Virgilpony's blog

These sorts of blogs always start out the same way; smug self aggrandizing post + 1, 2, 3, Dragon illustration diagram x an artist's ego = look how much better I am than you are. Ha!

Lets get this out of the way now: I am a shmoe. I am a classical nudnik. I don't know my butt about anything and -think- I have maybe one or two things figured out. Out side of the fact that I am a little further down the road than you when it comes to art, I have nothing on you. And what I most want to give to you here, is the courage to try doing the things that have helped me accomplish the successes that have recently made their appearance in my work. If I can learn to do this, so can you. And this is not going to turn into a tutorial on how to draw ponies. I would rather you learned how to draw only to come and draw ponies -with me-

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/9444/firstevermolly.gif

Too big to post here, this is the first pony art I drew back when I started in the middle of the First Season. It is rough, it is hardly 'on-model' and clearly copied rather loosely from the show. Still, it is serviceable as an illustration to learn from. As you can see, I was experimenting from the start with complex poses, forcing myself to try and figure out the geometry. I wanted to learn the fundamental shapes that went together in order to become a pony. After all, arranging these objects differently or changing their size in relation to one another would not derive a show accurate pony. Enough messing around and referencing from the show allowed me to start doing this:

http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/5562/foxytailsmugflank.gif

Closer and Closer. Foxytail still has this Avatar from the first days I arrived on the site. The Newbie Artist Training Grounds were still going at EQD so I finished that out but was doing better art. I arrived here because, in the first stages, I concentrated on learning the volumetrics of the ponies first, then forcing them into exotic arrangements to find where the shapes broke down or what they were supposed to look like at odd angles. By constantly checking back with the show and illustrating from reference taken from the show itself, I started to get ponies drawn that looked right more often than not.

Although it was never 100%, it was closer: http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/9472/gilsonsmoothbeatheat.gif

Right around the beginning of the second season something began to change in my working body. I wasn't just learning how to draw ponies correctly, I was starting to learn how to draw what I saw regardless of what it was. I would dabble in other styles of drawing from other cartoons and surprises came one right after the other.

Several Styles unrelated to ponies: http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/1310/virgilstyle.gif

Because I was so focused on finding the volumetrics that made up the ponies, I had secretly taught myself to find them in all other characters. Now that I'm so confident in locating these mass shapes, I've expanded it into the last realm of drawing I'd been trying to avoid all along.

Still not great, but improving: http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/1447/humanponies002.gif

This is a drawing of a model from UKHairstyles.com. It's still missing some things and could use a lot of improvement, but its coming along nicely! Remember, I only started getting deadly serious about drawing a year ago in the middle of the last season. We're coming up on Two years now and, seeing as I have only been drawing ponies and some pony related stuff on the side, it is no surprise that I am turning out better and better art. I started correctly.

Congratulations for reading this far, I want you to have these tips that have allowed me to achieve this skill in this short a time:
1. Focus on studying the volumetrics of an object (the Mass Shapes) first.
2. Experiment with exotic poses to teach yourself how the shapes are arranged in as many varieties as you can think of.
3. Refuse to have a 'personal style.' Insist on drawing what is uncomfortable as-you-see-it!
4. Don't be ashamed if you want to draw nothing but ponies at the start. Once you have them down and are drawing show-accurate-art, expand slowly into buildings and objects for the sake of fun. You'll be surprised what you find yourself able to draw!

Hey guys, just offering up a little something that's been quite a thing for a while now: I'm loosing weight and not really even trying.

That's a hell of a thing for me to say. And be damned, it feels like I'm not even trying. To cement the concept, lets deal with one thing off the bat: I own a bicycle because I am too poor to own a car. Really? Who isn't? Talk about a secret group of people -you've- never heard of called 'everybody' right?
When I graduated from College and managed to get a decent job, commuting became part of my regular day. I started, much like you would, by walking. Walking, it turns out, isn't really an effective fat burner. You have to do it for hours to get anything approaching effective caloric burn and even though you're working the largest muscles on the body, they are evolved for energy economy. We're a species of runners after all.
Tell you what's not easy to do: Cadence. No, I don't mean the princess. Cadence is the speed with which you turn your cogs (the front gears of the bike) in terms of Rotations/Seconds. When I bought my first bike (DO NOT MAKE AN ELECTRA TOWNIE YOUR FIRST BIKE) I was clued into this phenomena at the start and got with the program fast. Man alive did my Quads kill me the first couple of months!
See, Cadence is the rule with cycling. Modifying the speed of the pedal pumping is how hard you're working, not your travel speed! I found that as I became able to turn the cogs at a set rate, doing that but faster made me tire sooner and breathe harder. My muscle pain would jump and my body temp would rise and I'd only be able to keep it up for a little while. Obvious as that was, thinking only that I should be able to turn the pedals faster if I'm doing it right, I started loosing weight without noticing.
Making it to 350 was incredible. That already sounds to most of you like the upper limits of morbidity but it was even higher. (Let that frighten you!) It's just that I was never slow, did Karate for many years and had always been active. Thing is, as the years tick up, the amount of weight your body is willing to put up with changes and it is time, at my age, to deal with this beast. I was shocked to find that I wasn't killing myself to do it.
I wager that, at this point I was tooling around with a 2200-2800 calorie diet. If that sounds like a joke, it is. Most of that wasn't even the good stuff mom wants you to eat. Considering that I've rebuffed Diabetes this entire time, I guess that I am lucky. It sure as hell never felt like I was eating that much. However, on those days where I eat out with friends and start tickling the edge of 2200 Kcals, I feel like I've eaten half a brick wall with a mortar chaser! Even with a horses rations, I was -still- burning up the pounds and reducing. I started to wear smaller clothing, stopped needing to snack so much, and actually started looking into healthier options! I didn't even think about it!
And then the mental shift. I don't know when it started or even how, but I discovered that I love cycling. You could argue that I always have, especially since I have owned a bike of some make or model for almost every year of my life, but this fundamental shift from necessity to need was the turning point in all of this. I didn't bike to work because I didn't own a car, I biked to work because, even if I owned a car, I love the feeling of kicking down the street under my own power! It continues to fill me with joy to this day!
Now that I have coasted down to 335, I still bike daily and eat even better than before. I've just opted into an 1800 Kcal diet plan which lets me eat every 2 hours and I cycle 6 miles daily to work and back. I've even started biking in the morning to help out! I fit into clothing I stopped being able to wear long ago and just generally feel terrific! I search out the best and healthiest meals I can afford, recently traded up in bicycles to a Giant brand Hybrid, and fear nothing when I go to see the doctor ever year! I am still loosing weight and literally NOT. EVEN. TRYING! I just get on my bike and go to work.
Take -THAT- Jenny Craig.

Hey guys, Virgil here. I have a confession to make and it's kind of hard to admit this much but, I'm turning 30 in September. Now, this whole post isn't going to be about how 'I've only got so much life left to live' or 'wow, what have I got to show for 30 years of life' or any of the other crap dudes my age are supposed to be saying. In fact, I feel pretty positive about the next decades because; long before it's over, I got it.

See, I graduated from the Art Institute of Portland in 2007 and have been post-college-flopping ever since. I have a regular job any schmo can do and I am lucky to have it. Additionally, I carve out just enough free-time from it to keep working on my skills, most of which have matured here, right before your eyes. Since I never was able to make the cut, I might as well keep honing my skills such that I can at least feel confident I could do the job if the opportunity is ever mine. And work I have these last 5 years, to teach myself the skills my college wasn't interested in giving me. Humbling as it is to say, I only recently got it.

My drawings here on the site, the art I create, is only as good as it is because I lucked into two good sources of drawing skills. One is Burne Hogarth, a master illustrator who's drawings are iconic as they are solid. This mans work, which you can buy in illustration manuals for very little money, diagram the ins and outs of human anatomy without expensive studio memberships and live-nude drawing. In addition to that I encountered the Blog of one John Kricfalusi. While his opinions and art style -LACK- his knowledge of drawing fundamentals is extensive and available for anyone to learn! Whatever speed you're at, these guys can help and only now do I understand why.

Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." As far as art is concerned, the statement holds true. When I work on art, when I decide, 'A pony doing "X" at "Y" while "Z" is "A," I start with the same simple steps: Create the mass shapes, establish their relationships to each other, decide the narrative, refine. It starts as simply as that. Only when the complexity of the image increases are there additional concerns. Knowing the simple steps, I repeat them for the eyes, the ears, the manes, etc. Everything done in the final steps of an image are permutations of the simple steps in the beginning. And because I focus on these simple steps, the end result comes together effortlessly!

Of course, I can't say that the images are always 100% successful or done well, but they are always done correctly. It's unfortunate that it's taken this long but the notion didn't cement for me until recently with painting and now architecture. For your consideration, I present the following video:

[video=youtube;FPz8Xyt3z-w]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPz8Xyt3z-w][/video]

Now, it may not make sense at the moment, but what he's telling you to do here is precisely what I do when I start an image. In painting, as opposed to drawing, you concern yourself with color shapes. These localized color-masses (for our benefit) have borders with their neighbors in terms of their edges. After you seat every color at the table, you can manipulate the strength and presence of each color to reflect your narrative in terms of what to do with your warms and cools. Should you be sufficiently able to discover and reproduce these fundamentals, your painting is going to turn out properly.

It doesn't stop there, either. Being that I have a strange bent for the stuff, Architecture ends up being an important consideration in my drawings. Especially when I need the background to assist the image, I want to nail the buildings down correctly. Funny then, that I've discovered the process is already mine, just being executed in a different manner:

[video=youtube;vmHoGicPQQQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmHoGicPQQQ[/video]

So, it's not color shapes and it's not mass shapes, instead its even more symbolic. He talks about where 'parts' of the house are in terms of where the others are. Here the kitchen, here the master bedroom; so forth. In the act of designing enclosed spaces, you utilize these function-shapes and distribute them over the site. In architecture it's where you put these shapes in relation to the others that defines the home. Stairs, supports, electrical, kitchen counters; these are the details that go in last. If you start just by getting your function shapes into their proper places and then refine down; you bypass all the frayed nerves and anxiety you might have if you just started designing the master bathroom first.

It may not seem very clear by the way I've presented this, but I hope what I say here helps at least one person. Knowing your fundamentals, figuring out what they are for the given skill you want to develop is your first step. Once you understand these parts to the whole, you are free to experiment, knowing full well when you get it wrong and, most importantly, how to make it right from there. You won't be a sure success with this, goodness no! But successfully discovering and working with the fundamentals is the difference between trying and giving up and trying, failing and trying again.

There have been some makings of a debate forum or subforum here on EPR. Maybe this is a thing that can be done. Perhaps not. The body of evidence collected thus far through my observations of debate flow are discouraging. So, here are my two cents on the subject of why a debate subforum is pointless for EPR.

1. We're an internet forum.
Honestly the problem is right here in our equal access to the thread. Unless by some code magick, we limit debates between two people can be muddied, escalated and derailed by other users. That's not a strike against you guys personally. Debates have structure and are moderated by some form of access restriction. Either in the form of debaters being isolated before the performance or being limited in numbers present. Since all of us have the ability to descend on a topic with equal voracity, no -REAL- debate is possible.

2. Nobody understands the format.
There has, up until now, been nothing but well meaning starts followed by a flood of verbal angst followed by a lock. This inflicts, at best a load of butt-hurt and at worst engenders grudges and our friend 'hatred' for those other ponies who just don't 'get it.' This is all because no one wants to use proper debate structure. You're all children of the age, much like myself, and can find all the debate structures on Wikipedia.org. You're free to choose one applicable and then run with it. The fact that we aren't doing that means we don't have the necessary muster in us to pursue true debate.

3. We're not debating, we're opinion-having.
This isn't really anybody's fault but our parents and culture. It started in the early 19th century but has recently become a real farce-to-be-reckoned with. All it says, all it's used to say, is that everything is relative. There is nothing certain and people are entitled to their own opinions and must be respected. The problem is that debate is attempting to discover what has the highest preponderance of evidence and who is more right than whom. It's more like legal proceedings and as such must be born out by the rigors of debate in terms of evidence. You have a right to your opinion but you don't have a right to your own facts.

4. There is no accountability.
This is the internet. We're a bunch of user names on a forum where people can look at what we say and never have it attributed to us. We're free to do and say anything we please until it gets us banned or reprimanded. In fact, there is so much going on in just our little neck of the woods, one person's actions can go unnoticed by 90% of the other forums users. Cruel people go unpunished, good people go unrewarded. Without moderation from beginning to end, the process breaks down by nature and nobody is going to jump at getting that job.

5. No one really cares.
Again, this is the internet. Know what people care about on the internet? Nothing. We care about making rent on time. We care about getting to work on time and not getting fired. We care about getting good grades, having money for gas, whether the kids are alright, what time it is and what we're going to have to eat. Stuff as small as this gets priority because it can be managed. But the internet? Even just our bounding box portion of it is so much larger and complex that our brains just shut it off. TL/DR, you just think that because you're a f****t, can't we all just get along, etc. It's easier to put water on the fire than to tend and maintain it. A thresh hold of -give-a-damn- has to be reached in order for anything meaningful to happen and that threshold isn't possible on the internet except in certain sections, the ones you have to pay to be a part of.

Right, well, there you have it. This is why it won't work. Now, as opposed to what usually happens when I post, I dare anyone who got this far to do the following:
Post a legitimate example of where an argument of mine is wrong in our forums and I will concede it. Show me an example of all of them that I can't showcase to be false and I will concede this argument.