Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Speed paints suck

Can someone explain to me the point of speed paints? Just to clarify, I'm talking about sped up videos of the painting process, not the valid practice of painting a piece in an hour or less. It seems that the speed paint is solely an exercise in flaunting ones skill while making the creation of it seem effortless. Most of them are just stupid. You can sum up most youtube speed paints as "Hey, I can draw stuff in photoshop and I've got awesome music tastes too!" I can see the usefulness of time lapse in the creation of something truly arduous like the creation of a mosaic or a Tibetan sand mandala, but to post a video of you making some dude/chick/robot/monster in photoshop/painter is just lame. I'm sure it did take hours to make, but so what. Are people truly that starved for attention? I'm not trying to harsh on the artistic ability of anyone that does make these things, some of them are truly impressive, it's just that there isn't anything pedagogical about them. You can't read any text because the resolution is so low, it's difficult to follow the usage of tools because any changes made are faster than eye blinks and on top of it there is usually some crap music accompaniment. On top of all these things sometimes the video is cropped so that you can't see the toolset or the menu items being accessed. If I watch another speed paint it will be too soon. I just had to get this off my chest once and for all.