I tried a few things here, the first being a campfire with a wisp of smoke floating up from it. It wasn’t very good. I tried a cigarette on the ground, with smoke wisping up from it. This was even worse. I started to think I might have to come back to the prompt late. This isn’t what I wanted for the second day, so I began thinking about how I could somehow incorporate a gum gum person and that’s how I ended up with a gum gum person conjuring fire. Kind of weird, but sometimes you just roll with these things.
The first prompt is FISH and I cleverly drew a fish:
This year I am using:
iPad Pro 12.9 inch
2nd generation Apple Pencil
Procreate
Today’s prompt was done using the brush pen and eraser. A lot of eraser. The brush pen allows for great control of stroke thickness and opacity, which are two things I am good at bumbling around with, hence the eraser. The drawing is a combination of careful construction and winging it. A flying fish, if you will.
I am officially ready for Inktober 2020. Well, I still need to get the screen protector on my iPad Pro, but I’ll do that tomorrow–two whole days before!
One of the most important things you learn in art class is using reference. To put it simply, copy stuff. In doing so, you learn how things connect and when your oranges come out as squares, maybe you need to look into that.
Here’s an example of copying from source material I did when I was probably about 10 or 11–the drawing is untitled, so I can’t say for sure, but I’m reasonably confident I was around that age, as it jibes with when I was reading Disney comics.
It’s actually a pretty good representation of Pluto, the odd dog pet of Goofy–odd, because Goofy was also a dog, of course. I’m intrigued by the fact that I did this using felt pens, as I have very few examples of felt pen art and the majority of my stuff was done in pencil or, to a lesser degree, pencil crayon.
PLUTO:
And for the sake of comparison, here’s the same with the wrinkly, yellowed sketchpad background removed:
Ken Robinson tells this story: “A little girl was in a drawing lesson. [The teacher] said, ‘What are you drawing?’ And the girl said, ‘I’m drawing a picture of God.’ And the teacher said, ‘But nobody knows what God looks like.’ And the girl said, ‘They will in a minute.’”
Sometimes I miss the sheer awesomeness of being a kid and having no filters, no limits, no preconceived ideas to slow you down or stop you.
I’ve fallen a bit behind on my drawing lessons in part because I wasn’t following drawabox.com’s 50% rule:
This brings us to an extremely important rule: at least half of the time you spend drawing must be devoted to drawing purely for its own sake. Not to learn, not to improve, not to develop your skills, not even to apply what you’ve already learned. There are no restrictions on medium, no specific techniques you must use, no subject matter you must focus on. Draw the things you’d draw if you were the most skilled artist in the world; draw the things your brain insists you’re not ready to tackle just yet.
This can only mean one thing: It is time, at last, for more Gum Gum People.
The final exercise of the Lines part of drawabox.com’s Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes is Planes. The exercise requires two pages of work and I have only done one, so I have one more to go.
A few observations:
Rushing will always yield poor results. There is not a single time I rushed on the ghosting (drew in the air over the paper as I would when applying pen to paper) and it turned out well. Fast is bad.
Every time I loosened my grip on the pen my line quality improved, and quite often my accuracy did, too.
Likewise moving away from using the wrist, which is one of the main focus points of these exercises–to get you to draw using your shoulder and elbow, and not your wrist.
Focusing on the ghosting made it easier to stop at the endpoint instead of overshooting it. As you can see, my focus needs work. 😛
I did one plane using a ruler, so you can see what the page would look like it I had the precision of a robot or a really good artist. Or a really good artist robot named Drawbot 8000.
As mentioned before, when I finally complete Lesson 1 (in ten months), I am going to switch over to ctrlpaint.com’s traditional drawing lessons and try the first few there to see how they compare, then decide which one to go whole hog on. Because I never half-hog.
This is the second book in Austin Kleon’s trilogy of motivational books for creative (and other) types. I read it after the other two, but they can easily be read in any order.
Much like the other books, Show Your Work is peppered with Kleon’s quirky illustrations and art as he provides insights and tips in easily digestible bites. The advice is sound, smart and simple, with each piece built around its own chapter.
This time the focus is on getting your work seen, your presence known and to push aside some long-held conceptions, such as how selling art leads to the corruption of it. One example Kleon points to is how Michaelangelo was commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel).
The advice ranges from sharing some small part of your process with your audience every day (usually on the social media outlet of your choice) to dispensing with the notion of keeping everything secret, openly sharing how you work, how you do things, so that others can benefit from your knowledge as you may have benefited from the knowledge of others. Kleon is big on community, basically.
This is a good book and a short book, so it’s easy to dip back into it when inspiration or motivation is lacking, or when you feel you are drifting and losing focus.
This one leans more toward creative types, people who make stuff for others to enjoy, but I think anyone who can appreciate the same is bound to get something out of this book.
I came across this video on YouTube last night from Struthless, in which he discusses the drawing advice given to him in 2016 that changed his life.
Leaving aside how quaint the world seemed in the long ago time of January 2020, I found this advice resonant, especially when I look back at my creative shenanigans when I was younger. Here are some of the things I did:
recorded audio plays/skits
acted, directed and wrote skits in school; acted in school plays
worked with clay (and plasticine)
painted
sketched
wrote short stories, started several novels
wrote and drew multiple comics
learned to play one song on acoustic guitar
played the recorder in music class (to be fair, I had to do this)
That’s a pretty extensive list. And for a kid, it’s actually okay to be scattered. I was trying stuff out. Looking back, I enjoyed pretty much all of it, too. I was a Renaissance Lad.
But as an adult, with much more limited time to not just do stuff, but to learn to do stuff, I need to focus. I can’t do everything.
I kind of still want to, though.
But with my fiction writing currently in a comfortable coma, blissfully unaware of the hellscape that 2020 has become, I have decided to focus on drawing and sketching, first by honing my analog (pen and paper) skills, then moving into the digital realm of pen and tablet. I’ll occasionally tell myself, “But I could learn acoustic guitar, like, actually learn it this time” and then I have to remind myself, “No, stay focused. Do one thing well, not ten things using 1/10th of your ass on each” (ass analogies have been popular ever since that one episode of The Simpsons).
This video makes that point and goes even farther, by showing how he (Struthless) initially focused on not just drawing over other creative outlets but drawing just one thing–ibises. Many, many ibises. By narrowing his focus, he was able to do this one thing really well, and used it as a means to expand beyond, creating more elaborate tableaus around ibises.
It’s a good way to approach art.
I am not going to draw ibises.
But I do have my own thing: Gum Gum People.
And now I own the domain for them. This will eventually become my home for all art, not just GGP-specific stuff.
We’ll see how it goes. For now, I am putting writing on the backburner, guilt-free. If I get drawn (ho ho) back to it, it was meant to be. If not, well…hopefully I’ll have settled onto something even more rewarding. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life watching cat videos.
Tonight, I finally started doing actual exercises and actual drawing. Woo!
Specifically, I began Drawabox’s Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes and then started the homework. Much like in my school days, I did not finish my homework in one sitting.
The first section is on Lines and I did not quite make it through because I started late and don’t want to rush. I did finish the first two of three exercises on lines.
Superimposed lines
Two pages of lines where you start with a base line and then draw over it eight times, trying to achieve even, confident strokes that overlap as much as possible. My results are not exactly exact. I also noticed the copy paper I was using tended to almost create grooves, so if I got the pen tip into a certain groove, it was hard to get out of it. I switched to different printer paper after the first page.
Page 1:
Page 2:
The second exercise is Ghosted Lines, in which you trace out how you are going to draw a line connecting two points before committing to drawing the actual line. This is supposed to improve muscle memory, among other things.
Some of the lines are decent but I have a tendency to arc a little and overshoot the end point. The lesson addresses both of these things, so I am a bit of a noob here.
A few things I noticed:
The exercises are designed to get you to draw from the shoulder, not from the elbow or wrist. My worst lines were when I forgot this and drew from the wrist.
I often found I was gripping the ultrafine marker too tightly and would take a few moments to relax my grip before drawing. This definitely helped, but it is something I will need to keep on top of, since my natural tendency is to grip the marker like I must CRUSH IT TO DEATH.
Next up is the final Lines lesson, Ghosted Planes. I did a few as a finale for the night and my planes were not exactly air-worthy.
I need to better arrange my desk for drawing, too. Things are a little tight. I shall do so before completing the current lesson.
I have been delinquent in posting the past few days. I have no good explanation for this other than general laziness, so on with the lessons!
Having completed the Intro to Digital Painting 101 on https://www.ctrlpaint.com/getting-started I moved onto the series of videos on traditional drawing, in which Matt Kohr explains the tools to be used (mainly HB pencils and a combo of vinyl and kneaded erasers) and a few basics. The confusion came when he started referencing things in videos that I had clearly not seen. This made me check the user comments and for some reason, the videos are posted out of order. It wasn’t a huge thing, but it did not instill confidence in the rest of the material. I watched the following:
For those playing drawing along at home, the correct order as noted by a user, seems to be:
Welcome to Traditional Drawing
Crtl+Paint Unplugged road Map
The Pencil
Visual Measuring
Unplugged: Pencils and erasers
The first actual exercise is to draw soft, loopy ovals in pencil, to help train the use of shoulder movement and get away from the tight grip used when writing–and rarely for drawing.
After the confusion of these mis-sorted videos, I went over to https://drawabox.com/ and started their lessons. They take a different approach, swapping in ultrafine markers for pencils, with the notion that this is easier because it lessens the urge to fix mistakes (no erasing) and just focus on the exercises, and the pen produces a single thickness of line that requires no pressure (one of the things they emphasize is to not mix different pen sizes). With pencils, the pressure will affect the stroke, as will the tilt of the pencil. Pens keep things simple and presumably easier for the beginner.
I have completed:
Lesson 0: Getting Started, an explanation of the lessons and tools needed, along with an overview of the non-technical skills that will be needed and refined through the lessons (patience, spatial awareness, etc).
I have read through but not yet finished:
Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes. This includes the first actual drawing bits (homework, as the site calls it), requiring a total of five pages for the three subjects. Repetition is a key component here–getting better by doing.
I have not yet taken pen or pencil to paper, because I am pondering the following:
Try doing both sets of lessons together (potentially confusing/overwhelming)
Do one set of lessons first, then the other
Stick to one set of lessons, then only do the other if I feel it’s needed
I don’t want to turn this into an excuse for not diving in, so I will likely start doing both and see how it goes. It’s easy enough to drop one and go back later.
I am treating my art lessons as if I am a beginner, as my last instruction was in high school, which was…awhile back
I have chosen to start this particular adventure with Ctrl+Paint, a site featuring copious free lessons provided by freelance artist Matt Kohr. It helps that Matt has a really calm, soothing voice in the videos, as opposed to say, Bobcat Goldthwaite’s.
I have completed the first set of lessons, Digital Painting 101, which comprises six videos. It introduces you to some key functions, features, and handy shortcuts in Photoshop.
The Ctrl+Paint videos highly recommend using Photoshop for ease in following the lessons, so I have temporarily renewed my subscription. I also dusted off my Intuos tablet and so far things are working as expected.
In time I will drop Photoshop, and transfer what I’ve learned to Affinity Photo and Procreate on the iPad. For now, I am following dem rules to keep things simple.
The initial lessons are traightforward, but the next set is where it will get interesting, as it goes back into traditional drawing instruction–using pen, pencil and paper. I have all three, so I am ready to start scrawling. I never practiced much in school because my attention was split among a bunch of stuff (as I mentioned in a previous post), so I may get somewhat better results this time. Or at least know sooner when to give up and go back to writing haikus.
I plan to start the next lessons tonight, so another update should arrive soon™.
