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Serenity

Well, this is just a rough sketch, but for those of you who recognize it (and no, it’s still not the Flying Spaghetti Monster), you should know what the rest of this post is going to say. Yes, this is the ship, Serenity, from the short-lived Joss Whedon show, Firefly. The movie Serenity, which is a continuation of the story, will be opening on September 30th.

What’s it about? Well, via Dan Drezner, M.E. Russell at The Weekly Standard said it best: “Think of it as Star Wars, if Han Solo were the main character, and he still shot Greedo first.” Yeah, that’s Captain Malcolm Reynolds all right (you’ll see what I mean if you watch the two-hour pilot episode). Actually, it isn’t really like Star Wars in that you don’t have a lot of spaceship combat, but don’t worry, there’s still plenty of action and special effects. Yeah, the show doesn’t really look at all like my rough pencil sketch — maybe I’ll turn it into a painting someday. And yes, I also drew this (no, I didn’t trace it) in Corel Painter 8, which I blogged about earlier. As always, click on the image for a larger view.

But anyway, enough about my stupid drawing. What I really want to talk about is Firefly. Since it’s too late to alert you to the Sci-Fi channel’s rebroadcast of the show, I very highly recommend checking it out on the four-disc DVD set, because you need to see it from the beginning, and in order. Yeah, the main reason the show got canceled so early is that Fox, in its infinite wisdom, aired the pilot last and showed the rest of them out of order and often preempted it for baseball. Yeah, maybe that would be fine for some shows that don’t have an ensemble cast to introduce or multi-episode story arcs, but can you imagine a show like Lost or 24 or The Sopranos gaining an audience if subjected to conditions like that?

Look out! He's got a brush!

Well, a virtual one anyway. Okay, to be sure, I do have some real ones too, but I haven’t touched them in years. Painting is pretty messy, and the condo doesn’t have enough room for me to have a dedicated studio. Not that it’d be worth it anyway, since I’m just a dabbler. So I’d been meaning to try working with digital painting for a while, but never got around to buying any painting software. And then over a year ago, Mark blogged about ArtRage, a free painting program for Windows and Mac OS X.

I tried it out, but found that it didn’t make drawing with a mouse any more easier, and in fact the makers recommended using a graphics tablet with it. And so I finally bought a Wacom tablet, and I’m very glad I did. It came bundled with a bunch of software, including procreate Painter 7. This was a much more sophisticated program than ArtRage with features that I really wanted to use, so I tried learning it but kept getting frustrated with the user interface. So I bit the bullet and upgraded it to Corel Painter 8 (choosing 8 over 9 because I wasn’t sure my old computer met the system requirements of the later version, and because I’d read that most of the usability issues were addressed in 8).

It’s still a bit of a learning curve, but I’ve gotten to the point where I can satisfy my urge to scribble without having to invest that much time in setup or cleanup, which was pretty much the goal. And as I’ve mentioned earlier, art is competing for my time with a plethora of other interests.

But the neat thing about abstract art is that it doesn’t take too long to get something that looks kinda cool (I whipped this up while sitting on the couch, watching/listening to various music videos). Plus, as you might have guessed, I’m a big fan of Wassily Kandinsky, specifically his Blue Rider period. Indeed, I have a huge print of his “Improvisation ‘Klamm’ Ravine” piece on my living room wall (although my favorite piece is “Composition VII”, which is the background wallpaper for my iBook). I’m not as fond of his later geometrical work. And I also like Willem de Kooning. Shouldn’t be surprising, given my interest in jazz.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m some great talent, but I have taken a few art classes and also read a couple of books, which is far more than I can say about photography. And I thought this came out pretty interesting enough to post here. I’ve also uploaded it to deviantART, but it doesn’t seem to be drawing much attention.

I won’t go into much explanation of what I was thinking when I painted this, as that kinda spoils the point of art. But I just thought I’d point out that this is not a completely abstract work. Not sure if it’s obvious or not. It looks obvious to me (especially from the thumbnail), but when I showed it to Erika, she couldn’t see what it was. She guessed it was the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which has been amusing us greatly as of late (I first heard of it from Hank, and you can read more about it at WikiPedia). But that’s not what this is.

Of course, now that I’ve mentioned the FSM, that’s probably what all of you are going to see in this. Argh. Well, I’ll be sure to try and paint it next, I suppose.