I recently got my banjo repaired and have been playing it again. I had taken a break of about 8 months from playing it though and it is interesting how much music has sort of queued up in me that is now trying to escape. I’m back to playing with a bunch of regular folks around my area which has been fun as well as learning a whole bunch of new tunes. I play claw hammer style banjo primarily because I love the kinetic feel, control, and tempo you can achieve.
Continuing with my recent drawing streak I decided to pay tribute to my love of banjo by setting up a nice still life in my family room with my banjo and case. I drew for two hours and captured a screenshot automatically every 5 seconds to create a time lapse video. The music playing with the video is an old classic piece called Arkansas Traveler. Enjoy!
Yesterday I took an hour and sat down with my drawing tablet and a small hand mirror which I propped up on my desk.
I have been feeling like I wanted to do more drawing lately from real life things since it has been too many years since I used to regularly do that. I’ve felt some of my illustration skills slipping a little and I am going to try to draw at least one hour a day.
For fun I took a time lapse of the drawing. I took shots every 30 seconds and turned them into the following video:
I’m continually amazed at the both the flexibility that my drawing tablet offers as well as the way it lets me get every pen effect I used to be able to get with an actual pen and paper. I use a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet and it has really changed the way I approach drawing. Instead of having to labor over storing and scanning my drawings in order to post them or use them in a game I can now work directly in a digital environment. Plus I have become accustomed to the nice tweaks you can do when roughing out the initial drawing’s form.
If you watch the time lapse video you will see where a few times in the beginning I am able to resize the initial shape and size of my head. It is a pretty common thing when drawing to get some of the proportions a bit wrong. In my case I often tend to make things elongate too much vertically. I was able to squash the vertical dimension down and then later resize my facial features to more accurately represent what I was seeing in the mirror.
Once the proportions were right I was able to start defining the shape by laying down the shading. Another nice benefit of digital drawing is I can use the pen set to a white color to come back in and hatch light areas. In a traditional drawing I would do this by erasing an area if I was using pencil or by carefully laying out pen over pencil guides so that I would leave the area white to begin with. Being able to just come back over with white pen and flip to black pen again and again can really let me focus on getting all the form and feel right without worrying about the logistics of meticulous planning and allows me to flow along with the drawing in a way I enjoy a lot more.
I was trained classically as an illustrator way before things like tablets existed. I was initially quite worried when I bought my tablet if I would be able to adjust to looking at the screen while my pen hand drew on a different surface. What was striking was how quickly I did adjust until it became like second nature to draw while looking at the screen. I didn’t need to watch my hand anymore. I think a lot of that has to do with getting a tablet that is large enough and in the right proportion to your screen’s aspect ratio. I have a fairly large landscape tablet and the pen is mapped from the relative position on the tablet to the same relative position on the screen. I think this helps with the transition and learning curve a lot. The pen has so much sensitivity and angle sensing that I can pretty much get every effect I could out of a traditional pen or pencil.
Anyone else out there have thoughts or experiences to share on drawing with a tablet?
I wanted to pass along some information about a multiplayer Flash game contest in the works that could even be of interest to Flash game developers with finished games.
Come2Play and the Linkedin Flash Game Developers Group are launching the 2nd ‘Games that Challenge the World Contest’ for multiplayer games. Cash prizes totaling $10,000 will be awarded to contest winners.
Developers keep all rights to the games they submit and even previously released games can be entered.
There was only a handful of entries to last years contest, so the chance of winning a serious cash prize is very high. Check out the winning entries of the 1st ‘Games that Challenge the World Contest.’
If you’ve got a multiplayer game and you think you stand a chance of winning, why not submit your game?
Prizes:
1st Place – $5,000
2nd Place – $3,000
3rd Place – $1,250
4th Place – $750
Contest Genre & Judging:
The contest genre is Casual Games and submissions will be judged on the following criteria:
Multiplayer playability for new and return players
Replay ability of the game
Design, sound and effects
Concept and execution
Deadline:
All games must be integrated with the Come2Play multiplayer API in order to be officially accepted into the contest. All games must be submitted by April 15th, 2011 at 23:59 est. Games submitted on this date must be the final version of all games.
