967 Angel Of War.

My net service is having a rare normal day. I can hardly bring myself to write anything down because I want to go watch instructional videos while I can. XD I’ve been watching stuff about photoshop and various other tools I use so I can use them better. That’s how that animated Carol came about, in fact. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a decent animated image for advertising. I got as far as that image. I’m not sure how I’ll make use of the new powers, but at least I have them now.

I’ve said it before, but when I was in school my instructors were terrified of Photoshop. We were told in no uncertain terms that real art would never be made with computers; that they were a fad. An actual human being told this to a class full of other human beings… I don’t know who they thought was going to stop the world from moving on, but they never arrived. Practically everyone I went to school with kind of ended up lost when it came time to find art jobs that you could actually make a living at, because people don’t give a fuck how you make art just as long as they can get it cheap and it sells their crap. The computer terrified a generation of people into turtling up and some of us in the middle were the casualties. Of course I went to school at a 5th rate craphole in Kansas. I suspect that there were places where people saw the writing on the wall and they jumped in feet first screaming GERONIMO! The long and the short of things is that no matter how you cut it art is a brutal profession. Mostly because artists are the way they are. Very few have any business sense and the ones that don’t are constantly fucking everything up for all the others. They have no confidence, no concept of the value of their work, and are taken advantage of because of that. Being able to create art is a skill no matter what you make. It’s undervalued, but it’s still something that not everyone can do. Therefore it has value. What that value is hasn’t been agreed upon, so artists keep getting dicked over.

In any event, the net (when it’s working) is populated by millions of people just begging to tell you everything they know for free, and I intend to take advantage of it as often as I can. Sure, some of the knowledge is outdated, or wrong outright, but it’s not any worse than a textbook. XD

26 Comments

Crave – you’re on the right track about art issues, except when you try to turn art into a business, it ends up covered in commercial slime – it’s no longer just art.

y’ever see any Robert Hughes documentaries?

Heh, I wasn’t in graphic arts classes for the photoshop revolution, but I remember the same thing happening with photography. There were huge flame wars in the pro and amateur photography communities over film vs. digital, and for a while a lot of film festivals were actually refusing to admit movies that weren’t shot on celluloid simply because they didn’t consider digitally filmed movies “real” movies for no really intellectually honest reason. To their credit, my own professors didn’t really share this attitude. They were mostly from photojournalism and product photography backgrounds, which kinda gave them a Spock-like pragmatic attitude towards technical and logistical stuff.

Personally, at the time I felt that digital didn’t match film in image quality yet, but I knew it was really only a matter of time before it would. Photography *would* become digital, the question was not “if”, but “how long/soon”. The “is it art” question was largely a non-issue for me, as I felt that in that regard how well an artist communicated their ideas was the core important part, regardless of the media or whether their method of choice was harder or easier to use.

I can’t believe I only just now processed the fact that Ed’s last name is “Lincoln” and Reggie’s last name is “Booth” No wonder they don’t like each other! Does this mean Reggie’s going to assassinate Ed at the theater?

Gotta nitpick about “an truly” and “elfin”

The first thing is just a typo, but the second is how he said it. Although as far as I know Elven and elfin are two acceptable words with various meanings depending on what part of the world you are in.

Is Reggie making nice? No… Impossibru! WHO IS THAT MAN AND WHAT HAS HE DONE WITH THE REGGIE WE WERE SUPPOSED TO HATE?!

Oh gods! EVERYONE IS BONDING! Hell will freeze, Cubs will win, I’ll get a girlfriend! It’s the apocalypse I tell you! APOCALYPSE!

You know, I’m quite interested in what we have in store for Reggie now. I mean, if Nina’s giving him some slack then he cant be a complete bastard.. except to Jo apparently, but I think that’s just because she shot him down.

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