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.