Ward – Page 4 – unigon pics

The Case of the Curious Filmmaker

My good friend, Matt Seilback, approached me a few months ago with a passion project of his. Matt and I met at my previous employment where he and I immediately found in each other kindred spirits. From the outside we are an unlikely pair, he a devote Christian and I an ardent atheist. And yet, our passion of art and shared sense of humanity quickly bonded us to each other. It’s been many years and at least one company separating us since we met, yet we’ve stayed steadfast friends through all that time.

Like the story of too many this year, Matt found himself in the midst of COVID-19 looking for ways to financially support his family. As artists, even in the best of the years this can be a challenge. Your artistic voice often must be very tamed, if not outright held in check, when working in corporate settings. This is not an incrimination of corporate work, just the nature of the needs of the company are not necessarily served by one’s own inner needs as an artist. Given his situation, it was an opportunity for Matt to see how he might step closer to creating a future where his artistic vision could be better expressed and harnessed while still earning a living for he and his family.

When he came to me, he wanted to start his own company, The Curious FilmMaker, that would become a door toward such a future. He was in need of a logo, and as a friend, I could not resist but to volunteer my time to help him get a bit closer to making that dream a reality.

One of the joys of working with other artists is their clear sense of vision for what they want. They also understand intimately how to work with another artist. This is no more true than with Matt; while he had a clear vision of the overall motif he wanted for a logo, he needed my skills to help bring his ideas to life.

There is nothing worse than starting out on a project where you get an early start, fall in love with a particular direction, only to discover your client hates it. Happen to you, too? Happens to everyone, and I’ve yet to find a person who enjoys that even when its our day-to-day job. It’s the nature of things for sure, but over the many years I’ve worked on graphic design for others, I’ve discovered the sooner I can narrow in on a client’s tastes the better. Once I get an idea of that, then and only then can I jump headfirst into ideas that will largely land with them from the very first rough draft.

We spent a day or two examining logos from other companies that inspired him, gathering notes on what aspects resonated with him. Whether it was typography, line-weight, color schema, or even theme, everything was game. This was largely an opportunity for Matt to more intuitively describe his tastes without having to articulate it directly; something most of us would find challenging to put down in words but effortless to do is just by pointing to examples. And this is exactly what Matt did for me: help narrow in on elements of design that he loved (and did not love), freeing me up to spend more time iterating on composition and content without getting bogged down on stylistic choices.

For those not in the know, Canva is an amazing tool for graphic design work. While it’s a web-only tool geared toward digital design with easy exports to PDF and other digital platforms, I found it superior in a lot of ways to more traditional tools such as Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer (which I love). Canva is frankly an amazing tool for rapidly prototyping, and in a lot of ways is a complete design studio for jobs such as this. I’d export progress to my local machine and then share in a common Slack channel for Matt to comment on. This allowed us to seamlessly collaborate when convenient for ourselves, especially as we both have other full-time jobs along with a two-hour time zone difference separating us. Even with this kind of asynchronous communications, it presented zero hinderance to us, and we maintained that sense of carefree collaboration and virtuous feedback loop that feeds the soul of every artist, myself included.

We wanted a logo that spoke of Matt’s passion for the craft and long-history of videography stretching back to the days of analog film. There were some attempts for more abstract design elements in the logo, but ultimately we decided on a more direct approach, including the silhouette of a vintage film camera that Matt provided. It was straightforward enough to use Inkscape to produce a reliable vector outline of the image, and then manipulate it to create perspective while providing a solid outline to allow me to separate it from the background when I composited it within Canva. Finally, given Matt’s passion as an artist is to reveal the quirky, the curious, the inner-most passions of his subjects, we wanted a logo that even in typography nodded to this quality of Matt, thus I settled on both a serif and sans serif font to juxtapose Matt’s rounded sensibilities in a modern setting.

Various versions of the final logo design for The Curious FilmMaker. I wanted to ensure Matt had a number of variations on the theme that would work in any setting whether digital or print.

I’m excited for Matt. He is an amazing friend and generous human being. But more than that, he is a visual story-teller who is out to tell other peoples’ stories. I’m excited to hear, and more importantly, see what he has to say. For my small part, I’m grateful to be a part of his journey.

Weeks & Decades

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

I’m not the first to post this quote … but I like it. It’s a good reminder that we are quite likely living through a pivotal inflection point of our country. That our tomorrow, whatever it will be, will look very different than our yesterday. And rapidly so.

I am hopeful that recent years are not for naught. For some it has only been a few years of challenge living in a nation divided, where hate has replaced acceptance, where bigotry walks our streets and flies our airwaves uncontested, where so many who fought for the right to be acknowledged and to exist as they were born have seen their inalienable rights erode right under their very feet.

And for others, these few years are but a drop in the bucket; for many they were born into a lifetime of living in fear for nothing more than being different than the status quo. And more than this, others still it has been an unshakable, unwanted, perverse family heirloom and legacy that has haunted their family through the generations; all waiting to see promises made that to this day remain broken and unfilled for so many.

Who does not want for themselves, their children, their loved ones the simple act of living in a world where they can openly walk the streets without fear of retaliation from the systems built to protect, where they can apply to any institution that is meant to employ them without wondering how far the stairs truly go for them? Who does not want to live in a world where we live only with the limits we impose on ourselves, instead of living and dying by the limits imposed by those who cannot see their shared humanity in every face they encounter?

For many of us, myself included, we lived with incorrect assumptions about our successes. We believed our success was largely, if not wholly, a reflection of our merit. We confused merit with our privilege. It is not that we are not without merit, but that our privilege as white, as male, as heterosexual, as being brought up in a middle-class family set in a community where college-education and high-paying jobs were the norm not the exception, gave us far more than our merit alone would have achieved if all things were equal. And because we believed in the inherent rightness of our merit, we thought by being color-blind that we were not racist or sexist when we believed everyone, regardless of their disadvantage and lack of privilege, to be able to achieve the same heights as us through effort alone. And if they could not, then our flawed narrative made us conclude that those without were themselves somehow lazy, unmotivated; they were without sufficient merit. That is the lie we tell ourselves, the narrative of the American dream writ large but not true for the vast majority of our nation’s peoples.

None of us are born equal. We are made equal by the compassion, by the understanding, and the support of all those around us who understand this fundamental truth, and who further subscribe to the notion that we are all equal to the rights, freedoms, and successes found in a life lived freely. This compassion is not costless; it requires us to share and make room for everyone. It’s a compassion that requires us to be selfless, and may at times require us to sacrifice so that others may share in all these things. But this is not to say it’s a zero-sum conversation; what we share is returned to us all many fold by the peace, prosperity and well-being that such selfless compassion engenders and germinates in all touched by it. Again, these things do not just happen; they require us all to lean toward each other, with hands and heart open for this kind of world to materialize.

The stairs we climbed as a nation are long, hard ones. We have faltered. We have slipped. We have scraped shins and broken bones in our ascent, and sometimes confused our descent as anything what it is: a falling away from grace. We have lost ourselves in the romanticized notions of a nation that only exists in our minds, only exists in our myth-making words. We cannot be great again, because we were never great to begin with. And may never be truly great in all that such ideals are just that: ideals meant to be unattainable, just beyond our grasp but still forever inspiring us to reach higher, with deeper conviction and stronger resolve. We are meant to struggle with our humanity, we are meant to wrestle with our imperfections. We are meant to accept these things, and in them find the peace that comes from accepting this simple fact: we are all equals to each other unto our own eyes and our own hearts.

Yes. It’s a scary time. It’s a time of turnover. It’s a time of chaos. But it is also a time of change. We are not truly lost till we stop accepting who we are. We cannot arrive at a nation we believe we to be until we accept the nation that we are. It is now a time for us to accept our racism. Accept our sexism. Accept our national legacy of hate. And change. Each and every one of us.

Accept. Change. Grow.

Great Dan’gons

“Two Great Dan’gons and Their Owner” is a bit of humorous portraiture of our two Great Danes, Kumo and Sora, along with a guest appearance by me, albeit posthumously. Hopefully it’s not too hard to find me tucked away there in the picture.

The whole idea for this picture originated, ironically, from a picture I took of Kumo and Sora lounging around – rather adorably I might add – inside our house. But never satisfied with them as mere great danes, I wanted to transform them into dragons. Why? Why not!

More so, I thought we rarely see dogs transformed into my favorite mythical creatures, and more so I wanted to topple the great Todd Lockwood and his great feline bigotry toward dragons. But let’s be honest, while it pains me to admit it, cats, not dogs, are a better foundation for creating a dragon’s physique. Have you ever seen a dog’s head on a dragon’s body with wing and tail? I’m not knocking Never Ending Story … but Falkor‘s head looks like it’s going to fall off at any moment. It just looks a little silly. So I concede that Mister Lockwood might actually know a thing or two about drawing dragons. But I felt I had to try!

My normal workflow often starts on an iPad Pro (12.9″ first gen) using Procreate. I like this application for sketching and generally to get values and composition nailed. But I’ve found I do not like it once I move away from roughs, especially as I focus on details. Its too easy to have misaligned brushstrokes, even on the ginormous 12.9″ screen with a lot of zooming in and out. In the past year, I’ve introduced Corel Painter 2020 on a Wacom 22″ touch as my preferred platform to follow-through with detailed work around coloring and final rendering where the larger screen is invaluable for keeping track of everything at a glance.

I started this back in September of this year, but then put it down as I felt it was not going the way I liked. In particular, I was worried the values were too severe for me to properly pull off rendering without it feeling washed out. And as happens as an amateur, I still get overwhelmed at various points in production that basically force me to put a piece down and just walk away for weeks, months, and even years. Fortunately for this piece, after a few months of hiatus, I picked it up earlier this week in late November largely just to finish it from a “I start what I finish” perspective.

As things would happen, having an uninterrupted day to work on the piece was a bit of a watershed opportunity for me to constructively work through some of the anxieties I’ve had for the piece. It’s still not my favorite piece, but I feel I’ve gotten as far as I’m going to take it. In particular, the rendering of Kumo’s fur took me a few attempts to get something that I feel works good enough. Even so, I’m not completely satisfied with portions of the piece such as Kumo’s extended foreleg where I still feel like something is just not quite right. In my experience, I sorta need to mentally walk away from a piece for me to later come back and solve lingering issues.

Regardless, I think the piece has some elements I’m proud of. I think Sora is rendered perfectly, framing Kumo beautifully in the foreground with a sense of depth provided by Sora fading into the background. There is a sense of depth given by the atmospheric lighting that I quite like. I’m equally happy with the the tree and forest which has enough details to be interesting without being overwhelming. And I continue to chuckle whenever I think of the backstory of having been eaten by my girls, with Kumo now laying with my skull nestled in her foreleg while she looks off into the distance with her characteristic disinterested gaze.

Artist Resource no. 17: Trent Kaniuga

Trent Kaniuga is a professional artist who works in “the industry” where the industry is all things fantastical. Cuz his art is fantastic! Get it?! Oh, you’re no fun. 😛

In all seriousness, Trent has been contributing and influencing professional concept artists for the past two plus decades. And he more so, he has spent a lot of time creating awesome tutorials that you can purchase on his Gumroad site. He also publishes a ton of free content on his YouTube channel, often where he teases some of his paid-for content on the aforementioned site.

Product Over Process & What is Art

I thought I would take a moment to share my thoughts that have been percolating for awhile now. In particular, I wanted to address something I’ve heard or otherwise read online around the lines of “what is art?” or “is that legitimate art?” or even “does this constitute cheating in art?” I thought I would minimally attempt to answer these questions head-on, if for no other reason to state what I think is art; note the emphasis is on my opinion. You may disagree, of course; but, hopefully you find this discourse useful.