Today’s piece is the latest artwork for a monster card (Banshee) that I plan to include with Age of Heroes: Second Age. I’m still testing out the possiblity of using displacement maps rather than the white circles for the sound waves. We’ll have to see.
The holiday has been great. One of my close family members has taken up drawing anime characters, so I bought her a sketch book and made her promise that she would fill it up.
When we talked about constant practice, I was reminded of a discussion during Chicago Comic Con with Amul Kumar, a photographer I have seen at multiple convention art shows. We talked about our respective approaches to our work, and he told me an interesting story that he once read about clay pots. I later found the story here:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot”albeit a perfect one”to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work”and learning from their mistakes”the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
As I’ve settled into this blog, I’ve committed myself to creating a new picture in DAZ every Monday and Thursday. I like to think I am getting better at the lighting and perspective, but only time will tell. Until then, I’m having a lot of fun.