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.