I hope you like them.

They hold the class once a month and I can’t wait to go back again.  Here are a few of the drawings I did.

I was hanging out with a friend a few months ago during a sketch group.  My friend asked me to draw a certain pose.  I looked at the blank page and started to put together, in my mind, how the pose would go.  What foot is the weight on?  Where is the elbow is relation to the rib cage?  How many heads tall should I make this figure?  Structure?  Angles?  Depth? Lighting?  OK, you’ve got the chest connected to the arm this way, connected to the neck at this angle, etc., etc., etc.

After a couple of minutes my friend asks what was wrong and why I was taking so long.  I know you can draw, he said, and you should be able to knock this single pose out in seconds.  You’ve drawn it dozens of times.  I was a little taken aback.  I’m not the fastest artist I countered.  I told him about my thought process.  He picks up the pad and draws the sketch quickly, going boom, boom, boom.  There.  Done.

At the time I just thought my brain didn’t work like his.  He was self taught.  I was more classically trained.  I had a process.  He just drew.

I now understand and realize that you don’t drive a car by thinking about the individual parts.  Micheal Jordon does think cross-over, spin, put the ball in my right hand, then my left, and stick out my tongue before he dunks a basketball.  It’s a gestalt thing.  A left brain holistic thinking thing that my natural logical right brain tendencies try to overrule.  It’s hard to remember all the details of a person’s pose to draw but it’s very easy to remember the gesture of the person’s pose.

The really, really cool thing too is the gesture is what our brain recognizes most as the pose.  Like my earlier example from part 1 of this post on Gesture the image in your head of a man with his foot on the chair got much clearer and sharper in your mind when I added the context of him being sad.  It’s the same way you can remember hundreds of different faces of people you’ve meet.  When you see a person you recognize you don’t see the nose, add the eyes, the ears, the width and height of the face and then know who the person is.  You see the gesture.

So, do some gesture drawing every day to warm yourself up and after a while that looseness and life will begin to seep into your regular work.  Drawing will become easier and a lot more fun!

Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.  After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I’ve understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.

- Bruce Lee

Throughout my entire life as an artist I’ve always had a consistent problem with being too stiff, of staying loose and keeping my drawings loose.  I’ve discovered a number of methods and tools over the years to help with this but it’s only been recently that I’ve rediscovered something that helps dramatically.

Gesture drawing!

Most artists have fond (yes, this is sarcasm) memories of beginning figure drawing classes doing these scribble like drawings.   A gesture drawing is where an artist attempts to capture the “gesture” or “essence” of a pose or subject.  It’s usually done it very small window of time such as 10 seconds to 60 seconds.  The object isn’t to draw the actual pose but to get down that thing that represents the rhythm of the pose.  In the book, “The Natural Way to Draw“, artist and teacher, Kimon Nicolaides describes it like this.  I’m paraphrasing here.

Imagine that I describe to you a pose to draw of a man facing a chair with one foot on the chair.  He is leaning forward and his arm is resting on his knee.  His hand supports his head.  You could draw that fairly well.  But what changes if I add to the description that the man is sad.  Suddenly the pose is much more alive and defined in your mind.  This is where the gesture comes from.

In good drawing and painting most see composition or design as the key thing that makes or breaks a piece.  I’d put gesture right up there because this is the thing that conveys the “genesis” of what the viewer is relating to.  It’s what makes a drawing look alive.  It’s what causes a line to be a LINE and then just a line again.

(More to come in part 2)

Last week I had the great opportunity to take a live online class with fantasy artist Jon Foster through Conceptart.org.  It’s still available for purchase, streaming, on demand here for anyone wants to spend 6 hours with Jon Foster.  Foster has always been one of my favorite artists and the class focused on doing a “Young Adult Book Cover from Start to Finish.”  The class was $95 dollars which isn’t really that much at all considering how much workshops with artists can cost.  The streaming technology was very good and my 4 year old Dell with a broadband connection had no problems.  Jon was a wealth of knowledge, sharing his methods and process and answering numerous questions on everything from how to break into the industry to how to use reference to how to use value correctly in your painting.  To make the session even more enjoyable, fabulous artist George Pratt hung our in the accompanying chat the entire time.   When Jon was busy painting a demo you could learn a thing or two from George if you could tear your eyes away from Jon’s beautiful work in progress.

The software for the online streaming displayed a large window that was linked to Jon’s computer.  To the side was a live chat and it was also possible to talk to Jon via microphone which some took advantage of.  Jon began with a slide show and talked about his process taking us through the process of one of his painting (the one at the beginning of this article, in fact).  We began with the script and went from Jon’s sketchbook to tight drawing to reference to black and white to color.  He showed us tons of images illustrating his decision making process and how and why he made the choices he did to end up with a successful illustration.

Foster is a very good teacher and seems to be incredibly humble.  Without question he’s got a lot of talent but from his methods you can see that the reason for his success his how hard he works and his attention to every single part of the illustration.  Jon was often asked how long it takes it to do an illustration.  His response was, “as long as it takes.”  That may seem like a canned response but after spending an afternoon with him it’s very true.  When most would think an illustration finished Jon is only halfway done.  That next 50% is what takes his work to that, “holy crap, that’s awesome” category.  He’s not overworking a piece, he’s just not settling for less when he as the ability to do better.

It was a wonderful class and I’d do it all over again in an instant.  One of the pluses to the class is that I am able to re watch it on demand any time I want for 30 days after the live class.  I’ve already watched it a second time and gotten a few nuggets I missed the first time around.  Conceptart.org is a real asset doing these classes and getting the very cream of the crop in the field to share their knowledge.  A big thank you also goes out to Jon for doing this class.  I’ll leave you with one of my favorite Foster pieces below.  Wow, is that not awesome or what!

We started a few weeks ago but the basic concept is to design the Mayan God, “Hurakan” with the Dungeons and Dragons universe in mind.  Then we’d proceed to create a book cover.  That challange only has a few weeks to go but I thought I’d post my progress.

Here are the list of assignments broken down.

Phase 1 character silhouettes (completed)
Phase 2 character thumbs (completed)
Phase 3 Black and White detailed character drawings & compositional Book Cover thumbnails (completed)
Phase 4 Character color roughs & Black & White Book Cover detailed drawings (completed)
Phase 5 Final color Character development & Book Cover color rough
Phase 6 Book Cover Final

Here are the silhoutte based on the character brief (seen here).  You can also read all about the challange in that same link. Doing silhouettes is a really underrated way to begin character designs and really just drawing in general.  It allows you to focus on the actual design of a character without worrying about the details of the drawing.  In basic drawing it forces you to deal with overall shapes and picture compostion.  It’s just a great way to distil down and focus on some important aspects in the beginning of design or drawing.  I liked these three out of the dozen or so I did but as luck would have it I ended up going in a completely different direction.  More on that in a future post.

I’m going to spread this out over a few posts as I don’t want to post a novel here in one setting.

This turned out to be a lot of fun and Thor is now one of my favorite characters to draw.  I love his new costume.

I finished the oils a few weeks ago but have only just now gotten around to posting them.

I found this page from a book on Norman Rockwell.  I thought it to be a wonderful example of how to use reference and not be a slave to it.  Rockwell used reference like nobodies business.  In his early career he didn’t use photography.  He used live models in full costume set in the scene he would paint.  To anyone saying this was an easy way out hasn’t seen the extent to which Rockwell went to achieve his paintings.  I’ve seen as many as 30 painted studies for just one face in a composition.

One can see in the example above how he used reference to obtain a level of detail and realism that could not have been achieved drawing from his imagination.  Yet, there is a vast difference between his reference and his drawing.

The man was a wonderful talent but didn’t succeed because of it.  I believe his rise to iconic American Illustrator was due to his extraordinary devotion to craftsmanship and the quantity of time and effort he put into the work.

Even though it’s different from the TV show the version of the Hulk in my mind has always been more Gorilla like.  A real square shaped caveman type with the features of a Silverback.  He should be unintelligent but gentle with a childlike innocence and always feel like smashing.  I don’t think that I could get all that in my illustration but hopefully a lot of it comes through.  Below are some progress shots I scanned as I went.

Process

This commission was done on 14×17 Bristol board in pencil, then inked and colored with acrylics and colored pencils.  You can see the progression above from pencils, to line inks, to filled in inks, to color wash and finally the finished product with a few more layers of paint and some colored pencils.

Through my progress I’ve found that I hate using a ruler on anything including architecture.  I love that loose contour line.  There is so much more life and energy to it even in things that are more defined by their mechanical or processed nature.

I’ve also found that I need to catch up on the materials curve a little bit.  There are these wonderful things out there called Copic markers that apparently are the bomb.  (Am I dating myself here or what)  I plan on ordering me a set and hopefully use them on future commissions.

If anyone out there wants to send me Hulk swag (or Copics), don’t hesitate.  Until next time…

Study of Adam for Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo

That is a quote by Simon Munnery and really sets the tone for today’s post.  A lack of sound drawing skills is the number one reason for a piece of artwork wallowing in failure.  You can get by with a deficient in any other area but bad drawing will always give you away.  It’s not “your style” to draw badly and it’s not “just my opinion” when your perspective is wrong.  Bad drawing is also the most difficult thing to correct when you don’t get it right to start with.  We’ve all had the experience of spending the majority of time on a drawing “fixing” it.  There are hundreds of good books on how to draw and I’m not even going to try it here in a short blog post.  I, myself, still work daily on strengthening my foundational drawing.  Instead, I’ll list a handful of tips that may help you next time you sit down to draw.

A.  Use reference because you don’t know what you don’t know.

B.  Stay Loose.  Make sure you’re not holding your breath and draw with a flourish, not as if you’re building a bomb where one false move will be the end of it all.  Develop some rhythm.

C.  Draw the silhouette.  Many artists will pay too much attention to the individual parts or in the rendering and neglect to draw the whole.  Their figure end up looking stiff and wooden.

D.  See it in a different way.  Our brains automatically try to categorize what we’re looking at and “see” what the thing is.  It’s way too easy to draw what you think you see and not the reality (when drawing from reference or life).  Try holding up your picture to a mirror or turning it upside down.  Squinting is also useful to get rid of any detail in your picture and allow you to see the basic shapes and values.

E.  Be confident!  Nothing will destroy a drawing faster than not knowing what you’re doing.  Don’t guess.  If you don’t know then go do some studies or get some reference.  Even a laymen can tell the difference between a simple circle drawn by a professional artist and that of one drawn by an amateur.

My favorite assignment to do is a cover illustration which is why I was thrilled with the project I’ve just finished.  The subject was to illustrate the cover to a short story called The Voyeur.  The material was slightly racy in the vein of Fatal Attraction and that’s fine with me.  Fatal Attraction was a good movie and The Voyeur was a good story.  My client forwarded me the story with some suggestions as to the illustration and after also reading the story  I had a pretty good idea of what would make a good painting.

The initial idea was to do a scene from the book where our villain is creepily peering through a window at a blind woman who is in the midst of undressing while her German Shepherd looks on.  The problem I kept running into was that I wanted the blind woman to be the most prominent part of the image but the window frame just kept getting in the way.  I ended up going back to the thumbnail stage and coming up with a more collage type image with elements from the story.  I just really ended up loving the composition and after getting approval from my client (YEAH!) I was ready to move on.

Gather reference & board prep!

From my thumbnails I  gathered all kinds of reference from photographing myself to photos of bedrooms until I had everything I needed to draw my image.  I put my image together in Photoshop and transferred it to my board.  Using my composited/drawn/painted Photoshop reference I used a grid to aid me in redrawing my image to my board.  My board is a 20″ x 30″ piece of 500 Strathmore illustration board coated with three layers of acrylic Gesso and mounted to a piece of foam core for added support.

Next, I cover the entire piece with some burnt sienna to get rid of all the white.  I also take some time to do a value study to help map my way to the paint.

Time to paint!

I begin by painting large easy shapes or my favorite part.  This time I start with the background because it’s going to influence the way I paint my figure.  I usually paint in large layers painting the whole thing, then going back to add a second and sometimes third layer building as I go.  Sometimes I’ll paint something all at once like I did the German Shepherd here.

This is where style really comes into play.  I can paint wild and loose or refine everything to a degree of realism the would surpass a photograph.  I’m definitely into realism but I have no desire to just paint a photo.  I’m aiming for a comfortable balance between the realism of the figure and abstract elements that create a lot of visual interest.

Photography & Digital Finish!

After finished my painting I use my Nikon D80 to photograph the image and do some Photoshop tweeks.  I adjust some color levels and add a few elements that are far easier to do digitally than traditionally such as the circle pattern behind the blind woman’s head.  Now that’s it’s done it’s time to send it off to the client and hope he loves it!

After you get your thumbnail it’s time to find some reference.  There are a few different ways to do this.

1. Use a camera to take your own reference.

You don’t have to be a semi-professional shutter bug to take some good reference shots.  You’re just looking for information to help you with your drawing.  Use your family and friends to pose for you.  Get them to dress up in costumes or anything that simulates what you’re after.  You can even put up flyer’s or post on Craig’s List advertising for models.  I did take some profile pictures of myself that I used for the peeping tom guy.  The biggest thing to look for when taking reference photography is lighting.  I’ve found it’s the hardest thing to make up and goes the furthest in grounding your image in reality.

Sometimes you don’t have the time or resources to find a live model.  Whenever I have this problem I turned to this giant box of photography I have on my desk called the Internet.

2. Find it on the web.

There are quite a few sites that cater to artists looking for reference that can be used commercially for free.  The money word is that last sentence is “commercially.”  You see, you just can’t go grabbing any picture off the Internet and using  them.  You have to have the photographers permission.  There are copyright laws and trust me you don’t want to be a dirty thief anyway.  For numerous sites like that check out the reference section over at Conceptart.org here.  From there you can find hundreds of links to other reference sites and forums around the web.

You can use copyrighted pictures to take information from.  For instance, in a painting I’m doing now I’ve got the German Shepard attacking the peeping tom guy.  I can’t draw a German Shepard from my memory.  I needed reference.  I searched online through Google image search, Yahoo image search, and various stock photography websites for pictures of German Shepard.  I ended up with 8 or 9 pictures of various dog snarling, jumping, attacking, etc.  I also got 4 or 5 more specially of German Shepard’s.  I used all of them to draw my own version.  So, while a single picture of a German Shepard can be copyrighted, what one looks like can’t.

3.  Use your local library.

Many times photos from the web are low resolution and just aren’t clear enough.  You won’t have that problem with books.  The best section for this is if you library has an over sized book section.  There are for the books are that too big to go on the regular shelves.  The only reason to print books so big is to showcase some beautiful photography.  Just remember that you don’t have the copyright to these image either and you’ll face the same restriction in using them as pictures from the Internet.

4. Use Photoshop.

I take all my reference and composite it together in Photoshop.  This way it’s really easy to move elements around, re size them and draw and paint in my own bits and pieces.  I’ll end up with something pretty close to what I want my painting to be.

I’ll print this out and along with my other reference photos draw my image.  I’ve also found that artists are an impatient bunch (I know I am) but I implore you to take your time as you do this.  Think of it as if each part of the process is your only job and when you’re done you’ll pass it off to a co-worker.  This forces you to put your energy into the stage you’re on instead of cutting corners so you can start slinging paint.

Recently I began attending a weekly figure drawing sessions.  I always thought that the best way in the world to getting better as an artist, no matter what medium or genre you’re into, is to do live figure drawing.  The models so far have been fantistic dressing up in costumes and utilizing various props.