=rheall http://rheall.deviantart.com/journal/20866550/ http://rheall.deviantart.com/journal/20866550/ Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:43:31 PDT This is a Livejournal entry I just posted on at ye olde journal, but decided it was sufficiently artsy enough to post it here as well (please forgive any rambling).

If anything offends you in this, please, don't be upset! I love all of my watchers and I love any kind of comment, criticism, support, etc. that you guys give me. I'm so damn lucky to have you all at all. This entry is not a criticism against you, it's just a general statement of a problem faced by most artists in the world. Anyway, discussion is encouraged if you have anything to say!


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A Thought (or two) About Art

The past couple days I've been feeling my creative urges slowly start to swell again. This isn't the same as inspiration, it's merely the want and drive to be creative. That doesn't mean any ideas or incentives are there in any way, but still, I haven't felt the want to be creative like this in a long time.

The wants center mostly around art and writing. Writing because of all the thoughts of NaNoWriMo I've been doing lately. I've been thinking about writing, reading my old writing stuff which has been exciting me a lot, and not too long ago I had a nice long chat with my sister about writing and things that got me super pumped. I tried to convince her to do NaNoWriMo with me and she was nearly convinced, but she told me she was more afraid of it than anything because she doesn't want to become "obsessed" with it, like she does whenever she starts writing again. I think that's stilly. But still!

I really wish she'd do it, just so she can sit down and get some of those freaking ideas of hers out of her head and into some tangible form. The things she tells me are things that make me crazily excited, and the images they conjure up just from her short description of them are so vivid and meaningful. I want to read this story of hers that she has pent up in her brain, and I've told her so many times, but the sheer scope of it, I think, scares her so much she can't even sit down to write it.

Anyway... I really wish she would. Her stories are so amazing. Even make an attempt, you know? I wish she didn't have such high expectations for herself, so she could just sit and write without being afraid of doing it well, or to some crazy standard. That comes later!!

Drawing, too... I want to do more drawings like that Lipizzaner picture I did based off of Caroline's photo. You know, something mainstream that people can easily identify with? Realism is good for that, it gets people to look at it and immediately they can tell whether that looks like a horse or not. They immediately have a critical eye, they don't need any expertise to "evaluate" it. They can look at it, say "That looks like a horse", and enjoy it for that.

I'm one of those artists who's plagued with the whole "Nobody likes what I like" thing that plagues all of us. All my favourite drawings, sketches, and paintings are barely noticed by anybody when I even dare to show them, and some of the things I spend the least amount of time on, or the things that invest the least amount of my creative energy or that bore me the most, seem to make most people the happiest to see. Perhaps with each of my drawings that I post I should rate it on a scale of 1-10 for how much I personally like it. It wouldn't do anything to influence how other people see it, but who knows? Maybe if I ask others to rate it on that same scale and then compare the numbers it'll create an interesting contrast.

I've noticed, on DA at least, that anything remotely horse-y is faved pretty much immediately. My deviation with the most amount of views/faves (that isn't that freaking beatles stamp) is a crappy step-by-step explaining how I learned to draw a horse. When I was five. I told everyone this; "This is how I learned to draw a horse when I was little." I even said, "If I were to make a proper tutorial to try to teach people how to draw a horse, I would do it completely differently." It took me less than an hour to make, and it looks like crap, and anything following its formula ends up looking like crap. But it is my most faved deviation, people keep coming back, seeing it, favouriting it, saying "OMG, this helps soooooo much!!1!11" And I just want to ram all these hundreds of better drawing tutorials down their throats and hope they grow a brain.

But who am I to criticize? Maybe I'm just bitter because a picture I spent hours and hours and hours on and that I'm infinitely satisfied with hardly garnered any kind of a reaction, and yet something http://rheall.deviantart.com/journal/20637539/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:05:10 PDT Slacker Uprising: Free Download

A friend of mine posted a link to this in his journal, and since I haven't heard anything about it anywhere else I thought I'd help spread it around.

Michael Moore, that controversial filmmaker who made such movies as "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11", has put his new movie on the internet for free streaming and downloading, at absolutely no cost to yourself. All he asks for is your e-mail address.

The movie is called "Slacker Uprising", and is about his efforts during the 2004 election to get young people up, out, and voting. I enjoyed it exceedingly.

You can download it, stream it, etc. right here.


The Other Stuff

I'm not a political person, really. I don't know the names of any of the local politicians in my area, and I don't read political blogs or watch the news with any degree of regularity. The classifieds are more likely to catch my attention in a newspaper than an article about the Liberals/Conservatives arguing about some policy or other in parliament.

However, this upcoming US election has had me in pins and needles (and a fair amount of anxiety, lately).

I live in Canada (thank goodness!). I don't live in the US, never have, and have only visited the country a few times in my life. I am, however, deeply affected by that country in every day of my life, whether it's through foreign policies affecting things, the US media that spews over our border like an overflowing bathtub, or my own Conservative leader using the Republican government down south as an inspiration for their own wacky policies.

I get more exposure about most of the US elections and other political issues than I do about my own country's. The US is not a single, closed entity; the US affects, and continues to affect, millions of people all around the world through various means (and I don't mean just by wars and armed conflicts around the world either, though those are a large part of it).

I've been watching, and feeling, the affects of the Bush administration for the past eight years (granted, not as much as those of you living in that country), and right now I am terrified, absolutely terrified, of this upcoming election.

Every single thing that I hear about this election race and the candidates involved pushes me closer and closer to the Obama party. And I haven't just been relying on biased blog posts either, or this so called "Liberal Media". I've watched various speeches and demonstrations and ads made by the candidates themselves, and each time, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin scare the living daylights out of me, not only by the things that they say, but how they say it. Everything I hear from them and the republican party just screams of scare tactics and propaganda.

Every time I hear reports about how race is such a deciding issue in this election, how people can be turned off of Obama simply due to the colour of his skin, it makes me sick to my stomach. I could never have imagined that such an archaic and broken idea still exists in a supposed civilized society like America's, but apparently I am wrong.

My biggest wish is to in some way be able to help make my voice known in this election. But I'm not American, so my voice is useless. I can't vote, and my opinion in this matter means extremely little, because, again, I am not American. The fact that I live less than 30km (or 20m) away from the US border means absolutely nothing, even if I have to travel farther than that just to visit my mother. But even that doesn't make me any more entitled to my opinion than someone living in Nunavut, or Britain, or Finland, or Greece, or Malaysia, or anywhere else in this world.

I wish I could vote. Or in some way have my opinion matter in this. Because I'm so damn scared of another four years of Bush's policies (because no matter how anyone spins it, I don't see McCain as any different), and it's a huge matter on my heart to see such a wonderful country like America reduced to this. To a simple matter of race, or party loyalty, or skewed ideas about patriotism. Voting opposite, or have differing opinions than the ruling entity of your country does not make you a traitor. Your country is a democracy for a reason; so that when a corrupt or inept leader comes to power, the people have the ability and the means to elect someone that isn't so corrupt or inept. When I see this idea so horribly misused... anyway.

Like I said, my opinion in this doesn't matter, so I don't know why I'm ranting about it. I suppose the main thing I want to say is to entreat those of you who read this who are of voting age and live in America to please vote, and make yourself educated on the parties in... ]]> =rheall http://rheall.deviantart.com/journal/19667169/ http://rheall.deviantart.com/journal/19667169/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:20:48 PDT
What else... trying my hand at Painter X, and it's proving to be interesting. I'm not sure just what I'll come up with, or if I'll come up with anything at all, but it's fun anyway.

I remember I had a lot to say, but now it's all flown right over my head. Well, I've uploaded a lot of things over the last little while to my Scraps, in case you don't watch those and are interested. Other than that, I've been doing a little bit more artwork recently compared to months before, so maybe I'll have something interesting to show you soon. We'll see.

Sorry for being so silent and boring; I'm on DA every day, and I'm continually amazed by what I see from all you guys. Please keep it up.

That's it for now, I suppose. *yawn*

]]> =rheall http://rheall.deviantart.com/journal/18215457/ http://rheall.deviantart.com/journal/18215457/ Wed, 07 May 2008 17:06:39 PDT
A Day In The Life