In Which Far is a Blithering Idiot
Nov. 28th, 2009 03:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darthfarART EPIC FAIL
What is the first thing one should do before trying out new media? Why, look up tutorials and tips, of course. Unfortunately, because I am a doint of the first order, I neglected to do said research beforehand... with the result that when I found out the following piece of information, it was too late:
(And because one of my professors had always stressed that "a negative result does not mean no result", here's that information on technique, Despard!)
1. Pencils do NOT go with soft pastels. Charcoal does. I tried it on a test sheet and bingo... the pastels just sort of skid over the pencil lines.
2. Nor does dark-coloured paper. (I found this out by trying said pastels on said test sheet). Because soft pastels are already muted in colour, so any attempt to apply them on brown paper results in... unsaturated bleargh.
I have thus unwillingly changed the Lucien Barbarin project to a colour pencils one.
Work-in-progress:
But I did also break out the pastels earlier today - this time on white (cheap) paper. And considering I didn't even start out with a sketch (and in fact didn't even have any clear idea where it was going), but just built it up from shapes, it could have gone far worse than this:
Although it still comes under the heading of Epic Fail because I still managed to mess up. I'd intended (since there was already so much green in the skin palette) to neutralise the warm colours with blue drapery. Unfortunately, I also had the bright idea of adding maroon to said blue drapery, with the result that what came out was a hideous shade of bleargh. Which was 'round about the time I made the next discovery:
3. You can't erase soft pastels. Not even by pen eraser. Not even by scraping.
The only way, it seemed, to salvage it, was to neutralise the maroon to brown through the addition of green - which is why the background's a nasty blend of greens and yellows, instead of the pale blues I'd intended, and which is why it looks so unbalanced in colour. I suck.
Oh, and:
4: One needs far bigger paper than A4-sized 70gm printer paper for pastel work. Live and learn.
SCIENCE & MATH HORROR STORY
So a few years ago they decided to change the language for science and math subjects at school from the national language to English. Fine. I've always been of the opinion that science and math SHOULD be taught in English, anyway, given that the overwhelming proportion of reference and reading material for these two disciplines are English publications. Of course, the transition was far from smooth because all of a sudden, teachers who were previously teaching the subjects in the original language had to learn a whole set of different terms and spelling. ... And I've only just found out that the Ministry is now planning to switch it back to the original language. Moses on a bike! So what's to become of all the trainees at the teachers' training colleges, who are being trained to teach the subjects in English? LOL.
Oh, and let's not even go into textbook translations. I still vividly remember my argument with my 6th form biology teacher about the word "coenocytic", which the textbook hideously translated in one place as "senositik" and "koenositik" in the other, and which my inept teacher took to mean two different phenomena, when they were in fact referring to one. (At least he had the grace to admit, after doing his homework, that I was right). Or the fact that, should I continue with this tutoring thing, I face the prospect of teaching biology in a third language. ROFL. Fun times.
What is the first thing one should do before trying out new media? Why, look up tutorials and tips, of course. Unfortunately, because I am a doint of the first order, I neglected to do said research beforehand... with the result that when I found out the following piece of information, it was too late:
(And because one of my professors had always stressed that "a negative result does not mean no result", here's that information on technique, Despard!)
1. Pencils do NOT go with soft pastels. Charcoal does. I tried it on a test sheet and bingo... the pastels just sort of skid over the pencil lines.
2. Nor does dark-coloured paper. (I found this out by trying said pastels on said test sheet). Because soft pastels are already muted in colour, so any attempt to apply them on brown paper results in... unsaturated bleargh.
I have thus unwillingly changed the Lucien Barbarin project to a colour pencils one.
Work-in-progress:
But I did also break out the pastels earlier today - this time on white (cheap) paper. And considering I didn't even start out with a sketch (and in fact didn't even have any clear idea where it was going), but just built it up from shapes, it could have gone far worse than this:
Although it still comes under the heading of Epic Fail because I still managed to mess up. I'd intended (since there was already so much green in the skin palette) to neutralise the warm colours with blue drapery. Unfortunately, I also had the bright idea of adding maroon to said blue drapery, with the result that what came out was a hideous shade of bleargh. Which was 'round about the time I made the next discovery:
3. You can't erase soft pastels. Not even by pen eraser. Not even by scraping.
The only way, it seemed, to salvage it, was to neutralise the maroon to brown through the addition of green - which is why the background's a nasty blend of greens and yellows, instead of the pale blues I'd intended, and which is why it looks so unbalanced in colour. I suck.
Oh, and:
4: One needs far bigger paper than A4-sized 70gm printer paper for pastel work. Live and learn.
SCIENCE & MATH HORROR STORY
So a few years ago they decided to change the language for science and math subjects at school from the national language to English. Fine. I've always been of the opinion that science and math SHOULD be taught in English, anyway, given that the overwhelming proportion of reference and reading material for these two disciplines are English publications. Of course, the transition was far from smooth because all of a sudden, teachers who were previously teaching the subjects in the original language had to learn a whole set of different terms and spelling. ... And I've only just found out that the Ministry is now planning to switch it back to the original language. Moses on a bike! So what's to become of all the trainees at the teachers' training colleges, who are being trained to teach the subjects in English? LOL.
Oh, and let's not even go into textbook translations. I still vividly remember my argument with my 6th form biology teacher about the word "coenocytic", which the textbook hideously translated in one place as "senositik" and "koenositik" in the other, and which my inept teacher took to mean two different phenomena, when they were in fact referring to one. (At least he had the grace to admit, after doing his homework, that I was right). Or the fact that, should I continue with this tutoring thing, I face the prospect of teaching biology in a third language. ROFL. Fun times.
