OG’s BLOG

How can any artist look at that drawing and not want to draw comics all day every day for the rest of his life? (Larger version HERE.) This is the inspiring work of José Luis Ágreda. You can see more of this strip, and plenty more like it, at his BLOG.

I came across José’s stuff at the blog of another exceptional artist, Paige Pooler. Her official website is full of plenty of gorgeous work that will put a smile on your face, and the links to other artists at her BLOG will keep you happily busy, chasing great link after great link, leading to more and more inspiring art, for hours.

Gotta love talented artists…

Left the garage door open last night, with the lights on. I think that’s why THEY came. Either that or one of the weeds we pulled from the garden and inadvertently left in the garage for a couple of days had a nest. But whatever the reason, this morning – tons of baby praying mantids. On the walls. On the door. On the ceiling. Everywhere.

They’re tiny — maybe a half inch long each. I fear for them… the spiders are going to get them.

“We seem to keep making the same mistakes, over and over and over again, sometimes in the same generation. And it makes me mad. Sure, I’m pissed off, because we don’t seem to be learning anything.

“I’m only one man. But Gandhi said that if you sprinkle enough grains of sand into a machine, even one grain at a time, you can stop the machine. This is my contribution. Anyway, if an artist can’t say what he really feels in his Art, then what the hell is the point?”

Fun is fun, but too much work is too much work.

Work has decided to see if they can kill me. This is an annual sport. I must say they’re getting better at it… either that, or I’m slowing down in my old age. They’re getting close, and one of these times they’re finally gonna get me.

Meh.

You know, you can almost track these things by the little bursts of creativity I exhibit. Paradoxically, my initial response to Too Much Work is to go into overdrive, to draw something, to animate something, to create something, just to have some control over something while I’m pounding away on Too Much. Inevitably, I get crunched, and all the superfluous things fall away, leaving only stress and work. I am in this latter stage currently.

All of this to say by way of feeble excuse, everything except work is on hiatus until further notice.

See you on the other side.

Here’s a little strip I did for our family.

Basically, we’ve been trying to have an Easter Egg Hunt since, well, the day before Easter. But the usually stable and reliably gorgeous Maryland spring weather has been notably absent. Cold. Rainy. Pacific Northwesty. Dare I say it, Spokanish. *shudder*

Kids don’t want to have an egg hunt when it’s cold enough to snow but somehow drizzly as well, and parents don’t particularly want to stand around and watch in those conditions. So we’ve scheduled and re-scheduled this thing, hoping that things would improve.

It became a running joke at my house that if things kept on this way, we’d be having our Easter egg hunt on the Fourth of July… hence the comic. This strip ran at the bottom of the latest – and I hope, the last – egg hunt invitation for this year. Fingaz crossed. (Yes, that’s my long-suffering wife in this one…)

Well… here we are at the final installment in my series of posts celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars and how it inspired me to become an artist.

In this last post, I want to talk about the extraordinary lengths the team went to in order to bring the fantastic world of Star Wars to life. Remember, this was before computer graphics, so all this stuff had to be built, and painted, and photographed. See the image up there… those are the Death Star surface modules I was telling you about yesterday. Here they are, all assembled into a continuous surface, and actually taken outside. The sun, it turns out, is a really good light source for photography.

Also, it allowed the team to get really unusual perspectives. By turning the model up on end like this, they could put the camera on rails and push it forward for the impression you were dive-bombing the Death Star.

Plus, someone figured out that explosions filmed like this would scatter sparks and debris in unexpected directions, giving the impression it had been filmed in space and not on Earth.

For the sequences of the fighters zooming down the Death Star trench, the model shop built an actual trench out of Johnston’s modules. To get the point of view of the fighters zooming through that trench, they strapped a camera to a boom, strapped the boom onto a truck, and drove along with the camera in the center. I wish I had a picture of that. It’s one of my favorite images from the making of Star Wars.

I think it’s the scale of the operation that impresses me. I think of the parking lot behind the initial ILM facility, littered with these mammoth Death Star surface models, and the trench. Think about working outside because you get different effects than working in a nice, sterile studio environment. Isn’t this such a cool, gritty feel? Isn’t it just so garage-development?

Today, you’d just do it by computer. And to prove the point, look at this screen capture of the Death Star surface from the original Star Wars:

And now, look at a CG recreation, composed of modules faithfully replicated off of Johnston’s original designs. That’s pretty neat. Makes me want to model a few ships and animate them flying off down the trench. (The Death Star greebles are available at our friends over at Scifi Meshes)

The CG model is undoubtedly crisper, and undoubtedly cheaper to create. But I sure miss the artifacts. I mean that both in terms of a physical artifact, a memento of shooting, but also artifacts in terms of imperfections. Something about the edges being imperfect, not sharp, not crisp. The physical models just have so much charm.

Of course when the camera is zipping past them at a zillion miles an hour, who cares about that anyway.

But the guys in the model shop cared. There are gun turrets on the Death Star. They could have just been tossed together out of junk plastic. But they weren’t. They were designed:

And built:

See what I mean about all that junk and artifacting? Look at the amount of detail on that thing. Just phenomenal.

Well, that’s about all I have to say about Star Wars for now. Since I began running this series, I’ve had many artists contact me to tell me they had the same books, and the same reactions to some of the same pictures. Funny to think how much this film has inspired an entire generation of artists.

And now, I guess it’s our turn, we who are lucky enough to be working in TV, film, computer games, comics. We should spend that extra bit of effort on that drawing, that model, that design. Just think… some kid might be inspired by your work.

Isn’t that an interesting thought?

The one last thing I got from Star Wars and Joe Johnston was the notion of managing the impossible. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. When you’re faced with a seemingly insurmountable task, figuring out what you want to do is only half of the problem. In preproduction, and on through production, you need to decide, and occasionally review in light of new information, HOW you’re going to do it.

Take scale:

That drawing is classic Joe Johnston. Simple, quick little technical jot, but it sets the scale for the ships, so that everyone involved in the production can see at a glance, without having to go ask or look it up, exactly how big the ships are in relation to one another. That’s very important.

But equally important is how you break up the Impossible Task. Take the surface of the Death Star, for instance. It’s a nightmare of chunky detail, what the special effects guys call “greeble”. Look at this scene from the movie:

Bad enough you’ve got to create acres of this stuff, you’re going to fly a camera RIGHT DOWN IN AMONG IT! Sure, the camera will be whipping by, and there will be fighter ships and lasers to distract the viewer, but no matter what, it all has to be made (this is in the days before CG, when stuff was actually built and painted by hand) and it has to hold up reasonably well at close range.

Well, Johnston and his boys came up with a solution: a modular approach. They designed a series of modules that could be broken into sections and reattached, or turned 90 degrees to get different effects. These were then modeled, and mass produced out of a sort of high density styrofoam. Brilliant! But it all started with this series of drawings by Joe Johnston:

This ingenious approach has served me well when I’ve had to model stuff, even in the computer, that needed the appearance of detail and variety, but time or resource was short. Think of the “forest” in Channelwood in realMYST. They are all one tree, scaled and rotated to try to give the impression of more:

Next time, I want to talk about how this approach worked on Star Wars, the strange things they wound up doing to make it work, and discuss a little bit about the power of detail.