“If you don’t feel personally exposed when publishing the game, you did not make art.”

It’s funny that I’ve never been asked that same question, since I also paint a lot of women in various states of undress. I’m probably covered (so to speak) with my watercolor pieces — since those are all technically life drawings and thus fall under the safely acceptable umbrella of “artist study” — but I don’t have the same excuse with my acrylic pieces, which were all done from my imagination, and thus I had to choose that as my subject matter.

To my friends’ credit, none of them have ever gone and asked me, straight up, “What’s the deal with all these naked women?” I think maybe they understand what an uncomfortable question that is. Or maybe it’s just not a big deal to them. I have no idea.

But I’ve thought about it a lot. These feel like very personal pieces for me, but I couldn’t really tell you why. There’s nothing autobiographical about them. There’s no message or statement I’m trying to make. What makes them so personal? I know that when I sit down and just paint for myself, these are the paintings that come out of me, but are they really personal, or are they just paintings of naked women? Do I fall back on the standard excuses — that the female nude has been a favorite subject of artists for thousands of years? Or, even better, that I’m just your average heterosexual male and so of course I like painting naked women?

I don’t know. Maybe. But I think there’s more to it than that.

For one thing, I’m purposely painting these pieces a certain way. I tend not to like painting in an obviously “pin-up” style, and I try to avoid all the usual pin-up tropes, like deliberately sexy poses or staring seductively into the camera (in fact, whenever I can, I usually try to paint them looking away from the camera, or just off-camera). My paintings still feel a little suggestive, sure, I’m not trying to avoid that. But I think my intent is to make it seem like the subjects aren’t aware that anybody is looking, and so maybe they’ll seem a little less fake and posed, and a little more relaxed and natural.

Another thing is that because I’m painting these from my imagination, not from reference, I think it gives them a more personal quality than the ones painted from live models. I don’t know exactly why, because, again, what’s so personal about painting a naked woman? Maybe it lets the piece be closer to my natural drawing style, more stylized, like something out of my sketchbook. Maybe it turns the piece into more of an abstraction, like I’m painting the idea of a woman, rather than any one specific individual. Or maybe it’s that, by creating the entire piece from my imagination, I’m showing you exactly what was going on in my head, and, well, there’s just something very personally revealing about that.

But why is that the image in my head in the first place? Why not flowers or landscapes or people with their clothes on?

Well, I don’t really have a good reason, because I’m honestly still trying to figure it out. I only started this series a year ago, after a long hiatus from traditional painting. And at the time, I was at something of an artistic crossroads, with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my art. When I started painting again, it was because I wanted to see what would happen if I just painted for myself for a while.

But I think maybe sometimes you don’t get to decide what a piece is about, even when you’re the artist. Sometimes you just paint what you feel compelled to paint, and only when it’s finished does it reveal to you what it’s about.

This series hasn’t quite revealed its purpose to me yet, but here’s my best guess so far, which is maybe just a variation of the “straight male likes to paint naked women” excuse, but here it is anyway:

I think I’m just trying to paint something beautiful. And maybe this type of female nude — this stylized, abstracted, anti-pin-up woman — is what I think beautiful is.

If that doesn’t make these pieces personal, I don’t know what does.

The exhibit will be at Market Street Gallery, more details as we get closer to the date. Incidentally, the submission window doesn’t close until July 31, so if you, too, make pictures and want to express your reaction to the word “Palin,” by all means, join in.

About a month prior to its release, its creator wrote a post explaining his reasoning behind, god forbid, actually charging money for the game, and in the middle of it all was this quiet indictment of the conventional wisdom:

“… The idea that we can produce more things, with higher quality, and fund it with smaller payments seems unrealistic to me.

“The smart money is not the ones trying to survive on microscopic payments, but the ones creating a platform to skim money from them. Apple wants the games on the Appstore to cost next to nothing, so that people buy more iPhones even if its not sustainable for the vast majority of developers. Google wants to you to think that you can become an overnight millionaire when everyone suddenly flock to your lolCat page with google ads on it, when they really make money on having millions of websites with their ads on that get a few hundred views each.”

And it makes me wonder whether this brilliant internet business model of giving your work away for free and then making money off the eyeballs is going to work when all the eyeballs are doing it too.

Seeing as I currently have a number of works available for sale, allow me to set the record straight on my own views:

I want you to buy my art. I’m happy to sell you my art. And I would love to sell enough art to make a living from just selling my art. But please don’t buy my art because you think of it as an “investment.” That’s not what art is for. That’s not why I created it. If you’re going to buy my art (and I really would like you to), please do it because you really like the art.

If you only buy art that you like, you’ll never end up with art that has no value.

Look for more acrylic paintings coming soon. I’ve got a few that have been brewing for some time now, and I think it’s all gonna boil over if I don’t finish one of them soon.

I’ve got a new painting up in this month’s issue of The Book of Imaginary Beasts. As always, there’s also a new timelapse video of my process.

These are comps for the next paintings I’m working on (and an older one I already finished). Most of them are currently in what I and many other artists refer to as the “ugly phase.”

The ugly phase is a phase every picture has to go through, it’s the phase right after putting something on the blank canvas (because you need to put something there or you haven’t started) but before any of it is in the right place. The ugly phase is essentially fixing everything after that first stupid move, when you decided to sully that nice pristine canvas with your wretched markings.

Thanks to my new procedure of recording every bit of my process, you can actually watch me go through the ugly phase on some of my own paintings. You might not even notice, it goes by so quickly in timelapse. That’s accurate; the goal is to get through the ugly phase as quickly as possible — because, for the duration that a painting is in the ugly phase, its artist experiences lasting physical pain until it stops looking ugly.

And while the video makes it look easy, what the camera doesn’t show is all the time spent between sessions, not painting, just staring at it, thinking to myself, “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Now what am I supposed to do?”

During this phase, it’s rare that I’ll spend longer than twenty minutes before stopping, setting it aside, coming back to it later, working another twenty minutes on it. I spend a lot less time, but it’s much more staggered, and all of it is agonizing. Compare this with the rendering phase, which is long and boring and monotonous, but easy. At that point, all I have to do is finish it. And when I get to this phase, I’ll often work for hours at a time, and it may take a while, but at least I know what I’m doing.

And that’s the thing about the ugly phase. It actually doesn’t occupy that much painting time. The bulk of the time on a painting is really spent on the rendering needed to take it across the finish line. But while the ugly phase may account for maybe only 10% of the time spent, it easily occupies a good 90% of the anguish.

The ugly phase is what makes starting a new drawing or a painting so difficult. It’s not just the tyranny of the blank canvas, as some say, though the two are related. After all, you had a perfectly good canvas there, it looked fine before you decided to draw on it. Now look, all it took was a single mark, and you’ve ruined it. It’s too late to take it back. You have to live with it now. You can only go forward.

Ruining the canvas was your crime, and now the ugly phase is your punishment.

Faceless Nude, 8″ x 10″ — (etsy link)
Sunlight Nude, 9″ x 12″ — (etsy link)

Three of my paintings are currently on display at D-Structure in the Lower Haight in San Francisco — two acrylic paintings (Figure on Canvas and Teal Nude) and one watercolor (Nude on a Draped Pedestal).

All three of these pieces are available for purchase, so if you happen to be in San Francisco over the next two months and you’d like to own one of these, now’s your chance. Click on this link for prices and directions to the store.

For any other insecure artists that may be reading this, I submit to you this short list of required reading.

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
A sprawling ensemble novel about lots of different things, if you want it to be. Some may identify with it as an immigrant story, some as a novel about class tension in America. I identify with it as a story about being young and insecure, and facing the pressures that stop us from doing what we were really meant to do. There are no artists in this novel, but not for lack of art. Whether any of the characters ever decide to do the thing they love isn’t for us to say. But they aren’t alone in their struggles.

Confections of a Closet Master Baker by Gesine Bullock-Prado
The story of an ex-Hollywood executive turned Vermont-based small business owner and master baker. An inspiring success story of a person doing her own art on her own terms (in this case, the art of delicious cakes and pastries). Along the way, we get accounts of the frustrations of working in Hollywood (always cathartic), and, as an added bonus, each chapter concludes with a recipe for one of the many titular confections.

Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton (audio book version)
Like the previous book, this is also a story of an artist’s rebirth from the ashes of a former life in Hollywood. Unlike the previous book, however, this deals much more viscerally with the painful effect of years of constant failure, and questions of insecurity and self-doubt as the author tries, again and again, to do the thing he loves. It’s one of the most touching and honest books ever written about an artist’s vulnerability. Yes, there’s Star Trek in it, but it’s not a book about Wesley Crusher. It’s about an artist’s personal demons, public failures, and eventual rebirth doing the thing he was probably meant to do all along.

The two points that Cartoon Brew excerpted (and indeed almost all of the list) speak to something I’ve believed for a long time: the idea that as an indie, you can afford to take more risks because there isn’t $150 million on the line if you fail (unlike if you were doing a big budget film at a studio), and the ability to fail without huge consequences means you have the freedom to do what big studios can’t, so you should take advantage of that.

But I’m surprised no one is talking about this one, even more relevant to animation, in fact much more relevant than it is to video games:

12. Grow up.
Chances are you’re not a fucking kid anymore, so if you feel like making a more adult game, do so. When you’re indie you don’t have to answer to anyone, so stop designing games like you have to have to pass ESRB. I’m not saying everyone should make porn games, but why do all video games seem to have immature themes? People aren’t stupid: stop treating them like they are. Speak through your work like you would to your friends, design for yourself and don’t censor your ideas.

I feel like I’m beating a dead horse here, but this is always my number one complaint about animated films. The medium can be used to make anything, and yet so often it always comes back to family entertainment or children’s films. This is, of course, this is the safe move. It’s what everyone knows will make money. And I do understand, the studios have a need to make a profit, especially since these movies are not cheap to make, so I don’t begrudge the big studios for making what the market wants.

Independents, on the other hand, aren’t trapped by their price tag the way big studios are. So let’s please use that to our advantage and take some risks, including more animated films in different genres. Let’s please let some of them be sophisticated adult stories like the best of our live action films are. And let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that stories with real people instead of talking mice don’t “take advantage of the medium” and are automatically better suited for live action. Animation, just by being animation, already takes advantage of the medium even before we start to justify its use with things like the twelve principles.

All the best stories being made right now are done in moving photographs. All I’d like is to see them in moving illustrations.

P.S. — I understand, of course, that making a feature-length animated film as an independent is a tall order; in fact, from first-hand experience I know what an incredible undertaking it can be. I know I’m asking a lot, here. And I know there won’t be any flood of feature-length independent animated films, in any genre, coming out anytime soon. But I can still want it anyway, can’t I?

P.P.S. — Two movies from the last few years obviously already did this: Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir. These are incredible films and exactly what the medium needs. However. Let’s diversify a little bit. We don’t want the only alternative to children’s entertainment to be weighty political memoirs.

Not the first new painting of 2010, since I actually painted it in December, but the first newly posted painting. This was a Christmas gift to my brother, last seen frolicking on the surface of the moon in Oregon. Pictured above.

Also, timelapse video of said painting, for those who, in these economic times, can’t afford to go to the moon themselves, you can live vicariously through the magic of streaming web video.

This redesign is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, now. The old site may have sufficed, originally, as a humble gallery to display my work, but as my interests diverged I needed to expand, and ended up creating a whole different site specifically for my portfolio work, leaving this site to house my growing body of (so-called) fine art. Well, very quickly that, too, outgrew the original site. A change was in order.

The site now features a Wordpress-powered blog for sketches and news updates, a new store page with prints and original art for sale, and a paintings section with the capacity for many more galleries than before, including entire series of works that previously had no proper home. This also, of course, allows for the expansion of paintings and series not yet painted, so no longer is my work limited by where to put it on the Internet.

Hopefully, this means I’ll be getting work online sooner and more often, and best of all would be if this encouraged me to make more art in general. That would be convenient, because that was my plan for 2010 all along.

There’s also a sort of sappy personal story behind this, if you’ll permit me.

This is a special painting for me, because it was the one that got me back into doing traditional painting. I started working on this one about a year ago, at the end of 2008. Now, since then, I’ve actually managed to finish a bunch of other traditional paintings before this one, but before I started this, pretty much all of my work was purely digital. Before this piece, the last time I’d done any traditional painting was 2005.

It didn’t occur to me how much I missed painting until I saw, of all things, a post on Penny Arcade showcasing some paintings that Gabe had started doing. The paintings themselves were pretty great, but he also wrote this in his post:

This latest piece is the first in a series I plan on doing based on my favorite games. I sat down and made a list yesterday of all the games I’ve really loved over the years and I plan on trying to do paintings based on as many of them as I can. The list has stuff like Zelda, Rez, Kingdom Hearts and Bioshock on it, plus lots more.

Strange as it seems, that’s what inspired me. Just the whole idea of painting something fun. Somehow, in the previous three years, I’d been so serious when it came to making art (anyone who’s been through art school maybe knows what I’m talking about) that it didn’t occur to me that I was allowed to have fun.

And so I started this painting. And now a year and five other paintings later, it’s finally finished.

Here’s hoping I can keep it up.

I’ve also got another four as well, that only got as far as pencil drawings during the session, and I’ve been working on these at home. I’ll post them later in the week when they’re all finished.

In the meantime, enjoy!

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

Another timelapse film, from the latest painting. Enjoy!

With the focus of this site shifting increasingly in the direction of the fine arts, I’ve been needing a new place for all of my actual production work. Well, today my professional portfolio finally has a proper home with the completion of my new portfolio site, Zachary Knoles Illustration & Design.

Over there, you’ll find my professional art: illustration, backgrounds, design, storyboards, etc. Back over here will be my personal work: paintings, short films, and this blog. Maybe it seems like an arbitrary division, to split my work thusly into two sites. But there is a reason. With one site now clearly marked as “the portfolio,” the other one can be used for whatever I want. I find that freedom comforting.

Latest painting. Was going for something like that old pulp paperback cover feel. Or something like that.

You can actually see the original thumbnail for this one way back in this post, second from the right. The pose changed along the way, that thumbnail was just for the colors. Sometimes that’s all it takes, for me to want to take something to a finish.

You can see the finished painting here.

Total painting time was about 19 hours. The footage was shot with a Canon PowerShot A570 IS running CHDK firmware, using Ultra Intervalometer to take a picture about every five seconds. The unedited footage ran almost nine minutes, so I actually had to speed up the footage even further to bring it down to the four minutes it is now. In this final version, each second represents a little less than five minutes of painting time.

Also, my goodness, I have terrible posture.

Five of the pieces available for sale:

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

(click here to buy the original)

One of my favorite things about Cogswell’s life drawing sessions are the short poses. At Cogswell, five minutes is considered a long pose. The warm-ups are ten-second poses. Ten seconds. I’ve never been at another drawing session that does it this way, but it’s great. When the models know they won’t have to hold a pose for very long, they all seem much more willing to give us more difficult poses. And with less time, our pencils get looser, and our drawings get better.

That’s the idea, at least. It doesn’t happen that way all the time, and sometimes it makes me feel utterly exhausted to draw that fast for three hours straight. But more often than not I get some real gems out of these sessions, and even when I don’t, it’s more fun this way.

Some of my favorites from my last two sessions:

New painting, acrylic on canvas panel, 11″x14″.

I’m doing a bit of a fun experiment. For the last couple paintings, I’ve been shooting timelapse photos of my painting sessions, with the intention of being able to show the entire process of how I make a painting. Also so that I might look back at what I did and learn from it.

This one here is the first painting where I’ve recorded the entire process from beginning to end (I have footage for other paintings, but they all start at some point in the middle).

So hopefully I’ll be posting a timelapse video of this painting soon, provided the footage didn’t come out terrible!

Our film got a nice write-up in the Mercury News last week. The full article is online at the Mercury News website.

The last several posts are the result of a new system of warm-up exercises, which I shamefully stole from my fellow artist Geoffrey Stone. It’s very simple. First you start with a list. Fill it with all manner of drawing exercises. Assign each one a number, one through however many you have. Then, when it’s time for your warm-up exercise, take your list, look over it very carefully, and roll the dice.

Whatever the dice say, that’s your exercise. Now go do it.

I love this system. For me, the worst part of having lists like these is actually picking one. Making a decision always feels like such an investment, like there are so many choices, I’d better have a good reason for picking this one over the others. Most of the time I end up not doing any of them. But now that’s not a problem. The dice make my decision for me.

My list is below, for anyone who’s curious. (Extra nerdy detail: some of these also have secondary rolls from other lists, and one of them even requires me to roll again from the same list. Yes I do enjoy this a little too much.)

1 – SKETCH OUTDOORS FROM LIFE
2 – NOIR SKETCHES
3 – COSTUME REFERENCE
4 – FIGURE SKETCHES FROM REFERENCE
5 – FIGURE SKETCHES FROM MY HEAD
6 – SELF-PORTRAIT
7 – COLOR SCHEMES
8 – SONG SKETCHES
9 – FAN ART
10 – ARTIST STUDIES
11 – AMBER’S CHOICE
12 – PIXEL ART FREE SKETCH

Drawn first in ink with a brush pen, then scanned into Photoshop where I added several variations of color.

This was how I found Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee, a novel I’d never heard of, and it turned out to be the best novel I’ve read all year. It’s not at all the kind of thing I would normally read, but it’s amazing (and, for a 560 page novel, an incredibly fast read). I wish I could easily describe what it’s about, but it’s an awkward sort of novel to summarize in a compact, elevator pitch description (“sprawling modern day Victorian novel featuring Korean-Americans from all walks of life and every rung of the class ladder, poised at the edge of what-do-we-do-with-our-lives and finding their way in mid-1990s Manhattan” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue).

There’s an interview with the author (4 parts on YouTube) that does a much better job of describing the novel than anything I could say. So I’ll only add that although the book has nothing to do with being an artist (except possibly for protagonist Casey Han’s love of making hats), reading it I somehow felt as if it was describing exactly the same trials and pains and pressures that I feel as an artist.

There are probably other books that do exactly the same thing, but Free Food for Millionaires does it really damn well.

My wife and I went to Seattle a couple weeks ago, and I did this sketch from the window of our hotel. (I know, it’s what every artist draws in Seattle, this or the Space Needle.) Below is a photo of the same view.

Hey, it looks like Bye-Bye Bin Laden just got a pretty awesome review from KGO Radio’s Ronn Owens and film critic Tim Sika, who calls it “the film with an all-talking, all-dancing, all-singing Taliban,” which is a better tagline than we could ever come up with.

Check out the audio of the review!

Incidentally, Bye-Bye Bin Laden is out today! Go buy it now on the Cinequest website!

And that wraps it up for all my previously unposted Sketch Noir drawings! Enjoy this quick little animation (done from this initial sketch).

After a hiatus, Sketch Noir is back to being updated. I’ll post the rest of what I have over the next week or so until there aren’t any left, and then I’ll wrap it all up with a short animation of one of the sketches. After that, updates will be more intermittent, whenever I have more drawings to post. Enjoy.

Some of these are for the paintings I just posted, while some others are for paintings I haven’t done yet. For the last two, I used their color palette in this painting, but I still want to make them each into paintings of their own.

I’ve also got a deviantART gallery up now, so if any of you have dA accounts, you can follow me on there: acebullet.deviantart.com

Bye-Bye Bin Laden, the feature film I worked on last year, is screening this Saturday @ 8:30pm at the South Beach International Animation Festival. If any of you happen to be in Miami and don’t mind being reminded that George W. Bush was president for the last eight years, come check it out and let us know what you think.

It was finally time to update the old portfolio, time enough, really, that a complete overhaul was in order. And along with the new design comes a new look (and URL) for the blog — which I promise I will endeavor not to neglect in the coming days/weeks/months.

The old URL (acebullet.blogspot.com) will now be home to Sketch Noir, where I’ll be posting a series of black and white sketches and comics along the same line as my original Ace Bullet short. The first entry there will be coming in the next couple of days.

As for this blog, I’m not quite sure, exactly, what I want to use it for (more drawings? more writing? pictures of my cat?) — I just know I want to post more, and more often. So let’s start there and see where it takes us.

This film is an absolute delight and deserves to have the distribution it may never get.

This film is the best Bill Plympton movie yet.

And this is the best animated film of the year.

Anyway, this week I made it on time, and I thought the resulting pages made for a pretty interesting visual progression:

Below are also the best of the rest of the session’s drawings, featuring about an equal dose of brush and watercolor, as I fitfully attempt to capture this model’s unusually stunning poses.

Let’s just say I’ll be making this a regular stop during my lunch breaks.

Also, drawings from this week’s Cogswell session. This time, the model brought a couple of musical instruments and actually played while modeling. First a guitar, and then later an alto saxophone:

Though, what I really need is a way to instantly dry the page between poses, so that I can start on a new drawing without fear of messing up the previous one!

The source is a Halo 3 screenshot, snapped at just the right moment in the grenade-throwing animation so that it looks like two guys (in full space marine body armor) shouting, “WHAT’S UP, FELLAS! Master Chief in da HOUSE!”

Here are sketches from this week, along with some from a few weeks ago.

Joking aside, things have been busy. The film is in its final, long overdue stages, and we’re pushing hard to finish. I’ll post some artwork from that soon. Also, I have a new job. So you can imagine, between that and the film — busy.

Anyway, here are some sketches from the Thanksgiving weekend, visiting with family and friends:

Sadly, I haven’t been following the series (though, as they’re now all released, I suppose I could read them straight through, no waiting!), so rather than read book seven, I did the next best thing — draw sketches of people reading book seven:

From last Thursday, the end-of-the-year Shrunkenheadman picnic.

And from three weeks ago, the BFA Animation/Illustration Gallery 2007.

While we’re at it, here’s an older drawing of the same friends, from a housewarming party back in March:

I think this is actually an over-the-shoulder shot, with the cell phone as the point-of-view character. Not only that, notice how the shot is oriented so that the phone is higher in the frame than Matt Damon’s face–meaning the cell phone is actually in a dominant position here.

This shot is only on screen for about ten frames, inbetween other shots that aren’t quite as disorienting. The effect is so subliminal, you probably don’t remember the shot even being there. But you feel it.

This one could easily be a companion to another drawing I posted earlier.

Congrats also to fellow SJSU entrant John-Paul Balmet and company for getting their film Journey: A Short Vignette into the semifinals, as well.

The writing at the bottom is part of something he said regarding Good Omens: “When we wrote it, we were just two guys no one had ever heard of. We had no idea it would go on to sell millions of copies. Or that it would be translated into fourteen other languages. Or that young ladies all over the world would be writing pornography involving the main characters.“

The result is this two-second “sketchbook animation.” It’s not an acting test or a funny gag or a film with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s just something I felt like animating. It’s like something I’d draw in my sketchbook, except animated.

Click to play the movie (3.56 MB)

Also:

Click to play movie at 320×240
Or download the 640×480 large version (76.7 MB).

The gun featured in this clip is the N-STRIKE Nite Finder, which unbelievably only costs $5.99.

Anyway, here are some sketches from the last couple days.

From photographs by Albert Arthur Allen. Mostly from the 1920s.

The SJSU tower.

The intersection at 4th and San Fernando, as seen from the 6th floor of the Martin Luther King Library.

The indie film I worked on premiered last Saturday at the Mill Valley Film Festival. I drew storyboards for the film way back in early pre-production, before they’d even had a complete cast. And now after over a year, we finally get to see the finished product! Pretty satisfying feeling.

Sketches during class. “Week 8″ refers to this being the eighth week of classes.

Last stop, the Fremont BART station. I was a little early picking Amber up from BART, so I sketched this out real quick and then painted it later at home.

Drawn from the 7th floor of the Martin Luther King Library at SJSU. The gigantic linked image is half the actual size I was drawing.

The Sepulchral City:

Kurtz Station:

And Kurtz’s Intended’s Drawing-Room:

Portrait study from deviantART stock (yellow-stock).

Figure study from deviantART stock (tracie76stock).

Registration took something like 3 1/2 hours, and I was pretty much sketching people the entire time. Many of these people are dressed up in costumes for characters I don’t recognize.

Check out those two with their arms around each other. If you look back at page one, I drew them once, way at the beginning. Then about an hour later, when the line started doubling back on itself, there they were again, still all over each other. I think they were more into each other than anyone’s ever been into anything.

We were just sitting around in the Hilton lobby when we overheard these Metal Gear Solid cosplayers ranting about not being allowed to walk around with their weapons, and I just started writing down as much of it as I could.