CaptianQ

I just posted a new wallpaper I made and it made me think about something.

The wallpaper came out AMAZING, much better than I had thought it would. But even as I looked at it and even though in my mind it looks very professional and very "legit" I new that I'm simply NOT.
Just because I produced good art does not mean I have a lot of artistic talent.

I've never possessed the ability to just grab a pencil and some paper and just DRAW SOMETHING, I always need some help. To borrow a phrase from a friend, "I lean on references so hard that I break them." I don't have the talent to produce good art on my own steam, so I have to be clever.

For example, in all the pictures of my Homestuck RP Character Rick I took pictures of myself in jeans, a T, and my Reflective Aviators and I literally traced them. I have these amazing visions and ideas of what I want to make, but I have to cheat a little to actually produce them. With Rick it's not "cheating" per say since I took the photos and I did all the tracing and editing and its all still 100% my own original work, its still not as "legit" as I'd like because I don't have the skills. I don't have the talent.

In my most recent submission, False Victory, I "bent the rules" once again. The idea is all 100% mine (with the exception of Minecraft itself of course ) but I borrowed a lot of things in order to make it. To make Steve all I did was go into the Minecraft.jar file, extract/copy the Player skin file, scale it up by like 1000% or something, and then copy selections of each part and used a perspective tool to drag the corners where I wanted them to be. Even the position of Steve is borrowed. I was having trouble just dragging the points around to get it to look right so I went on youtube and pulled up Revenge by CaptainSparkles www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPJUBQ… and used a frame from the video as a reference. (i used this part at 3:22 www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPJUBQ… for Steve's position) The creeper background was the same really, I pulled up the creeper.png file and scaled it by A TON and then stuck it in there as the background. Same with the diamond, straight from the Minecraft.jar.

Now, those I used on purpose because I wanted it to look like real minecraft sorta? but still, my point is the same.
The only real editing I did myself was darkening the creepers eyes and mouth, blurring the inside edges of the eyes/mouth, and the shading on the corners of the picture and around the diamond, both done with pre-set gradient settings in Gimp.

I don't really know what the point of this was, I don't have a message or anything. This is just me talking about me.
Heh, I just realized how fitting the picture really is.
"False Victory" as in I cheated so I don't REALLY win?
I didn't even do that on purpose xD

Anyway, TL;DR
I have no talent and I cheat at life, and I don't care.
Haters gonna hate.

I've had that idea swimming around in my mind for a while now, and I only just forced myself to draw it last night.
I think it turned out really well! I'm referring to Rick: Bring a light of course, my most recent submission.

I was going to do some detail and shading on him, but when I saw his face the way it is with the hair and the glasses I just couldn't bring myself to change it, it was too amazing! xD

I plan on doing something with Rick, giving him his own story and all that, I'm just not sure EXACTLY how.
I've started a tumblr page for him rick-mage-of-mind.tumblr.com/ and that will probably be the main place things will be uploaded, but they'll also be uploaded here and on my actual tumblr captianq.tumblr.com/
There's another page involved in this, but that's coming later

As the title suggests, I've found myself with some free time.

SO

I've decided to learn how to do Vector art ^.^

Wish me luck!!

Ok, so I use Gimp 2 for most of my art, and I love that program, its a GREAT program.

The only problem is... As far as I can tell, there's no way to draw a simple box from two points!! You can't even draw straight lines!!
I have to say, either I'm a total dumb ass, or something is clearly wrong with Gimp. >.<

Can anyone help me out?