Songs without Words

Just because I’d do it for you, doesn’t mean you’d do it for me.

I’m not referring to anyone in particular, nor am I referring to any particular action.

~610~

I think that this image is one of the greatest I’ve seen.  Your ability is really 99% practice and 1% intrinsic talent.  Everyone is creative in some way or another:  you see the great artists; some of them have creativity in the way they present things, some of them have creativity in the details and textures, some of them choose a creative scene and then reproduce it faithfully in another medium.  There’s really no such thing as a person who cannot do this or that.  All it takes is discipline and a lot of constructive criticism from others ;).

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/22215323/

Ever since I became estranged from my body, I’ve been using my body as more of a transport device than anything else.  I think that’s probably why I haven’t bought many things that I *want* in person, and those that I do, I buy quickly and try to forget about it.  On the other hand, so many of the things I’ve wanted to do, places I’ve wanted to go, people I’ve wanted to meet – I’ve done it all in the safety of my mind.

But what if I try to restart again?  To experience life the way it was meant to be experienced, through the five senses of the body and not simulations of them that I invent?  What if I let other people speak the lines instead of supplying them myself?

The sad thing is that change – no, everything – is very slow in real life.  I don’t have that sort of patience.  But the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (whenever I say that, I remember the most awesome valedictorian speech I’ve heard, where the speaker promptly followed that proverb with, “And yet you can’t cross a chasm with two small hops.”).  Oh well, but yeah, I think that maybe I can change things if I’m just not afraid to.  I need to gather my courage.

Because every man dies, but not every man truly lives.  :).  I like silly sayings like that!

I went back and recorded data on my entries and moods, and my final conclusion is this:

The period of the cycle is approximately 1 1/2 to 2 months for a complete round.  As such, I can expect to experience another enlightenment in early-to-mid November.  Well, I look forward to that time …

I believe that there is a cycle from which my mood might be predicted. This cycle basically works like this:

1. (Arbritrary starting point): Loneliness and confusion: this stage is characterized by insecurity and worry, with moments during which I spontaneously feel like crying. I tend to also feel as though I need love or at least someone else at this time.

I wonder why I exist, and consider not existing. I also view the world as being something of a conspiracy for the purpose of causing my loneliness. There is a possibility, during this period, that I will decide that I am in love with someone. From here, there is an “incubation” period of love during which I exit this cycle and go over, for several days, how reasonable the conclusion that I am in love really is. However, it remains to be seen what happens if the love is returned, as this has never happened through my own initiation (I am always rejected). Rejection simply leads to the next step in this cycle.
2. The search: I latch onto a particular aspect of the ultimate question and begin to ponder it. I may also attach myself to some sort of diversion, esp. something designed to make me feel as though I do have love or someone else, eg. a comic, game, story, etc.

3. The epiphany: Something happens and I feel as though I have located an “answer.” I will try to express this through some work of art, be it writing, music, etc.

4. The period of enlightenment: During this period, I feel as though I have all the answers I need. I feel happy and satisfied, and this is the time when I feel as though life itself is enough, and love is not necessary. I tend to produce almost nothing during this period, since I am happy and complacent.

5. Deterioration: I “lose” enlightenment as life begins to feel boring or unsatisfactory. I become increasingly troubled, and I disconnect myself from the world. I may also have a short temper because I feel like things are slipping out of control.

---

The cycle takes approximately one month to complete, based on my current estimates. This time may vary from two weeks up to possible half a year: I need to study it more closely to find out more.

The problem with this cycle is that while I can distance myself from my self and study myself objectively, I cannot actually influence this cycle. Indeed, the only way to escape this cycle is for someone to love me. You can tell by that comment what stage in the cycle I am in.

That’s the weird thing – while I am “objectively” trying to study this cycle, my presentation of the cycle is inherently affected by the way that I am thinking, which is the product of my stage in the cycle. That means that while I can write about this cycle during any stage, the way that I explain it will change slightly, especially with regards to how important love and purpose are in life, and whether or not it is escapable. Right now, I would say it is near inescapable.

This is not to say that I am homogeneously of one mood; I can be, on the micro scale, happy or sad or whatever. And it’s not as though I really treat people differently – I try to be nice to people at all times, and be accommodating to them, etc. So, the only way to find out the subtleties of this is to examine my productivity, esp. in extracurriculars, and how much I smile when I am alone.

Depression and desperation are the greatest causes of creativity and creative output, so in the absence of love, the production of most creative items stems from those moods. During times of enlightenment, I tend to talk to people instead and produce less personal work.

Anyway, I’m not uniformly depressed or anything. I’m not even sad, per se. But undoubtedly I have a certain demeanor of melancholy. Probably within the next few days, I’ll begin my search.

It’s so weird to be conscious of this cycle and to realize that I’ve been through it time and time again. I wonder when it’ll end? Can enlightenment last? Probably not.

I recently compiled my major CG works from February ’05 til September ’06 into a neat Excel file, and the amount of change in quality and technique over the period was really astounding.

I began working with CG around Sophomore year (2001), and my first pieces were very simple, colored using fills and Gaussian blurs. I scanned in my line art after inking with a real pen. By the time this most recent “period” began, I had been CG’ing for four years on a very slow learning curve. Despite understanding the basics of color, line, and texture, many elements of my CGs really stuck out as being immature or poorly executed.

Most prominent was probably the needlessly thick lines. Thick lines are only excusable when they are genuine strokes, conveying weight and shadow. I was using thick lines simply because I couldn’t draw the thin ones without having them waver or appear jagged. One of the largest changes in large-eye anime-style drawings over the next year was to whittle away at the line thickness. The lines ended up thinned down by a factor of at least 4 or 5 by the end, if not more.

Indeed, I have recently experimented with dropping lines altogether as I continue to pursue the hybrid anime-realistic style with larger than normal eyes (and especially irises), thinner lips, and narrow noses on roughly normal-proportioned faces and bodies. My early attempts at “realism” still relied a lot on lines, a huge mistake in mentality.

The more subtle change in mentality has been from one of “I’m drawing these 2-D shapes with pre-defined borders” to one of “I’m drawing a 3-D continuous surface with no clear “edge.” As such, I have striven to increase the contrast between light and shadow, which only carry meaning in a 3-D world.

My super-deformed style reached maturity, in the sense that it has stopped significantly changing for several months now, and I remain satisfied with works of this type from earlier on. My basic anime style continues to change, but almost the only factor that is now being tweaked is the shape and coloration of the eyes.

The greatest changes now are taking place in the previously mentioned semi-realistic style. Even work from a month ago is displeasing to me. In essence, the semi-realistic style demands much more stringent adherance to principles of proportionality. The neck mustn’t be too long; the eyes mustn’t be too far apart; the ears mustn’t be too short. I have had to constantly study various photographs in order to adjust my wayward proportions, as well as come to understand lighting and its effects on the contours of the face much more closely.

I am certainly not satisfied with any of these semi-realistic works thus far, including the most recent one that you see above. While at least now I can say, “She looks kind of pretty,” the work is a far cry from maturity.

One of the biggest telltale signs of maturity is the “flip test.” Any mature style work should not look blatantly “wrong” if it is mirrored horizontally. The semi-realistic works tend to fail this test, in the sense that something looks amiss in the mirror image. A lot of times, it is the symmetry being skewed on a 3/4 view portrait.

Every art requires two elements: technical ability and artistic expression. The former without the latter makes for dry, copycat artwork like what I produce right now. The latter without the former is a lousy mess. However, the first almost always has to come first. With violin, I had to learn all the techniques very well so that I could concentrate on the artistry without thinking about what techniques to use. As a friend of mine put it, there’s a point where “you can learn any piece you want to.” That’s the maturity of technical ability, and it allows a person to approach any piece and play around with expression. Music lessons in the later stages are all about expression, not technique.

The same goes for cooking: one needs to know how to bake and fry and peel and dice, and so on, before being prepared to tackle any recipe that uses standard techniques.

And so it is natural that with CG art, the same applies. One needs to know how to emulate textures, render lighting, and reproduce effects before then delving into true artistry. I am not an artist when it comes to CG: my drawings have no emotional or artistic qualities. I am simply trying to hone my skills until I can execute what I envision in my mind. As you can probably tell, I devote almost no time to backgrounds; the poses tend to be very elementary; the colors are literal (ie, what they’d be in real life).

When I feel I am satisfied with my ability to use colors on the computer to the effect I wish them to convey, then I will begin producing real art: works that have some philosophical or personal purpose, in the same way that I use music and writing not for the sake of an exercise but for self-expression. That means that the poses will be carefully selected; the backgrounds will be as lush as necessary; the colors will be affected and impacted by the mood and purpose.

Until I can achieve that, I am no artist. I am merely a person making marks with my tablet.

… an experiment: one single character design.  Thousands of people reinterpreting this design in different poses, different styles, different undertones.  Hundreds of thousands of images created by people worldwide at a rate of 5000 a month.  Some beginning artists.  Some very accomplished.

http://hoehoe3.sakura.ne.jp/u1h/ebbs/bbsnote.cgi?fc=page&page=1

She’s a cute girl, small and petite, almost doll-like face except for the eyes that are anything but glassy; long black hair, dainty fingers.  Her clothes are simple and solid, but the colors are all over the place.

There are innocent creatures who live ignorant of the harsh and sensual world around them; there are those who partake in its dirty proceedings.  But she’s an island, an incorruptible being, the girl who’s learned all about the world but remains pure from the sheer strength of her will.  A mystery to all those who meet her, vaguely lovely and deceptively soft-spoken.

Despite my traditionally high resilience to being affected in the real world by events in the dream world, it is still a little disheartening to see my mother die in one dream and then wait helplessly as the US military fails to stop a North Korean missile about to strike with a fifty-mile radius that includes my home … within sixteen minutes.  There’s a degree of implausibility, and yet at the same time, the power of the simulation to engulf you.

my lunch was a city

here is my meal: turkey, carrots, stuffing.
i am the general; she is the pilot;
‘gravy?’ she asks.
‘only on the turkey,’ i reply.
down rains the thick liquid
spreading along the slabs of meat
and then the box shuts closed.

i later reopen the box:
the turkey is soaked; the carrots are soaked; the stuffing is soaked;
a bomb knows no friends but death.