hello hello!
i'm thinking today about... well, lots of things. initially i was thinking about typing out some thoughts about tracing, about tas-ing, ya know. community based controversial items that get the fire of conversation flowing. now that i've typed those sentences out, however, it feels like i'd be describing a lump of coal. yeah.... very lumpy. black, crunch, unused, if you're just hanging out with it looking at you, anyhow. maybe i can throw those previous sentences into the controversy fire and not just talk about them adjacently, but today.....
i think i'll talk about coal.
how much do you know about coal? lots of different kinds of coal, there are. anthracite, bitluminous, sub-bitluminous, lignite. takes about a million years to form. it used to be peat, beat up pieces of old plant material, which isn't exactly the best energy source, but. the high pressure and heat coalifies it. coalifies. love that word. coalification too. nifty little words there. yeah, that's exactly what we're doing with it. so that's what we're gonna call it!
anyway. it's usually used for energy, coal is. it has other uses as well, but boy does it do its main job well. and for a great price, too. used to be the cheapest way to produce energy we had, and in a good deal of countries it still is. buuuut, since it's such a pollutant compared to the other ways we've started to procure in the past few decades, it's become, well, controversial, in a few forward thinking circles. what can you do. but! it's still the second most utilized form of energy! nothing those clima-tards can do about that, heheh. can't be sure on why they're so mad about things, or why they're so mad about the utilization of an amazing tool that's been at our fingertips for thousands of years..... i mean.
all it is is a tool! just like some of the people who use those tools can be, heehee! every tool has a use, even the thingamajigs and thingamabobs of the world. sometimes the use is to, well. well that's not really for any singular person to truly decide. but we can utilize and dispose of any tools we'd like, in any order we'd like to. here, i'll use free rider as example:
brush? hate it. never liked it. i'm gonna keep spamming the click button on the line tool with the connect on, thanks. curve tool? useful in drafting, but the end result of these slightly slippy lines isn't usually the right play. checkpoints? i'll plop just enough of them to keep people from being too annoyed to continue. usually, anyways... again, everything has a use, an over use, and an underuse, being that powerups, lines, and silly stuttery bike physics aren't really much of anything by themselves until someone CREATES something with them. and some people have found much better ways of utilizing the tools at their disposal than others.
that's what i seem to be understanding from making this pokemon track. since covid, i've been dabbling more seriously in the überlayered detailing styles in the editor. it creates a really neat effect, been calling it 'matte'. both kinds of lines do this lil crispify thing around the 200% and 400% mark. 100% zoom seems to do it too, just a bit harder to see that far away. everything sharpens, feels like it has some more clarity. go back and look through maple's
primordial sketchlands, highly abundant there. here's an example:
see the difference? it's small. but it's there...
the effect is primarily on lines that are either horizontal or vertical, but it works in larger or smaller ways depending on that angle the line takes. 45 degree lines do some pretty neat matte as well. all the different various ways have a different vibe that they give to each other, which creates an amazingly easy way to get things done quickly while also looking interesting to the eye.
here we find yet another tool to utilize. this one really excites me actually. finding different ways to work with this weird lil mechanic has been extremely fun to draw with in the past few weeks. i'm sure people will find more and more ways to use it now that it's stated out loud... at least, i hope so!!
also shown in this example, i really enjoy the way both maple (
and lolz!) show the depth with the lil tiny lines as they are here. i think cataclysm may have done it first with that
universe track, but boy are we getting even better at it over time. i've borrowed (read: stolen away forever! muahahah!) this technique a TON. really enjoy how it blends itself out between black and gray to white and back again. it adds a light glistening to things that would reflect light to our eyes. works great. just been calling them glistens, to shove a word at it. i apologize for being awful at naming things!
of course, this and all ideas can be worked to look just awful with the right person at the helm. remember your old tracks?
i sure do. but that's truly alright!! gotta break some eggs to make some scrambie
the way we used to burn coal used to be even more time consuming AND even more polluting!! very good that it isn't too hard to see when a tool isn't being used properly, once you've figured out a better way to use it, anyway. putting in the effort to see and understand how to do things with a higher level of understanding than you have is a bear of a thing to do, yet the rewards for doing so are second to none.
does this mean that every technique is worth learning? that answer i feel should be left on an individual basis. for most people, the logical answer is a big fat "nah man, why do i need that ****?". i don't need to know how to mine and properly operate a coal mining facility, after all. not everything is needed to be learned, not every tool has pertinence in every other life. so it goes. but if it seems worthwhile to you, it likely will pop up in some other thing down the line that you're doing. you're usually going towards things you find worthwhile in your life, are you not? and it might not even be tied at all to what the original thing was! experience points are experience points, no matter how they're accrued.
big wrap em up point here, the big majority of us are using the exact same tools at our disposal to create a vastly large amount of different things. the next time you feel like doing anything here, ah screw it. anything anywhere! take a look at what you're utilizing and how exactly you're utilizing it. doesn't really matter whether that's for art or for work. try and improve on even the tiniest little marks that you leave in your life, see about your favorite way of throwing coal into the fire
oop! forgot to do the recommendations thing last time. not feeling the whole constructed way to end this AND do recommendations thing this time around... so i'll just put some things here.
uh....
i watched men in black this week? pretty good one.......
...
listened to music....
........
okay! that'll do. maybe uhh, just fill us in on the cool stuff you've found over this week? or what you're looking forward to this year? yeah! do that
