This isn’t really a tutorial or anything like that, but I’ve noticed that my art friends are surprised I do this so I thought I’d share.
Most of the day when I’m not doing analog work or studies I’m working digital, which means I’m pretty much stuck in front of a computer and I’m not getting a chance to draw in my physical sketchbook. So what do I do? Make a digital sketchbook!
I keep a running .PSD file that basically fulfills the same role as my physical sketchbook – idea generation, studies, random doodles, etc. I’d rather keep one file than multiple photoshop files out and about, so instead I just start a new layer as if it’s a new page and keep on trucking.
As you can see, the dimensions of the file are pretty slim, this is for two reasons – one, it keeps the file size down (currently my latest iteration of my sketchbook is about 75 MB) and it keeps me from noodling too much.
Whenever the sketchbook hits about 100-120 MB in size, I’ll typically put a copy of it in the archives and start up a new one, clearing out all the layers and starting over.
Petition to sit down all the people who make coma theories about Adventure Time and tell them “listen, this fucking show is about the last human living in a post-apocalyptic world where deadly magic has been reawakened following a global thermonuclear war that wiped out the rest of the human species, how much fucking darker do you want it to be”
Even though I thought my first Creative Writing professor was kind of a douche, he made a good point about this. One of our first assignments was to write in this eerie, otherworldly style (we were mimicking a specific author whose name escapes me), so we had to write about eerie otherworldly things happening. It’s no exaggeration to say that more than half the class had a “big reveal” where we find out that the story’s strange events and themes are all in the mind of some person in an insane asylum, or someone having a drug trip.
My professor said something like, “you just successfully wrote a world that feels separate from our own, but got frightened last minute and shoe-horned in normalcy. You showed that you were afraid to commit to something different and interesting.” Though I’m typically a contrarian and a piece of garbage, I am inclined to agree with my professor. I feel like people who write coma theories and the like are afraid to accept that the world of the story is separate from our own. They like everything wrapped up in this crazy little realism box where nothing out of the ordinary happens in fiction.
you win the Best Addition to a Post prize
Thank you 🙂
This pretty well hits the nail on the head as to why I generally hate coma/dream theories and people who think they’re so fucking deep for coming up with it. In my book it’s LAZY, plain and simple.
Izzie’s tumblr archive 