Trying Something New (Arting Part 1)

I’ve been drawing much more recently. And I wanted to do a Teespring (now Spring). And then I realized that I never posted much of my art online. I settled on doing what I thought I’d never do –starting a YouTube. It was the last thing on my mind, but here I am. This is part 1 of Arting. I’m making it up as I go. Before I start, I think it should be said that I am not abandoning blogging. Nope, I’ll probably blog more about my adventures in art and my thought process. I’m also going to be adding a page as a sort of gallery; plus, I’m thinking of revamping my Instagram to include both my art and reviews. Today’s post is mostly rambling. The speedpaint will be in part 2.

I’m mainly doing digital speedpaints and it’ll be that way for a long time. I have always been drawing since I could remember. Watching art videos just came along naturally. Eventually, I got my Wacom Bamboo Fun, which was bundled with Corel Painter Essentials 4 and Photoshop Elements 8. That’s when I started watching digital speedpaints to try to learn the software. Also back then, I got Manga Studio Debut 4. (And you can imagine how mad young me was when I found out the cover art was done in Photoshop. I can’t recall, but I’m pretty sure Manga Studio itself had more abilities than Debut. Nonetheless, here’s a fun fact, Manga Studio is now Clip Studio Paint. Okay, back to the topic at hand.) Watching, re-watching, and editing my first video felt somewhat nostalgic to be honest. 

I had a couple of programs to get started. Like AMD Radeon ReLive to screen record and Blender to edit it. That combination was fun until I nearly killed my computer. Recording was constantly crashing my graphics card. I’m surprised I even got as many clips as I did. Especially since the files for the sketching and line art got corrupted. I’m really disappointed because I was happy with them too. I sped everything up in Blender from 7+ hours to 6 minutes. Now, to be fair, Blender is more for modeling and other things, not video editing. But my rendering time ended up being around 4 hours. I let that go over night, but I knew it was too much. So, I then tried to use Kdenlive. I love the layout and user interface a lot. But it wasn’t what I needed. I chopped up the second video I’m worked by a lot. As it turns out, you can’t CTRL + A (select all) and speed up clips nor connect them to do so. To have to manually select each clip to apply speed changes was not efficient. 

I tried so many open source programs. I’m currently taking a chance with Olive 0.1 since it's unsupported. I can’t merge clips, but the speed can be adjusted all at once. I still have to manually slide clips back together, but the render time wasn't too bad. About an hour for 23 minutes Back to the first video, I took the already rendered video and added the final image in Kdenlive. This ended up rendering in 36 minutes. I can’t wait to post it. Anyway, rambling over. Thanks for reading.