Welcome To Golabutron 3000

Welcome to my first weblog entry. What can I say, everybody else is doing it! I intend to use this weblog to post random thoughts and doodles as they come to me. This is still shaky territory since I'm hardly an extrovert, but it just looks so fun, I have to try it out!

Who the heck is this "GOLABUTRON?!"

Golabutron first appeared here, years ago, in an old online comic strip of mine called "The Bastich". He's basically just a wannabe over-the-top, megalomaniacal, Darth Vader villain-type who was going to invade the Earth some day. The funny thing is that I just now realized how drastically his design has changed since then, including a complete shift of his superfluous tubing from the back to the front of his head. Now he's gone from Darth Vader to the scumbag who ratted Luke and Obi-Wan out at Mos Eisley. How did this happen! I have no clue. Call it a theme. Anyway, I've always liked the name, so now it's the title of my weblog.

How WACOM has ruined my life

So my first doodle (above) was created with my brand-spanking new Wacom Intuos2 4x5" graphics tablet. I'm obviously still working on technique here.

This purchase is actually a huge step for me, as I've been kind of a ludite artwise for the past few years. I realized a while ago that I wasn't a such great artist, but that most of my enjoyment in illustration basically came from shoving lead and ink around a sheet of paper anyway... so I've never been big on 3D rendering or even vector art because it was always so detatched from the pacifying experience I yearn for. Staring at meshes is not what I really want to do right now.

Don't get me wrong... this isn't some debate on what is "art" and what isn't. This is the kind of thing you always hear blurted out in art classes: "It isn't art if you didn't make it with your own hands!" Well, I say thee nay! Art is so utterly in the eye of the beholder that I'm not sure there's anything in all of creation that doesn't qualify somehow. Every new technology is going to be challenged in this way. Just wait until the robots start writing music! What! You say they already are!? Well, eventually it will be just the robots creating art for other robots, so we may as well get used to it now.

Anyway, it's meaningful to me on some primal level to doodle, and I hope this new Wacom tablet will free me up to do cooler things without losing what I enjoy about this stuff in the first place.

But MAN, is it a pain to learn. It's better than using a mouse by far, but I'm still having major coordination problems across the board. Nevertheless, I intend to plow through this and become the Wacom Master.