Random Sketches

Part II of my ramblings on art won't be coming this week. Putting down my pure, undistilled thoughts on paper takes a lot out of me. The problem lies in how I have to weave the main ideas together in a comprehensible manner and explaining them enough as to be understandable (and I doubt I was able to do that in the last) thus I must tread much more carefully, plan how I write better rather than just going off the cuff. Formalism is integral in fine communication after all. In any case, here are some things that I've been up to lately.

An eternal bane is our law of undulation whereby we humans enter peaks and troughs of zeal, skill,
 and emotional attachment to anything we do or anyone we speak to as our faith in ourselves and our victories attained gives way to self-doubt and losses. Why do I bring up a paraphrase of Lewis' concept of the emotional business cycle here? I don't fucking know, I've been listening to the audiobook of the Screwtape Letters and I've just been loving the wit of it, its lessons, and Cleese's charisma. If it isn't obvious, I'm using Lewis' (or Screwtape's) Law of Undulation to highlight the lack of figure drawing in my posts for awhile now is because of my journey of late with said law: the drawings just haven't been up to par with how I want to draw.

My main goal in drawing at least on the technical aspect is to have dynamic and emotive figures with reasonably realistic proportions and shapes. Realism is not my goal, though I'd like to attain the skill to draw realistically enough, my goal is to cartoon and to cartoon well enough. Such is why I deeply study comics and impressionist works more than others, the abstraction from life while still retaining life-like notes and frameworks is for me the best of what I would like to achieve, anything beyond that is welcome but not required. Recently, I've taken figure drawing and capturing the essence of the figure seriously again, enough for me to be proud enough of them to show to other people. My work isn't the best, but I'm proud of what I can do with my shabby, lazy self.

I really like some of these.

Also, I took all of these within a few minutes of each other early in the morning. Why some are bright as all hell and others blue like a shadow, I do not know.

Of course, with figure drawing exercises must come the spurts of creative drawing, just letting loose and having fun so that you can maintain the imaginative aspect of art and creativity along with the refinement of one's artistic skill. For my desires (to make a webcomic), it's integral to have both if I want to do well (by my standards). Such is why I still hang around draw threads and draw random junk.

A Change of Pace, or Part I of my Discussion on Art

Before anything else, I think I should announce to no one in particular that I have a Twitter, I should probably integrate this place and that one a lot more than I should. I'll tweet this blogpost later.

It's high time that I try to shift my format here somewhat, it's worth a try. This blog is supposed to be another means for the flourishing of creativity and not a chore or archive where I store some of my art. Thus begins the first of many experiments. I hope you find some joy in them, whoever you are. If you don't want to listen to my ramblings, scroll down below and head straight to the pretty pictures.

So, art. As this is an art blog, what do I, the owner of this blog, think is art?

Art, I should think, is wholly different from technical exercises and works such as treatises, scientific papers, one's daily grind with figure drawing, studies of another person's art, etc. I do not deny the creative capacity of these things, in fact I am wholly cognizant of the creativity and richness in thinking that goes into well-done research and deep thinking and reflection that goes into the sciences and the study of art nor do I deny the style of one's writing and original ways of thinking over data and theory that can come out of a technical exercise (look to men like Joseph Schumpeter or John Maynard Keynes as examples of amazing stylists, and in contrast there is Friedrich August von Hayek and Adolf Hitler for the poor stylists; an ordinary writer that is not so much a good stylist nor a poor writer would be Roger Garrison or Milton Friedman (and yes, you read that right, I have read Chamberlain's translation of Mein Kampf out of curiosity to know the man's thought himself, it was shit - interesting - but shit)), rather I believe that there is a qualitative element to art that sets it apart from these things. The main thing? I think it's a combination of storytelling and the extraction of emotion from the audience of one's output that makes it lean more as art or lean more as a work of technical capacity, thus my determination of polemics as art more than serious pieces of political philosophy. This is a somewhat Romantic take on the essence of art and the artistic endeavor. I know take this time to say that I do not limit art to the visual, I take song, dance, a good tale told, a sand castle, all of those things, as art, memes too are art, very post-modern (or meta-modern, whichever). Art is more than a renaissance painting or a good comic book cover, it is emotion and concepts embodied in order to illicit a response of an emotional sort from the audience. Science is a materialist endeavor which seeks to comprehend the world within a lens which holds back as much metaphysics as possible as it seeks relations and a consistency in behavior in material things and between material things, the matters of the transcendent are more in line with theology and philosophy (but not mutually exclusive given the scope of things like Physics); learning the subtle curves of the bones of the body as they reveal themselves from the flesh of your model is finding the relations between shapes and perfecting it, art is transcendent in how it brings something out of you by making you feel something from the interplay of the shapes and image's associations. Science divorces you from emotion, art makes you revel and feel emotion. 

Such are my conjectures on art, more on this some other time. NOW ON TO THE MUCH MORE BORING SHIT LIKE WHAT I'M UP TO ART-WISE.

I realize that it's time to expand my drawing subjects again, which has only been refining the thumbnails for my comics adaptation of a public domain novel and drawing some pokemon for Anons on the /vp/ drawthread (the /vp/ drawthread is kinda slow but I find that it's a lot better than the ones that I've seen on other boards). Something that might pique one's interest is that my friend invited me to do some collaborations with her, draw some fun stuff and hang out with a friend. Given her interests, what better way to bind with a guy like me and a girl like her than to draw the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? She likes metal and Hellboy, as do I, and a lot of other traditionally masculine interests. Fun. I'll be talking more about this later when I have something concrete to share beyond mutual interest.

On the technical aspects, I have a few problems: my wrist is killing me and my scanner, possible the computer itself, is undergoing some problems. The wrist thing is a problem given how my right hand is my drawing hand, writing hand and the one that I prefer to use to eat with for both holding a utensil and the occasional eating with one's hands. I need a splint for it and just buying some one-size-fits-all types would not be the smartest idea. I used to stretch my hand a lot too but that comes with its own problems, mainly looking like a weirdo in public. I'm shameless but I can't be totally shameless, I HAVE to have some standards, somewhere, somehow.

Finally, on to the drawings.

An older Aceroli hugging a Purugly.

An Anon wanted some Swablu being cute, so I made some bothering the male MC from Pokemon Sword and Shield with Scorbunny.

A kind Anon cleaned up my drawing.

Returning to a More Consistent Schedule is a Pain

There was a time in my life when I could keep this place in regular enough updates, same with my reading - doing at least some of that a day beyond the mandatory figure drawing exercises to keep at least somewhat fresh and some light reading. I blame my math exercises for screwing my internal clock up for the reading bits but there is no excuse for not drawing. I'll get better, I promise.

Some New Crap

Getting into drawing and inking again for a week or so now has allowed me to creep back into brush inking as well, not just inking with my usual fountain pens:

I think I did this with my Rotring Art Pen with some Noodler's Bad Black Mocassin ink. Kinda klunky but I'm proud of this one as well, it was okay.

Treading back into brush inking for the first time in a long time with this drawing of Kid Melee for Rob Johnson's Miss Melee. I could have done worse but this isn't bad either, tbh.

Finer control here after that practice from above. It was fun too. I should try to ink with a non-brush pen brush tool again. Inking with a marker was fun too.

The Importance of Planning

How some artists like Jack Kirby are able to just draw full pages without much thought and get what they want out of them is beyond me. To be able to put pencil to paper and just let your arm and the graphite do its magic takes a certain skill or imagination not with me. Borrowing Kelley Jones' term for someone who has had an extreme influence on one's art, I am much like my "art father" Mike Mignola. I cannot just have my way with the page, I need to plan carefully only to destroy some pages after much thought as they do not satisfy a certain level of quality that I expect of myself. An extreme form of this problem is what had happened to Mike Mignola as he was writing and drawing what I believe was Hellboy: The Island. It may very well be the reason too as to why the artist changed from Mike to Duncan Fregredo from The Wild Hunt onwards up until The Fury, only coming back to the drawing board as the writer-artist for Hellboy in Hell. In any case, I'm in my own mini-The Island phase right now. I want to draw but I can't get myself to like my own craft nor my compositions. Oh well... Some mild bitching from me is the most one would be getting from for now. Till next week.

These are the abandoned The Island pages, carefully penciled and inked but still abandoned. Just like the two pages I've done so far!

This page is particularly powerful in my memories. Fifth panel, left-most face. That face is seared into my memory, likely forever.

The art from this point onwards is from the Mike Mignola-Duncan Fregredo era of the Hellboy comics. These are all from The Wild Hunt.

I Remembered that I'm a Slow Writer

I always underestimate how slow I am as a writer. Oh well, that "short" brush essay
 won't be coming any time soon, assuming you count a six-pager and counting on TNR font 12 as short. As I won't come out with that any time soon, I'll just go back to posting some sketches for now and talking about my stupid reading in the arts.

In the past month or two, I've felt as though I've stagnated and the fluidity and weight and motion that I've come to develop has ended. My figures felt stiffer and it was depressing. I blame myself for having seen that one Danny Galieote video on the asymmetry of the body and how it balances itself out in the contrasting curve as you will see below. Strangely enough, seeing the asymmetric curves again in the work of Michael Hampton's Figure Drawing: Design and Invention made it clock in my head and add something to my work that Danny Galieote took away. I like having more life and energy in my drawings again. He also broke my mental prison of trying to stay in proportion while making thirty-second sketches. As long as you capture the emotion and comprehensibility of the pose, it's good.

Some sketches I'm really proud of post-Hamptonian revitalization.

Drawn on my small whiteboard.

Another angle.

Hampton just pushed my head back into another direction, a good one. I really appreciate it. I'm more confident and happy with my work now.

The next few drawings will be assorted in subject and who was with me when I made them, the first being a riff with my friend. I'll post more of those drawings with him in the coming weeks. He came over and we had fun with all my paper and markers. I introduced him to the asymmetric curves and he's just so happy with his art now. Good for him. He's learning!

Sketches of My Studies and a Refinement of My Style

I believe that my style has evolved once more. I have no idea how to describe it but it seems to have become more unified and "internally consistent" in its form.

It's different somehow, but it's for the better. It is here that you can also see some sketches of mine where I was consciously and forcing myself to draw in a more Mignola-esque style. The reference is in Hellboy: The Conqueror Worm, bottom left panel. That's one of the particular images from Mike Mignola's canon of art that has always struck me and has burned itself in the depths of my imagination. I should probably make a series on that one day, "Artwork That Has Struck Me". That would be a good idea.

.

 

Here are some other sketches where I actively emulate Mignola, but no as hard as with the last sketch, and play around with some mild cartooning.

Lazy Week, Lazy Doodling

Sorry I didn't make the post yesterday, I was doing something. I'm back again for whoever finds this interesting, the scant one or two people out there, assuming there are even that many. No, I'm not bitter or anything, this stuff takes time to build up and I'm not surprised or angry no one is noticing me or anything. This is more of a personal exercise for me anyway, see how long I can sustain this kind of a project. Doing okay so far. I want to sustain this.

Oh yes, my secret Public Domain novel adaptation project is going well too. I had just recently finished writing it in its rough "script" form, if you can call it a script, and the thumbnails are not too far off themselves, those too are rough. I can start refining them further, soon enough. It's standing at twenty-eight pages so far. I wonder how long I need to finish drawing all of it.

Anyway, have some drawings.

There was another but it was stubborn and wouldn't upload for some weird reason. I wanted to talk about that one a lot too. Sad.

More lettering practice. I think I"m getting better at this.

Reaching into my Inner Mignola-clone and Other Things

I got my order for an Ames Lettering Guide, it's from Alvin (the brand and not some person named Alvin). I've been wanting this for awhile now, now that I do have it I absolutely love it.

I dove in and set it to the often quoted 3 1/2 setting from Todd Klein's blog, letterer extraordinaire, and I got somewhat confused.... Do you see what I see?

The paper, as you can see, is standard US Letter size. The setting Todd Klein uses is quite small, very much proportional to the general measurement of the very same lettering on reproduced art, that is the final product that you see in floppies, in trade paperbacks, in omnibuses, and other sorts of comics. Thus, the setting that Todd Klein says that you should use matches the size for the art once scaled down since the reproduced art is half the size or less of that which you see in what is offered to the usual comic book reading public, those who buy original art aside. Once scaled up to the usual size that the original art has, that is around 10X15", 11X17, or A3, to be proportional the lettering setting should also be scaled up to at least the 7 setting. Reproduced art is just half of that or less than that. Anyway, with this realization which might not even be true at all and I'm just going off on some weird logic, I set my own Lettering Guide to 8 and played around with 6 and went off with that. here's how it went. (I remember seeing some letterers working on reproduced art and Klein working on overlays over the original art, so I don't really know. It might just be something particular to the letterer and there isn't a set standard.)

Most of these are with the 3 1/2 setting.

Also, here's some doodles.

These were in the last couple days.

Some sketches.

Me calling on my inner Mike Mignola.

Perspective and depth

Nothing much this week, I've been reading Norling's Perspective Made Easy (again*). In one of the final panels of Dart With Destiny, the panel I was redrawing was a perfect opportunity to utilize perspective and the elements which were already there weren't going to be changed too much in order to accommodate it. It was fortunate to say the least. Thinking in perspective again was fun, not just focusing on the arrangement and foreshortening of characters to offer a feel of depth.

Grinding boxes

 Have a sketch.

*I say again as I read around a third of it in the past but forgot all about it. I've been fixing that.

Realizations and Reflections Thanks to Figure-Drawing

A lot of studies lately, mainly in improving my realism, my gestures, my drapery, and experiments in my inking. I've learned a lot in this time, I hope you would see what I've learned too.

 

Nothing really interesting here but it's something I've drawn and from what you can see here, I've still got a long way to go with making my drapery buttery, smooth, and technically correct. I just slapped them on without thinking too much about forming it around the figure. I should fix that.

 These ones were semiserious studies where I tried to study gesture in particular. 

My inking here is quite poor. Sadly I didn't get a picture of the pencils but they were so much better. I need to reform my inking, I was too quick and not careful here, the careful linework I've worked into with the pencils was lost in the spirit of the moment. I've even fucked up the anatomical details for crying out loud. Oh well, it's a learning moment. 

 

Some gesture and drapery studies where I did a lot better. I played with markers and brush liking here, it was really fun.