Haven’t decided whether I’ll be verbose or brief on this subject, here, today. Have to look back and see, I guess.
Conversation threads this morning on Twitter (which I can’t retrieve, on account of Twitter is “stressing out” – and I don’t feel like trying to track everything down with tweetscan/summize), included one creator saying they were thinking of planning on releasing a project they’re working on … in September or October. To which my mind replied: “I don’t understand. If you have a releasable product, why not put it out there as soon as it’s ready? For a finished product, why wait?”
Now, I can see how with certain products – say, a dancing Santa Claus doll or a new line of Valentine’s Day candies – releasing at a particular time of year might be appropriate. And I can see how products which will only be relevant for a limited time should be released in a specific time period – though that’s now, not later – to avoid irrelevance.
I can even see where something like a blockbuster movie, trying to maximize attention and profits would want to schedule its release to not be the same weekend as a directly competing release, which would not only compete for viewers dollars but for the actual, finite number of screens, but — and this is a big but — I can’t see why a studio would hold off on releasing a movie for months or, as actually happens more often than you’d think, years after it was ready to be shown. The finite number of screens is (I believe) now well over 30,000 in the US alone, and even the widest of releases hasn’t topped 1/3 of those – there’s a LOT of screens, if you have a movie ready to go, put it out there! If you don’t think it’ll make “enough” money in theatres, throw it to DVD – as long as you keep it in print, it’ll be available to whoever wants it. As long as it’s sitting “in the can”, unreleased, it’s not making anyone any money, it’s not entertaining anyone, it’s not communicating anything, it’s wasted.
Which, I think, is part of my problem with the whole thing: Someone, possibly a lot of someones, put their hard work and creative energy and ideas into creating something, and that work, that creation, is being held back, hidden, kept from its audience. Continue reading Press, Release. Marketing, Products.
Then I waited half a day for that to dry. And then, before I started working on the painting again, I set up a video camera to capture the rest of the process. I put a line of 1/2″ tape vertically on the canvas, and cut out a square of tape for the square – it’s like a sort of stencil; where I put the tape, the purple remains when I paint over the rest. Then I painted on the red circle, the blue background, the off-color right-side… You’ll watch the video and see it, right? I don’t need to describe it all in detail? Well, I painted on the colors, and as I’ve learned to do from countless past tape-involved projects before, I pulled up the tape while the paint was still wet. So, to explain the next part of the video: tape isn’t perfect. So some of the paint leaks under. What you can see me doing is cleaning up the worst of it, trying to maintain the purple background as intact as possible without hurting the (still wet) pink and blue foreground. The image you see at right is the painting when this process was complete; the main elements of color are present, but I hadn’t yet put on any borderlines, and certainly hadn’t painted the most-foreground element (the black, horizontal lines), so this image is sort-of an in-between-takes image. It was taken in between where the camera angle changes in the video. The camera angle changed, by the way, because I waited until the next day for it to dry, and I had to put away the camera before Mandy came home, or it would have blocked the walkway.
Okay, this one will be quick. It was the last of the paintings based on blurry photos of doodles I made at work last year. Painted this one Thursday, 5/15/2008. I’d been thinking about it for a while. Thinking pretty seriously all week this week, about how I wanted to go from a blurry simple line drawing to a painting. I considered just doing ink on paper or some other more common media… But I decided that for the background on this one I wanted to have a slight gradation from blackBlackBlack at the top to pure, unpainted white for at least the bottom half of the canvas. I considered painting the white canvas white, even doing some more complex, swirly, flowing, sort of out-of-the-head-and-up and into black abstract thing. But I decided to just take some water, wet half the canvas, take some black paint, black the very top and with water only, work small amounts of the black pigment down the canvas in long, nearly-horizontal strokes. Then, I took the photograph on the right, to show off all the excitement of watching paint dry. Literally.
Then, while those colors were still drying, I moved forward again. I mixed up a pale blue-green for the skin, more blue in the skin and more green in the beard, but a very subtle gradation between hues was what I was going for. In contrast with the blue-purple coat surrounding it, the green in the beard almost disappears. I actually spent about as much time just on getting the beard to look the way I wanted as I had on the entire hat. I knew I’d been planning on adding a thick outline to the major features of the character before I was done, but I also didn’t want to have to outline the beard – I wanted it to look furry/hairy on its own. So I made sure that I not only was creating variations in color, but that I was creating a fully-overlapping color, beard-over-coat, with hairs and mess along the full edge of the beard, from lip to eyeball. The other colors all had a bit of space between them, and were fairly rough, but for the beard I made sure that the edge I was painting would be an edge I was happy with. More green added to the blue-green for the eyes, then black added to that for the centers, and then for the mouth. For the centers, I also didn’t want to have them outlined, so I made sure the black was touching the green. Then, finally, I decided to let it dry before doing the outlines.
The next morning, I went out to run some errands, among which was to pick up a gold paint pen. I actually ended up going to six different places to find three items. Only one of which was the gold paint pen that I used to outline the figure’s hat and coat. I’d already had a pearlescent blue pen on hand to use to outline the figure’s eyes and mouth, and that was the easy part. I fought with myself for a long while, trying to get happy with the shape of the hat, the thicknesses of the lines, how much purple was left, how much gold I wanted to use in total… And the pen I’d bought was terrible. Just terrible. It was a real pain just trying to use it without screwing anything up, but after the morning I’d had running all over I wasn’t about to go out and start looking for another one, so I struggled through.