#oneaday Day 768: Sketchin'

I've been meaning to get back to doing stupid little doodles on posts for ages, but have just never… well, to be honest, I just haven't really been bothered to. Best to be honest about these things, and it's been nice seeing the stock images that kind and talented people from around the world have made freely available on Pexels, which you can access right from WordPress. But today, I thought I might as well actually use the fancy S-Pen that is stuck in the bottom of my phone, and so I did a tiny bit of research, found an actually pretty good-seeming free drawing app for Android (no more leeching off ClipStudio Paint's free trial) and just doodled a very quick thing for today.

Yeah, I know. Hardly worth making a big song and dance about, is it. But I tried to analyse why I fell off doing doodles on this site in the first place, and it was because I think I was trying to do a bit too much too soon. I thought that if I got a fancy graphics tablet and started faffing around with a fancy piece of software, then some sort of latent artistic ability would suddenly emerge and I would be able to produce something truly amazing, immediately.

Of course, it doesn't work like that. Not only does producing things that are genuinely amazing take time and effort, everyone also has their own distinct ways of working that they find most comfortable. For me, that has always been stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces. And so, I think for the immediate future at least, the stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces are back for now.

The thing I've always liked about doing the stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces in the past is that they make me think a little bit about what I've just written. I wouldn't go so far as to say sketching a companion doodle for a post makes me really reflect on things in any great depth, but it does at least make me think about how — and if — it would be possible to get the general vibe of the post across using a quick and dirty doodle.

Often that takes the form of a stupid joke. Back when I did three-panel comics on this blog — which I know at least one person enjoyed, but no-one else ever mentioned, so I stopped doing them just in case I was actually embarrassing myself with them — there were even some running storylines that went along with the blog posts, and sometimes the blog posts and the comic storylines would feed off one another in various ways. That was always pretty fun, actually, but like I say, outside of one once-regular commenter who I haven't seen for a long time (I hope you're well, Jud!) and my wife Andie, who bought me a large canvas print of one of my comics that still hangs above our bed, no-one ever really mentioned them, and I had no great designs of being "a webcomic" or anything anyway; it just seemed like a fun thing to do, and I had a copy of Comic Life on my Mac, so things just sort of went from there.

When you have your own site, though, I think it's important to make your own little mark on it somehow. I mean, obviously you already do that if you're writing things on it, but we are creatures that respond well to obvious visual stimuli, so if the overall look of the site helps get someone's personality across, so much the better, I say. I have tried to do this to a certain degree with the use of the Atari ST's system font for headlines — I tried putting the whole site in it once, but several commenters said it was difficult to read, and it probably was — but nothing beats a bit of scrappy artwork from someone who doesn't really do visual arts.

I've told the story of why I like drawing expressive stickmen many times before on this blog, but for the benefit of those disinclined to go searching through the archives, it stems from, as so many things do, my time at school.

I did pretty well for myself at secondary school. What eventually turned out to be an autistic spectrum condition (though I wouldn't know that until several decades later) meant that I kind of thrived in the structured environment where I was always learning things. But I wasn't, like, the school swot or anything. I had a mischievous streak, which was brought out of me by my friends — and particularly my good friend Edd, who I sat with in many different lessons.

Edd and I liked to doodle. We would doodle all sorts of things, all the time. It was one of our favourite activities — though we knew not to do it anywhere that we might get in vaguely "serious" trouble for. No drawing on desks, no defacing school property, and no doodling on our exercise books that the teacher would mark. (I must confess, however, that during one especially memorable Year 7 Humanities class, my other friend Daniel Blyth and I went through an entire History textbook and drew at least one dick on every single page. My favourite was the one that was poking out of a Roman water gourd, inexplicably shouting "I SCREAM!")

No, Edd and I would doodle on paper that we would specifically bring in for that purpose, or our "Rough Books", which I know I have talked about multiple times on this very site, so I won't tell that specific story again. But anyway. Given the opportunity to doodle, we would take it. And one of the things that we loved doodling was stickmen doing stupid things.

One of the earliest things we did with stickmen began in German lessons, which were so boring we eventually came to the conclusion that was some sort of temporal disruption around the Modern Languages department. (I successfully freaked several of my friends out by using the "countdown timer" feature on my snazzy Casio digital watch to make it look as if time was indeed running backwards.) We livened things up with "The German Stickmen", which was a four-panel comic in which two people would argue about something really stupid in German in the first frame, the second frame would devolve into them yelling "Nein!" "Ja!" at one another multiple times, the third frame would always be one of them shouting "ACHTUNG!" (like in Wolfenstein 3-D, see) and drawing some form of (usually explosive) weapon, and the final frame would inevitably involve some form of extreme violence or, most commonly, a mushroom cloud.

Over time, our ambitions for the stickmen became more elaborate. We'd already "created" (and I use the term loosely) the characters Edlock Holmes and Watson as a result of our shared enjoyment over the point-and-click adventure games The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and when we went on holiday to Gran Canaria together, we produced an epic-length stickman comic, drawn in extreme haste and with no real care, called Fate of Thingy. This thing took on a life of its own and was rewritten multiple times, and I still have it somewhere — though I think it's missing one or two pages. The intent, you see, was to do a "rough" version of the comic using stickmen, then when we got home we'd do a "proper" one. I did, indeed, start doing a "proper" version, at one point, but we both decided we liked the stickmen so much they would become the canonical versions of Edlock Holmes and Watson. As Fate of Thingy continued to expand across multiple parts, all further development was in stickman form — and continued to be on the bright yellow legal pad Edd had acquired from his mother's workplace, until we ran out of that and had to start using bog-standard notebook paper.

So yeah. Stickmen are important to me, as ridiculous as that might sound. I have an intense, nostalgic and emotional attachment to them. And thus I think they should continue to be an important part of this blog. I will, therefore, from hereon, endeavour to provide you with a stupid little doodle to accompany each post (except when I really can't be bothered). Is that enough of a commitment for you? Well, tough shit, because it's all you're getting.

Nein!
Ja!
Nein!
Ja!
ACHTUNG!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 581: Another experiment with references

I present you with the author's self-portrait, in which he is a bit more generous to himself than he normally is, and which was based, once again, on a 3D reference pose. This was also an experiment at adding noses and ears to a character.

I still have a lot of fundamental techniques I need to work on — getting my pen pressure consistent as I draw something is a big one, though there are tweaks one can make to one's tools to mitigate that somewhat — but I'm quite happy with how things are going, and feel like I'm definitely learning some things every time I draw something. And I'm not taking a ton of time over these right now, as is probably readily apparent — so I'm sure if I were to take a lot more time over a single image, things might come out better.

I'm actually keen to experiment with some other ideas, too. I have vivid memories of "Computer Art" classes back at school, where I got very good marks for a digital recreation of an Impressionist painting, achieved on an Archimedes computer. The toolset on the art package we were using there was limited, but I was able to make creative use of it to produce a satisfyingly good image that looked vaguely authentically Impressionist — as close as one can achieve with a limited resolution and colour palette, anyway!

One of the nice things about Clip Studio Paint is that it has a lot of nice built-in tools — virtual pens, pencils, paintbrushes and painting methods. Thus far I've been keeping it simple for the doodles I've been doing on here, but I kind of want to fiddle around with drawing some completely different sorts of images — maybe something more abstract, maybe something a bit more landscapey, maybe something completely imaginative. That will be a project for another day, which I will chronicle on here for sure, but for now, I'm definitely having fun dabbling in the visual arts.

I recognise that I will almost certainly never be as good as someone who has been practicing this stuff their whole life — but you also never know what you're capable of until you try it, which is partly what this was all about. I haven't even really tried drawing of any description outside of a few idle doodles since I was a teenager; I didn't study Art or any related fields at GCSE, so my "formal" education in such things stopped around year 9. And I tended to find Art classes a little frustrating at times, since I never really got on well with real paint. I was bad at mixing colours — whatever I mixed, I always seemed to end up with brown — and I didn't have particularly good command over brush strokes. My paint would drip and dribble and my eventual compositions would end up looking a bit messy.

There were parts of it I enjoyed, though. I do remember enjoying sketching still lifes with pencils, and the brief period we did a bit of technical drawing was something I took to quite well. I'm sure I will rediscover some other things eventually, too. For now, though, like I say, I'm continuing to feel like this tablet was a good "investment". And by "investment", I mean "put on my Amazon wishlist so someone would buy it me for Christmas".

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 574: Characters, remastered

For today's doodle, I thought I would reimagine the "characters" that occasionally appear on this blog in a new style, courtesy of my new drawing tablet and the capabilities of Clip Studio Paint. I think they all probably need some refinement, but I enjoyed making this initial sketch, and each new thing I draw gives me some ideas on what I might need to focus on when developing my skills. I don't have any grand designs on becoming an illustrator or anything, but it would be fun to develop if not "technique" then at least "a distinctive style".

Honestly one of the biggest challenges is fundamentals! Drawing a circle is surprisingly hard! Drawing a circle with roughly equal pen pressure all the way around is even harder! (And, as you can see, I have consistently failed in this regard across the entire image.) Part of me wants to figure out a way to refine that somewhat, but another part of me feels like those individual quirks and "brush strokes" (of a sort) give a piece some individuality and a sense of identity — and that's where a distinctive personal style stems from.

I'm not 100% sure where all the characters came from, to be honest, other than "my own brain". Obviously there's the version of me, which is a little bit less fat than me and a lot cooler than me.

Phillipe (the one who is 80% mouth, and who will almost certainly get his cock out at some point) was primarily introduced to the blog as an homage to a fellow blogger and Twitter enthusiast first time around the #oneaday train — and I was pleased to note recently that he appears to have made something of a name for himself as a voice actor. The character wasn't intended to resemble him in any way, either looks- or personality-wise; he was just named after him, which I recall us all finding quite amusing, given that in stickman form, Phillipe was always the most wilfully offensive of all of them.

Alex, the redhead, has changed her style a bit from her stickman form, sporting some '80s frizzy hair instead of the straight bob she previously had. I primarily created her because I like redheads. She was often designed to be something of a "foil" or "straight man" to me, tending to be something of a voice of reason and rationality even when things were taking a turn for the bizarre. She has canonically slept with Phillipe on more than one occasion, however, much to her disgust.

Lucy, the blonde, I believe first came about in this post, albeit as a brunette. She was initially intended as an embodiment of mindlessly chipper retail workers who stick rigidly to a script even when it's abundantly clear that all you want is a cup of normal coffee and minimal interaction with other human beings. Over time, she developed into what I freely admit is a blonde stereotype of being a ditzy dumbass who is painfully naive about pretty much everything, but she's actually one of my favourite characters to draw because her overly exuberant personality encourages me to make her as expressive as possible. For her new look, I gave her a bit more detail in the bow that ties up her ponytail, her key identifying visual feature.

Other characters that have put in more occasional guest appearances, and who are not pictured above, tended to be more explicitly based on people I actually know. These four, though, I think have always subconsciously represented parts of myself.

The "me" character is, obviously, partly represented by my own self-image, with a little more generosity than I would usually provide myself with. Humour in past images and comics I've used "me" in tends to be at my expense, but I have also used "me" to express my thoughts, worries and feelings about things.

Alex, I think, represents part of me that wants to be cool and popular and liked. I'm not especially desperate for this or anything (although to be perfectly honest, some more friends who live nearby and actually care about me would be nice) but there is part of me that thinks "if I wasn't so fat, ugly, stupid, socially awkward, cripplingly self-conscious and generally inept at living on this planet, I'm sure I could be a riot at parties". Or, you know, something to that effect.

Lucy, then, represents the part of myself that acknowledges that I, myself, am indeed fairly dumb and naive about things one probably should know better about by the time one is 44 years old.

So that's that. You will be seeing a lot more of all of them, particularly once I figure out how to do full-body shots of each of them without them looking weird. That's something to figure out another day, though!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 568: Doodling is fun

I'm going to make no attempt to convince you that my doodlings are in any way "good", because I know that I have precisely zero technique and don't do things "properly", but man, doodling is fun! I just spent a little while fiddling around with Clip Studio Paint (which I bought a copy of, because if I've got a tablet I might as well use some good software with it) and that resulted in the above nonsense. There wasn't any real thought behind it other than an experiment with how to bring the cartoonish representation of me into a slightly more "detailed" space than the stickmen I've been drawing up until now.

Don't get me wrong, I love stickmen and I doubt I will be abandoning them completely, but when one has better drawing tools at one's disposal, one inevitably feels like one should be doing a little "more" with them. And so we have the above.

With the above images, I was channelling some of my past cartoon-drawing experience — specifically that of my time in secondary school, doodling with my friend Ed in our "rough books". The styles I've experimented with over the years have a few influences, but one I keep coming back to is inspired to a certain degree by Jim Davis' work on Garfield — particularly in the area of the eyes. I've always liked Garfield-style eyes as two slightly "protruding" spheres on a character's face; it's not at all realistic, but it can be immensely expressive, which is why I think I've always been rather fond of it as a style.

The uncoloured top-right doodle in the above is somewhat akin to how Ed and I drew our shared "Edlock Holmes and Watson" cartoon strips when we weren't doing them as stickmen (which, eventually, we adopted as the "primary" style) — big noses, eyes inspired a bit by Sonic the Hedgehog's big "mono-eye with a perpetual frown. Fiddling around with that style today, I feel a bit less fond of it than the other approaches: the aforementioned "Garfield-style", and an adaptation of what I was doing with the stickmen, with simple lines for eyes.

One thing I've discovered with Clip Studio Paint that I'm quite fond of is colouring the images in! Using layers, you can leave your line art "on top" and paint behind it, and that, it turns out, is immensely satisfying to do. All of the above are coloured by hand using a paintbrush tool rather than a flood fill, and I really enjoyed doing that for some reason. Given the output of the tool is rather "solid" you probably can't see much in the way of "brush strokes", but I feel that colouring things in that way introduces just enough in the way of human imperfections to give it a bit more of a personal touch.

One thing I really like about drawing with a tablet on the computer is the smoothness of the lines it produces. There's still some "humanity" in there due to things like variances in pen pressure and suchlike, but there's a pleasing smoothness to lines drawn as one continuous motion that is hard to recreate even using real materials. You can't do that with a mouse, either — not even a fancy-pants high-DPI model — and, for me, it's one of the ways that computer art strikes a nice balance between the physical and digital spaces; a real way that the medium makes itself stand out as something unique, rather than an attempt to recreate something that already exists.

I'm looking forward to experimenting a bit more with this drawing tablet, and I'm going to try and scribble something as a companion piece to each post each day, just like I've been doing up until now with the stickmen. As I say, I can't promise that some days won't still have stickmen — I know they have their fans, and I still like them myself — but I also want to experiment with pushing myself a little more, and perhaps developing a bit of a style that I can absolutely call "my own".

Also the sassy gal in the bottom left is cute, no? She will definitely be making more appearances.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.