of it, like closing it gently so as not to wake up a sleeping passenger

Ken Fountain - Splat Frog

Ken Fountain's got a site where he's offering tutorial vids (which I recommend, I thought they were great). and also some free video podcasts with some tricks

Kong Hands

Finally jumping in to do the latex on the hands, feels like I'm playing in the cat box (ammonia ). This stuff takes longer to dry than I thought, guess it'll be more than 1 night process. Hopefully it turns out all right, but keeping expectations low so as to continue progressing.