Art kick this week, apparently...
Nov. 16th, 2006 09:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI'm addicted to Drawn!, a beautiful website that brings me daily lovely art from around the world, highlights great and important illustrators, and generally makes me want to cry with envy at the talent that's out there. Drawn yesterday brought me Jen Wang's beautiful Dance of the Flight Attendant (SFW). The latest addition to my art addiction is Ping!, an English-language magazine published in Japan.
I mention these two because Drawn several months ago brought me Gez Fry, a manga-style illustrator who prior to 2002 had never thought of himself as an artist or illustrator. This month Ping! (why does that name remind me of the robot ("I'm a non-H model, dammit!") from Megatokyo?) brought me an interview with Fry in which he revealed that he went from being unable to draw to being one of the hottest illustrators on the planet right now-- in two years.
To me, that speaks to the real intersection between talent and expertise. Innate ability is nothing: practice is everything. Fry analyzed each and every drawing he did and asked himself how he could make it better. And that's really all there was too it.
Oh, yeah. Speaking of dedication, 752 words this morning. Not a great start, but at least the really big orgy scene is done. Whew! I definitely broke many of the rules: "One exclamation point per chapter." Broken. "Don't have characters shout 'I'm coming!'" Broken. "Don't write the way porn movies speak." Broken. All by Zia Tau because she (and the upcoming Ash & Arwen) are characters from the pornoverse who just happen to have dropped into the Journal Entries, and nobody's quite the wiser for it. I haven't written something that long and involved in a long time. I wanted to get back to my roots as a pornographer. Unfortunately, the writer in me is getting in the way, demanding that I tell a story about these characters, who they are and what they want. This is definitely gonna call for some rewriting. But it was nice to write something with the kind of relentless, careless pace that defines much of the writing on ASSM.
I mention these two because Drawn several months ago brought me Gez Fry, a manga-style illustrator who prior to 2002 had never thought of himself as an artist or illustrator. This month Ping! (why does that name remind me of the robot ("I'm a non-H model, dammit!") from Megatokyo?) brought me an interview with Fry in which he revealed that he went from being unable to draw to being one of the hottest illustrators on the planet right now-- in two years.
To me, that speaks to the real intersection between talent and expertise. Innate ability is nothing: practice is everything. Fry analyzed each and every drawing he did and asked himself how he could make it better. And that's really all there was too it.
Oh, yeah. Speaking of dedication, 752 words this morning. Not a great start, but at least the really big orgy scene is done. Whew! I definitely broke many of the rules: "One exclamation point per chapter." Broken. "Don't have characters shout 'I'm coming!'" Broken. "Don't write the way porn movies speak." Broken. All by Zia Tau because she (and the upcoming Ash & Arwen) are characters from the pornoverse who just happen to have dropped into the Journal Entries, and nobody's quite the wiser for it. I haven't written something that long and involved in a long time. I wanted to get back to my roots as a pornographer. Unfortunately, the writer in me is getting in the way, demanding that I tell a story about these characters, who they are and what they want. This is definitely gonna call for some rewriting. But it was nice to write something with the kind of relentless, careless pace that defines much of the writing on ASSM.
