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.

Off We Go

Now that the website is finally done (check out the fancy new dekraus.com!) I've got about 10 days left to pursue... other things. Other things have ended up being some commissioned work (which is awesome) and some fix-my-computer work (which I don't mind!) along with a few other things on the side.

One of the commissions was actually started back before the holidays, of a World of Warcraft character. I'm always happy when these pop up because that's mostly what I draw myself on my own time, so I'm pretty familiar. This fellow gave me a unique look to work with, which I really enjoyed, especially all the detailing (like all that hair!) This was also the first time I used the DAZ 3D studio for my reference. I ended up changing his right arm from the model's, but having the general pose and lighting was super-useful.



The other commission is actually *gasp* aviation art, which I haven't done in a long time. I've been gleefully going through references for Huey helicopters for the past three or four days, figuring out the proper variant and markings and doo-dads on the sides. I'd forgotten how much fun that is. It's going to be a large charcoal, too, which I'm also excited about. Charcoal has recently become a favorite medium of mine, but I've never done anything like aircraft with it. Very exciting!

Here is a little study I did yesterday while "getting to know" the Huey. It's wonky in a lot of ways because I was trying to turn a UH-1H into a UH-1E. DON'T GET ME STARTED!


I've also continued doing my drawing exercises, though I haven't been as steady with them as I would like. I've especially slacked off on the painting ones, due in part to some frustration with Painter. When I finally find a brush I like using cheese will fall from the sky and everyone will win a million dollars. Really.

But here's a lovely sketch of Julianne Moore, just because.


I know, kind of doesn't look like her. Oh well. That's what sketches are for.

Website Whoas

I wish I had some art to show this week, but unfortunately 80% of my time has gone INTO THE WEBSITE.

I tend to do this - instead of just adding a few more pictures to my website, I decide to rewrite the whole thing. This year, I'm adding some Flash galleries, and I figured out how to do a php contact form. I've never worked with Flash or php before. I have no idea what I'm doing.

I'm not a web designer. Let's make that clear. I wouldn't even say I dabble in web design, or that I particularly enjoy it. It's just been a necessity for the past 10 years. When I first started showing my work online, there was no DeviantArt or the many other gallery sites - at least not that I could find. Everyone had a Geocities site. I got myself one and an "HTML for Dummies" book and went at it.

My first site was hand-coded in a text-based HTML editor. It didn't take long to memorize how to format tables and all the "a href=" "" and so forth. But that wasn't enough!! By then I was getting the hang of Photoshop, and soon started to make Photoshop-based sites with slices and rollovers, figuring it out by trial and error and whatever tutorials I could find.

Sometime in the past 6 years or so, I did take a web design class or two, and ended up with Adobe Dreamweaver. Having such an advanced site builder/editor was a miraculous advancement. I could build and modify and maintain sites so much easier - I even made a couple for some other people! And for the most part, the little things I knew how to do or could figure out were enough. But never for my own site!

One of the big questions is always, "How do I display images online in a way convenient and interesting to viewers?" You have to think about loading times, and thumbnails, and galleries and navigation. How many images to show and how many to leave out, how to display them, how to protect them, so on and so forth. I've always wanted to use Flash galleries, and I've had Adobe Flash for some time, but no idea how to use it. This year, I found some fantastic tutorials and tackled it.

I just spent the last hour and a half trying to add a tiny preloader to my first gallery (which took me two hours to build) and so far failing. It's been like this every day. Two steps forward, one and a half back, incredibly slow. The payoff is that it's a thing I toss up on the Internet and can leave alone for a year. But these weeks putting it together... AUGH.

The website though... beyond this blog, beyond my DA account, beyond my online AAU portfolio - the website is the home of my artwork online. It has to speak for my work, not just where it is and what it is, but where I want it to be and how I want others to interpret my professionalism most of all. If I will spend hours and hours polishing a website to the best of my ability, having no clue whatsoever what I'm doing... imagine what I'll do with a piece of artwork.

Then I'll have to rebuild a gallery to contain it. =P

Getting Down to Business

This year, I'm trying something new.

One of the interesting things about being self-employed (as well as being an online student) is handling your schedule. I've had people say to me, "I'd never have the self-discipline!" and I also know there's just as many envying the fact I can (or could!) pretty much get up whenever I want to and never be held to a work schedule set by someone else. One of my good friends is a retail manager who sometimes has to get up at 5AM and be stuck at his store for the next 12 hours. I also think of my mother, who got up at 6AM to go to her classroom until 4PM every single weekday from September until June. That kind of set schedule and routine is incredibly intimidating to me, so hats off to everyone who does the 9-5 thing!

That said, there's also something really important about that kind of schedule, and it's not just the assured work-time. That's the obvious part - that here you've got time set aside to *work*. The less obvious part is that scheduled work days also give a person scheduled time *off*. Sure there are sometimes extra things to bring home now and then, but a lot of folks when they leave work, they leave work.

Working for yourself, you never leave work. It's always there. Prodding you. Poking you. Telling you you'd better look at this or do that. Maybe it comes up in the morning; sometimes it comes up at night. Days set aside to be specifically taken "off" end up with this background static of stress because of all the little work things buzzing at you to be done. Sometimes there just are no days off, and it goes on and on and gets more and more stressful and really unpleasant overall.

So before New Year's - actually, on New Year's eve - I had a long long talk with my buddy the retail manager. I have been worn out, stressed out, not getting enough done and not getting good rest, and wanted to change. He explained to me the *reward* of keeping to a schedule - how if you work 6 hours or whatever, you can then walk away and *reward* yourself with absolutely free relaxation time. That sounded awfully good to me, since because most of my efforts go into schoolwork, I see very little reward from it all (A's are nice and all, but they can't pay for a movie!) So together we worked out a viable schedule which *gasp* included me getting up at a respectable hour, doing nothing but *work* (no breaks for Cheezburger sites!!), taking a lunch break, working some more, then having the evening off.

The evenings are the important bits. During the semester I'd often be working very hard until 9 or 9:30, then it would take me forever to wind down to be able to sleep, then I'd be tired the next day.

So I installed a site-blocker addon for Firefox, made up some schedule spreadsheets and printed them up, and set my alarm for 7:40. This week has been fantastic so far.

I've scheduled two hours a day for drawing exercises. Simple things like drawing a bunch of hands....



Or doing a quick master copy...



Or just experimenting with Painter and Photoshop (that's scheduled for this afternoon!)

In between those two exercise hours I have "project time" - which could be anything. This week it's updating and redesigning my website, dekraus.com. I've learned some Flash to build some custom galleries, and will hopefully get it up and running by next week.

Tuesday is a day off, since that's grocery day! I also took Sunday off, since my mom and I often have brunch that day. On Tuesday I just relaxed, played games, did some chores, but then in the evening I ended up drawing just for my own pleasure, a little sketch of my WoW goblin, Elli:




I don't know how often I've *wanted* to do little sketches like that but never had the time, because there was always work to do. Drawing for fun on my days off?? What a concept!

So my New Year's resolution is to stick to this schedule. I'm really curious how it will work for school, and really hopeful it will help prevent some of the exhausting 12-hour painting marathons I had last semester. At very least I feel like I'm really working, and not just *trying* to work, which is a subtle thing but very good for my whole mentality.

The other good thing is that I've got in the schedule to update this blog once a week. No more months between updates! I promise!

Looking... Sideways

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

At the end of the year, "looking ahead" and "looking behind" seem to be the things to do. I'm taking a more conservative approach this year and looking sideways, like in my self-portrait up there, which was part of my Intermediate Figure Drawing final. Sometimes it's not about what you did last year or what you plan to do in the coming year, but more about how your current state might take you unexpected places. I've found that it's nearly impossible, at least when the semester is in full swing, to get anything I've planned to do done, hence why I'm not going to make any concrete predictions for the coming new year. I'd much rather take a few sidelong glances and see what's been happening and where it all might be leading.

What's special about the artwork I'm including in this entry is that all of them pulled me towards different places. I'm used to doing "good" drawings or paintings, but I'm not used to surprising myself creatively. As I've said before, I'm not always the most creative artist, because I tend to concentrate so much on realism and likeness that I don't bother with it. The following assignments forced me to take the time to be creative. And they ended up pulling me off sideways, taking me to places I hadn't expected to go.



The above charcoal drawing I call, "Bigger than I Am". It came about during the composition module of my intermediate figure drawing course, during which we were supposed to use light and shadow to design a figurative composition. Usually for figure drawing classes I just take a photo and draw it and not worry about composition. For this one, I ended up taking about 20 photos of myself in my exercise clothes lit by a clip-on lamp at about knee level. But when I got to drawing it, it started to mean something. Maybe something bigger than I am. It was a breakthrough for me in the application of the figure.



What that did for figures, the above gouache painting from Color & Design, our second big project, did for color. Before this painting, I'd always painted colors as I saw them. This time, I had a black and white printout of my composition and a limited palette of six colors. I never would have painted a blue-green rock or given the sea a touch of violet. But when I went ahead and did it, it *worked*. Granted, the above image was later tweaked - her hair is too orange, the shirt too purple, the skin too warm - and I'll upload a new version once I get it back from the school. But the thing was, I found out I didn't need to copy colors anymore - that I could make choices based on the entire mood I wanted to convey, use colors to set the scene, and still pull it all together and make it believable. Another breakthrough.





A bit later in Intermediate Figure Drawing, we were given a photo of a model and told to be creative with it. Now, I'd struggled some in the "exaggeration" model - I don't like to exaggerate or stylize if I don't have to. REAL REAL REAL!!! LIKENESS!! I admit to being a little caught up. So I paced around quite a bit with this one, staring at this guy curled up on a podium. What came across to me was this mood carried across in his posture, and the feathers came from there. I call it "The Shame of Flight." Every now and then a gift feels like a burden, doesn't it?

I've always thought that exaggeration or stylization would turn my figures into cartoons. But it could turn them into something else, perhaps not real, but just *as* real as I'm used to. That was another breakthrough, learning to use the figure to pull something absolutely unreal out of the ether and make it appear real.




This last one is the second half of my Intermediate Figure Drawing final. I'm honestly not sure if my figure drawing has improved that much from Spring semester, but what I do with it has certainly been freed up a lot. I think it helped to have a more open-minded, easy-going instructor who encouraged what I did right and graciously nitpicked what I did wrong (i.e. he told me the strings on the head and upraised arm should be taut - oh, I know, I know!) I mean, it's great to be able to draw figures, but even more inspiring to be able to DO something with them. And the more I draw them, the more I remember about certain bones and muscles, the landscape of the body, so it becomes easier and easier to do it every time, and easier and easier to apply those things to more creative pursuits. I still feel it's absolutely necessary to take some kind of figurative course every semester (I have anatomy coming up in the spring) but at the same time, the further I go the more confident I get.




This last thing I'm putting up here is my final project for Color & Design, my mandala. Being a bit of a Buddhist myself, when I found out we were doing mandalas as the final project I was all sorts of enthusiastic and interested, as I've actually thought of making them in the past. When we got to the actual project though, for some reason my mind went to trees. Maybe because it was late fall and they were all going to sleep; maybe because I have this weird obsession with preserving them... maybe simply because natural elements fall into place so nicely in a design. Anyway, I ended up with this Ode to Trees, with the old beech that grew on my grandparent's land featured in the center. It fell to pieces years ago after a heavy ice-storm and I've always wanted to do a piece of artwork for it. So, here we are.

I really don't know what to say about this piece. I'm posting it because I did a split-complementary color scheme right, about the most complex application of color we studied. I'm posting it because I created a balanced and interesting design with a clear focus point. I'm posting it because the thumbnails, lineart, 6" value rough, three 6" color roughs and the 10" final took more hours of tedious painting than I can calculate. I'm posting it because I did it and it was deemed successful.

It's so far off to the side of any work I'd planned to do this year, and any work I can imagine doing next year, but I learned a whole lot in doing it, which is what makes it so worthwhile. This past year has been tremendously frustrating in a lot of ways, as most all of my time gets sucked into doing the schoolwork above. I keep my fingers crossed for an eventual payoff in the future, but for the time-being, sideways we go, learning all the while.

By the way, I've got prints available of most of the above pieces at both Imagekind (fine fancy prints) and DeviantArt (less expensive prints and mugs and stuff), if anyone is interested!