Pieces of Art (29): The Old Man

Two down, two to go.

It somehow confirmes my humble drawing-skills that the following occured in the process: I started penciling The Old Man without the wrinkles, therefore the drawing bearing not so much resemblance to him - but to Hotdog.... huh. You could think the actors playing Adama and Hotdog are kinda related... ;

I'm very satisfied with the work and the inking went noticeably faster. I grow accustomed to my Wacom :)

Like a Prayer

As you may or may not know, I consider myself an agnostic (though I'm not sure I really am, so maybe I'm a Meta-Agnostic...) and there are days I am really glad about that:

Information Age Prayer provides a service for the forgetful religious person to read prayers in their name. With their computer via voice synthesizing (actually it's the computers of the company, NOT the personal computer of the subscriber as I thought first). So, if you don't have time to pray for yourselves, you can subscribe for a fee and somewhere a prayer is read for you by a computer.

Huh. Let's read the FAQ:

"Are the prayers meaningless, will subscribing really make a difference?
(being exactly the very first question I had) As with all prayer, the final results are up to God as everything follows His will. We make no claims regarding the efficacy of the service, however it is our opinion that the omniscient God hears the prayers when they are voiced, as He hears everything on this Earth. The omniscient God knows exactly who has subscribed and who each prayer is from when their name is displayed on screen and their prayer voiced. He is also aware of all donations to charity from each subscriber and we can surely make a difference in these charities supported."

Huh. Honestly, if I were God.... I mean, C'MON! That's cheating! I would strike every wanna-be-follower with lightning who thinks he can get off that easy! Isn't the point of praying that you sacrifice some thoughts and time to your God? Maybe that's just me, but if I were religious I would feel deeply insulted when some soulless machine speaks with god in my name. (As a SciFi-Geek I'm pretty amazed by the way.... all kinds of cool stuff come in mind... mechanical gods, Deus Ex Machina, robots with their own religion....).

And it get's even better:

"If your children don't pray anymore sign them up for one of the many daily prayers available for each religion (click categories at the left). You may also want to have a prayer said for them directly. The prayer for children is the cheapest Information Age Prayer service at only $1.99 a Month. Pray for a child here."

Ha! Everything's gonna be fine for Junior. He doesn't pray, he doesn't believe... but hey, a machine prays for him! Because I paid someone to do that! Phew, NOW God will think totally different about that black sheep...

Pfff. I don't know who I pity more: The developers, The clients, or God. Probably the latter one. If you exist, God, I just spent twenty minutes defending the good old ways of praying. Keep that in mind on Judgement day :).

Moments of Claire-ity (1): Shopgirl

I kinda made some oath two weeks ago, to watch all of Claire Danes' movies. Today I'm in quotation-mode, so don't expect a big review ;).

"Are you the kind of person that takes time to get to know, and then when you get to know them - they're fabulous?"

"Shopgirl" is a very nice piece about love and desire. Mirabelle (Danes) is a young artist working as a shopgirl. Her life seems empty, so she tries to start a relationship: First with the very unexperienced and annoying Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), later on with the 60-year-old millionaire Ray (Steve Martin, who wrote the script based on his own novella). I cannot really describe which direction the movie takes without spoiling to much, so I just use another quote from Roger Ebert's review:

One of the things you cannot do in this life is impose conditions on love. Another impossibility is to expect another's heart to accommodate your own desires and needs. You may think that cleverness, power or money will work on your behalf, but eventually you will end up feeling the way you really feel, and so will the other person, and there is no argument more useless than the one that begins with the words "But I thought we had an agreement."

"Shopgirl" seems to have no real "moral" or "message", it's just a portrait of how life is - and it's a well written and well played portrait, especially by Claire.

Pieces of Art (28): Gone Digital

Okay, I did it. I did it two weeks ago and bought the Wacom Intuos3 A5 Wide Screen Graphic Tablet. Pretty expensive (though not as much as the homepage suggests), pretty cool, pretty useful, pretty needs getting used to. First results on the left, a digitally inked and colored River.

Nothing new on the coloring front, I just relied on my old process of lots of layers. Went much faster than with the mouse, just as I hoped. In fact, I was much much faster with the coloring than with the inking. It took ages to "draw" over the pencils with the pen. It was pretty hard to draw lines on the tablet while looking at the screen, because you just see indirectly what you're drawing. Got faster at the end, I'm optimistic to master that when working on the next projects (being the pre-mentioned already finished pencils of Adama, Tyrol and Baltar). Hopefully I'll learn to draw convex curves with that, 'cause I can't turn the tablet like I used to do with the paper...

Anyway, the digital ink has very great advantages, illustrated below. I can experiment more - if you compare the inked face with the penciled one you see the difference. Details I couldn't have drawn with a fineliner plus the priceless ability to erase (yeah, my pen has an eraser at the back, just turn around and erase... :) ), enabling me to loosen myself from the pencils and just rework in the inking process. Well, let's see how Adama's face will turn out - since it's just a portrait the pencils themselves are more detailed and I can work on a deeper level...

Ladies of Interest (9): Claire Danes

I really wanted to proudly announce the completion of the pencil works for the FedCon-Stuff, but... I just watched the second episode of "My so called Life" and I sorta kinda felt the necessity of doing another LoI-Post. Don't know why... ;)

The long-time reader won't be very surprised by Ms. Danes' ascension into the ranks of the Ladies of Interest since the simple glowing effect of her Yvaine in Stardust left me that ... enchanted. So I only hesitated shortly when I saw her smiling from a DVD-Box-Cover in the nearby MediaMarkt. "Willkommen im Leben" was the title and I remembered how the ex-fellow-student (is there an english word for "kommolitone"?) reminisced in nostalgia and Claire-Adoration some time ago.

I never saw an episode of that show before last week, so nostalgia's out of the picture - but just after two episodes I think I can already understand why it's so loved by lots of people. It really IS good, as far as I can tell (just google it). Plus, there's this girl, you know. Not so much with the glowing but almost unbearable amounts of cuteness. Examples on the left.

Teenage-(No Mutant, No Ninja) Batch would've fallen madly in love with 15-year-old Claire Danes instantly like 50% of the viewers did (the other 50% fell in love with Jared Leto, I hear), while Twen-Batch is of course much too grown-up for that (prefering the older, glowing version ;) ).

Anyways, learned some things about Claire when reading a biography:

- She had her first on screen kiss before having her first real one. Huh. That must've been ... difficult, I think. She almost complained about having to kiss (a then 22 years old) Jared Leto every day- I guess millions of teenage girl viewers wanted to have her problems.
- She was a persona non grata in Manila and her movies were banned in the phillipines after she ranted about the city in an interview (mentioning rats and the lack of a sewage system).
- She turned down the female lead of Titanic because she didn't want to be typecasted for "romantic" roles. She probably just didn't want to kiss Leonardo DiCaprio again ;).
- She did star in an unhealthy lot of flops - no wonder she stayed under my radar for so long.

But that time's gone, I will not rest before I've seen all those bad movies just because of her. Even Mod Squad. ;)

P. S.: Gamer, Flatmate: I want this Terminator-Evening ASAP! Maybe we could start with the third part?

Pieces of Art (27): WIP

Phew. After months of not touching a pencil using a pencil to draw - my last work was a still unfinished Dr. Horrible Pin-Up - I finally managed to find the time to relax and draw something again. FedCon is happening in a little more than two months after all. Lots of Stars attending, lots of signatures to hunt, so lots of work to do.

I'm very relieved that I can honestly say I didn't loose my humble skills over the unproductive months. River Tam on the left certainly wasn't the easiest start after the break, being a full pose with the jumping, the swinging, the coolness-y-ing 'n' stuff. Little harder than the usual portraits I did for the last con. Btw: Sorry for anyone trying to check out my previous art-stuff - it's temporarily offline since my university-webspace vanished into thin air after my graduation ;). It will be up on some new location soonish. Together with a new wordpress-blog ;).

I was able to sketch the pose pretty fast and with very few corrections afterwards. Still light years away from people with real talent but still much faster than I feared. The face went very smoothly (considering the little space I had for it, I used to have problems with that), thankfully no feet and only fists.

Her legs seem to lack a few centimeters and her left arm seems to be a tad thicker then her right - well it's just the pencil-sketch. Due to an existing income I plan to buy a graphic tablet in the next weeks, so River will be my first digital inking. Then I can experiment much more and correct those things without destroying the whole picture with a single wrong stroke.

Hope Summer appreciates it ;). Next up will be a Jayne-Pose for Baldwin and three portraits of Douglas' Tyrol, Olmos' Adama and Callis' Baltar, resulting in two covers (one Firefly, one BSG) to sign. Yeah, I gave up temporarily postponed the new Cylons-Poster, there's not enough time. For some better looks on River, see the Details-Sketch below.

Babsi faktorisiert!

Guilty-Pleasure- und spärliche-Leserschaft-Vergraule-Time! Normalerweise bin ich ja nicht so für das Mainstream-TV zu haben, vor allem dieser ganze Casting-Kram lässt mich eher kalt. Aber - der langjährige Leser ahnt es schon aufgrund des Titels - es gibt eine Ausnahme, zu der ich mich auch bekenne: Germany's Next Topmodel.

Ich kann's nicht so recht erklären, wobei die Tatsache, daß da potentiell viele hübsche junge leichtbekleidete Frauen mitmachen, was damit zu tun haben könnte ;). Wobei es zum Teil auch die reine Neugier ist, warum zum Geier diese armen Mädels unbedingt Models werden wollen. Allerdings steht und fällt mein Interesse an der Show am sogenannten eben von mir erfundenen Babsi-Faktor.

Soll heißen, es muß wenigstens eine dabei sein, die mich persönlich optisch und bestenfalls charakterlich anspricht (jaja, bei angehenden Models darf man(n) schonmal oberflächlich sein), so wie es dereinst die holde Barbara Meier tat (der geneigte Neuleser darf nun auf die Babsi-Kategorie klicken und sich an uralten Beiträgen des Babsi-Fiebers erfreuen... lang isses her und irgendwie hört man von Babsi nicht mehr viel... wobei ich von Models generell eh nie viel höre, insofern ist die wahrscheinlich immer noch fett im Geschäft und ich krieg's bloß nicht mit). Nachdem das die letzte Season so gar nicht geschafft hatte und somit mit Nichtbeachtung gestraft wurde, habe ich heute pünktlich zur neuen Staffel einen neuen Versuch gestartet.

Ich gebe zu, diese Jessica war zumindest in den Talk-Einspielern (also wo die offenbar Wochen nach dem, was man eigentlich sieht, vor der Kamera sitzen und kommentieren) ganz schön niedlich. In der Sendung selbst nicht ganz so, da war sie mir zu sehr geschminkt, aber trotzdem vor allem markant anders als der Großteil des restlichen Einheitsbreis. Erinnert mich an irgendwen, ich komm bloß nicht drauf. Das war's dann leider auch schon, das muß wohl reichen für den Babsi-Faktor. Ne neue Zickerina gibt's auch, zumindest ist die weniger prollig als seinerzeit Gina-Lisa.

Anyway, ich bleib erstmal dran, den Hühnerhaufen kann man ruhig weiter beobachten. Und bald gibt's auch wieder nerdigere Blog-Einträge ;).