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.

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