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digital art depresses me. it's official.
i gotta find some way to resolve this whole love-hate thing.
digital is clean, it's fun, it's quick. it's easy, and you can undo to your heart's content (or do 500 variations and more!).
but it's still digital.
you can't hold it in your hand, can't pile it in a box, can't see all the loving kindness and care that went into fashioning each piece.
that makes me bonkers. especially when it comes to paper dolls (which are, after all, supposed to be made of paper).
my brothers and i grew up with more paper and pencils than plastic in our childhood. sure, we had all the Star Wars toys (especially by the time the third movie came out), but our imaginations were prone to other things. we were especially fixated with warrior skeletons (a la Jason and the Argonauts) and also talking animals who wore clothes (this from a children's book of stories of mine in which an animal orchestra gives a concert).
well back in them thar old days, they didn't make these kinds of toys and furries weren't exactly "in", so we improvised: we made them out of paper.
we built elaborate sets containing hundreds of pieces. warrior skeletons fought medieval knights and we drew castle walls and halls on paper taped end-to-end as battlegrounds. of the animals, my brother's set had the most bizarre mix ~ i don't remember it precisely, but the daughter was a cat and the son was a goat and the goat boy wore little knee pant-suits (like angus young). he must have had twenty knee pant-suits in all different colors. and then of course, later, when Star Wars first came out we drew a hundred stormtoopers and sand people and they fought on long sheets of paper taped end-to-end drawn to look like desert canyons.
alas, since these were playthings, they were handled roughly, fell into pieces, and eventually got thrown out. for all the hundreds of characters we made, it's really unfortunate that not a single one survived.
as an interesting side note, despite my love for paper dolls, i've always disliked dolls (like Barbies and whatnot). i never owned any dolls as a child (well none that didn't get trashed, burned, and wrecked in vicious ways ~ but let's not talk about my "issues"). likewise, for all my love of paper dolls and all their clothes, i personally don't like dressing and take a very einsteinian approach to clothing: everything matches and it all looks the same. just thought i would share.
well, thirty years later, i still make paper dolls, but i don't have the sort of longevity with doll projects that i used to. i don't like the style or i don't like the pose or i just don't like the doll and i never seem to finish any of them. take Razi-el that i posted this morning. i'll never finish him because i drew him on a piece of scratch paper so that i could scan him in and having done that and colored him, i'll just toss him in the pile will all the other doodles i've made recently. i didn't build him out of something to last, so he's easy to abandon.
this is a terrible habit. in the last year alone i've made and abandoned dozens of dolls whose only crime was that i didn't like what they were made out of.
okay, this entry just makes me sad.
i'm going to go make art or something.
: D
i gotta find some way to resolve this whole love-hate thing.
digital is clean, it's fun, it's quick. it's easy, and you can undo to your heart's content (or do 500 variations and more!).
but it's still digital.
you can't hold it in your hand, can't pile it in a box, can't see all the loving kindness and care that went into fashioning each piece.
that makes me bonkers. especially when it comes to paper dolls (which are, after all, supposed to be made of paper).
my brothers and i grew up with more paper and pencils than plastic in our childhood. sure, we had all the Star Wars toys (especially by the time the third movie came out), but our imaginations were prone to other things. we were especially fixated with warrior skeletons (a la Jason and the Argonauts) and also talking animals who wore clothes (this from a children's book of stories of mine in which an animal orchestra gives a concert).
well back in them thar old days, they didn't make these kinds of toys and furries weren't exactly "in", so we improvised: we made them out of paper.
we built elaborate sets containing hundreds of pieces. warrior skeletons fought medieval knights and we drew castle walls and halls on paper taped end-to-end as battlegrounds. of the animals, my brother's set had the most bizarre mix ~ i don't remember it precisely, but the daughter was a cat and the son was a goat and the goat boy wore little knee pant-suits (like angus young). he must have had twenty knee pant-suits in all different colors. and then of course, later, when Star Wars first came out we drew a hundred stormtoopers and sand people and they fought on long sheets of paper taped end-to-end drawn to look like desert canyons.
alas, since these were playthings, they were handled roughly, fell into pieces, and eventually got thrown out. for all the hundreds of characters we made, it's really unfortunate that not a single one survived.
as an interesting side note, despite my love for paper dolls, i've always disliked dolls (like Barbies and whatnot). i never owned any dolls as a child (well none that didn't get trashed, burned, and wrecked in vicious ways ~ but let's not talk about my "issues"). likewise, for all my love of paper dolls and all their clothes, i personally don't like dressing and take a very einsteinian approach to clothing: everything matches and it all looks the same. just thought i would share.
well, thirty years later, i still make paper dolls, but i don't have the sort of longevity with doll projects that i used to. i don't like the style or i don't like the pose or i just don't like the doll and i never seem to finish any of them. take Razi-el that i posted this morning. i'll never finish him because i drew him on a piece of scratch paper so that i could scan him in and having done that and colored him, i'll just toss him in the pile will all the other doodles i've made recently. i didn't build him out of something to last, so he's easy to abandon.
this is a terrible habit. in the last year alone i've made and abandoned dozens of dolls whose only crime was that i didn't like what they were made out of.
okay, this entry just makes me sad.
i'm going to go make art or something.
: D
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