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!
