...uDraw A Crowd

For the first part of this story see this post. I split it into two for the sake of my sanity. Brief recap though: Volunteered to do a uDraw demonstration at an event at the local Children's Science Museum (The Orpheum), and was asked to do art for the poster. We pick up around the day of the event...

Up until the day before I was under the impression that we'd be showing the kids how to use the tablet and software, maybe walking them through colouring one of the built in pictures (yes, uDraw has a built in colouring book mode - something that proved extremely popular at the event). I was wrong though; while most of the volunteers did do exactly this, myself and another Volition artist (Jose) were to be doing a live demo of the software.

This would prove trickier to myself than Jose I think as he is employed as a 2D artist and has years of experience painting family friendly work without reference - he used to do those airbrushed t-shirts and (legal) graffiti murals. Anyway, this raised the stakes, and my heart rate, a bit.

I would not be able to attend the whole thing, and nor could Jose - He had to leave at 7, and I couldn't be there until then for the second session, so we'd be flying solo for an hour in the evening. The afternoon demo we would take it in turns for though.

When I arrived (a few minutes late due to heavy snowfall the evening before) Jose was already painting an impressive beach scene and putting me to shame. I wasn't too depressed by this, as I said this is Jose's day job too. I won't be posting Jose's work, impressive as it is, because it's his work :) If he puts it on line I'll come back and link to it.

Before we move on to showing my pieces I want to introduce you to the volunteers. I took photos of everyone (bar one) at the event, but they were pretty unflattering. So, given the subject of the blog in general I decided to draw them - And this resulted in even more unflattering images. Regardless, here they are:

If I was smart these would have been done in uDraw too, but they aren't; I wanted to try out my new white Gel pen, so they're all done on paper. Quite small too. Anyway, sorry for the terrible pictures guys (if you're reading). I won't name them all specifically - best to maintain privacy, and no-ones likely to identify them from my poor sketches anyway :) One of those is not from a photo at the event though, and I think it's probably also the worst one - but this isn't about my poor illustrative skills, this is about the event!

Jose finished his Beach Scene and then it was my turn. Unlike Jose I need some form of reference to work from, and the only this handy was a photo of a little boy at his computer (we were place in such an area that it was easy for folks to see us, but we couldn't see anything really except the screen). This photo was small, about 3 feet above my right shoulder, and reflecting the overhead lights. This really isn't a very good excuse for the result, but it was what I was working from regardless:

OK, maybe it's not that bad, but it's a long way from good, and that Joker smile is just plain embarrassing.

While I was painting a nice girl from Eastern Europe came over to chat - she was from the local University doing a study (I can't remember of what) and had some questions. She'd spoken to my wife, who was at the museum with my Son at the time, and this naturally ended up with her watching the painting. This was a good test, as at that time of day the museum was fairly quiet and not many people were around to see our demonstration. I consider the afternoon session a warm up for the main event.

After the Jr. Joker I had a few minutes and sketched out this pretty poor dragon before time ran out. I'm only posting this here because the promise of the blog is you get to see the best and worst regardless of how embarrassing they may be. This one is pretty embarrassing.

And that was the end of the session. I went upstairs to see how the rest of the gang was doing and they'd had it almost as quiet as we had downstairs. I guess one or two children had come up to have a go, but mostly they'd just been drawing Christmas Trees and Ogres - I think some of their stuff was better than what I'd been doing in public downstairs. Anyway, that was that, and so we broke until later - in my case 7PM.

When I returned I was somewhat stunned by the queue outside the museum. In addition to us the museum was also throwing a "Snow Globe" which is a sort of indoor winter activities thing in the main auditorium. The area this is in is pretty big, and it's not heated. I had expected it to be popular, but the level of popularity was far beyond my expectations. My heart rate went up a little more because to get to the Snow Globe this vast line had to go directly past where we were doing the live demo. Eeek! hundreds of people get to see my suck in person! Terrifying.

It took a few minutes to get past the crowd to where we were doing the demo, and following a bit of good thinking from Deb I grabbed some cuddly toys on the way for reference (It's children's museum, there are cuddly toys 'k?). This time Jose was painting an elephant (He did 5 pictures to my 3 - Beach Scene, Shark, Graffiti name, snowboarder, elephant... I think the snow boarder was to show off the colouring book feature though). I pointed out that between the crowd and the weather he should get moving to make his appointment, but he decided to finish the elephant, which looked great. Then it was my turn.

So, picture the scene - I'm in a side corridor (more spacious than it sounds) with a queue of people filing in from outside directly past my back and through a set of doors to my left. Past the doors is the unheated auditorium, and the through draft from outside to the Snow Globe was freezing (Seriously, I was so cold I started to lose feeling in my fingers toward the end). I'm sitting with my back to the line, so I can't see what's going on back there, and I'm painting a display of cuddly toys on a TV screen about 10 feet away. Children regularly wander in and out of the way of the TV (they want a better look at what I'm doing, but of course I can't do anything with their head in the way :)), and one little girl keeps trying to pilfer the toys in the display I'm painting. None of this is condusive to painting a good picture... And then the drums started. They were having a demonstration of African drums on the other side of the wall I was seated next to.

If you think that sounds terrible and dreadful and I clearly hated it you'd be wrong, it was a blast! The results weren't what you'd call good due to the distractions (well, you might call it good, but I don't), but it was a lot of fun trying to do it. Also, thankfully, Elizabeth had come down from upstairs to talk to interested people and sell Raffle Tickets. She was my hero that night as it meant I could focus on the painting despite the distractions. She also occasionally moved the children out of the way so I could see what I was doing. I was, quite frankly, terrified, but I still had a lot of fun. Over the course of the hour I painted this:

Which is kinda cute right?

After that we hung about for an extra hour or so as the display upstairs was so popular (I think someone mentioned that they ran out of ink for the printer due to printing out the pictures the kids had done to take home). Myself and Elizabeth stayed more or less by the uDraw and Wii downstairs so people could try it out there as well. Finally it was time to go home, and I got a lift from Laural (Thanks Laural!) as my wife had taken my son home to bed a few hours before.

All in all it was an exciting day (I didn't mention the holiday parade I saw with my son between the two sessions, but there was one, and it added to the Christmas spirit brought on by the event and the snow), and lots of people seemed impressed by the pictures I was doing even if I wasn't particularly happy with them. More importantly they had a great time at the museum, and some of them spoke of getting a uDraw for their kids for Christmas ("Where do we get them from?" and so forth).

No more uDraw posts for a while though, if for no other reason than I'm running out of eye-rolling titles for the posts.

uDraw A Poster...

Today's lame pun post title is brought to you by the letter U and the number 500.

Several weeks ago someone thought it would be a great idea to do a cross promotion between the local Children's Science Museum and the local video game studio (where I work).  We wouldn't be promoting the studio's games though - those would be utterly unsuitable for a children's museum, rather we would be showing off the uDraw tablet which is produced by our parent company (as has been mentioned before).  This isn't sarcasm by the way, it really was a great idea.  Give away some goodies, give the local museum and the new tech some exposure and generally have a great time.

So, somewhere around the end of November there was a general call to arms for volunteers, and since I'd been using the uDraw for a bit already I felt duty bound to do so, and said as much in my response.

Since I already had a tablet, Laurel, the lady organizing the event on the Studio side, asked me to bring it in to show it off to those organizing it on the museum side (including Deb, who used to work for the Studio, so we all knew each other).

Unfortunately, while I brought the tablet I forgot the software, so that was a bust. As a result of my ineptitude though I was asked to provide some art work for the flyer using uDraw.  I said OK of course.  The museum supplied some photographs and asked me to pick one, which I did; a nice picture of a lizard (I think it's a one of the museum's male Bearded Dragons, but I'm no expert).  This was the result:

Which took about two hours. I have to admit this is not the original uDraw version - As I've mentioned before the uDraw is highly dependent on the settings of your TV, and mine is set to be really bright, so I've tweaked the levels to better represent how the image looks on TV. They print fine in my experience, they just lose a little in the transition from TV to monitor. Anyway...

I finished it, looked pleased and then re-read the email. I had failed to read the text below the bottom of the window which needed me to scroll down - it said that the picture should not be intimidating to non-artists... Ooops.

Round two - same picture, but done much faster, and less intimidating:

And this is the one they picked for the flyer. One of the reasons it's taken so long to post this is because I wanted a copy of the flyer for prosperities sake, and now I've finally manged to get one to scan:

So now you know where I work! Remember, my work there does involve art, but not traditional 2D stuff - the quality of my illustrations has nothing to do with the quality of the work I do there, 'k? Good, glad we got that sorted.

So time went by, Thanksgiving came and went (but that's another post) and then December 4th arrived. But that too is another post, and for that... Read on MacDuff!

A Musing 3: Can uTell What it is Yet?

My blog post titles should be reason enough to visit this fine establishment.  Look at it, it's genius!  Okay, maybe not, but you know we're talking about uDraw again from reading it right? Right?  Job done then.

When last we met I was showing off my uDraw pieces for worldofudraw.com (more to come BTW, just not for the same reason), and saying I'd reveal my favourite feature of the software while giving a more in depth look at the creation of the portrait.  Well, I'm not - at least not the way I intended because it was booooring.  No, I came to a realisation while capturing images for this post, so it's going to be cut down, but hopefully more interesting.

We'll get to the realisation in a moment, but first of all a little background, and that neat feature.

uDraw has a memory limit, as I mentioned last time, that prevents you from painting too much.  This seems really odd and silly (and it still does, but we'll get there) but it's for a reason.  Every stroke you make in uDraw is recorded.  Every last one.  Each time you make a brush stroke it stores it in memory.  The more stokes you make, the more memory is used, and there's only so much to go around.  

The upshot of this is that it has a replay mode.  In fact you have to sit through the replay every time you open a previously saved image for editing.  This isn't too bad until you've painted rather a lot, at which point it seems to take a while.  Anyway, this replay effectively gives you an undo feature that can undo all the way back to a blank canvas, and also allows you to see the way you painted something.  When I'm painting or drawing I don't really think to hard about how I'm doing it, so this is actually pretty fascinating, and useful (I can see where things went horribly wrong too).  It also allows me to go back and grab scenes of an in progress painting without having to save multiple versions as I go along - making this post possible.  Neat right?

Okay, okay, stop nagging, here's an image to tide you over.

So that was after a couple of minutes painting (a blink of an eye at the replay's top speed).  Dammit, why does Blogger nuke paragraphs of text when I only want to undo one bloody word?  Now I have to type loads over again.  I'm not doing it, you'll have to deal with just the highlights:

• David Kassan
• Technique
• Nicked
• Looks rubbish
• So far

So, anyway, I'm working through the time line capturing images for th epost and it's "looks rubbish," "looks rubbish," "Still looks rubbish," "Hey, that's not bad!".  And speeded up it was literally the time you'd pause for a comma too.  Even in real time it went from Ew to Ah in about 30 seconds.

This put me in mind of something a work colue  college  coulege colleague said (WTH, could colleague be any more difficult to spell?).  He's a fellow artist who, like me, has fallen out of favour on the more traditional side of things.

"My issue," He said, well, close enough, "is that I paint or draw and it looks bad, and because it looks bad I lose all interest in carrying on, so I don't, which leaves me with a bunch of unfinished bad things that don't inspire me to do more."  (OK, it was nothing like that, but that was the gist of what he said)

This was in reference to something unrelated to this post (but very related to one coming up), and this 30 seconds to glory event on the timeline reminded me of it.  There is a point in probably the majority of art work, where it goes from looking like junk to looking amazing (or at least acceptable).  Up to that point working on a piece can be pretty depressing, especially if that switch is a long time coming.  Here's where it occured on this piece - remember, 30 seconds to a minute between these two images:

Nay

Yay!

From that point on it's all gravy.

It  reminds me of those wonderful illustrators I used to love on TV, the late great Tony Hart and not so late but equally great Rolf Harris - the same thing would occur.  You'd be watching them put seemingly random scribbles down on the paper and suddenly it's an elephant, or Daffy Duck.  Harris' catchphrase was even "Can y'tell what it is yet?"  Usually you couldn't until the picture was almost done, then one line would transform the unfathomable to the incredible.

And I realise it's happened in the majority of my work as well, much of it posted on this blog.  I'm working on an image of The Doctor thinking "Oh no, this is terrible" and all it takes is a highlight on the eye and then it's not too shabby.  One white dot makes all the difference.

This does raise the question of when to give something up as a bad job and when to keep plowing on in the hope that the magic will happen.  To that I have no answer because I don't know myself.

Practice and experience probably help - I mean I can't see Rolf Harris spending 10 minutes of screen time painting something when he's thinking "Oh no, this is going to be shit?" the whole time - he must just have had the confidence what at some point in the time alloted he was going to make the magic line and turn it all around.  Maybe he practiced the night before or something so he could even know when it was going to happen, allowing him to say "Can y'tell what it is yet?" just seconds before you actually could.  I don't know.  I met him once but was too small and nervous to think of asking such things.

OK, that was the musing, the interesting observance, you can go home now...  Oh, OK, I'll show the rest of the in progress images.  Incidentally, I don't know if anyone has done research on this topic, but if they haven't I hearby dub it with the dual titles of the "30 Seconds to glory effect" and "The magic line."   Here's the images:

fin.

uDraw, I Draw, We All Draw

So I've been busy of late, as I may have mentioned previously. All sorts of interesting things going on in the world of me, and since many of these things are art related, and stall me from posting here, it means I have some catching up to do. First of the many posts I kinda sorta need to do is one of two involving work.
I don't speak of work on here much, mostly because the work I do is pretty much unrelated to the sort of art the blog is about to any real extent, but I am an artist (according to my job description) - I just make things in 3D rather than painting them in 2. Oh, heck with it, you may as well know...

I am a vehicle artist for a video game company.  At this point the company can remain nameless, but they are a subsidiary of a larger company known as THQ.  You may have heard of THQ - they publish games.  Quite a lot of games.  A while back they fell on hard times; they were not unique in this, the entire video game industry did, as did many others, and I was very lucky to be working somewhere where my job wasn't at risk...  Hah! Right! Everyone in America's job was at risk for a time there, but I got through it with mine intact (unlike so many unfortunate others).

You're wondering if all this is going somewhere - it is, calm down,  You know you can just scroll through the pictures if the text is too boring.    ----     Now I've scared everyone off I can whitter on with impunity - MuaHahahaha!

Anyway, THQ...  So they were sick, but then they got better.  They restructured, poked sticks here, prodded buttock there and decided to try some new things, since clearly the old way wasn't working out so well.  One of the things that came out of this was uDraw.  It's a drawing tablet, for a console.

As far as I know this is unique in the history of consoles.  There have been tablets of various quality on computers for many years, but on a game console?  I don't think so.  So some clever boffin figured it was time to make one - one that was kid friendly, and therefore for the kid-friendliest system of them all, the Wii.

So, uDraw.  They sent me one, which was rather nice of them, but I'm skipping ahead.  THQ contacted my Studio Art Director, along with the Art Directors of other studios and asked him a favour.  Would he contact artists in the company and ask them to do art for the uDraw site done on the uDraw tablet and software (uDraw Studio). The deal was, you do some launch art for our site and you get to keep the tablet, plus this SD card we're sending you to save on.  Of course you had to have a Wii of your own.  Conveniently I do, though I rarely use it.

So the tablet arrived in the post*.  It'd seen a video of David Kassan painting with it online and it looked like pretty reasonable tech, so this should be easy right?  Wrong!  uDraw, I should say right now, is designed for two types of people - People who don't draw and children.  You can play games on it (like Pictionary), or you can draw with it (with uDraw Studio).  The former should be good fun, it's ideal for the purpose but as a drawing tablet for anyone really serious about producing art it has some drawbacks.

It has limited pressure sensitivity, and a cable that can get in the way from the tablet to the pen, while uDraw Studio is a pretty basic drawing package; it lacks some basic features that are standard in PC software these days (like layers and selections), has a very limited resolution (576x396), a fairly clunky interface (partly due to that res, although some of it is quite elegant) and it insists on placing "uDRAW STUDIO" in the corner of every image you export out of it.  It also has an oddly delayed response - this isn't bad, but it does feel a little like speed-painting in slow motion at times.

This sounds like I'm ragging on it, but I'm really not! I think it's great! Why?  Because it is perfect for it's target audience - kids with a possible interest in art, but who aren't ready for complex packages with hundreds of options. It also has some neat features you'll learn more about shortly, but it's time for some pictures!  Well, a picture (click to enlarge as usual)...

That was my first picture with it.  See what I meant about the watermark?  It took about 5 minutes, and it's a Jack-o-Lantern because I selected Cardboard as a background out of interest and the colour screamed at me to draw a pumpkin.  I like it, so there.  The next attempt did not go so well.

This was based on a quick sketch of a surfer I did in my sketchbook (I'm sure it'll turn up on here eventually).  The sketch was a lot better.  I hate this one - but the nice lady at THQ seemed pleased and I guess that's what counts.  Don't let me dwell on it, lets move onto the next one:

Better, but still not great.  This does highlight one issue I discovered (more with my setup than the software); my TV is a lot brighter than most monitors, so colours that looks vibrant and bright on the TV come out muddy and dark on the monitor.  This picture looks much less funereal on my TV, and likewise for the next two.

This one turned out well enough that is signed it.  Depending on your monitor this will be a collection of happy autumnal veg, or a sad pile of rotting plant matter.  On my one at home (and the TV) it's the former, at work it's the latter.  I would have put more work into this, but I ran out of memory.  Yes, uDraw Studio has a limit to how much you paint before you can paint no more.  This seems a bit silly, but given that this was 2 hours solid painting I have to wonder how many people would produce a work that could hit the limit...  Well, one clearly.  There's a reason for that memory limit that takes the sting out, but we'll get to that on the next post.

 

Yes, it's a dog, and it's a bit dark - what else need be said. Not terrible, but looks nothing like the subject matter.

After seeing how miserable the last three looked (in terms of tone, not quality) I decided to do something a little more jolly.  I think I succeeded there.  I also got to use some other tools that up to this point I hadn't (there's a leaf brush I used on the tree a bit, but it's hard to see).  Not the greatest piece in the world, but probably the most likely to make my son smile.  OK, final piece.

 So I mentioned seeing David Kassan do some pieces using the tablet, and was extremely impressed (more so after some of the disastrous pieces above).  I wondered if I could do something similar, and this was the result.  David Kassan I ain't, but this is a pretty good portrait.  Good enough that I'll go into it with a little more detail on the next post.

So there you have it, uDraw and uDraw Studio.  The whole thing should be a disaster, but once I was used to it's limitations I found it oddly freeing, and fun, and since it's for a console I suspect fun is the whole point of the exercise.  My son is going to love it when he's old enough to use it, and I think I may rise to the challenge of producing pieces in it again fairly soon, if only as a challenge to myself.

Oh, and there's the website all this work was for in the first place - World of uDraw - Go check it out, and make sure to peruse the gallery...  This may be the only time in my life I get to be in the same gallery as David Kassan; I think I should savour the moment, don't you?

*I say arrived in the post, but I think they sent it by rocket mail, because it came insanely fast(less than 24 hours from CA.  They forgot to send the software, so that arrived the following morning.  From California!  Mental.