Friday, May 02, 2014

visuallize this, no black angels

I have a rant and maybe it's because I'm looking in the wrong place and I am cheap er broke. Us image makers especially we who use clip-art of people to populate a scene have a shortage of African-American, Black, African, etc; figures to put in these drawings. As I am not skilled in these things it is customary to use public domain or purchase (modest price) these figures.

I use Sweet Home 3d, the Caucasian character types are natural looking but there are one male and one female Afro-American characters. They are caricatures. The male is a morgue figure (stiff lifeless) and the female got huge boobs and looks like a dead hussy.

Clip-art of Afri-American people is scarce and so is 3d models of figures of the same hues. What a beef to have! BUT, suppose you were doing a project for your neighborhood that happens to be heavily populated with black people and other ethnic hues and you want to convey the real. It wouldn't be a hard sell to populate the picture with white folks but it does put a damper on expectations. Images means a lot subjectively.

So, there are a lot of Black artist who are into 3d games, making characters of monsters and super heros, villains, and aliens. Why don't you service an under served and under represented market. How in the heck can you project your images into the future if your likeness isn't in the plans that builds it, humm?

I use SketchUp for 3d work, it has a people populating scheme using 2d images that face front. It is easy to take a picture, cut it out and apply it. I even found a library of Afri-American images to use. I can't tell you how cool to design a spacey home and put black people in there. Man, got to do some full body shot of yours truly..............

Looking at the character market, there are game characters of every hue and description. What I'm talking about is the type used in 3d architectural models. These are usually pre-posed, standing, walking, sitting, etc; you can just pop them in for the effect and you're done. There are packages of Caucasian people, I haven't seen any with African people, business or casual. I'm just saying there are few images of black peoples for design purposes. Don't look at me funny, there are no black angels either, have you seen a black angel? This is deeper than you know.

PS. How deep? There were two European Renaissances, one that dealt with written languages, thus a war in words. Then the arts where the image also became a weapon of that same war. It is too bad words and images were/are used against us black folk but that is the truth. So yeah, we black artist can draw/paint black faces but the need is in the engineering pictorial arts, the clip-art realms not just games and sci-fi. There, I've said it and I'm glad! 

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