ABSOLUTELY (NOT)

If I could find 9 other artists who want them, we could get these 17" LCD graphics tablets for $900 each.

As opposed to Wacom's 17" LCD graphics tablet at $2,000 each. Same features.

I'm so annoyed by Wacom's grotesque overpricing that I don't think I could ever buy one again, even though I love using graphics tablets.

Wacom holds patents on some elementary principles of tablet digitization and uses them to shut out competition. Their profit margins are unreal. They charge $1600 minimum for an LCD tablet, but a guy named Drew made his own Cintiq-like LCD tablet for $200 out of old Wacom digitizer and a regular LCD.

I've thought about making my own, but I'd like to support Wacom's competition and get the P-Active linked above, or the Adesso CyberTablet M17 (but it's more pricey and I don't know about the quality, whereas I have a firsthand report from an artist that the P-Active tablet is on par with Wacom.)

All inking and painting of celluloids, and all tracing done in the Studio is perfomed exclusively by a large staff of girls known as Inkers and Painters... This is the only department in the Disney Studio open to women artists. From the "Disney Studios Artist's Tryout Book" from 1938.

I know things were very different in 1938, but it still bothers me that women could only trace and not draw for so long. At least, that's all they could get credit for doing.

I really had been curious to know if women did any drawing jobs that involved animating...obviously, there were and they did. What a shame they weren't on the historical radar of the archives.

I made several little holiday card images this year. I've given most of them away already. More soon!

I read this weblog entry from an animator named Keith Lango about the visual cacophony of the Shrek movies. He displays a still of troll Princess Fiona with four other fairy-tale princesses. It's amazing to consider the amount of money that went into making something that looks fairly horrible. Check out the still, really look it over.

The dresses on all the characters look like solid sheets of plastic. Each woman seems to have an identical half-sneer. On the left, Cinderella and Snow White are obvious ripoffs-- sorry, "parodies"-- of Disney character designs, though in both cases, they've used similar colors while making the overall design look worse.

On the right, Rapunzel is identifiable by her long hair, which is styled into an ugly Conehead 'do. The gold of her gold and red dress is almost the same color as her golden blonde hair, giving the character an overall sallow look. And look at her skirt: where are her knees? I'm sure under that ugly plastic sheet, her legs are perfectly proportioned and rendered, but it's impossible to see that here. She looks as if her thighs must be shrunk to a foot long, with unusually highly-placed knees and three-foot-long shins.

Furthest on the right, check out the brunette princess with a green dress. There's nothing in the design of this fourth character to identify her. IMDb says the fourth princess is Sleeping Beauty, but the Dreamworks geniuses seem to have put no thought into making her identity visually apparent, not even by ripping off Disney's design for Sleeping Beauty as they did with Cinderella and Snow White. They didn't even put her in something that looks like a nightgown, which seems like the least you could do with a Sleeping Beauty character design. Long, slightly unkempt hair after a hundred years of sleep? A deteriorating gown? No. She doesn't look like Sleeping Beauty, she looks like Princess Maura Tierney.

Overall, it just reads as ugly and incoherent. Fiona and Sleeping Beauty are striking martial arts poses. Rapunzel looks like she's trying out for marching band, while Cinderella is poised to win the fifty-yard dash and Snow White is playing with birds. Fiona is looking at the camera. Cinderella is looking at Fiona. Rapunzel is staring into space, while Sleeping Beauty looks off to the right and Snow White looks up. Notice how the background isn't designed at all: there are bright patches of leaves in the upper left, and on the mid-lower right behind Sleeping Beauty's outstretched hand, unbalancing the background and distracting from the figures.

I hate the look of the Shrek movies, and Keith Lango explains how the assembly-line nature of CG animation contributes to the mess. But CG can't be completely to blame, because Pixar movies are beautifully cartooned, as well as better written and better films all around. It still peeves me that the first ugly and barely funny Shrek film won the Best Animated Film Oscar over the superior Monsters, Inc.

I'd love to know exactly what the Pixar people are doing right that the Dreamworks people are getting so wrong.

Late, for illofriday.



( Ghost )

I used a set of Prismacolor pencils at bluecalico's and loved them. I made this with them!



A few weeks ago, I saw a similar 120 Prismacolor pencil set on Dickblick.com on sale for $80.

So why didn't I buy them?

The sale ended. The pencils are $101. I'm about to replace my laptop, so I can't really throw more money around on art supplies now.

I am a fool.

I read that the One Laptop Per Child project (a.k.a. the $100 laptop, but they weren't able to get costs below $140 per unit in the end) is launching next year. Libya has ordered 1.2 million for their schoolchildren.

If the project succeeds at supplying computers to large populations of kids, the next few years are going to be an interesting time to be involved in Internet culture. A lot of people who up til now have had no access to broadcast media are suddenly going to have a voice.

Not only that. People worry about outsourcing to India, but just imagine. There are tons of free programming resources and tutorials online, and programming can be accomplished on a relatively thin client. Within a few years there could be millions of young people with laptops who will all be very, very motivated to learn Ruby on Rails, or Perl, or C++.

Future events like these will affect you, in the future!

For the "smitten" prompt:



Sometimes I ask mr_stillhere for drawing ideas, and end up with drawings like this. Crossposted to illofriday, which you should join, if you haven't yet.

bluecalico showed me how to make jointed dolls like hers.



I took a million pictures of this doll, but only this one that came out well, so far. I really need to learn to use that camera.

Thank goodness for scanners. Alice was a gift from bluecalico.

A day late for "Trouble."





( Bigger Trouble )

It’s rather touching when the alt-weekly editor Louis Black beats himself up for pressing for Johnston’s committal. He asks: Would he have committed Van Gogh too? You don’t normally think of rock musicians as Samaritans, but members of Sonic Youth comb New Jersey for Johnston, find him babbling about Jesus in a parking lot, and stick him on a bus to his parents’ house in Virginia. A band he ends up performing with first lays eyes on him as he’s being attacked by dogs. His loyal manager returns years after a brusque dismissal (he made the mistake of negotiating with Elektra, a company that Johnston considered satanic) to “spread the word of Daniel Johnston.” The Devil and Daniel Johnston suggests that if art and madness can be sibling-close, so can art appreciation and altruism.

It's a great movie. I was really struck by the moment when Louis Black says that he'd always disdained the people who didn't recognize Van Gogh's genius and committed him, but he did the same thing and committed Johnston because he had no idea what else to do. Everyone in the documentary struggles with the same question, and no matter how hard they try, they seem to come to the same answer in the end.