Red Monkey: Sketches Archives

March 20, 2008

Sketchy

Quiet week, eh? I've been sick for a bit over a week and messing about with various projects a little aimlessly. Last night, however, I got a bit motivated. You see, a friend pointed out a grand "new" website to me a few days ago: Gorillustrator and I immediately became both entranced and frustrated. Dammit, I wanna be able to do THAT. So after going through the Gorillustrator's entire site and a few days of futile whining, I downloaded Corel Painter X last night. Then it took HOURS for stupid Wacom's site to come up today - apparently it was down for at least 3 hours this morning and apparently I didn't have the driver installed on this machine somehow and managed to use the tablet and not notice the missing driver until I started messing about in Painter trying to figure out how the hell to do pressure sensitive brushes. (I have only just downloaded the driver and still haven't figured this out yet. dammit)

So, whilst Wacom.com was down this morning, I decided to play with a sketchy-sketch of Metalman, a character I'm developing for yet another project: Los InterWebz.

Now I just have to figure out how to use Painter like the Gorillustrator. Yeah. That oughta be ... umm, easy. Uh-huh.

UPDATE
So I've spent a good chunk of the day experimenting with Painter X and my Wacom tablet. Now that I actually have the silly driver installed, I get some better features out of it that I wondered why I couldn't get to work before (like pressure sensitivity). But I'm also having to re-learn how to draw digitally because a lot of actions work a little differently now.

All of that is lead up to the fact that this is all I've gotten done in the past three hours or so.

I'll update again either tonight or throughout the weekend as I attempt to learn how to colour digitally with Painter.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:08 AM | Comments (3) | Sketches | StumbleUpon Toolbar Stumble

March 14, 2008

Don't Feed the Trolls

My bedroom in high school and the first year of college, was, more often than not, pitch dark. It wasn't for the lack of trying to lighten it up - my mom bought the most sheer curtains she could find. And when I demanded "bed dressing" that matched my personality, Mom made matching curtains out of an extra set of the sheets. (White, with a stripe of rainbow down each long side ... yeah, I know. Early indicator?) Stark white walls, mostly white comforter, sheer curtains which let in the light from the street light at the corner of our front yard. But my favourite way to be was laying on my bedroom floor, all the lights out, just the glow of my "jambox"-stereo's equalizer dancing up and down. And that last year of high school when I scrounged together all of my money to buy my prized Magnavox Videowriter, I would sit at my desk, adding the amber glow of that cheesy word processor to the dim light of my room.

When my creative writing teacher first told us how he would go to an all-night Waffle House to immerse himself in the biomass (to borrow Stephenson's word), I was appalled. How could anyone write with all of the cacophony of activity and light around them? F.J. insisted that it was a valuable way to observe characters, to practice dialogue. Being far too much of an introvert, I could not really wrap my head around this enough to do it. That was about 1986 or 1987.

A few years earlier, my dad brought home a stunning new toy - a Commodore 64. He was amazed and gleeful like a little boy on Christmas morning discovering his new Red Ryder BB gun or Radio Flyer sled. He practically squealed as he opened up the package and pulled out that brick of a keyboard/computer. A whole 64k stored in this sucker! He explained to me, in one of our rare actual conversations, it used to take a machine the size of about half our house to do what this little sucker could do. I remembered one of those rooms - Dad took me to work with him once ... an icy air-conditioned room filled with huge metal cabinet-things. Punch cards. Later, rolls of paper tape.

Mom forbid the acquisition of a modem as efficiently as she'd forbidden cable television - but the boy across the street had a modem and I watched as one letter after another would pop onto the screen from some distant person. Heh, and watch those letters disappear as the person hit backspace to correct a typo.

But it wasn't until I was nearly done with my seven year stint at university before I discovered MUDdog and email and just how fascinating this online Waffle House could be. That was somewhere around 1992-4.

I've been hooked ever since.

This morning, once again, I've turned off all of the lights. I have the band Sick Puppies blaring on the stereo, though not as loudly as I'd like - my neighbors are still sleeping. The glow of my keyboard and laptop screen - and the blue glow of the stereo are all I want. I'm writing against the deadline of sunrise, remembering how easy it was for me to get lost in my introspection as a teenager and 20something in the dark. How much easier it was and is to reflect honestly on myself and my actions as well as the biomass I observe around me.

I recognize that I'm damaged
I sympathize that you are too
But I wanna breathe without feelin' so self-conscious
But it's hard when the world's starin' at you

To me, this is the most interesting thing about the internet. You have all of these people with their foibles and faults and strengths ... you have these intercies, these nodes, of common interest where this diverse mass of individuals pour their thoughts into shared pixel representations.

Why do we do this? Why do we strive to share our experiences and thoughts with everyone else? Why do we strive to get people to understand what we're thinking, feeling, wanting?

It seems to me that no matter how introverted or extroverted an individual is, we all are reaching for some connection beyond just our self - to know that we are not totally alone in our thought or experience or feeling. That someone groks at least a fraction of who and what we are.

What I constantly strive to understand, and I'm not sure I'm capable of really understanding it, is why some people are literally so lost in their own individuality that they cannot hear the experiences and feelings of others.

I can't even begin to recall how many times I have read the pixels of people who define their world by "I'm right" and you're either 100% with me or 100% against me. So when I see one of these people laying their pixels down in a frantic dance of light and dark dots, I'm sucked in by my own curiosity and confused fascination. When I watch as they blithely ignore the community around them and choose to take disagreement as attack; when they insist on reading a helping hand as condemnation.

And, then, of course, all of our shared human foibles come to the fore. The helping hand and the civil disagreement becomes frustration and anger - which does become attack and condemnation. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves the outer edges of the community in confusion and often shock. It's like seeing the "perfect couple" have a real fight finally. You see sides of these people that you never suspected lurked beneath all the letters they've strung together on the internet.

And when the smoke clears and all the participants who are able to do so actually sit back and take a look at what happened and how they contributed to the explosion, they are left with this conundrum:
How do I both "protect" my self, ideas and beliefs ... and balance my emotional reaction ... and walk away from the trolls who only want a fight and to get everyone riled up?

How do we differentiate motive on the net without body language and tone of voice to help us decipher our pixelated world?

In my experience, it becomes about building a context. If one person's response to disagreement is to always either ignore or attack, with no middle ground attempting to bridge differences and create understanding, then that person is probably simply trolling for trouble. It's a subjective thing. And, in online communities, it's a dangerous field to walk across. Newer folk are going to tend to side with the troll when the old hands attempt to slap down the troll out of frustration. The old hands know the history and have often decided to take a stand to defend their community and hunt the troll until they've left the community. New people, not knowing that the troll may be currently presenting the mask of the maligned victim in order to garner support and thus keep the battle going on longer, may openly side with the troll in an effort to defend their new community from bullies.

The term troll is highly subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. The term is often erroneously used to discredit an opposing position, or its proponent, by argument fallacy ad hominem.

Often, calling someone a troll makes assumptions about a writer's motives. Regardless of the circumstances, controversial posts may attract a particularly strong response from those unfamiliar with the robust dialogue found in some online, rather than physical, communities.

Experienced participants in online forums know that the most effective way to discourage a troll is usually to ignore him or her, because responding encourages a true troll to continue disruptive posts — hence the often-seen warning "Please do not feed the troll".

Frequently, someone who has been labelled a troll by a group may seek to redeem their reputation by discrediting their opponents, for example by claiming that other members of the group are closed-minded, conspirators, or trolls themselves.

No matter how even-handed ... how just ... we try to be, the fact of the matter is, we are not perfect. We snap. We jump to conclusions. We get tired and cranky. And what separates us from the trolls? We are able to step back and re-evaluate our behaviour, to try to learn from our mistakes, to learn when to stop reacting next time and walk away from what we feel is trollish behaviour.

To creatures who seem to intrinsically need to be understood, it's a hard thing to walk away from that chance at communication. But some battles are won only when they aren't fought at all ...

The light is beginning to make the curtains glow ... so now I leave you with this ...

February 14, 2008

Cre8ing Some Buzz

Yeah, yeah, hush. I used that 8 on purpose because I'm talking about the site Cre8Buzz today. So there. Hmph.

Anyhow, Cre8Buzz is a pretty cool little site for bloggers. Generally speaking, MySpace, Friendster, Dogster (no, sadly, I'm NOT kidding), FaceBook, blah blah blah, they all bore me. In fact, they remind me of the silly days of GeoCities when everyone pretended to put their websites into little neighborhoods like all those li'l pixelpals were really hanging out kinds of buddies. So when my buddy Jodi said, OH you just HAVE to try this one, I rolled my eyes at first.

Wow. You still get the tons of gratuitous friendings, but most of the people who friend you either stop by your profile and/or your blog on a pretty regular basis. I, of course, suck at keeping up with all of the people on my friends' list, the same as I suck at keeping up with all my pixelpals' blog. (And yet, I'm irritated when they don't keep up with mine. I know. I'm an arrogant jerk sometimes. *sigh*)

Anyhow, I'm really digging the Anthill, as we affectionately call the Buzz (after their logo mascot, Antman). Well, not digging like an anteater or something. I meant to say, I'm enjoying it. Sheesh. Gotta watch the metaphors around you lot, don't I? If you want to check it out, gimme a buzz and I'll send you an invite.

Meanwhile, the Buzz is having a t-shirt contest ... and here's the design I'm entering ... make sure to click to get the larger image to pop up (still a fast load time on it, though) ... squishing it down to 400 px to fit into this template layout killed the detail of the logo. Wish me luck, the winners are announced on Monday.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:27 PM | Comments (6) | Blog | Sketches | StumbleUpon Toolbar Stumble

February 5, 2008

Safari Sketches

Some fast pencil sketches for a baby book project. Several of them are only in the outline stage, others are a little more fully realized. Kinda going for a cave drawings type feel ... but I'm waiting for feedback from the almost-mom ... so things may change drastically yet. :)

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:03 AM | Comments (5) | Sketches | StumbleUpon Toolbar Stumble

January 27, 2008

New Explore T-Shirt

I started out on CafePress quite a while back. Posted some designs, sprang the $60 per annum for a "pro" site that let me put Design A on a baseball shirt ... and Design B, too! (If you don't spring for the pro shop, one style of product = one design ... boooooooooring. At least, that's the way it used to be. Then they pissed me off, took an extra year's $60 from me and I won't have anything to do with them anymore. Bah)

Anyhow, after I left CafePress, I went to GoodStorm. (What is with all of these companies and software packages and such smooshing together two words without a space but still capitalizing both words? Oh, I know cuz then it's easier to make a web address, but still. WordPress, CafePress, GoodStorm. Bah)

GoodStorm had some incredible artists designing stuff. More shirt colours, but fewer shirt types. And no "ancillary" products like bags and pillows and mugs and posters. But, the company was way cool. You made more money than you did with CafePress - and best of all! They didn't charge you $60 a year to put up multiple designs. Awesomeness.

Now, GoodStorm has been bought out by Zazzle. *sigh* It's not that I don't like Zazzle. I do. They offer more products than GoodStorm did. But, now I'm back to the same damn restrictions I had with CafePress. At GoodStorm, I could utilized the entire t-shirt for a design. If I wanted it placed in a particular area, I could contact the good folks at GoodStorm and know they'd place it where I wanted and it would be COOL. Now I'm back to a smallish area placed way up high on the shirt. No wrap-around designing available, either.

I have updated one of my favourite designs for now and have it available at Zazzle. I'm not positive that I'm staying there, however. Zazzle doesn't do white ink on their "light coloured" products which puts a big damper in some of my designs and would mean that I could only offer those designs on white shirts or dark coloured shirts. And since I would have to offer the white shirt and the dark coloured shirts as separate products (in other words, I can't create one product and then pick and choose what colours I want available. I can choose all dark, all light, all, or one of a few subcategories like organic).

I do know that Zazzle has done shops for places like The Disney Store, Build-A-Bear Workshop and others ... they're a good company. I'm just not sure they're right for me yet. Just not enough control over my designs. But, I've played with the site for only a day. Maybe I'll find more details as I get used to their interface and explore some more. Or maybe I want to leave t-shirts behind and move on to posters and cards. I'm not sure. Mostly I'm just sad about the change.

Meanwhile, does anyone know of any other product shops which might offer more control to the designer?

UPDATE: On recommendation from a few people, I've also started a store at RedBubble. I have a little more control over placement and a LOT of control over the shirt colours. Plus, Zazzle does not print white and RedBubble does!