WHY WE HATE COMPUTERS
Artists have failures and frustrations on paper and canvas frequently -but you either salvage it or dispose of it, right? Or it just sits there to quietly mock you... At least it is "there".
Illustrating the book "P22, The Journey" took me into an entirely new realm: digital drawing. For this story, I set our hero into actual scenery of his Santa Monica Mountains. Well, as much as I could...
When it came to his desperate crossing of two Los Angeles' fearsome freeways, I had to somehow conjure the frightfulness of that experience. Learning to use the computerized drawing program "Procreate", I stumbled my way through all of its' endless options: tool/color/hue/light/clarity/size/save/layer/CMYK vs RGB, etc. It became my nightmare! I worked five endless hours on the glaring headlights of the scene below ....-and then my computer crashed!!! I was stunned. Outraged. Furious. Frustrated. All my work was gone. Realistically, there was nothing to do but begin all over again even though I did not recall just how I had coaxed and prodded those tools to that successful point.
Forevermore, I will look at this scene and wince...
