Who uses a lightbox? Can anyone inform me on what a really good lightbox is? Like, as far as brightness and.... stuff? I am the most untechnical person I know. xD Lately I've had my eye on this thing Copic previewed at AX09, which seemed like a lot of fun. It comes with one hell of a price tag though. Really, it just comes down to what do I need in order to trace through 140lb+ paper? The only lightbox I ever had, some ghetto ass shit from the 90s, had problems which lighting through two sheets of printer paper. ._.

Also, lately my art discontent has led me to go exploring in places I would have snobbishly turned my nose up before. I mean, abstracty or minimalist art. Well, I still prefer the smell of my own farts to abstract art, and those artists who have that weird infantile thing where the heads are all big and it's like what you drew when you were 7 only worse???? .... It's true,  I'll just never be a truly open person, I'll always be a discriminating bitch. But I've become very interested in a lot of minimalist stuff, the fineartsy editorial stuff... The stuff you look at and say oh I can do that but then no, no you really can't. That's intriguing me the most right now. Where's the line between minimalist and unfinished? The people who are doing this stuff have a very finely tuned sense of when to stop, of what looks right, it's a very delicate balance. Especially in figurative stuff, when are you keeping things simple and when are you just being lazy? I thought I knew, but my teacher gave me the "unfinished" smackdown the other day, so I keep searching.

I realize I'm also approaching art-as-a-career completely backwards. I'm a strategies and formula person. The only time I could seriously comprehend math was in algebra, solve for X, works every time just so long as you do the steps in the right order. My instinct right now is that there's some kind of magical formula for a successful career.

Doesn't work with art, but I want it to.

It's like when people say "originality is what makes your career" I read it as, "make sure the artists who are inspiring you are different than the artists inspiring everyone else." James Jean and his young contemporaries have popularized Arthur Rackham again. Art Nouveau has been back for a while now... And the ultimate taboo, if you let yourself be inspired by your contemporaries you're going to fall into the group. You know, a "school." And then you're part of a crowd, like how the big names of the Impressionist era showed in galleries with buttloads of other impressionists that you'll never study because they're just inconsequential faces who all did the same trendy thing. Your career will probably get testicular cancer and die as soon as the trend that made your crowd does. That's what I'm telling myself these days.

Too bad, since I love the work of Rackham and his contemporaries _{I like Warwick Goble much better than Rackham actually, even though he's sort of seen as the copycat} and I love the stuff floating around these days, specifically stuff like Yuta Onoda's, Chelsea Greene Lewyta and Jillian Tamaki. But if I just aped what I find attractive, I'd kill my prenatal art career so fast abortion doctors would be studying my methods for centuries. My decision now is to never look at any of "my" _{as if I am actually a real artist} contemporaries' works ever again.

My plan to excommunicate myself from the works of current illustrators has some upsides, though. It's forcing me to go look in those places that I wouldn't have. The most important thing art school teaches you is to be humble, not in the way that you can take critique like an adult, but in the way that the things you think have no relevance to your goals are actually usually the most important...

Also: NEWSFLASH YOU GUYS

ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME

MY JOURNAL MY WANGST ME ME ME ME

god this is such a giant pile of self-absorbed shit
wish I could just get over myself

I'll end this journal with a poop poop poop. Lightens the mood. The end.

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