Last post here!

Oh, it was a nice little blog while it lasted! I've set a blog up as my home page though, and everything else, so all the exciting stuff will be happening over there. Head on over to dekraus.com! At least once, then do the following thing on Twitter/Facebook/G+ and I'll be sure to keep everyone informed!

The Puzzle

Lately, my number-one hobby has been cooking. Specifically, attempting to make those foodstuffs we often buy in stores. It started over a year ago with granola, then this spring with yogurt. Lately I've been working with breads, crackers, tortillas, tomato sauce, various dips and spreads, all with varying results (got the tortillas down though.) Partly I'm enjoying making these things from scratch, and partly I'm enjoying saving some dollars at the grocery store (JUST BUY MORE FLOUR.) What I really love, though, is figuring out how these foods are made and understanding them, so I can throw them together at any time with any random ingredients and get something tasty.

Take yogurt for example. Bought in a tub in the supermarket, this thick dairy stuff is kind of a mystery. It's just milk and cultures. That's all it is. Heat some milk, put in some cultures, let it sit... there's yogurt! Granted, there are some times and temperatures to watch, but the basics are pretty simple. Or, I should say, understanding yogurt is pretty simple.

I recently watched an interview with a successful concept artist, Anthony Jones. Near the end of the interview he talked about how important it is to understand all the various facets of creating art - to understand light and composition and perspective and color. I realized that's the same tack I've been on since classes have ended; I've poked and prodded at some things, looked at them upside down, and said, "I want to understand this." It's not enough to know how to follow my eyes and copy a picture. I want to know how to turn the subject around in my head and draw it every which way. I want to understand the human figure the same way I understand yogurt.

The figure is what I started with, as it's so essential to any scene involving humanity. Despite being good at copying models, I don't understand the figure the way I want to. So I struck out searching for ways to do so, lacking sitting in a room with a real live model before me. I've gone through Loomis' basic structures and started working through Vanderpoel's studies. I read books online about drawing comic-style and anime. I searched Google and came upon a little site tucked away that had an excellent page about drawing the figure but was mostly about color theory. It was the color theory, a tangent to my own quest, that really got me thinking.

Whether you're an artist or not, I beg you to go to this page on the Real Color Wheel and take a moment to scroll down. You don't have to read it. Just look at the charts, the manipulations, the experiments, the lengthy explanations. This is an artist trying to understand color. The color wheel isn't just a spectrum laid out in a circle. The importance of it runs across the circle, in matching complementary pairs in order to bring those colors down to darks without using black. Complementary pairs "mute" each other, taking away brilliance and saturation. This is incredibly important when painting shadows.

Many of us grew up being taught that Red, Yellow, and Blue are the primary colors, and Orange, Green and Violet the secondary. In that color wheel, Red is opposed by Green, Yellow by Violet and Blue by Orange. But what if that's not entirely correct? One artist works his way through his palette and natural sources and says, no, wait, Red is opposed by Cyan (a blue-green) and Yellow by BLUE. What difference does this make? Darks mixed by Red and Green are brownish. Darks mixed from Red and Cyan are cool gray. That's a big difference, when shadows in warm light are meant to be cool.

The puzzle of understanding color in the real world. The puzzle of understanding all the complexities of the human form. The puzzle of taking the three-dimensional world around us and attempting to portray it on two dimensions. These are the puzzles artists have struggled with since they first drew a stick-bison on a cave wall with a bit of burnt stick.

People love to talk about art in terms of "passion" and "talent" and so many other ideals that are hard to quantify. No doubt it takes a certain amount of passion to be dedicated to any pursuit, and no doubt there are natural inclinations - especially those dealing with spacial understanding and a visual mind - that certainly help any artist. But just like doctors must understand human physiology and engineers must understand physics and thermodynamics, there's a wealth of information and ideas artists must understand as well. And because Art isn't considered a science, a lot of it is floating around in the ether between artists, some taught here, some taught there, information fading in and out through the centuries as we learn and relearn again, peering through the world around us to try to understand these things in order to share them with each other through our creations.

I've made a mental list lately of the things I don't quite understand, but need to in order to create the artwork I wish to create. Top of the list, of course, is the human figure. There's a lot I'd like to work with regarding color, too. Composition, something I've never felt good about, also has a pretty prominent place.

Right above making a perfect loaf of whole-wheat bread.

Backwards to go Forwards

The earliest I remember being really obsessed with drawing was when I was about thirteen years old. Before then, I had done a lot of drawing, as something to do, drawings of the dog, of things around the house, little cartoons, dinosaurs, and so forth. But I didn't obsess over it - I didn't pace around the sketchbook, drawing the same thing over and over again, trying to get it right.

That's one of those fine lines you cross when you really get into creating art. There is an obsession to it. Maybe that's where the idea of the tormented artist comes from. It can make you feel a little crazy sometimes.

When I was thirteen, I saw an excellent TV movie of Treasure Island (the TNT original with Charlton Heston, if anyone remembers) and then I read the book for the first time. Suddenly, my mind was off seafaring in the 1700's, and oh, I wanted to draw those characters. I tried and tried and tried again. As I wrote more of my own stories, I kept trying. Eventually I began picking out photos from magazines of actors and actresses and drawing from them, because I couldn't get it right straight out of my head.

From that point on, I've been on this crazy quest to have the realism and detail of a photograph but also, somehow, bring out a unique character from my head. A lot of times people will say of my character art, "That looks like someone I could pass on the street." And that's good, but - at the same time, I've felt tied to and burdened by my dependence on photo-reference, as I've written about before. It's necessary for what I want to do, but too much, and too focused, and we end up with stand ins and not unique characters, and worse, lose any freedom to create outside the references.

In the time I've had now, without assignments hanging over my head and the freedom to be creative in both my work and studies, I've begun to strip back the references, find out what I can do on my own, and - in the next step - refine it. The top picture took me two years to finish, and had a huge file of references: photos, 3D models, screenshots, etc. I even took pictures of my cat! The character sketches below I worked up in a couple hours, working only from my head, without references.

What surprised me was how much I *could* do without looking at anything else. That maybe I've crossed into some other level where it's possible to put the pieces together myself. They could all be refined using references, but the essentials - the essential *characters* - are there, unique and on their own.

It came out of a lot of planar head drawing, structure studies, lines and circles and measurements. It came out of doing a lot of quick sketches to learn how mouths and eyes and noses can look differently. Practice and understanding. The depth of creativity in art comes from practice and understanding, and THEN detail, or style, or abstraction, can be applied.

Before Picasso began to take his portraits apart in Cubism or other abstractions, he was a wonderful realist painter. A lot of people are surprised when they see his early work. But you have to fully understand what a thing is before you can take it apart in all dimensions, which is essentially what Cubism is.

When I was trying to draw those characters when I was thirteen, I thought I was trying to replicate them in realistic detail, and it was driving me crazy. What I really wanted to do was understand them and bring them to life on paper. The most basic cartoonists hold an understanding to the truth of how we perceive things around us that is immeasurably important in bringing a character to life. But it takes stripping away so much of the beautiful detail I so often get wrapped up in. I have to assure myself, if I can get the basics right, I can add all the detail I can dream of LATER.

This is a start, though, and what I plan to focus on as I move forward in other projects. In a month or two, what will come of it?

I'll be sure to post again before then!

New Prints!

I just updated my Imagekind Print Gallery with my still life oil paintings from last semester. There's a really wide variety of subject matter, from odd things like cat toys to more traditional vases and books and such. Something for everyone! Take a look!

Very soon I'll be getting most of the originals up for sale at my Etsy shop - I'll be sure to post when I do, as some might end up priced around the same as the prints! There's a whole lot of charcoal drawings to come, too, to satisfy everyone's tastes for naked people.

Stay tuned!

A Place for Everything

Remember this? The cluttered little corner in which I’ve been making my art for the past 3 years or so?




It’s been transformed into this:

But wait a sec, you say. That’s all banjos and Kermits and ridiculously clean flooring, where are you going to make art now?

Oh, I have a whole room for that now.




That was, previously, the little room featured here:

Let’s take a look around!

First we have the computer center, for all my digital art needs. The bookcase next to it holds all my art and design books for easy reference.

In front of the window is a lovely little spot for a stool and the easel. I’ve never so appreciated the light this little room gets and holds - it’s southern light, and is kind of intense in the winter, but right now seems lovely.

The storage thing by the easel was actually once a printer stand. It still does well for holding lots of office supplies and such. There’s an old glass cutting board on top which will be easy to clean after I fling all my dirty brushes around on it.





The drawing/work table is totally cleared off - and will stay that way. No more stuff piling up around the edges! I’ve spent some time there already in the evenings, working out of Vanderpoel’s The Human Figure and the feeling in the room is so different than what I had. There’s something very still and encapsulating and isolating, which tremendously helps me focus. I’ve been turning the PC on to have Pandora running and loaded up Pidgin on there, too, for the occasional IM, but I find myself not even glancing at chats and such. Just happily drawing away! I very much need to download a work/break timer though, like Pomodoro, just to give my eyes and hands a rest and stretch my back every 20 minutes or so.

The closet in the little gray room has become storage central! I think I carried in 15-20lbs of different papers and canvases alone. This was desperately needed though, especially with all the nice substrates I’ve collected over the years, just to keep them both nice and also close at hand. I think I’ve had the same book of watercolor paper for 10 years. Time to use that stuff!

The top of the cabinet also gives me a nice place for finished works to lie flat, at least until I can afford some drawers specifically for that.



Now this whole transformation took me well over a week. In fact, I just got my banjo-hanger today and still have to put shoe molding down in the closet. That was really the issue, when it got down to it - a lot of little things that have been needing to be done for a long time. I ended up cleaning out that cabinet, three closets, half of the attic, laying about 33’ of molding, washing all the floors, throwing out masses of old stuff, and finally finding the good stuff decent homes.

If you work with charcoal, wash your floors more often than I do:



Actually, I have a Hoover Floormate and do the floors once a week, but that obviously wasn’t enough. In fact, everything needed to be washed/wiped down. Everything. All the furniture was pulled away from the walls and swept behind/washed behind. And that shoe molding, yeah. I laid all the laminate flooring you see between 4-6 years ago. Some places never got that finishing touch of the shoe molding. Outside of one closet, it’s done now (and I just have to do the finishing on the molding for the last closet and it’ll be done, too.)

It’s nice not having ½” cracks catching dirt and cat hair gaping open here and there!

The amount of stuff was just overwhelming, too. I have never moved (well, once when I was 6, literally walking from one house to the new one next door) so there was, of course, a TON of stuff and clutter that just builds up over time. Trails that would sprawl across the room:

I ended up going through all my DVD’s, CD’s, VHS TAPES OMG, old electronics, so on and so forth, and putting a ton in a bag to sell and a ton in a box to recycle. I’ve often read that we really shouldn’t keep anything we don’t use in the past 6 months; that might be overboard, but by the time I was done with this project I was quite happy to be casting stuff out right and left (my dresser drawers and clothes closet remain on the list!)

The change, though, has been remarkable. Having a separate space for work and for relaxation is wonderful. Getting my instruments out of corners and closer to a place I might reach up and grasp one has lead to a lot more use - despite my being very out of practice on the bass and violin! I’m still splitting my gaming time between the big PC in the studio-room and my Mac on the couch in front of the TV, but the odd thing is it’s actually lead me to play a lot less, as I find myself with so many other things at hand to do.

It was also really refreshing to do a house-project like this again. I’ve done a lot of painting, stenciling, flooring, refinishing, etc, but basically nothing in recent years. It was great to smell the paint and spackle again and to put pieces of wood together. It’s gotten me itching to build a model or something. Build something again.

But more than anything, I want to put that little gray room to good use. I feel presumptuous calling it a “studio”, especially when it’s such a humble little space. But it’s already giving me a feeling of such concentrated promise. If there was anything I wanted out of this whole project, it was that.

Preparations and Renovations

Lo! The end of classes is upon us!

There is, officially, less than a week left of this semester. Unofficially, I'll have all my work in on Thursday. And with nothing scheduled for the summer, that means I can actually plan to successfully Work for Realz.

This is very exciting for me. Anyone who has read this blog for the past year knows I'm terrific at getting ideas and making plans. Very seldom do I actually get things done, however (I still have an ongoing painting started in the summer of 2009 nearly finished.) There are lots of reasons for this, the top ones being that I'm so often Working on Assignments. I don't know how to only spend 40 minutes or an hour on a drawing. I draw or paint until it's good and right. So school assignments eat my time.

I can also only spend so much time wrestling artwork in that little corner pictured above.

If I really want to get some things going this summer, as I plan to, I figured I need to do some renovating. You see, my art-studio space kind of suffered a crisis several years ago when I put all my stuff away and said I'd never draw again. At the time, I was using a very large former bedroom and had plenty of room for two big easels, a worktable, a drafting desk, lots of bins and carts and so forth. But when I put everything away, I decided to make that room a living space, and so turned 2/3rds of the room into a bit of a home theater - big TV, surround sound, big couch, etc. That left me with 1/3rd to use as a workspace when I started drawing and painting again. As you can see above, it's been a little... close.

The other difficulty is that the computer/scanner is in the other room. These days I go back and forth so often between sketchbooks, Photoshop and Painter that I'm constantly carrying things in and out of the smaller office room, which has also been suffering a bit of an identity crisis. In my youth the office was the "playroom" and sewing room, sometimes even a guest room. Ever since our first IBM PC, it's had a computer of one sort or another in it, and for a while had two. Presently it's got my work computer and the printer/scanner/fax, along with a lot of half-used office/storage furniture. It has a large, poorly-used closet and harbors the catbox. I replaced the flooring and repainted a couple years ago, and it's now a lovely neutral shade of gray.

Behold this poorly composited photo:

The glass desk with the big monitor is where I generally do my digital painting and such. It's been problimatic for years because it constantly conducts static electricity to my (homebuilt) PC, switching it off or killing the USB devices if I dare move (usually only in the winter.) I don't know how much work I've lost because of this, but it's been infuriating at times.

SO, after much deliberation, I've decided to take that little office room and turn it into a studio workspace. It is small, but small can be efficient, too. Small can mean I can turn around and flop a sketchbook onto a scanner. Small can mean I can bring up a reference right on a computer screen in the room I'm painting. Small can mean all the mess is concentrated in one space.

Most of all, small means I can open the door to go to work and close it behind me to stop. If you don't get what that means, well, it's probably the biggest challenge when working from home. When your prime workspace is in the same room as the TV and the couch, it's not easy to focus. When your prime relaxing space is in the same room as your workspace, it's not easy to relax. Secondary to the huge time-eater that classwork has been, this has been my biggest stumbling block. It's time to get a new, clean, efficient workspace in order.

And at the same time, reclaim my living space from the charcoal dust and paint!

Thanks to a nifty little online floorplanner I figured out how to fit all my work stuff in that one little room. The glass desk will be brought into the TV room as a home for my Macbook, which has been living on a lapdesk by the couch for the past year. Thankfully the aluminum unibody makes it near-impossible to shock! My work PC will move over to the unused wooden computer desk with the printer/scanner, and my worktable and easel will get moved in where the glass stuff used to be. Big Cabinet will get shoved in the closet - it WILL fit! Catbox and Cattree get moved into the TV room, to get tucked behind a door. The cats will just have to adapt to their change in facilities!

It really ends up giving me a decent space, with all the storage and tools around me that I need.

It's such a relief - and so exciting - just to have this all worked out. I've been trying for several years now to Get Things Done with the current setup, and it just hasn't been working. So once everything is handed in Thursday, I'm going to moving things around. There's some shoe molding I never got in after laying the floors in here years ago, and tons of cleaning and clearing-out to do. Rearranging closet-space. Spackling and touching-up walls. Getting everything cleaned up and organized and ready to do stuff in again.

At very least, it's a good place to start.

Fill 'er Up

I've been thinking a lot about the word "impetus" lately. Kind of an odd word, old Latin thing. "The force or energy with which a body moves." I've been severely lacking in impetus lately.

"Motivation" is a whole other thing. I have tons of motivation. I have a billion reasons *why* I need to do this or that. It's the impetus, the force or energy with which to do so, that's been missing.

I've often compared working creatively to being a big ceramic jug. There's times where the jug is steadily pouring out a lovely stream of water; times where it's even ridiculously overflowing. There's also times where the jug is too low on content to pour out, or even empty. It comes in cycles. In order to create we must be full, or else we have to pause and fill up again.

In the best of times, it's a never-ending cycle. What we do and what we create helps to keep us filled up. We have our own wellsprings and pump systems and the best of us become continual fountains. But even wellsprings run dry sometimes, or pump systems break down. Then we have to go looking for inspiration, for those things that will get us going again.

I wrote last time about wanting to start a webcomic, and that's still forefront in my mind. I've been collecting ideas and images to work into it, writing down some basic plotlines, but I haven't started drawing just yet. I found, while brainstorming, my creativity well is feeling shallow and limited - much like my frustration in only ever posting schoolwork and World of Warcraft fan art. So instead of trying to get somewhere on an empty tank, I've kind of taken some time here to pause and refill the ol' jug.

First things first, I'm looking beyond WoW for the first time in years. (I used to say, "There are no other games!!") Video games are fantastic sources of inspiration because they present the amazing work of other creators - whole massive worlds and storylines, images and styles. The first thing I did was reinstall The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind on my PC, with a big graphics overhaul mod made in the last year. I bought myself Morrowind on my birthday in 2002, the first real roleplaying video game I'd ever played, and definitely an amazing introduction. The graphics update brought it up to today's standards (far outshining WoW except in regards to animation) and it's been fun to poke around in such a rich - and unique - world again.

On the lighter side of things, a friend introduced me to the free-to-play League of Legends. This is a pretty simple realtime-strategy type game, where you control a single "champion" in a team with others and try to take over the opponent team's base. No biggie, and a lot of fun to just sit down and play (and free!) The really interesting thing is looking at all the champions, their design and artwork and skillset, how each one is made different from the others, what they represent and how they are portrayed. A game like this tends to take archtypes and turn them up to 11, so they're clearly seen even when only an inch high and manically played for 30 minutes each. It has a wonderful sense of fun and humor and is refreshingly easygoing and lighthearted.

The bigger news is that I've joined up at Lord of the Rings Online, especially now that it's also free-to-play. I had a devil of a time getting it downloaded and installed (ended up getting a client at Fileplanet and using IE - of all things - to get all 12GB downloaded uncorrupted) but once I got it working and started up, well... I'm impressed, to say the least. Yes, in the most basic ways it looks and plays like WoW, but beyond the interface and the basic MMORPG gist of it, it's a whole new world. I was a huge fan of the movies when they came out and subsequently read all the books like mad, but when the game came out I was deep into WoW and couldn't afford neither the time nor the money to also pick up LOTRO. But now it's free? FREE?? Well, a nice little slice of the pie is free, then it's kind of pay-as-you-go. I can live with that much more easily than a monthly subscription.

I have been just... incredibly impressed with it so far. It's a beautiful game to begin with, and it seems like everything WoW roleplayers have ever asked for is freely given in LOTRO. You want armor dyes? Custom outfits? Player housing? Check, check, check. How about some musical instruments you can actually play and some horses that actually look like horses? How about NPC's that don't seem like afterthoughts and quests that pull your interest along? Oh, I am happy with this. I am very happy with this.

WoW offers some awesome stuff - in fact, WoW is all about the awesome, and I love it for that, for it's humor and it's overthetop awesomeness. Yes, I want my nelf to be able to turn into a dragon and carry someone around. But I'm looking forward to refilling some of my creative stores in Tolkien's beautiful, rich world.

Also! We're not just looking into games here. I've also started watching Doctor Who, starting with the new series in 2005. Again, I've been very impressed, I just loved the first season with Christopher Eccleston. I used to watch Doctor Who when I was little, but it was always a bit too "much" for me then. The theme song alone creeped me out, no less the daleks! But I'm finding it fantastic now, though I'm still getting used to David Tennant in season 2 here. I admit I was drawn in by seeing a fantastic trailer for the new season. Why have I not been watching this sooner!?!?

Lastly, movies. One TV show (outside of the Food Network) that I do watch is Nikita, partly because a friend turned me on to Maggie Q (not that Alex isn't quite something, too!) Watching Maggie lead me to a number of movies out of Hong Kong, and I recently watched Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon. Now I had watched some modern-day Hong Kong action films before, and really enjoyed them, but NOTHING like this. This made 300 look silly and the LOTR movies look like Hollywood blockbusters (not that there's anything wrong with that.) There was just so much *art* in this film, from the scale of the historical details to the beautiful cinematography to the dance-like action scenes. I was just stunned, and quickly asked same friend for a list of others I should queue up on Netflix. Watching these, I couldn't help but think, "I want my comic to look like that." That artful, that detailed, that striking. Huge inspiration, with much more to come.

So, between schoolwork and WoW fanart, I'm filling up on these other things. There are 35 days left in the semester, then for the first time in years I have some serious time off - months off - from classwork. I hope by that time I'm overflowing.

Words and Pictures

I've been doing a lot of thinking in the past few weeks. Thankfully, I've gotten a bit over my frustration obstacles, at least to be happy with what I'm doing right now. I can't argue much with my little still life paintings or anatomy drawings. What I've been thinking about though - for a change - is inspiration. Maybe it was just the horrible headcold I got stopping me in my tracks. Maybe it was other things. But I've come out of it with some interesting replies to the old "Where do I go now?"

"Where do I want to go?" is really the question. "What am I doing?" is another one. All of the... technique stuff - all of these gestures and sketches and anatomy drawings and little oil paintings - they're all like, learning equations for an engineer, rules of physics, all the stuff you need to know to build a bridge. But in the end, you build a bridge. But of course you can't just walk out the door and build a bridge. There has to be a need for a bridge, some specific bridge that needs building. Likewise, an artist needs something to do with their skills and knowledge. And that's something the general public asks artists and art students all the time. "Oh, you're an artist? So what do you DO?"

Because there can be a million different answers. A thousand different jobs and career paths. You've got your conceptual artists and your gallery artists and your fine artists, your wildlife artists and portaiture artists, landscape artists and those folks who go do amazing pen and ink renderings of old factories and steam trains. Then you have your commercial illustrators and your children's book illustrators and your Hallmark illustrators, book cover illustrators, medical illustrators. Concept artists for games and movies, set designers, character designers, fashion designers, storyboard artists. The list goes on and on. Once you know how to draw and paint there's a billion things you can do.

And what have I done, in the past few years? Academic realism renderings from still life or reference, and World of Warcraft fan art. Hm.




It's not really what I mean to do. The reason I went into Illustration instead of Fine Art was because I wanted to tell stories with my pictures. The thing is, there's two things I've done for as long as I can remember: I've drawn pictures, and I've written stories. I started writing stories before I could write, telling them to my grandmother, who would transcribe them for me. Once I could write, I wrote a lot. I wrote a whole darn novel in high school. I wrote short stories in college. When I started playing roleplaying video games seven years ago, I wrote for my characters. I still do. I have hundreds of pages of storytelling - some of the best stuff I've ever written - stowed away for my elves and hunters and alien spacegoats. And of course I've drawn pictures to go alongside.



And this is where I've been left thinking the past few weeks. I've been playing World of Warcraft for over six years now. The game is showing its age, graphically and as far as the entertainment value of the mechanics. The latest expansion still has stuff I want to see and do, and I'm devoted to my friends and my raiding group, but week by week it's falling away as a source of inspiration. It's hard for me to find reason to write for my characters anymore, and when I do artwork of them - like Tavlo's finished concept piece above - it feels more like practice than something finished. There's nothing wrong with doing fan art and I'd still love to get a piece up on the WoW website, but anymore it feels like I should be pushing my skills towards something more. But what? What?

The two things I do well, that I've always done, are drawing pictures and telling stories. For some reason, I've never thought once about doing comics. (Or if I have, I've thought, "What? Me? How??"

We never really had comics in the house growing up. I remember my brother had some great big Superman one, but I think it was just because it was a collector's edition or something. My Dad and I always read the Funnies together out of the Sunday paper, but that was just... Garfield and so forth. I did always love Garfield and had several Garfield books (early love for fat lazy cats... *stares at my Dudley*) but other than that... no Marvel. No DC. We watched movies and cartoons on TV. We just weren't comic people.

So (oddly, like other things in my life) I'd never really considered it. It's funny, because I'm one of those writers who "sees" everything as they write, like a movie playing in my head. It's all already there. I'd just have to pic the shots and draw them and put down the dialog.

It took me about 5 minutes to think up a story and a setting and a handful of characters. Now they're all leaping around through my head chaotically, waiting for a script. And I keep asking myself, "Could I do this?" Could I draw what I see in my head and write this story? Could I merge these two pasttimes into something from which I could build a solid career?

When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher wanted me to be a writer. My Art teacher wanted me to be an artist. My music teacher - well, I'm not a miracle-worker here. Two out of three ain't bad.

Then Fix it, Dear Liza

So last week I rambled about the frustrations of Making Better Art, then promptly turned on the "How Do I?" machine. Because it always comes down to figuring out HOW to do better; otherwise it's just empty rambling. If you want to do better, you figure out how.

Now and then, a solution pops up that is just... ridiculously obvious and easy. It just brings about this big sigh of relief and a whole lot of inspiration.

Mind you, this isn't an overarching solution to ALL the problems, but it definitely helps with one or two. One of my greatest frustrations working digitally has been struggling with brushes that just don't work how I want them to. I've never really liked working in Photoshop; I still have CS4, so I'm without some of the fancy new blending brushes and such. It always seemed very flat and sterile to me, anyway. So for the past 3 or 4 years now I've been working mostly in Painter, and just using Photoshop for adjustments and effects.

Painter has a HUGE number of brushes, the majority of them designed to replicate natural media. Some, like the Real Pencil brushes, I really like. Others, I just could never get them to work how I wanted to. But I thought, with all those brushes, there must be SOME that work for me, right?? Try as I might, I could never find them.

Now often, I hear digital artists talking about brushes they've made, but so many of them seem just like fancy effects brushes, and I thought, why bother? I have all these pre-made ones anyway. The other day, though, I finally hit my limit of patience with those pre-made ones, and opened up Painter's Brush Creator.

Like most things in Painter, it's hidden in the Windows menu, like it's a palette you need to open and not a "thing you do." It's also a little overwhelming:



ALL the variables to create or adjust ANY brush are all there. The tricky thing is, some only activate depending on other variables, so there's a lot of trial and error. Especially when you're not sure what each variable *does*. I'm sure there's some listing somewhere online. I just went through a lot of trial and error, starting with the scratchboard tool, which I usually use for linework. I wanted something a bit more refined, pressure-sensitive, and variable-width, as linework is a subtle art. After a while I came up with a nice little brush that seemed to be doing what I wanted it to do most of the time.

The week before I'd gone over a character sketch, *trying* to be careful about it, but more or less making a mess:



I started going back over the drawing with my new brush, taking advantage of it's smaller minimum size and ability to widen out and darken where needed:



Huge difference, no?

HUGE difference.

I love traditional media, partly because it's so forgiving. A smudge of charcoal or pencil on paper is in itself delightful because of it's reality, and drawings and paintings are given character through the application of the media. I'm not sure if it's an effect of the opaque media versus painting with light (which is really what you're doing digitally) but digital paintings clamor to be "clean". I think there are a lot of factors involved, but having the right brushes for your style and technique is one of the most important to creating "clean" digital work.

After I got my little lineart pen down, I went back and created a nice soft painting brush as well. Along with two erasures and a blender, I put the new brushes in their own little palette, and I'm very interested in taking some time to experiment with them. If the painting brush can revolutionize my painting (which always looks overly thick and smeary to me) like the linework one revolutionized my lines, I will be extremely happy.

Then I can get to work on all those other things I was frustrated with!

Stretching

Forgive me if I've written about this before.

One of my biggest frustrations right now is not being able to create what I want to create. Most of what I post here is academic classwork. Figure drawings, still life paintings, studies, etc. that are all created according to assignment parameters with suitable references. I spend a great deal of time on my schoolwork, earn appropriate grades for the time and effort I put into it all. It all looks good and I'm quite content with it, and growing ever more confident in my ability to do a nice figure drawing or paint a still life, or whatever else is asked of me in my classes.

That's not to say I'm not learning anything - the practice alone, of having to do two or three detailed and polished figure drawings a week - is invaluable. The classes themselves have tons of wonderful practical information organized in a way to make learning and understanding easy. I've progressed more in the past two years at AAU than I ever did before.

On the side, however, I'm constantly looking at other artists, tutorials, articles, how-to's, books, and other information. I'm also always experimenting. Usually the experimenting comes in the form of something drawn from my World of Warcraft playing, as that's what my friends and I are talking about all the time and it's fun to interact with them about it. It's a great source of ideas. It's also a great way to pinpoint where I'm lacking.

Schoolwork doesn't tell me where I'm lacking, because I'm not yet focusing on what I really want to do. I'm learning and perfecting, but I'm not *stretching*. Stretching involves going beyond what we know, what we're confident in. It involves reaching for something we can only imagine.

This is slightly related to my entry last week, about the huge difference between free-drawing and relying on copying. This takes it a step further, to the difference between relying on references and working from our own heads. This is where I see the huge bulwark of frustration in my own work. My little experiments are not near what I want them to be. My weaknesses blare out like overzealous horn sections and make me wince and want to look away.

But I'm more driven to keep stretching than anything else.

It's difficult at times to watch a tutorial - like the one I was watching Here, a great resource, the other night - and then attempt to do it myself... and fail miserably. Maybe not giving myself enough time, maybe trying something *too* difficult, but still, the obvious weak points bubble to the surface and infuriate me.

It does no good to feel badly about it, or to sulk about being yet unable to turn out awesome drawings and paintings. The only things that can be done is to look at what works, what doesn't, what can be improved next time. And try to build up some plan of attack to tackle those weak points so there are fewer and fewer Bubbles of Disappointment each time.

My short list:

• Spend more time and attention on composition (Still Life course helping here)
  
• Push values and colors even further (Still life also helping here)
  
• Create a focal point and let everything else gradually fall back (Anatomy drawings helping here, actually, in ways I hadn't expected)
• Don't rush the drawing (I have a horrible habit, when working away from the easel, of skipping steps in drawing and ending up with incorrect proportions)
• Settle on a color scheme (lessons from Color & Design)
• Be more accurate in realism and detail (Slow down, practice practice practice)

Even the short list, at times, seems insurmountable. The only thing I can do is try again, with another silly little piece of WoW fanart, or some idea thrown to me by a friend. It feels sometimes that no matter what I do, it will never click together how I hope it will, and I'll be left doing nice drawings and paintings from photographs and references. But the storyteller in me begs me to keep stretching, keep trying.

So keep trying, I shall.

It's All How You See It

I'm going to write something here that may be a little controversial and/or rub people the wrong way. It's been getting under my skin, though, for a while now, so I just have to say something about it.

I've noticed, especially lately, that there are a whole lot of people out there doing a whole lot of tracing of reference sources, layering over in Photoshop, or using a grid to get their subject on their canvas, whatever that canvas might be. Before I say anything else, I want to insist that all of these techniques can be wonderful tools. I've had instructors comment to students to use a grid to get a proportionally-correct drawing; I've had assignments that stated specifically to use a grid. I've had instructors give the very good advice to trace a reference onto a sheet of translucent paper, then hold it up over a drawing to see where the drawing is wrong (actually, the best way to use tracing.) I'm certainly not talking about using layers in digital programs or sheets of tracing paper to gradually perfect a drawing, either. Basically, I'm talking about using these tools to an extent that you're doing little to no drawing yourself, and doing so until you're dependent on it.

Related to this is the use of the eyedropper tool in digital art to pick up original colors from a reference. There's TONS to be learned by doing this on a few practice paintings, but someday you have to learn to mix those colors yourself. Just like someday you have to learn to draw what you see without any training wheels, without anything showing you the way but your own eyes and sense of space.




I have done all these things myself. When I was doing aviation art, I regretfully admit, I did very little raw drawing. I did a whole lot of gathering reference material and composing a scene, then tracing it onto a canvas. I think it's part of the reason I never felt like a "real" artist in those days. I was painting decently, and I could detail those traced drawings like crazy, but the gist of being an artist escaped me because of the shortcuts I was taking. I was more of an artist when I was in 11th grade, drawing from scratch photos cut out of magazines, than I was when I was making the most money painting airplanes.

When I began classes at AAU, it was that time spent drawing when I was a teenager that came back to me, and the lessons I learned when given Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain when I was 13. Contour line drawing. Drawing upside-down. Drawing negative space. I didn't understand sighting until I got the hang of it in my first class, but after that, it all seemed to make sense. No, it's not easy. It's not always quick. It's not always perfect. But it's incredibly liberating to be able to draw anything you can see before your eyes or in your head with nothing but a pencil in your hand.





Drawing, at its core, is all about seeing relationships. It's about judging the distance between two points, or discerning the angle of a line drawn between them. Drawing gets down to geometry without the numbers. Even if there is only a dot on a page, there's still a relationship between that dot and the corner, or the dot and the edges. If you can judge the relationships, you can take a blank sheet of paper and draw the dot in the same exact spot as the original. Try it. It's a fantastic exercise for *seeing*.

We trace and we grid and we use these tools to correct our imperfect, unpracticed sight. We use them to *learn* where that dot is. The important question, however, is are we using them actively, or passively? If I simply lay my empty paper over the paper with the dot, and make a mark where I see the dot showing through, what am I learning? I'm merely following train tracks, doing nothing myself. However, if I do my best to see where that dot should be, and put it down where I think it should go, THEN lay it over the original to see how close I was to the original mark, and look at the difference, and correct myself, then I'm LEARNING.

We should always, always be LEARNING.

Learning to see is like any other skill. It's like hearing intervals in music or knowing how hard to press the brakes in your car to slow to a stop. Learning to see allows us to look around our world and see it for what it really is, and manipulate that reality to create art. It allows us to take the clear visions we see in our heads - in whatever imaginative style we see them - and put them down on paper, on canvas, on our computers. Seeing relationships correctly is essential in every visual art, whether fashion design, graphic design, interior design, fine art, illustration... We have to be able to put down something that makes visual sense. There is not always a template. There is not always a reference you can trace or copy. The beauty of our own art should come from how we uniquely see and recreate our subjects. You can't be unique and creative and fully develop yourself as an artist if you're constantly riding a train track.



This is not to say, "Throw away your tracing paper, never make another layer in Photoshop again." Copying is a time-tested method of learning from the masters. Just make sure, as I said before, you're learning, and not just taking a shortcut. If you can do it yourself, with your own eyes, do it. Even if you have to go back and correct things after. Learn to see. Learn to draw. Learn that age-old, treasured skill of the artist. It's not something just anyone can do. It's *ours*.

And from there, learn to judge value, to discern color. The world is so much more beautiful when you can see all its shades and hues and know what they really are.

The work on this page is all schoolwork from the past week. There are lots of imperfections, mistakes, areas that could be better. The charcoal anatomical studies took a long time to draw and a longer time to render in value. The still life compositions take no prisoners in their difficulty to initially draw correctly. With all of them, there were moments where I stepped back, grit my teeth, and wiped entire sections off the paper or canvas. All of them were drawn with nothing more than a pencil or brush, my hands, and my eyes.

When you can really see, you can draw anything. The harder I work, the more I progress, the more I desire to learn to see even better. It simply unlocks every possibility an artist could dream of.

Catchup

Warning! This post contains images of nude figure drawings. If this is NSFW for you, you've been warned!

I have, unfortunately, let this blog go. For a week. Or two? What was it... I missed a weekly posting, at least. Sinus infection = me staring at the TV on the couch = needing to catch up with work and school = blog getting shoved to the background. But ah, look! You get a veritable smorgasbord for your patience, as I'll now just put up everything.

Anatomy is giving me a lot of opportunities to do... long charcoal drawings. So much so that I'm thinking of tweaking my charcoal technique in order to "get artistic" with them, since the drawings themselves are coming out pretty solid. These two skeletal drawings took several hours each:



They're both done on white paper that's toned with charcoal, then the lights picked out with an erasure and the darks shaded in with charcoal pencil. I'm really thinking of switching to a big charcoal stick for some of the shading though, to loosen it up a little and make application go a bit faster.

I was told last week by the instructor that for the exercises, taking a long time is really a luxury, and he's curious what I could do in less time. So, I limited myself to an hour each with this past week's exercises. I was actually pretty happy I could get down what I did, though I didn't have time to really linger on subtleties and "learn" them. Hopefully he won't mind if I go back to my lingering. I have no idea how we're supposed to learn what a knee really looks like if we're not given time to figure it out!


The thing is, I can do the basic vine drawing for things like this in 10-15 minutes. It's the rendering of the light and shadow and all the little variations in-between that takes forever. So I'm thinking, if I start messing with a half-stick of charcoal instead of the thinner pencil, maybe I can get it down faster, and a little looser as well. I'm sure if nothing else, I'll get even MORE charcoal under my fingernails!

I'm loving the still life painting course - whatever it is I'm doing there, I seem to be doing it right. I did this charming little display of cat toys last week with a limited palette: black, white, terra rosa, yellow ochre, and cadmium yellow. It's amazing what all can be brought out just through those colors.


This week we're using the full palette, but without black - ultramarine and burnt umber instead. Working with the limited palette really does get you thinking very frugally about color. When you can see what you can do with so little, just the barest spots of real red or real yellow make a big difference. I found it also keeps things muted and realistic. We'll see how that keeps up with the full palette paintings this week.

Last but certainly not least, I got to start on a new commission, just in the sketching stage so far. This is very neat because it's a fictional character, and not really a World of Warcraft character, plus Victorian-themed with a lot of fun stuff to play with. She lives a bit of a double-life, so one portrait will be a photographed mugshot, and the other will be a formal oil painting. I'll do both digitally, so there's going to be a lot of development and experimentation. So far, we just have the sketches to start with.



Now that I'm all caught up, I've got more time again for general sketching and on-the-side drawing and painting fun. Hopefully I'll be able to keep that up and throw some of that stuff up here soon, too. =)

Out of Nothing

Warning! This post contains images of nude figure drawings. If this is NSFW for you, you've been warned!

A day late here, waylaid by the yearly sinus troubles. Thankfully the antibiotic is kicking in and I have some energy today. So! A quick catch-up entry while I finish my coffee.

Classes started up last week, though the first week is always rather slow to start. The still life painting course did start us up with a little grayscale exercise - "choose two simple white objects" the assignment suggested, so I go bounding off to gather up a Wii remote and oven timer. Let's start off on the right foot, I say!



I was very curious about the whole oil painting thing, because I've figured it's been something I've been doing wrong for quite awhile, having taught myself. From what I've gathered so far, I haven't been "doing it wrong" any more than I'd been drawing wrong - it just all gets down to process. That's really the beauty I've found in AAU courses that I haven't found in others I've taken. I've taken drawing courses that have you do a lot of exercises - negative space drawing, contour line drawing, various subject matter - and that's all great practice and perspective - but the actual process of drawing I've learned in the AAU courses have been ten times more valuable.

I always maintain that the most important part of drawing is learning to draw what you see and not what you think - at least for drawing that has any connection to realism. At the same time, even if you're working purely based on your own imagination, you need a logical process. And that logical process I've been taught in the past year has been the most useful thing.

Step 1: Draw a rough sketch or a thumbnail of what you want to draw. Get an idea.
Step 2: Start with a large form. Rough out smaller forms via measurement, sighting, and careful observation.
Step 3: Refine the line drawing. Designate light and shadow sides.
Step 4: Fill in shadow/light tone.
Step 5: Refine values.

Those steps, every time, create a nice drawing. Step 2 is always the most difficult - it's the real *drawing* part. But once you get through Step 2 successfully, you're sailing.

And what I found last week, it works exactly the same for paint. Sure there's more to do with color and such, but the basics of defining the drawing, the light and shadow sides, then refining all worked the same way. Having that *process* down is just such a confidence booster.

I think one of the biggest mistakes we make is to look at a part of a subject, or a whole idea, and think, "That's too much, that's too difficult." Then we tend to concentrate on that difficult part and put it before all others. I think it's the reason why those who work primarily on drawing portraits, for instance, tend to work on the central features - the eyes, ears, nose and mouth - and forget about the rest of the head. So they'll have a very nice face with an undersized head and poorly-rendered hair. Likewise, in painting something (and I've often done this) we'll get all caught up in rendering the details of the main subject that the background and environment falls into obscurity, despite it being so important to the subject itself. I think of all the airplane paintings I did with very nicely-rendered aircraft and very basic, cheesy land/sky backgrounds, and I just shake my head.

The work has to be seen as a *whole*. And stepping through a process, for whatever subject matter it is, helps it all come together.

I've always felt there's a bit of magic that goes on when you take a blank white sheet of paper or canvas and create art, and put something there that looks like something that wasn't there before. The hardest thing is always making that decision to put that first mark on the page. Where do you put it? What will it become? So often, if you start with the idea of "this line is the eyebrow of a person" that first line will be off, then the whole rest of the drawing will be off. But if you use that first line to define "A person goes here" - and that's *ALL* - then you've started something that can slowly be worked up into something accurate to its source, whether real or imagined.

My first anatomy drawing this semester was a torso study, of a sadly thin woman (I want to feed her cookies!) I'm not used to drawing half a body on a page. I wondered for a moment how I would get it right. I ended up starting with one long vertical line, that ran (and still runs) from the base of her neck to her legs pressed together. That was the start of the process.


She's not perfect - her head is a little small, I'm sure some other things are a bit off - but in other ways, it's that miracle of the process again. Line by line, shape by shape, form by form. Out of nothing.

The Past and the Future

There was a day back in the year 2000, when I said to myself, "I think I'll try painting airplanes." I'm not sure where this idea came from. I'd gone to a couple airshows, was playing Flight Sims and building models as a hobby. I bought a few beautiful books of airplane photos, mostly warbirds. Then one day I decided I'd figure out how to paint them.

It was the first time I seriously ventured into any artistic arena, and I'm not sure why I hit on airplanes. I'd always drawn portraits and animals, not airplanes. But I did some drawings, copying those beautiful photographs, then got some brushes and canvases and oils, and in the summer of 2001 I sold my first painting. It was pretty exciting. And I just took it from there.

I had no idea what I was doing. For the next four years I did the best I could, learning as I went, taking commissions, painting a lot of X-planes and P-51 Mustangs. I donated a painting to the Civil Air Patrol and ended up doing a big commission for their Headquarters in Washington. I had my stuff put on veteran's calendars and inside model kit boxes and all kinds of fun things. And I had no idea what I was doing.

I simply wore out from the scrabble. Imagine trying to climb a mountain with no equipment, instead creating cleats and picks and ropes and things from the rocks and scrub around you. For as far as I was able to go with it, it exhausted me. When I finally called it quits, I didn't pick up a pencil again to draw, at all, for the next eight months.

The above UH-1E Huey, a Marine gunship from VMO-2 in 1966, is my first piece of aviation art since 2005. It was a commission from a friend. It's drawn in charcoal - which I'd never used for an aircraft before - and was researched on an Internet so much more expanded and easy-to-use than it was just 6 years ago. I enjoyed the research, I enjoyed the history, I enjoyed drawing and rendering the aircraft itself. It didn't quite hold the same magic and excitement as aviation art had for me once before, though. Would I do another aircraft? Oh sure, of course, any day. But I'm pretty sure I'll never pursue it - "I'm going to paint airplanes!" - the way I once did.

After I finished up the Huey, I ended up pulling up these PDF versions of Andrew Loomis' books I've had saved for a while. Andrew Loomis was one of the greatest illustrators of the 20th century, and is referenced in a lot of illustration and drawing classes. In 1939 he put out his first book, "Fun with a Pencil." It's very lighthearted and has a wonderful style to it that just yells "1930's". At the same time, his easy-to-follow system of deconstructing heads and bodies, features and faces, is invaluable.

I've never been a cartoonist. It's something I consider a weakness now, as I struggle to capture movement or emotion in an efficient number of lines. I spent the next three days drawing Loomis' heads out of his book. Pages and pages of them.



Now I want to go back to my mugshots and try to do cartoon faces that capture character and expression. The next part of the book is about bodies and figures, and I'm looking forward to that, too. My Anatomy class started Monday, and I can't wait to get drawing. What excites me now isn't a certain thing in my head that I want to draw or paint, but rather gaining the tools and abilities to draw whatever comes to mind. Maybe it will be an airplane. Maybe it will be three people working on an airplane and a car driving up in the foreground to drop off a passenger.

Starting to climb the mountain, this time I've got cleats on. THAT is exciting.

Tiny Sketchez

I always like to finish things. See things through. Polish and shine to as close to perfection as possible. I've never been so much about ideas as I am about process and completion, so I've often relied on other sources for inspiration - such as commissions or asking people to suggest certain subjects. The ideas I do have often get put on hold until everything else is done, and often never get realized at all.

In some ways, it's been a bit of a handicap, because most of what I've done I've done to create a finished picture, and therefore most of my time has gone into detailing and finishing. Once I started drawing academically it soon became clear there were two clear stages of a drawing: one, creating the drawing itself, and the other, finishing. Having always been good at the finishing (I used to do a lot of tracing or using grids to get my initial outline) it's taken me a while to get the hang of doing that drawing. It's always an exhausting challenge, and I always feel relieved when I can just sit back and start rendering value and detail.

That said, there's a whole other... pre-drawing concept that I've hardly ever touched at all. And that's the little miracle of the sketch.

Sketches are like notes taken for writing a paper or a story; they aren't full sentences, and are often poorly spelled and sometimes illegible. They're an idea slapped down for later, or just to get it out and down so you no longer have to hold it in your head. They don't have to be perfect and they certainly don't have to be finished. I've never really bothered with them much, because they've always bothered *me*. They never look "right" or "correct". They're never detailed or exact. They're never finished. They're throwaway art and a waste of time when I could be working on something bigger.

But what's to work on, without the ideas? What's an illustrator without something to illustrate?

My biggest hobby is writing fanfiction for World of Warcraft. I've been doing it for... oh, five years now, and have a whole stable full of beloved characters and chapters and chapters of story for all of them. A few weeks ago one of my friends (and fellow-writer) asked me if I ever thought about illustrating my stories. I said she must be crazy, as making illustrations, even black and white ones, would take forever. No no, she said, not finished illustrations, just little sketches. Quick little sketches to go along with the story.

What a concept.

Surprisingly, it only takes about a half hour to do five or six - plenty for the usual length of my stories. They're very basic, very loose. But they surprise me every time. Every time, I say, "Wow, I *could* draw that." Drawing a figure - or two - in a certain pose or scene, or drawing an environment in perspective, or an object... things I would never do otherwise, but pop out of the writing for me to draw. I even did a friend's story, just for fun. And sure they are just notations - honestly, they're less than thumbnails - but if I really wanted to, any of them could be developed into a full illustration. And that's what being an illustrator is all about, isn't it?

And now I can't post a story without including some tiny sketchez.