Fill 'er Up

I've been thinking a lot about the word "impetus" lately. Kind of an odd word, old Latin thing. "The force or energy with which a body moves." I've been severely lacking in impetus lately.

"Motivation" is a whole other thing. I have tons of motivation. I have a billion reasons *why* I need to do this or that. It's the impetus, the force or energy with which to do so, that's been missing.

I've often compared working creatively to being a big ceramic jug. There's times where the jug is steadily pouring out a lovely stream of water; times where it's even ridiculously overflowing. There's also times where the jug is too low on content to pour out, or even empty. It comes in cycles. In order to create we must be full, or else we have to pause and fill up again.

In the best of times, it's a never-ending cycle. What we do and what we create helps to keep us filled up. We have our own wellsprings and pump systems and the best of us become continual fountains. But even wellsprings run dry sometimes, or pump systems break down. Then we have to go looking for inspiration, for those things that will get us going again.

I wrote last time about wanting to start a webcomic, and that's still forefront in my mind. I've been collecting ideas and images to work into it, writing down some basic plotlines, but I haven't started drawing just yet. I found, while brainstorming, my creativity well is feeling shallow and limited - much like my frustration in only ever posting schoolwork and World of Warcraft fan art. So instead of trying to get somewhere on an empty tank, I've kind of taken some time here to pause and refill the ol' jug.

First things first, I'm looking beyond WoW for the first time in years. (I used to say, "There are no other games!!") Video games are fantastic sources of inspiration because they present the amazing work of other creators - whole massive worlds and storylines, images and styles. The first thing I did was reinstall The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind on my PC, with a big graphics overhaul mod made in the last year. I bought myself Morrowind on my birthday in 2002, the first real roleplaying video game I'd ever played, and definitely an amazing introduction. The graphics update brought it up to today's standards (far outshining WoW except in regards to animation) and it's been fun to poke around in such a rich - and unique - world again.

On the lighter side of things, a friend introduced me to the free-to-play League of Legends. This is a pretty simple realtime-strategy type game, where you control a single "champion" in a team with others and try to take over the opponent team's base. No biggie, and a lot of fun to just sit down and play (and free!) The really interesting thing is looking at all the champions, their design and artwork and skillset, how each one is made different from the others, what they represent and how they are portrayed. A game like this tends to take archtypes and turn them up to 11, so they're clearly seen even when only an inch high and manically played for 30 minutes each. It has a wonderful sense of fun and humor and is refreshingly easygoing and lighthearted.

The bigger news is that I've joined up at Lord of the Rings Online, especially now that it's also free-to-play. I had a devil of a time getting it downloaded and installed (ended up getting a client at Fileplanet and using IE - of all things - to get all 12GB downloaded uncorrupted) but once I got it working and started up, well... I'm impressed, to say the least. Yes, in the most basic ways it looks and plays like WoW, but beyond the interface and the basic MMORPG gist of it, it's a whole new world. I was a huge fan of the movies when they came out and subsequently read all the books like mad, but when the game came out I was deep into WoW and couldn't afford neither the time nor the money to also pick up LOTRO. But now it's free? FREE?? Well, a nice little slice of the pie is free, then it's kind of pay-as-you-go. I can live with that much more easily than a monthly subscription.

I have been just... incredibly impressed with it so far. It's a beautiful game to begin with, and it seems like everything WoW roleplayers have ever asked for is freely given in LOTRO. You want armor dyes? Custom outfits? Player housing? Check, check, check. How about some musical instruments you can actually play and some horses that actually look like horses? How about NPC's that don't seem like afterthoughts and quests that pull your interest along? Oh, I am happy with this. I am very happy with this.

WoW offers some awesome stuff - in fact, WoW is all about the awesome, and I love it for that, for it's humor and it's overthetop awesomeness. Yes, I want my nelf to be able to turn into a dragon and carry someone around. But I'm looking forward to refilling some of my creative stores in Tolkien's beautiful, rich world.

Also! We're not just looking into games here. I've also started watching Doctor Who, starting with the new series in 2005. Again, I've been very impressed, I just loved the first season with Christopher Eccleston. I used to watch Doctor Who when I was little, but it was always a bit too "much" for me then. The theme song alone creeped me out, no less the daleks! But I'm finding it fantastic now, though I'm still getting used to David Tennant in season 2 here. I admit I was drawn in by seeing a fantastic trailer for the new season. Why have I not been watching this sooner!?!?

Lastly, movies. One TV show (outside of the Food Network) that I do watch is Nikita, partly because a friend turned me on to Maggie Q (not that Alex isn't quite something, too!) Watching Maggie lead me to a number of movies out of Hong Kong, and I recently watched Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon. Now I had watched some modern-day Hong Kong action films before, and really enjoyed them, but NOTHING like this. This made 300 look silly and the LOTR movies look like Hollywood blockbusters (not that there's anything wrong with that.) There was just so much *art* in this film, from the scale of the historical details to the beautiful cinematography to the dance-like action scenes. I was just stunned, and quickly asked same friend for a list of others I should queue up on Netflix. Watching these, I couldn't help but think, "I want my comic to look like that." That artful, that detailed, that striking. Huge inspiration, with much more to come.

So, between schoolwork and WoW fanart, I'm filling up on these other things. There are 35 days left in the semester, then for the first time in years I have some serious time off - months off - from classwork. I hope by that time I'm overflowing.

Words and Pictures

I've been doing a lot of thinking in the past few weeks. Thankfully, I've gotten a bit over my frustration obstacles, at least to be happy with what I'm doing right now. I can't argue much with my little still life paintings or anatomy drawings. What I've been thinking about though - for a change - is inspiration. Maybe it was just the horrible headcold I got stopping me in my tracks. Maybe it was other things. But I've come out of it with some interesting replies to the old "Where do I go now?"

"Where do I want to go?" is really the question. "What am I doing?" is another one. All of the... technique stuff - all of these gestures and sketches and anatomy drawings and little oil paintings - they're all like, learning equations for an engineer, rules of physics, all the stuff you need to know to build a bridge. But in the end, you build a bridge. But of course you can't just walk out the door and build a bridge. There has to be a need for a bridge, some specific bridge that needs building. Likewise, an artist needs something to do with their skills and knowledge. And that's something the general public asks artists and art students all the time. "Oh, you're an artist? So what do you DO?"

Because there can be a million different answers. A thousand different jobs and career paths. You've got your conceptual artists and your gallery artists and your fine artists, your wildlife artists and portaiture artists, landscape artists and those folks who go do amazing pen and ink renderings of old factories and steam trains. Then you have your commercial illustrators and your children's book illustrators and your Hallmark illustrators, book cover illustrators, medical illustrators. Concept artists for games and movies, set designers, character designers, fashion designers, storyboard artists. The list goes on and on. Once you know how to draw and paint there's a billion things you can do.

And what have I done, in the past few years? Academic realism renderings from still life or reference, and World of Warcraft fan art. Hm.




It's not really what I mean to do. The reason I went into Illustration instead of Fine Art was because I wanted to tell stories with my pictures. The thing is, there's two things I've done for as long as I can remember: I've drawn pictures, and I've written stories. I started writing stories before I could write, telling them to my grandmother, who would transcribe them for me. Once I could write, I wrote a lot. I wrote a whole darn novel in high school. I wrote short stories in college. When I started playing roleplaying video games seven years ago, I wrote for my characters. I still do. I have hundreds of pages of storytelling - some of the best stuff I've ever written - stowed away for my elves and hunters and alien spacegoats. And of course I've drawn pictures to go alongside.



And this is where I've been left thinking the past few weeks. I've been playing World of Warcraft for over six years now. The game is showing its age, graphically and as far as the entertainment value of the mechanics. The latest expansion still has stuff I want to see and do, and I'm devoted to my friends and my raiding group, but week by week it's falling away as a source of inspiration. It's hard for me to find reason to write for my characters anymore, and when I do artwork of them - like Tavlo's finished concept piece above - it feels more like practice than something finished. There's nothing wrong with doing fan art and I'd still love to get a piece up on the WoW website, but anymore it feels like I should be pushing my skills towards something more. But what? What?

The two things I do well, that I've always done, are drawing pictures and telling stories. For some reason, I've never thought once about doing comics. (Or if I have, I've thought, "What? Me? How??"

We never really had comics in the house growing up. I remember my brother had some great big Superman one, but I think it was just because it was a collector's edition or something. My Dad and I always read the Funnies together out of the Sunday paper, but that was just... Garfield and so forth. I did always love Garfield and had several Garfield books (early love for fat lazy cats... *stares at my Dudley*) but other than that... no Marvel. No DC. We watched movies and cartoons on TV. We just weren't comic people.

So (oddly, like other things in my life) I'd never really considered it. It's funny, because I'm one of those writers who "sees" everything as they write, like a movie playing in my head. It's all already there. I'd just have to pic the shots and draw them and put down the dialog.

It took me about 5 minutes to think up a story and a setting and a handful of characters. Now they're all leaping around through my head chaotically, waiting for a script. And I keep asking myself, "Could I do this?" Could I draw what I see in my head and write this story? Could I merge these two pasttimes into something from which I could build a solid career?

When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher wanted me to be a writer. My Art teacher wanted me to be an artist. My music teacher - well, I'm not a miracle-worker here. Two out of three ain't bad.