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dandelionpie · 6 years

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So I’ve been Having Ideas About My Future lately. And right now this one feels like the very beginning of a soap bubble - the part where you’ve started to blow into it but it hasn’t closed around itself yet. And I want to be really cautious with it so it doesn’t just pop before it can even get into the air, so I wasn’t gonna talk about it for a while, but also.

[Click through for a very long post about Maddy’s Career Options - replies are fine but please be gentle with my baby bubble hopes]

Okay, you guys.

So I was on the phone with my mother the other day, and I was having a sort of a panic attack (you know, like you do when you’re on the phone with your mother [kidding this is not normal and should not be trivialized, etc]), and I was trying to conceal this fact from her but it was Not Working. And I was dismayed about where my life was going, my lack of definite plans for a career, etc., and she said, “You know, I was actually gonna tell you - we had a lady come visit our school the other day and she’s an art therapist.”

And...here’s the thing. Usually my mother’s career suggestions kind of go in one ear and out the other. Because my mom’s great! Really! But she isn’t me, and she doesn’t always get what my life is like. So I usually just say “hm, yeah, I’ll look into it,” and then I don’t.

But I had genuinely just forgotten that art therapy existed. I knew about art, and I knew about therapy, and I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that people were putting those two things together, but somehow I’d just sort of filed that info in the General Trivia drawer instead of the Potential Grown-Up Jobs one. And...I’m getting sort of cautiously excited about the idea.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS I HAVE HAD SINCE THAT CONVERSATION

(I Started Writing Them Down and Then They Became Legion)

Every piece of art I like has a strong psychological element. That’s the common thread, dammit. That’s why I’m so picky about song lyrics, that’s why I can’t get into a book unless it’s got some sort of strong interpersonal/intrapersonal thread for me to snag my little English major hooks in. At the end of the day, the narratives that interest me are the ones where people are constantly feeling and processing things and I have to think a lot about why they’re doing that the way they’re doing it.

Not trying to sound like I think I’m super virtuous or whatever, but I tend to see good in most people, which might be an asset in that field? I get along well with a lot of personality types that friends of mine have cited as abrasive. Like, I can find people obnoxious but still notice enough of their good qualities to enjoy their company or at least tolerate it. And that’s a strength that’s served me well on a personal level, and a little on a professional level too (getting along with people helps just about anywhere), but I never thought of it as something I could use to particular effect in an actual career track.

That said, I have NO background in psychology. I had a couple lab rats, but they didn’t really teach me any of their secrets.

On cursory examination I have decided that I Do Not Like neurology. I have a lot of friends who seem to love it and that’s great, but....look, it just freaks me the fuck out. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much of my adulthood (read: all of it) preoccupied with the vulnerability of my physical being to various surgery-requiring problems. But the idea of my mind (that place where I spend so very very much of my time) being subject to the physical limitations of my brain (a part of my corporeal body [which has in the past proven itself to be somewhat unpredictable]) is so fucking terrifying to me that I’d prefer to spend as little time on that as possible please and thank you.

(Aside: I know the phrase “I don’t like the Brain; I just like the Mind) is like peak dualism, but I’m sure you all know what I mean, right? It’s possible to think about and work with the mind without focusing on the physical brain that gives rise to it. I’ve been doing that on the client end of things for years.)

A lot of the art I do is actually pretty therapeutic! To me, I mean. I never did figure out how to translate the whole cancer thing into an autobio comic (I eventually realized I simply didn’t want to and it was one of the most liberating moments of my life). But I have been relying on art for years to process my trauma. Most of my creative projects and ideas for them go back to that in some way, even if it doesn’t come across to the other people who experience them.

That said, I am...not the biggest autobio comic fan. There are so many things about that genre that rub me the wrong way. I’m glad it exists, I just don’t tend to enjoy consuming or creating autobio comics. However, this might be a chance to see autobio comics through a new lens! And it also has the potential to set me apart - there are quite a few art therapists, but I’ll bet there are fewer whose background is in comics specifically.

I could have an office. I could go into private practice and have a place that I could build into a safe space for people to talk about their problems and work on them. I know it’s just a little thing (and I’m not sure yet if private practice would be feasible/right for me, at least right away), but I like the idea of making physical space for that kind of work. (And if I sometimes also used it as a studio for comics, well, I don’t think that’s illegal or anything.)

I could be relatively independent in my career. I could work for an agency (and I think I’d probably have to, at first, but I gotta look into how all that works), but I could also spend at least some of my time in private practice, or working pro bono or on a sliding scale, or doing other stuff that allows me a great deal of flexibility and control over my schedule.

I like the idea of a type of schooling that has experience built into it. Like, you have to get a certain number of internship hours before you can be certified. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but it’s nice to see a field that’s so up-front about the fact that you need experience before you can do your job.

A lot of art therapists work with traumatized kids, and I find that prospect faintly terrifying. But also maybe it would be good to get over that, if I want to Help People and Use My Strengths to Do Good Things In the World. Those kids are gonna be traumatized either way, and if I can handle it, it’d probably be cool if I helped them.

It would be so nice to not be broke literally all the time. Even with student loans, I think this has the potential to help that happen, if I do my research and play my cards right. And I might even be able to work *gasp* less than 40 hours a week, thereby freeing up my time for other projects. Or, you know, kids. Hell, maybe I’d even be able to feed them.

Nobody would be able to make me work Saturdays.

Not sure yet whether it’d be better to get an Actual Art Therapy Degree or do a more general thing and then get a specific art therapy certification after/during that? I’m leaning towards the latter because I’d like more versatility, but I’m getting the sense that the rules for who can call themself an art therapist are slightly stricter in Oregon, so I’m gonna have to talk to the people who run the program.

What with the horse in the hospital and all that, I was thinking about a career in activism. But I’m not sure I have the temperament to be a lawyer, and I hate talking to strangers (I’ll do it if I have to, but damned if I’m gonna go door-to-door every day). But this way, I could maybe help activists balance their lives and their activism. Activists need therapists.

I could help people like me, with medical trauma. I know all about medical trauma! It has literally been a constant since I was 18! And in college and after, I hated feeling like my problems were fake and that my illness affecting my life was the result of some moral defect. Without therapy, I don’t know if I would have kept going to doctors and trying to figure everything out.

Visual art has in many ways been a great avenue leading away from self-harm, for me. The physicality of it is so much more powerful, for me, than almost anything else.

I’ve been so conflicted lately with lots of ideas about art-as-saleable-product vs. art-as-catharsis-and-narrative-control. I kind of thought my interest lay in the former but now I’m wondering if maybe it’s the latter. Like, I still love comics and storytelling and I want to make comics for people to read, but at the end of the day, I don’t want to do advertising. I don’t want to build a brand. I just want to tell stories and draw pretty pictures that make people happy. And I know that’s not what art therapists do, but in some ways it feels like the field still lines up better with my goals than commercial illustration. Does that make sense?

Lewis and Clark has a program. PSU has a program (though not an art therapy one specifically I think). There are online ones and low-residency ones as well, although honestly I think I function best in a classroom. Right now I think I’m leaning towards L&C because I’ve heard really good things about their education grad programs from a couple of people, but: gotta look further into it.

I’m liking the prospect of being a student again. I like going to lectures. I like notebooks and pencils and pens and libraries. And according to one person I talked to, as a therapist you actually have to keep taking courses throughout your career as the field changes. It’s like a condition for licensure or something (at least in some parts of the field). I’d love to be able to keep learning my entire life in such a deliberate way.

And I think I’d be better at being a student now than I was at Reed. I remember realizing waaay too late that you could just...ask your professors for help with stuff. And they could say no! But they weren’t going to, like, set me on fire. So what if I just set up a meeting with someone involved in a program and said, “Hey, look, I have no psych background and an intense interest in therapeutic work; how do I do this?” They could tell me to go away, but that’s probably about it. In a way, I think it might be nice to take another stab at academia - redeem myself.

(I have no idea what my Reed GPA is and should probably figure that out. Pretty sure I got a C in Chem and at least one other class? But maybe they won’t mind.)

My original plan had been to fund my comics habit with a freelance illustration career. Because almost nobody makes a living in comics, at least not just in comics. It happens, but very rarely does it happen with creator-owned work. A lot of indie comics artists freelance or have some other sort of art day job, and I thought that was a lifestyle I could get into.

But the Horrible Deep Dark Secret is...I don’t actually like freelancing that much, at least with my life the way it currently is. I mean, I love drawing and I love not being broke, so please keep sending people my way if they want someone to draw something (please please please I need the money). But the illustration industry is downright exhausting. It’s so hard to switch off, and it’s so much work even convincing people you deserve to get paid, let alone getting them to pay you. Mad kudos to anyone who has the time/energy to do that, but I’m not sure I do, at least at this point in my life.

But if I was planning to supplement my comics with another, art-related career anyway, what if I did this instead? What if it ended up being something I, Maddy, could enjoy and feel good about? Doing this (with my temperament) might actually a) pay better b) offer me more time and c) lend a sense of structure to my days that I definitely need and that freelancing sorely lacks.

Actually, having comics projects might even help with work-life balance in this field. I don’t know yet, but I’ve been told that a lot of therapeutic practice is establishing healthy boundaries between your work and your life, and I think it might help to have somewhere else to pour emotional energy when I’m off the clock.

Having another career wouldn’t mean I couldn’t make comics. Hell, it wouldn’t even mean I couldn’t sell comics. I could still make a website and freelance sometimes. I could still set up a Patreon. I could still publish my stuff on the web and in real life. I could still table at cons. And if things started going better than I’ve been planning for them to go, comics-wise, I wouldn’t have to keep being a therapist full-time. I’d have some flexibility, especially in private practice.

Anyway, I literally just started thinking about this a few days ago, so I have no idea if I’m gonna stay this excited about it. But...I’m enjoying looking into it. I’ve felt so much more hopeful the past few days - like my life might actually go someplace I could like. It’s a nice feeling and I would like to keep it.

I dunno. I’ve talked to some people and I’m gonna talk to some more people. Maybe set up an interview at the college in the next couple months if I can swing it. Prereqs would probably be somewhat hellacious, but that’s what I get for majoring in the humanities.

Okay cool I’m gonna go eat something and clean the kitchen.

#personal #job stuff #self-harm mention #medical trauma #in which maddy begins to consider grad shool

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dereksmcgrath · 3 years

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How can a chapter feel simultaneously rushed and incomplete?

“Rest!!” My Hero Academia Chapter 327. By Kohei Horikoshi, translation by Caleb Cook, lettering by John Hunt. Available from Viz.

Spoilers for Chapter 23 of Blue Box.

Last weekend I wrote how the pacing was bizarre for that weekend’s releases of some Jump serials, not just My Hero Academia (as I’ll get to in this review) but also other publications like Magu-chan and Blue Box. And, spoilers for Blue Box, jeez, that pacing at the end of the newest chapter this weekend was odd--but at least odd in a way that heightens interest in the story, as opposed to odd in My Hero Academia where this chapter felt incomplete.

I wish I could say that was the reason I am delayed writing this review, but it’s not. A lot of other tasks (webinar, job applications and interviews) and writing projects (working on some “Episode 7 Rule” posts, getting some more stuff published) took up time before I could share this review. But because Chapter 327 feels incomplete, the fact that I also get to use today to read and write about Chapter 327 helps to round out an actually finished installment to this story, so my delay ended up being serendipitous.

(And make up your own joke that I needed to take a break before reviewing a chapter titled “Rest!!”)

But before we can get to what was complete in this story, we have to muck through this chapter, which still feels incomplete.

That’s not to say Chapter 327 is bad. I mean, some of the art looks a little off to me, especially Tokoyami and Mina talking after All Might leaves the dorms. And I could debate how valid that quotation in the image above is, but I think Izuku’s face already reveals that, no, self-care only takes you so far, when societal improvements are not being made so that, in his world, children are not having to take on the fights adults refused to, whereas in my world...children should not have to take on the fights adults refused to about climate change, bigotry, police violence, sexual harassment and violence, poverty, hunger...

...God, this manga about supervillains got sadly realistic, and I hate it. Izuku’s face up there is the look of someone who has seen some shit, and one bath is not going to help.

As with that one chapter of Magu-chan, the seams of the story are showing, and that hinders how I personally get enjoyment. It’s one thing to see how a story is put together and appreciate how well that works, from a critical perspective or if you’re trying to imitate such story practices in your own writing. But it’s another thing when you see the way a story is put together because something just isn’t connecting the parts of that story well. After how great the previous chapters have been with the slow-burn to Izuku’s return to UA, Ochaco’s speech, and actually seeing Izuku getting heartfelt welcomes back by Kota, that giant woman he rescued, and that starfish hair guy all the way from Chapter 1, the rest of this chapter feels rushed. It’s not like you could drag out a lot of this stuff: there’s only so much time you can have Izuku and the boys bathing. But there is so much to fit in: cleaning up Izuku, seeing how his classmates react to his return and his secrets, All Might’s arrival, what this means moving forward to stop Shigaraki, and what is up with Endeavor and Todoroki’s side story. It’s a lot--and nothing really feels like it gets what it needs. Just to tease out every last feeling every last classmate has to Izuku keeping his Quirklessness and One For All a secret would need a light novel chapter per character.

And speaking of the My Hero Academia light novels, at least I can give some points to Horikoshi, though, for doing a better job writing the boys bathing than Mineta peeping on the girls, or that inane joke in one of the light novels--in which the boys see who can last longest in the hot bath, because that tired exhausting trope of “kids do dumb things.” Ugh, at some point, I’m going to write about how to handle writing young people well in a story so it’s not that ridiculous trope of “young people make dumb mistakes” that some writers use to move the plot along. The only example I’ve seen where that works lately is Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun, and that’s because it doesn’t feel like those mistakes are to keep the plot moving but actually something innate to a character’s sense of justice or sentiment that, while foolish, is in competition with actual stakes, pros and cons, and part of the character’s core ethics, not just something ridiculous to get from plot point A to B. That light novel gag felt very much like “the boys have to do something stupid,” as opposed to “this is something that would make sense for the boys to do.” But I digress.

So, why do I give points to Horikoshi for this version of the bath gag? Because, as I am trying to say about Hanako-kun, this makes sense for how the characters would act, and moves the plot along. Bakugo struggling with what to call Izuku makes sense; Bakugo still being his rival makes sense; after how much character progression he has thankfully made by now, this late in the series, it makes sense that he is still going to regress to previous behavior. I’m grateful he regresses without verbally bullying Izuku (your mileage may vary whether he is still bullying him, though, and I’m open to being wrong on that point) and without physically attacking him (Bakugo cutting into Izuku’s head as a gag in the recent anime episode is still not funny).

But then the students ask about One For All and what Izuku has been going through--and we don’t get much more knowledge. Todoroki shuts down that discussion by saying he needs to get some sleep, so, again, that forestalls any discussion until probably some chapters in a future light novel.

Izuku is not ready for sleep yet, though, as he worries about how he treated All Might earlier. I’m not going to disagree that Izuku was not being kind to All Might, but what I appreciate about the moment is that, and forgive my phrasing, from both sides, it makes sense: Izuku was not as polite as he should have been but hardly as grimdark as many readers feared he would, and All Might was doing something kind for Izuku but has been failing to reach out to him. All of that character dynamic works.

But what hasn’t worked is how quickly their reunion and apologies are. It reminds me how quickly All Might insisted, after losing One For All for good, that he would be there for Izuku--and really wasn’t. All Might refused to introduce Izuku to Nighteye; All Might kept secrets about all that One For All could do; All Might was not there during the PLF Fight, and he knows he cannot be in the same role for Izuku while he’s playing vigilante. The apologies keep coming but aren’t really getting anywhere for these two characters, not before Izuku just passes out from exhaustion. There’s a lot left for these two, so no wonder people take that death flag from All Might peering in from the window to think he’s going to die soon and only then will he and Izuku have any meaningful resolution. Granted, the next chapter is going to go into more detail about All Might’s vestige inside One For All, so he won’t be quite dead, but that death cheat just makes this inability to resolve anything between the bad teacher and the disobedient student all the more frustrating.

At least Caleb Cook continues to translate some good gags out of Mina, such as when she criticizes All Might’s departure. But that only reinforces how empty his apologies feel when he speaks to the class, especially when he again has to run to pass on his intelligence to the police and probably Endeavor, which also makes all of this all the more infuriating because you would think that would be his first priority. I get the point of being there for his student--even if I still don’t think All Might has been--and it does characterize him well that of course he would go to his student first instead of passing on the intelligence from Stain first. But it also makes me want to shake All Might and tell him to get the intelligence to the police, given what we learn about it in the next chapter. So, again, the seams of the story are showing: Horikoshi delays revealing what All Might has learned until that chapter is ready to share with readers.

And that news from Stain is probably going to disrupt any of Jiro’s plans for a concert, and, yeah, after a weekend in my real world where concerts got more attention than reproductive rights marches throughout the United States, you’ll forgive me if I don’t care much about this plot point. Heck, comics, as a silent medium, invoking music, has always been a bizarre choice for me: that works for the animated series, but for the comics, it’s hard to translate that auditory medium to a visual one.

Then we wrap up the chapter with an exposition dump about Stain’s intelligence. When I first read this chapter, before Chapter 328 came out, this felt like an abrupt ending. Realizing this ending leads naturally to the next chapter, to show what Stain was up to at Tartarus, doesn’t make it work any better for me. Invoking the “we have one month to stop Shigaraki” rule, only to break it in the next chapter and reveal they have three days, is a more cynical method of the “don’t cross the streams” rule from Ghostbusters: this exists to set up a rule to then break it so that the protagonists’ chances of success dwindle further.

It bothers me because I have seen this done better elsewhere. The final season of Avatar: The Last Airbender wraps up with Zuko learning the Gaang has decided to wait until after Sozin’s Comet, thinking they’ll have a better chance. That makes sense, and while the Gaang’s plan is a final-episode reveal, it fits with their strategy: Aang couldn’t take on the Fire Nation when it was depowered, so taking them on when they are fully powered and he hasn’t perfected his fire skills is a practical approach. Then Zuko reveals that the deadline has to be moved up, because his father will take over the world during the Comet, something Zuko didn’t tell them until now because he already thought the plan was to stop the Fire Nation before the Comet, so why would scaring them help? This was a failure of communication on the part of both parties, and it introduced the rules--”Wait until after the Comet” and “No, attack before the Comet”--at the same time that it disrupted those rules, so we as the audience were not manipulated for a cynical gotcha moment. And that’s what My Hero Academia has done.

For the longest time My Hero Academia kept repeating that Shigaraki would need two months to increase his power. In the next chapter we learn they overestimated that time, and they got three days left. This feels rushed, as rushed as how this chapter was to wrap up Izuku’s return to UA, All Might’s apology, and the Class 1-A reunion. And I just didn’t like it. More was needed to give this chapter some meat, and it just isn’t here. The next chapter, thankfully, is better, given some payoff to what this chapter sets up, as well as a hint of things to come, but on its own, this chapter is like the first half of an anime episode, rather than a complete package.

#my hero academia #manga review #mha spoilers #izuku midoriya #all might

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chadnevett · 6 years

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The Man of Steel

I reread The Man of Steel today. As one of those people who run in whatever circles it is that I run in, I've been one of the stauncher pro-Bendis folks in the sense that I genuinely enjoy his writing and tend to get whatever he's doing for Marvel. I even find the flaws fun. His jump to DC is still a little surprising and interesting in that he's just doing Superman right now. There's his creator-owned stuff in force along with his hints about a curated imprint. But, for the DCU proper, it's just Superman (and whatever Batman stuff shows up in those Walmart comics, I guess). And it's been rolled out in an odd fashion, I guess: a short in Action Comics #1000, a short in DC Nation #0 (and, people, that means that DC put out a zero issue containing three comic stories for a title that's actually a free magazine about DC and contains no actual comic stories... THAT IS WEIRD), and, then, a six-issue weekly mini-series that everyone who actually sells comics for a living says it a terrible way to launch something (maybe some retailers are pro-weekly series like this, but I've yet to see them... which isn't to say that many didn't hype and promote THIS one, but that's because they live in the real world and it's better to try to actually make money off the flawed delivery than to be like, "This is dumb, fuck money and my business!"). But, I have reread it all on this day of rest to deliver some thoughts:

* The biggest thing I've been thinking about with regards to this specific story is, like with most Bendis comics, the reading order. Do you keep it as it was released with the Action Comics #1000 short as the first thing you read or do you put it after page 13 of The Man of Steel #4? I asked people on Twitter and 75% of them said in TMoS #4 (out of... er... four votes...). Having reread the whole thing, I still lean that way. However, the way the scene after that is written with Superman flashing back a little to what Rogol Zaar said/did in that short, it makes it a little clunky/redundant. The short reads like it was a scene lifted out of that issue and maybe expanded a little and with the issue itself expanded a little to make up for its loss. Not sure if that's how it happened, but that's how it reads -- especially with Rogol Zaar's comment to Supergirl about how he'd deal with her later, which is something he says in issue four. Sticking the short at the beginning of the story doesn't make sense structurally, because then the entire thing is a flashback that we catch up to mid-stream... and it already has a slow reveal flashback thing going on. Adding another in there wouldn't work. I'd ask Bendis, but his response is always "Read it in the order that it physically arrived in comic shops or book shops, depending on which version of the product you own," which is decidedly unhelpful. So, my reading order: DC Nation #0, The Man of Steel #1-3, #4 up to page 13, "The Truth" from Action Comics #100, the rest of issue 4, #5-6.

* It felt like the story was trying to do too much. An odd comment to some, but the arson stuff really didn't fit, I found. It may have been a stronger work if it was just Superman/Clark being sullen, dealing with the Lois/Jon fallout, the slow reveal of what happened, and Rogol Zaar's attack. By the end of the story, those two things have been resolved enough to feel like the story is over. The arson thing just kind of pops up throughout and then ends on a cliffhanger. It's hard to say for sure without seeing what's next, but it really felt like it could have been held off or made more of a background thing ala much of the Daily Planet stuff. It's focus was just large enough to come off as important to this specific series/story and it... wasn't. The balance was off.

* The Man of Steel is a plate-clearing exercise and a set-up thing. It's as close as Bendis is going to get to a reboot without doing one. He clears away some of the recent stuff like Lois and Jon, but does so in a manner where they can be brought back at any time. Same with Supergirl. He establishes a possible big villain and sidelines him for future use. He teases some Daily Planet stuff. It's a lot of work to put things where Bendis wants them for the monthlies. I think he does a good job there of hitting the balance.

* The loss of the communication device isn't just an emotional beat, it's one that helps the story of Rogol Zaar, because Superman can't just call his dad and go, "Um, about this guy trying to cleanse Kryptonians from the universe?"

* You could see Bendis trying to find Superman's voice to a degree and I always like seeing that. We have an expectation that these writers will nail it from the get-go and it's not... an entirely unfair expectation. But, there's always going to be a period of figuring it out. I really think he's nailed Clark Kent, husband and father. That stuff was fantastic. A guy who's put in a situation where he absolutely has to do what he doesn't want and is left feeling emotionally shattered, because he's not certain he'll get his family back. It's nice to see him not completely confident. His Superman isn't quite as solid, but it's not bad.

* Though, that part where Lois mentions it being a problem he can't solve by punching... a little too on the nose.

* I'm really curious to see how the two monthlies will work. When Bendis has written the same property twice a month in separate books, it's almost always been team books with different rosters. The one exception was when Invincible Iron Man and International Iron Man were both going at the same time -- but one was basically a mini-series with a specific story rather than a true monthly. I guess Ultimate Team-Up ran concurrent to Ultimate Spider-Man, but that was a gimmick book in its own way, too. He's never taken a single-character property like Superman and done two straight ahead monthlies. He's talked about how he plans to make them different, but that's been a bit... I don't want to say vague, but hard to see entirely, especially with what The Man of Steel was. I'm curious to see the practical reality of the two monthlies and how they are distinct and how they interact.

* The first story in Superman has the Earth trapped in the Phantom Zone... where Rogol Zaar was just sent...

* There was a moment in issue four that I absolutely hated: page nine, panel three. Supergirl asks off-panel "WHERE'D HE GO?" in a caption box that looks identical to the caption boxes used for the Lois/Jon flashback that have been peppered throughout the panels/pages before and after this panel. Using visually identical caption boxes for two different purposes on the same page is something you'd think they would have caught/avoided.

* As much as I enjoyed most of the artists involved with the series, I do think I would have preferred a single artist for the whole thing -- or one for the present and one for the Jon/Lois flashbacks (which is what they did for the latter of those two). But, I tend to prefer consisency like that.

* Ultimately, I enjoyed the series. I have no issues with the Lois/Jon stuff. I have no issues with Rogol Zaar beyond feeling a little frustrated that we have to wait for more information. I'd rather the whole thing be a bit more front-loaded, but I can see why you'd ease up and let it sit. I'm on board for what comes next.

#comics #Brian Michael Bendis

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webcomicry · 6 years

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Some Things, off the Top of My Head, an Artist Should Know

(Crosspost from the main blog.)

Please don’t take my extended absence personally: I barely wrote anything in 2017. Let’s change that this year.

But this post, as the title says, wasn’t planned. It started out as an answer to a Reddit post asking what you should study if you want to go pro, but as I kept writing, I realized it was turning into a blog post.

So here you go: a list, from memory, of what I think an artist with career hopes should be reading up on.

BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE

Your first priority should be learning to think in 3D. When you look at a reference, think of it as a rotating 3-dimensional object, not what it looks like from that exact angle, in that exact lighting, taken with that exact lens. You should never let a reference photo dictate what you’ll draw. And the first key to that is learning how to break everything you draw down to five basic shapes: Cube, sphere, pyramid, cone, and cylinder. Everything else is just stretching and combining them.

PROPORTIONS

You should know how to draw people from two heads—super cartoony—to eight heads—superhero—tall, how to build a body from a stick figure, and the differences between male and female body structures. Learn the relationships between different parts of the body and how to use the bony landmarks (the parts where bone is right below the skin, e.g. elbows and knees, since those don’t change with the amounts of fat or muscle) to measure proportions.

PORTRAITURE

You should know classical portrait proportions, the Loomis method of building a head, how to do it from any angle, and how all the features look from those angles, even the ones you can’t see. Read up on ethnic features so trying to draw other races doesn’t get you, to quote Yahtzee, “a white woman dunked in tea.”

ANATOMY

Even if you don’t know the Latin, you should know by sight the bones and where they go, the joints and their ranges of motion in all directions, the surface muscles, the muscle groups, and how the shapes of body parts change when they’re squashed and stretched. Learn how muscle and fat are distributed and how to draw all body types. Learn animal anatomy too, but since it varies so much, you can study that for each animal you draw as you go.

CLOTHES

Have a basic knowledge of how clothes work. More important than learning the individual styles is knowing what holds a strapless dress on, where the stitch lines on jeans are, what makes for a nice suit, things like that. Learn how different types of cloth flow over objects, drape, and fold, both at rest and in motion.

PERSPECTIVE

First study vanishing points, then learn how to break away from the standard “one point, two point, three point” rote techniques they teach you (long story) so you can accurately draw diagonal or tilted objects into a scene as well. Learn to measure in perspective and deduce sizes and vanishing points from a photo. Know how to create perspective grids – even if just digitally – and eventually, how to do curvilinear and five-point. Learn how to foreshorten objects and people from a subtle to an extreme degree.

LIGHTING

Know how light falls across the five basic shapes from different angles. Know how light direction, light intensity, and shadow lengths change depending on the time of day. Know how light hits unusual textures like brick and glass. Once you start getting into painting or digital art, know how to portray a subject lit in a certain color.

BACKGROUNDS

Study architecture to the point where you at least know the terms for the various building elements and where they go. Learn how to render rocks and mountains. Learn how to portray distance. Learn about plant structures and how to simplify them for a drawing.

PENCIL TECHNIQUE

Know how to both sketch and do precision work: I’d suggest practicing them with wood and mechanical pencils respectively. Know how to do rough gesture drawings, semi-rough figure drawings, and refined and fully-shaded studies. Learn to do both hard and gradual shading transitions, blend, use a tortillon, and draw using only value instead of lines.

PEN TECHNIQUE

Know how to ink with markers, brushes, and maybe even dip pens. Know how to hatch and crosshatch in all directions, create textures, and spot blacks.

COLOR

I was a pen boi until just last year, so this is my weak point. I wish I’d worked on it earlier. Learn how to develop good taste in color, and study how other people use it. Learn about color theory, harmonies, and symbolism. Learn how to turn a value drawing into a colored one. Learn how ambient lighting affects the color of objects, how color is relative and subjective, and how to use different intensities and saturations to achieve different effects.

DIGITAL TECHNIQUE

This is what I’m struggling with now, since I got started with tablets much later than most artists. You can start with a simple cel-shading style to introduce yourself to the tools, learn to blend colors, then move on to fully-rendered digital paintings, photobashing, and concept art-style environments. Know what programs are best for what purposes, and maybe dip a bit into 3d modeling, even if it’s just using posable figures and Sketchup.

ART STYLES

Even if you want to have a defined art style, study as many others as possible so you can do them if you want. And study caricature: knowing how to exaggerate features without breaking the likeness will prove invaluable, as will the speed drawing aspect.

If you’re a weeb dumpster like me, put a decent amount of time into studying various anime and manga styles, not just generic moeface and “Atlus ripoff,” so you’ll have a solid idea of how the medium evolved and the basics behind it. If you want to draw in that style, it’ll mainly be for fun (or to make side money from low-level commissions), but there’s nothing wrong with that, since having fun is what keeps you interested.

OTHER STUFF

Study visual storytelling. This is a super-important step a lot of artists skip. Study both other comics and film so you can get a sense of how composition and motion aid the plot. Study color symbolism, and symbolism in general. Learn how to come up with clever visual gags, jokes, and metaphors. I’d suggest reading some scripts and screenplays too.

Study graphic design. It’s a mandatory side skill for digital artists nowadays. Learn to scan traditional art and print digital art, as well as making—and designing for—different types of prints, merch, video, and other digital media. You should have a thorough knowledge of how to work across design programs, DPI requirements, and all the basics of putting pictures on stuff as quickly and cheaply as possible. Study branding. Learn to build a website.

Start building a reference library now. Back it up on an external hard drive or in the cloud. Keep it for the rest of your life. Make sure to add “inspiration” from artists you particularly like too.

Finally, read up on how to network and put yourself out there, both online and IRL. That’s how you get work in the first place.

It’s a lot. I’m going into my 9th year studying art, and I still don’t have a firm grasp on some of this shit. But no matter what level you’re at, good luck!

#artist #art tips #art advice #art reference #art skill #art skills #self-taught artist #art school #learn art

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jccamus · 5 years

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You’ve been reading charts wrong. Here’s how a pro does it.

You’ve been reading charts wrong. Here’s how a pro does it. https://ift.tt/2IObHal

In the current political environment, he notes in the book, misinformation is everywhere. A slick chart can add a veneer of authority to shoddy or misleading data, he said, so he made it his goal to help readers avoid the common interpretive pitfalls that took him years to figure out for himself.

Earlier this month I spoke with Cairo about the book, his background and some of the misleading viral visuals he’s come across recently. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me a bit about your background, like how you ended up in this field?

I studied journalism, originally with the goal of working in radio (I love listening to the radio and podcasts). However, I’ve always been in love with visual communication. My dad taught me how to draw a bit, and I read comic books and science books with tons of cutaway illustrations and visual explainers when I was a kid.

I guess I absorbed all that and, in the last year of my B.A., a professor of mine who knew that I can sketch stuff up recommended me to be an intern in the infographics department at the local newspaper of the city where I was born, La Coruña, in Spain. The newspaper is La Voz de Galicia. After that, it was just a matter of practicing, learning, studying, making mistakes and trying to learn from them.

Who is this book for? What audience did you have in mind when you wrote it?

I wrote the book with different “personas” in mind, to use the parlance common in design research. For instance, my dad and my mom. They are both educated professionals (a medical doctor and the head of nursing in several hospitals, both retired).

My dad and my mom both know a bit about numbers, but I observed in people like them (and even myself, I admit), the tendency to take charts, maps and graphs at face value, assuming that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” a myth I warn against in the book.

For some reason many people assume that numbers and, as an extension of numbers, the graphics that represent them, are “objective” and carry truth. The goal of the book is to disabuse people of this intuition. Sure, visualizations are amazing and they can open your eyes to insights you hadn’t noticed before (and I exemplify that in the book), but they need to be approached carefully as written text or speech.

Why write this book now? Have you been noticing a lot of misinformation, or maybe misinterpretation, among the public on this visual stuff?

Visual misinformation has always been something that has worried me. I addressed it in previous books. However, I’ve noticed an increase in the past few years in countries I’ve lived in: Spain, Brazil, and the U.S. I noticed that governments, companies and individuals have become more adept at designing misleading charts.

Just see this example from yesterday:

“Real median household income—the amount earned by those in the very middle—hit $65,084 for the 12 months ending in July. That’s the highest level ever and a gain of $4,144, or 6.8%, since Mr. Trump took office.” @WSJ pic.twitter.com/Sna9DHbnyV

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) October 2, 2019

Notice the absurd trend line during Obama’s presidency.

So, walk me through this — what’s happening in this chart? What��s misleading about it?

If we want to have an informed conversation about economic development, wages, jobs, et cetera, we need to consider not just the quantitative realities, but also the qualitative ones: What hides behind the slump at the beginning of [Barack] Obama’s presidency and the recovery at its end? The biggest economic crisis since the Depression.

That’s why the curve is so steep. Tracing a trend line between one point at its beginning and the end of the presidency is absurd just because that line doesn’t describe at all the realities behind the data. Moreover, the growth during [Donald] Trump’s presidency is simply an extension of trends that were existing before: You can see that if we trace a trend line since 2010 up to the present.

This is not to diminish more recent growth. The fact that the economy has continued improving steadily, that employment has gone up, that wages have continued increasing … that’s great news on its own. But it’s not something that began in November 2016 or January 2017. It’s an inherited situation.

One thing that struck me about this chart is it appears to be from the Wall Street Journal? So you have to assume that their intention wasn’t to lead folks astray here, but it ended up happening anyway?

Exactly! And that’s a point in the book, which contains mostly charts that were NOT designed in purpose to mislead anyone but that are at risk to be misread, particularly if they are related to deeply held ideological beliefs. As I wrote, charts often lie because we are all prone to lying to ourselves.

The good news is that I believe that we can curb this impulse a bit if we are more informed and more careful, and that’s what I try to teach in the book. And I’d add: even teaching to MYSELF, as most of the mistakes when reading charts that I describe in the book are mistakes I have made myself.

So this kind of segues into my next question: the title is how charts lie, which is a great title. But like, who is doing the lying, exactly?

A more accurate title would have been How Charts Mislead, Deceive, and Lie, How We Lie to Ourselves With Them, How We Can Avoid That Happening, and How We Can Use Charts Instead to Inform Meaningful Conversations About Urgent Issues. But nobody would buy a book like that!

But yes, charts do lie. Because reading a chart is not something that happens in the chart itself. It happens in the interface between the visual object AND your brain. And our brains are very prone to seeing what is not really there, to project onto charts what we already believe, to read beyond what the chart is showing (that’s why I came up with the mantra: “a chart shows only what it shows and nothing else.” Everything else that you see in a chart is often in your brain, not in the chart).

How do you generally recommend people approach charts, like the “shocking” or “stunning” viral charts they may see on their social feeds? What would you want a person who’s considering sharing a chart like this to do?

The Sagan Standard is timeless: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The more striking, shocking or stunning a chart is, the higher our scrutiny of it should be. In the book, I describe things to look into when facing any chart: checking the source of its data (if a chart doesn’t mention the source, ignore it, period); also, if you have a minute, visit the source itself to see whether the chart is measuring what it claims to be measuring. In one of my previous books, I have this example of several sources of worldwide data on intrafamily violence against women reporting hugely different rates for the same countries. Why? Because they defined “violence” in different ways. In the case of the source reporting lower rates, they were only counting physical violence; in the case of the source with higher rates, they also counted verbal violence, and other forms.

After assessing what the chart is truly measuring and showing, we need to pay attention to how the information is displayed: Is the chart or map distorting the data, maybe to emphasize points that favor the author’s opinions or agendas? Have the axis of a graph been cropped to exaggerate or minimize differences or variations?

The most important point, though, is to remind ourselves that we all project; therefore the mantra “a chart shows only what it shows and nothing else” is a good heuristic. The more the apparent message of a chart aligns with your ideological beliefs, the more you should force yourself to read it carefully, just because we are all prone to liking that chart beforehand and take it at face value. We all tend to do the opposite: scrutinize more closely charts whose message we disagree with. It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it.

https://ift.tt/2IUsQzc via Washington Post October 15, 2019 at 10:48PM

#IFTTT #Feedly

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