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.