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!

Words and Pictures

I've been doing a lot of thinking in the past few weeks. Thankfully, I've gotten a bit over my frustration obstacles, at least to be happy with what I'm doing right now. I can't argue much with my little still life paintings or anatomy drawings. What I've been thinking about though - for a change - is inspiration. Maybe it was just the horrible headcold I got stopping me in my tracks. Maybe it was other things. But I've come out of it with some interesting replies to the old "Where do I go now?"

"Where do I want to go?" is really the question. "What am I doing?" is another one. All of the... technique stuff - all of these gestures and sketches and anatomy drawings and little oil paintings - they're all like, learning equations for an engineer, rules of physics, all the stuff you need to know to build a bridge. But in the end, you build a bridge. But of course you can't just walk out the door and build a bridge. There has to be a need for a bridge, some specific bridge that needs building. Likewise, an artist needs something to do with their skills and knowledge. And that's something the general public asks artists and art students all the time. "Oh, you're an artist? So what do you DO?"

Because there can be a million different answers. A thousand different jobs and career paths. You've got your conceptual artists and your gallery artists and your fine artists, your wildlife artists and portaiture artists, landscape artists and those folks who go do amazing pen and ink renderings of old factories and steam trains. Then you have your commercial illustrators and your children's book illustrators and your Hallmark illustrators, book cover illustrators, medical illustrators. Concept artists for games and movies, set designers, character designers, fashion designers, storyboard artists. The list goes on and on. Once you know how to draw and paint there's a billion things you can do.

And what have I done, in the past few years? Academic realism renderings from still life or reference, and World of Warcraft fan art. Hm.




It's not really what I mean to do. The reason I went into Illustration instead of Fine Art was because I wanted to tell stories with my pictures. The thing is, there's two things I've done for as long as I can remember: I've drawn pictures, and I've written stories. I started writing stories before I could write, telling them to my grandmother, who would transcribe them for me. Once I could write, I wrote a lot. I wrote a whole darn novel in high school. I wrote short stories in college. When I started playing roleplaying video games seven years ago, I wrote for my characters. I still do. I have hundreds of pages of storytelling - some of the best stuff I've ever written - stowed away for my elves and hunters and alien spacegoats. And of course I've drawn pictures to go alongside.



And this is where I've been left thinking the past few weeks. I've been playing World of Warcraft for over six years now. The game is showing its age, graphically and as far as the entertainment value of the mechanics. The latest expansion still has stuff I want to see and do, and I'm devoted to my friends and my raiding group, but week by week it's falling away as a source of inspiration. It's hard for me to find reason to write for my characters anymore, and when I do artwork of them - like Tavlo's finished concept piece above - it feels more like practice than something finished. There's nothing wrong with doing fan art and I'd still love to get a piece up on the WoW website, but anymore it feels like I should be pushing my skills towards something more. But what? What?

The two things I do well, that I've always done, are drawing pictures and telling stories. For some reason, I've never thought once about doing comics. (Or if I have, I've thought, "What? Me? How??"

We never really had comics in the house growing up. I remember my brother had some great big Superman one, but I think it was just because it was a collector's edition or something. My Dad and I always read the Funnies together out of the Sunday paper, but that was just... Garfield and so forth. I did always love Garfield and had several Garfield books (early love for fat lazy cats... *stares at my Dudley*) but other than that... no Marvel. No DC. We watched movies and cartoons on TV. We just weren't comic people.

So (oddly, like other things in my life) I'd never really considered it. It's funny, because I'm one of those writers who "sees" everything as they write, like a movie playing in my head. It's all already there. I'd just have to pic the shots and draw them and put down the dialog.

It took me about 5 minutes to think up a story and a setting and a handful of characters. Now they're all leaping around through my head chaotically, waiting for a script. And I keep asking myself, "Could I do this?" Could I draw what I see in my head and write this story? Could I merge these two pasttimes into something from which I could build a solid career?

When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher wanted me to be a writer. My Art teacher wanted me to be an artist. My music teacher - well, I'm not a miracle-worker here. Two out of three ain't bad.