LIFE BEFORE WACOM
I had somehow gotten through my entire Photography BFA without once ever touching a Wacom tablet. Back when I was a freshman in 2003/04, we began with black-and-white film, and were taught to be intimately familiar with the boundaries and idiosyncrasies of film in general. Wacom tablets were (and are) expensive, and there weren’t very many to go around. Having a conservative attitude towards Photoshop, even as I was trying to manipulate my dry-media drawings, I didn’t put up a fight to secure a tablet for myself, and considered them nasty voodoo and continued to push my cursor around with a mouse.
Having a job (or two) changes one’s priorities and outlook. Pretty soon, in 2012, I didn’t consider it much of a gamble to spring for a 4x6” Intuos 4. The effect was so profound that I have to admit, with some sadness, that I haven’t used my Copic markers or Prismacolor pencils since.
TALE OF TWO KITTIES
The original sketch, which I did in 2007, was a skeleton, or maybe even a palimpsest, for what we see here. I was inspired, stylistically, by the work of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, and of Caravaggio; lots of tensed, glistening bodies under hard light, okay. A Clyda Rosen fixation explains all of the… hair. I cannot explain all of the cats—no idea what I was on about.
I can explain the tuxedo cat in the upper right: his name was Spunky and he belonged to my father. My mother bought Spunky back in 2005 with his companion, a solid grey shorthair named Ruby, as a present for Dad. Ruby turned out to be sickly. I was at an out-of-state school and didn’t get to see much of her, when she died a little less than a year later. Spunky vocally protested the absence for a while, but grew that much closer to Dad and me—and, eventually, Mom’s new Yorkshire Terrier puppy, Sanborn.
Spunky finally passed in 2014, and I still haven’t been able to quite completely vacuum his shedding from my gaming chair and winter coat. Though my figure collection can rest assured that a cat paw won’t gingerly tip them over during the night (that’s partly to explain how my PG Zeta Gundam was finished off), I will miss him.
REFLECTIONS
Painting Maggie (whom I’d like to call her, although she’s pretty unrecognizable in this context) was highly enjoyable—if I were lazier, I probably would’ve left the background out. Because painting all of those books, was mindnumbingly tedious. There’s nothing adventurous about painting towers and shelves full of geometrically-similar objects, again, and again, and again.