layla: grass at sunset (Default)
Layla ([personal profile] layla) wrote2005-06-07 10:38 pm

When it's good, it's sooo good

Every once in a while you hit a moment, as an artist, that just seems to make all the frustration and hard work and lack of sleep pay off. I had one of those in class tonight. We've been doing caricatures for the last couple of days, and after struggling and struggling with it, I suddenly had this BANG! moment when I felt like I got it. This is how you caricature. And with it, came a sudden fascination with drawing all the strange and varied landscapes of people's faces. For the last 5 years, I've been drawing characters who essentially have, more or less, the same facial features. Suddenly I want to break out of that and explore different faces, different expressions.

I would love to have shared some caricatures with my livejournal audience but my scanner -- not the scanner, the software -- decided to thumb its nose at me tonight, and I am just too tired to mess with it. I think something is fundamentally screwed up with my scanner driver. Sometimes it will scan OK, but with increasing frequency lately, it crashes in the middle of the Preview part of its scan cycle and the whole computer freezes up, having to be rebooted.

I need an excuse to buy a new scanner anyhoo. I've never liked this one and the more I use it, the less I like it. I bought it in 1999; it was the absolute cheapest one at Fred Meyer, and it scans like it, too. The little page guides are crooked, so it's impossible to line anything up and scan it straight. It's horrible at picking up gray tones, especially soft gradations on pencil art and that sort of thing. The software crashes all the time. There are no drivers for Mac OS X (whatta shock) so I have to use my old iBook for scanning stuff, and then transfer it to the new computer with a flash drive. I've been pricing scanners for a year or so, but never quite could make myself buy a new one while the old one was still working to the best of its very limited ability. But if it doesn't WORK ... hm.