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.

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!