I was reading through Penny Arcade earlier this evening and found through various linkage an article about Roger Ebert's dismissal of video games as, and I quote, a "high art" medium.  I take exception with this based on a philosophical difference. 

Ebert pronounces that "art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices."  I find this to not only not match up with my personal understanding of what art is, but to actually be completely counter. 

The other night I wanted to draw.  I sat at my drafting table and sketched down a couple of things: people, guns, stuff like that.  I wanted to draw but I didn't know what to draw.  So, for some reason I draw a picture of a guy pulling his own jaw out of his face. 



I don't really know where that one came from.  It just kind of fell out on to the page.  It's not often that you get to draw the interior bits of a person's mouth, so that was an interesting drawing problem.

It's weird the things that you think are interesting drawing problems when you grow up reading comic books and Clive Barker novels. 

I'm not exactly happy with the eye, it looks a little flat to me.  I am pretty proud of the hand though, and I like the way that the stretched out skin bunches up at the jawline.  Maybe I should draw some zomibes.  I was always pretty good at drawing those. 

Maybe now that I've got that knocked out of my system I can get down to drawing babyraven's Wonder Woman and mouserobot's Darth Vader. 

I have this problem with filters.  Or so I have percieved.  I really don't have one.  I say what's on my mind for the most part.  While that does include oppinions, I find that it normally gets me into trouble when I'm describing images that I grow in my brain.  Many have noticed that I'm a visually-minded person (haha, Star), which would make sense given my background as an artist.  In truth, I have a better tactile memory than anything else, but that's not the point here.  Stack the lack of filter and visually-tuned brain on top of a  pretty high tolerance for things most people would find disgusting and it's a recipe for trouble.  Mostly trouble for other people. 

Case in point, the Shadow of Yesterday Zombies game in that I'm playing in on Sundays with crowyhead, harrytheheir and some people that don't have LJ accounts.  (By the way, I shall forever refer to this game as Shadow of Zombie.  This is because that title is undeniably awesome.)  The game is modernish, a post-undead-apocolypse thing like the Stand or Dawn of the Dead.  I'm playing a character named Carmen "Southpaw" Navarro.  Navarro is a woman in her late twenties that was born just after the zombie apocolypse.  Having been raised in such a terrible time, she grew to reflect it.  She became a "ranger", a person that goes outside of her community and patrols its borders for undead incurrsion, gathers supplies, etc.  While out on the range, Navarro and her patrol were attacked by some undead.  The rest of the patrol were killed but Navarro was able to get away, though she had been bitten on her left arm during the battle.  She was able to wrap her belt around the top of her arm and cut off the circulation which has led to poor Carmen having a terrible, twisted, monstrously powerful left arm. 

Navarro, like so many characters that I play when I'm on the other side of the GM screen, started as an image in my head.  She began her life as a picture of a woman with a twisted, leathery, overly-muscled left arm stuck on the body of an athletic hispanic woman.  Kinda like this...



Things got worse from there.  I started imagining what the zombie arm meant for my character, what it could do.  Super-strong made sense, but wouldn't it be cool if it had a little bit of a mind of its own?  And what if I couldn't feel anything through that arm at all?  No sensation.  The thoughts chrystalized a little more when I realized that the arm was a bit violent and for Carmen to sleep she needed to literally nail her hand down in order to keep it from trying to attack her while she rested. 

Not much was discussed of the state of the zombie and undead world outside of our sheltered community of Sulphur, OK.  During gameplay Dan, the GM, revealed more and more that the undead weren't just slavering roving hordes.  They had community, they had memory, they had society.  This made the bite that my character recieved a much different ballgame.  I had orriginally envisioned the zombie bite to be the equivalent of a bite from a rabies-bitten dog.  With this new information, and the knowledge that my character would have known about the presence of zombie culture, it seemed obivous to me that things needed to get much deeper. 

On our first excursion outside of town my character runs into a character named Tottenkoph, a lich from the undead community and a bit of a diplomat.  (I think I spelled that right.)  Dan tells me that Tottenkoph was there when I was attacked and asks me to fill in the blanks.  I immediately decide that my character hates and distrusts this guy.  He was there when I was attacked and he did nothing to help me, so of course I hate and distrust him.  The problem was, of course, that he had already gained the trust of two other members of the group, which ostracized me in turn. 

Dan and I talked about Carmen and discussed what I thought happened.  I had a hard time trying to discribe to Dan the violation that had been done to Carmen and how it would hurt her so much on a psychological level.  His arguement, which extended through the character of Tottenkoph, was that the undead don't just attack for no reason, so I must have been doing something to get them riled up.  And since I've been bitten I am undead too.  I should just embrace it.  I hated the arguement but couldn't really frame a rebuttal. 

It was after a session of the game that I realized how to describe it.  I told Dan that Carmen was a rape victim.  I hated to say it, and I hated to make it a character point, but it was the only correlary that made sense in my brain.  Something had been done to her, against her will, and it was beyond intimately physical and it left her both physically and emotionally scarred. 

It was during the next session that things got worse.  Dan and I had talked about Carmen actually being undead, unlike the "not quite undead" that I'd been thinking about when I first envisioned Carmen.  I liked it, but I needed to make it terrible for her.  Part of my character's point was to show how truly awful, how horrifying the undead were.  And I was willing to go the distance. 


With these images in my head I knew that Carmen was not going to be going good places.  She was changing into the thing that had attacked her, that had killed her friends, and she had no control over it.  She was angry.  She was vengeful. 

During the next session I shot Tottenkoph in the face with a shotgun the first chance I had.  He was a lich, I knew he was coming back, but he needed to be shot becaue of what he did. 

The players were floored.  They didn't know why I did what I had done.  After a couple of scenes they were able to question me in character.  And once again I felt like I couldn't get the other people around me ti understand what I had thought Carmen had gone through.  One of the other player's characters had been going around in the undead community and was taking a liking to it.  The others found them to be inoffensive mostly.  I felt like my character had been neutered.  So I said that only thing that I could that I thought would bring them around to the horror of my character's life.

"They raped me."

This time I meant it literally.  My character became a rape victim.  I hate it.  I really do.  I don't like that she's become another one of those female victim characters.  I wanted her to have more dimension than that, to be deeper.  I didn't want to be the male writer that uses rape, the most horrific fucking thing that can be done to a person, as an excuse.  But so much of gaming is about the exact opposite of subtlety and I saw it as the only way to communicate what I had wanted to, to make the other players at the table to feel it like I did. 

Okay, I'll admit it.  I made Carmen to feel powerless and alone at the outset of character creation because that's the way that I feel too.  After Star, well... I couldn't really wear a character that wasn't feeling the same fucked-up, painful feelings that I was.  I wouldn't be able to relate.  And over time Carmen's become more self-loathing and I've made her more fucked up.  She's become more violent and angry and cut-off and I can relate to it. 

I'm trying to think of a way to make her okay but I really can't.  In a scene from last session I came across a character that was on Navarro's trail for some vengance against her.  We tussled and I cut his achilles' tendon and put him down.  I stood over him with my knife in my hand and I asked him what he wanted me to do.

"I don't care," he says and spits. 

I dropped the knife on the ground by his hands and turned to walk away.  I said over my shoulder "Use it on yourself.  Use it on me.  Either way, use it in time."

In that moment, that one bried excahange, Carmen became the  weathered, beaten down soldier; the broken, weary gunslinger from a western just waiting for that one guy to come along and kill her because she can't think of any other way out. 

I don't know what to do next as a player.  I like Navarro and I like the game.  I want to keep playing, but I feel like I've bullied myself in to a corner and I don't know how to get out.  I didn't feel like I could talk to the rest of the group before as I've been felling distant and I found it hard to communicate.  Maybe I don't have a choice anymore. 

Oh, Ron Edwards, rescue me!

Well, that makes two nights in a row that I've drawn.  This time around I did a sketch of Wonder Woman.  I had been catching up on my Friends posts earlier and saw a post by Jill/ Babyraven about the Wonder Woman movie.  This in turn reminded me that I had told her that I would do a drawing of the Themyscrian princess one of these days. 



This is not the final piece.  I've never really drawn Wonder Woman before, so I wanted to take her out for a spin and see what I needed to learn about her.  In the final assesment here I feel like my approach to her muscularity is pretty much spot on.  I do need to elongate her torso a bit and work on the face some.  Her face should be a little longer and more angled, and those eyes aren't quite right.  I want anyone that looks at the piece to see a Greek woman and I'm trying to get that ethnicity across. 

I'm also not too hot on the approach that I took to shading the piece.  A little too much hatching I think, which makes sense given the George Perez and Brian Bolland history she has.  I tend to prefer a bolder line with her though, more blacks and highlights.  Something like what Adam Hughes does with her right now.  That approach gives her a glowing quality and makes her feel more otherwordly or divine.  More of that with th next attempt. 

And who knew that her costume had so much going on in it?  All of the stars on her trunks, as well as the metal breastplate and belt are pretty intricate.  I love the recurring "WW" images in there.  If I were designing her I'd cary it one step further and include it in her bracers, as well as make them gold rather than silver.  Maybe if Jill's cool with it those changes may wind up in the fianl piece.  I'll probably start sketching that up in a couple of days.  Different pose and everything. 

... Well, I assume, as I never learned how to ride a bike. 

This is the first completed drawing that I've done since the my christmas present for Star.  And for some reason it's a picture of Conan. 


(click for a closer look)

I guess it's a result of my process, which is to A) draw a couple of lines on a blank piece of paper and tru to make a shape that I think is interesting, then B) keep building up on that shape until I get a complete image. 

This piece started out as a quick little sketh of his head, then went down along the arms, but nothing was formed in my brain until I started sketching in what would become his torso.  Then everything came together, so to speak. 

The piece is pen and ink, using those fantastic new pens that Debbie/ nodeva got me for christmas, as well as a photo processing ink that I like to play with because it's incredibly unpredictable but always cool.  That ink was applied using a medium sumi-e brush. 

I'm mostly happy with what happened here, though I don't like that I shadowed his torso in solid blacks.  That wound up blanding a part of his torso with the shadowing of his cloak, maiking him look much smaller than when he was still in the pencil stage.  Can you just imagine him with a bigger chest?  I'd appreciate it. 

I apologize for the blurriness at the bottom of the image.  My scanner has a pretty small bed and I drew the piece on a scrap of board a bit too large for the scanner to handle.