Dance-Illustration Friday

Support

One of the nicest things about being a Clay fan has been all the great people I have met in the past three years, funny, smart, passionate women who are such fun to be around.

One of the friends that I made is just that, but recently there has been some sort of back channel effort to smear her and make her seem untruthful. I don't know why people would go to so much trouble to bring another person down. Life seems to short to me to go around trying to hurt other people and I firmly believe this quote:

“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people” by Eleanor Roosevelt.

I can't claim that I discuss ideas all the time (although I do love it, especially if the idea concerns art), I do like to discuss events (especially the basketball playoffs currently) and I have been known to discuss people (um, specially that cute red-headed singer guy). People are fascinating in all their permutations but it would never occur to me to start a rumor/smear campaign about anyone else. Why would someone do that? And I am helpless to defend my friend from this because of the backchannel way it is going around. Sounds kind of like a certain lying JP, doesn't it?

So my friend has decided to take the high road like Clay has done and just keep silent in the face of these smears. She has my support.

There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
~Edward Wallis Hoch

Wallpaper clickable at your own risk!

Playing with Painter

I told you guys that I took Corel Painter this last semester, didn't I? I really enjoyed the course although a few people wondered what I was doing in the class because I could already use all the other graphics apps that a designer needs and Painter is geared toward more fine arts. Well, I took it for two reasons. One was the professor. He is great and I have learned a bunch from him, the other is because I love doing illustrations and I thought Painter would be a wonderful weapon in the arsenal.

All semester I played around with learning to use the tool and the different papers, textures, media and brushes. It is an AMAZING app. You can create watercolors, pen drawing, pencil drawings, gouache, oils, acrylics...you name it and Painter can do it.

Now, why do I use Clay as a subject so much?? Coss he is beautiful er handsome.

Watercolor

I have been enjoying all the different blogs (mostly about Clay) that I have been reading lately. A great place to keep up with them is the new Clayblogs.

It has been an exciting week, I have been playing with Illustrator CS2, which is awesome. I have always been about the pen tool with the bezier curves but lately it has been fun playing with the pencil tool. You can get a really sketchy feeling with it. It goes a lot faster than the pen tool also.

I had a request to explain installing fonts on a Windows machine. But now I have to admit I am still running Windows 2000 on my PC (Panther on my MAC). What can I say? I really have loved the stability of it. It never gives me the blue screen of death and graphics can be pretty intensive on a computer.

I digressed, sorry, back to installing fonts. Start/Settings/Control Panel/Fonts (right click on Fonts and tell it to Open). You will see a list of all your installed fonts. Now you can either drag your new font in to this folder, or go to File/Install new font and you will have to search for the location of the font you wish to install. Dragging is easier. ;) I wouldn't recommend going over 500 fonts in your Font folder as they have a tendency to slow your computer down a bit. (Please don't ask me if I follow my own advice, k?)

This week's art: Watercolor Clay (clickable)

Anime Clay 2

I don't like this one very much but I really just got tired of trying to make the mouth and nose look right. Currently looking at more source material. If anyone knows of a really good tutorial on drawing manga/anime mouths please let me know. Thanks.

We (MaggieO and I) are thinking about making a pin out of the first anime Clay but before we have always preferred the cloisonné style and it isn't going to work with this one. It seems to be a choice between offset or screenprint.

Thanks so much for the kind comments. I really appreciate them.