Zub Tales

Waves of tired hitting me now. I’m just gonna post this and then go to bed.

Today went weirdly melancholy, but I couldn’t honestly tell you anything specific that really stood out as the catalyst for why it seemed bad. An expensive and crappy tasting lunch comes to mind. Stagnation on some projects. Sore body and exhausted mind. Thinking too much about things I have no control over.

Life drawing was a wash out. The model took very boring poses and had a body that lacked good definition or strong waypoints to draw from. Fat people, thin people, muscular or not… it doesn’t matter as long as they have some dynamic posing and good angles to plot from. This guy was muscled, but they all seemed soft and were hard to plot. Very boring posing made drawing even more of a chore. That coupled with my exhaustion equaled a whole lot of wasted paper just trying to get into a groove that never came.

The only piece worth posting came when the model took a break and I doodled in the skeleton from memory over one of my gestures to try and get some of that structural knowledge in there and improve the sense of form. The rest of the pieces were woefully incomplete, lacking energy and filled with hesitant lines.

Fighting traffic and sleepiness, I went to the preview screening of Constantine. Overall the movie was pretty good. I could nitpick things about it – things changed from the comics for no real reason or ways they could have improved the pacing, but I don’t have the energy. It didn’t rock me to the core, but there were definitely some entertaining visuals and concepts. It’s not a horror movie at all and had about as many scares as one of the Blade flicks. The actress playing Gabriel the angel was sharp. The guy playing Lucifer was good too, though he’s a departure from the Vertigo comic vision of that character.

It’s also not really an R-rated flick. Other than the heavy religious overtones (which are really the only R-rated element I can figure – the MPAA must not like Christianity being bandied about with good guys and bad guys), there’s minimal swearing, barely any gore and zero nudity. I’m not saying that it had to have those things, but it seemed odd walking out of the theatre and trying to figure out what made it R-worthy.