Gare's non-Xara Art

[Soquili]

Sweet! I would need the effortless part, Arthur Itis has taken a toll on my hands.

[Seagull]

I have to totally agree with you that the program is just a tool used to get to your objective. I read the odd thread where the person refused to use bitmaps or plugins, insisting the work is 100% vector. I consider these people the hardcore or the maniac fringer, they come with every program I guess, but because of this they just make their work harder and sometimes not as good, but maybe it is just the challange of doing it, who knows. Looking at your work it is easy to see why some people are born to create and some of us are just born to dig ditches. Back to my shovel I guess.

[Gare]

Oh, I truly hope your last line was tongue-in-cheek, Frank. Yeah, I've been putting ideas down on paper since I was age 6, but it's not how I make my living. I'm a career author, and I try in each of the 25 books I've written in the past 20 years to make the point that the execution of an idea shows a lot of different things: style, technique, technical prowess, use of color, perspective, and so on.

But if there is no idea, or a poor one, behind the execution of artwork, ultimately it fails. I'm always initially intrigued by "high gloss" artwork, probably because as a race, we are all subliminally attracted to bright, shiny things. But it lacks sustaining power, like so much fast food, and ultimately it doesn't nourish a person's soul. You can't embrace "Flash artwork"; you can't learn from it when there's no concept driving it, it's just really nice wallpaper in the end.

Bear with me now: art...painting, drawing, whether it's with physical media or digital...is an avenue of self-expression. So is music, theater, dance, it's all self-expression and even Albert Einstein concluded that it's something Mankind can't live without.

Now me? I teach Art, and I've always told people that technique (skill, whatever you call it) can be taught and learned over time. Computers are simply (!) calculating machines. I use them to calculate where a highlight should go optically, or to repeat a pattern 1,000, but my computer has never created artwork. It's "concept" people need to work on, a mental muscle that takes inspiration from all around us, twists and re-interprets it, and gives birth to a new graphical idea.

I am more proud of a "student" who had become an Idea Factory, but currently lacks finesse in their execution of these ideas, than I am of someone who can reproduce a photograph using all vector paths.

Get it? One person has become a really good Xerox machine, and the other thinks for a living.

When I'm lucky enough to have the spare time to draw, I savor it, and reach into my bag where I keep ideas that need realization, and then choose my tools that I feel are the most appropriate to create the idea, and offer the least resistance. I reach for Xara a lot of times, but not all the time, and I'd ask everyone who reads this to think about that for a moment. It's really, honestly, sincerely, saying a lot about Xara. A quick check of my hard drives shows that I have 24,000 Xara drawings, and 37,000 modeling files, created using at least 7 different programs over the past 19 years.

If you're into statistics, that's pretty close, eh?

Enjoy your Friday, everyone!

My Best,

Gary

[handrawn]

Get it? One person has become a really good Xerox machine, and the other thinks for a living.

100% - but sometimes you get no favours for saying so...

[Gare]

I write books.

I get lousy reviews sometimes.

As a consequence, I never expect favours.

By taking this somewhat negative mindset, I'm always pleasantly surprised when someone thanks me!



—Gary

[angelize]

Well Gare, your reply to Frank certainly got me thinking When I look back at some of my favourite pieces of art that I have done I think that the ones I like best are the ones I enjoyed doing the most.

I love the Cookie Monster! He has always been one of my favourite Sesame Street Characters.

[Gare]

Oh. Yeah, Frances, thanks for reminding me. I forgot to mention: if you don't enjoy what you're doing, you're either doing it wrong, or should do something else.

This is a happy mash-up of photorealistic, painting, and drawing styles. I did use Xara to massage the overall composition, truth be known.

I felt for it to work, I needed to choose a very simple, easy-to-parse subject, such as a still life. The travel mug is one of my favorite coffee mugs, and I almost never travel with it.



—Gary