Getting back in the saddle

If you've been following this blog at all, you probably know by now that I'm really not a fan of my own work.

It got so bad that I pretty much quit drawing in January this year because I couldn't stand to look at anything I was making.  I haven't put down a single line in the past year that I haven't wanted to destroy on a molecular level, and I would still rather stab my eyes out than look at anything I'm drawing.

(By the way, if you have any well-intentioned but misguided comments right about now, feel free to keep them to yourself. It won't help me, and it'll just make me mistrust and possibly resent you. Also, Ira Glass can stick that entire lecture up his ass and STFU forever, because that means that this feeling of total inadequacy will never, ever get better and there is no such thing as a light at the end of the tunnel. So, really, really never ever quote him at me. Ever. Not even as a joke.)


Anyway, a little while ago I realized that the only thing worse than having to look at my art is not making any. And maybe, just maybe, if I work hard enough at it, eventually I'll start to get better.

So, here we go again, trying to climb back on the drawing horse and ride. Or draw. Or whatever.

Because like the blog says, I can't just quit.

I can't stop drawing. Not really.

Back to Work

Ok, May got away from me. Over the spring I've been trying to learn how to write, so there hasn't been a lot to see.

Compound that with the fact that I have vehemently hated pretty much every single line I've put on paper all year , and I came perilously close to hanging up the pencils and calling it quits.

But, like the blog says, I can't stop drawing, even if my work is utterly lacking in merit or potential. And, in any case, I'm not the type to quit just because I got to the hard part of the learning curve.

So, instead of quitting I study harder. I copy stuff from anatomy and life-drawing books until I understand what I'm looking at. 

For my daily sketches, instead of working on character likeness, I spend a few weeks working on anatomy and construction.

I keep drawing, every day.  Eventually, it's going to have to get better. Right?

References:
http://www.amazon.ca/Constructive-Anatomy-George-B-Bridgman/dp/0486211045
http://www.amazon.ca/Figure-Drawing-Andrew-Loomis/dp/0857680986
http://www.amazon.ca/Atlas-Anatomy-Artist-Stephen-Rogers/dp/0195030958
http://www.amazon.ca/Anatomy-Complete-Artists-Joseph-Sheppard/dp/0486272796

Back to the Basics

I got a copy of Figure Drawing for all it's Worth by Andrew Loomis for Christmas, which is awesome. So, naturally I'll be working through that for the next little while.

I've spent some time over the past few years in learning to draw, so some of the material in the book is stuff I've covered before. And sometimes in learning a skill, you'll find that you're revisiting stuff you'd already learned. 

The important thing in that case is to keep paying attention. Don't take anything for granted. There's the temptation to skim over "blah blah blah, I already know this stuff" but if you focus, and bring your more developed sensibility to the "beginner" material, you never know what new insights you can find.

There's no lesson that you can't still make new discoveries from, if you approach it with an open mind.

Doing things the hard way

Like I mentioned in my blog post a few weeks ago, if you want to get better at something, repetition is important. But if you really want to get better, what you're repeating and how you're repeating it is even more important. If you want to get better, you can't just repeat easy stuff that you're good at and call it a day.

I moved TO this spot from an easier one.

Making a leap

I've been doing things that are hard or that I'm not very good at, in order to get better at them. 

When I'm at a life-drawing session, I move to a spot where I'm looking at the model from a difficult angle. And I don't worry about what people will think of my drawings; I'm making studies, not art.

When I do my daily sketches, I try to find ways to challenge myself. At least once in a while, I try to draw a pose that involves a drawing problem that I'm still working on solving. And when I can't figure out why a drawing doesn't work (like this one of Lara Croft) I ask for someone to show me how I should have drawn it.

Twisting AND foreshortening. Yikes.

Learning from my mistakes
It's hard and it's scary and it's a little frustrating. I've ended up making a lot of not-very-successful drawings. But I've also learned a lot about what doesn't work. And along the way, I'm starting to learn what does.

Take risks
So, if you want to get better, sometimes you have to risk making drawings that really, really do not work. Go ahead and make mistakes. Make great, big mistakes. Make lots of them. Make bad, awkward, clumsy drawings, and figure out how to make them better. Be patient with yourself and with the lines that land on the page.

Never, never quit.
 Keep it up, and the things you're bad at will start to turn into things you're good at.

the red bits are where I corrected myself.

.

Starting to get the hang of it

I'm back

Okay, yeah. I didn't post the other week. This is mostly because I hated every single mark I put down on paper for a couple of weeks running. There was a final assignment for my class up in there, too. Loved the class. Hated my last drawing. I showed it to my teacher, but only because I had to.  I tried to weasel out of showing it in the class. But it's over and done with now.

Here's the thing. Sometimes drawing goes like that. When it does, you just have to plow through it, make a bunch of crappy, stiff, awkward drawings and throw them in the fire. If you've done a lot of drawing, you know what I mean. If you're just getting started, then just know when it does happen to you (and it will), it's not the end of the world, and it's not worth pitching a fit over. It's just the drawing equivalent of "no pain, no gain." And it's probably not as bad as you think.

I find it usually happens to me when I'm trying to process new information, and with the classes I was taking there was a whole lot of new information to process.  Yeah, it happens often enough that I've detected a pattern. It just takes a while for the hands to catch up with the brains, especially if the hands have been used to doing things their own way for a while. The good news is that if you keep persistent then the motor skills do catch up. And by the way, don't throw anything in the fire right away, because if you set them aside for a month or so and then look again, you just might see your learning curve.

Practice sketches

So, of course, right after this I jumped into the arena for artist Battle Royal over at Outcast Studios. I knew that I'd never make it out of the first round, but that wasn't really the point.

I had picked She-Hulk as my character for the fight, and with the luck of the draw got thrown up against Lobo. With that being the case, I figured it would be a hand-to-hand combat situation. I checked out some photo reference for martial arts and MMA and started doing some quick gestures on 9x12 sketch paper. I found a pretty good photo of a throw, but once I'd gestured it out, even though the mannequin matched the photo, it felt like my lady's pose was a little too scared. It looked like she was defending against a leap, rather than following through on a throw. So I thought about baseball, and came up with a pose I was happy with.

Fixing the poses

Once I had the main characters' poses figured out, I settled on a camera angle that I thought would work. I figured that since Lobo is pretty bad news in the DC universe, if he showed up in the Marvel universe, it wouldn't be a girl fight. A guy that has killed off his whole planet would pretty likely get all of the Avengers involved.

The official tournament rules specifically stated that any Avenger could call in the whole assembly.  As previously mentioned, I knew I would only have one shot at this, so I figured I'd go crazy with it, and do just that, and throw down with as much of the core team as I could recognizably fit in there.

Fixing the narrative

While I was roughing out, I realized that I had the storytelling backwards, so I dropped the drawing on a lightbox and did a quick trace job to reverse the layout so that She-Hulk would have the dominant spot. Even though she's farther back, and therefore smaller, she's on the left hand side of the page, which gets her noticed first by most people who follow the Western alphabet.

I plotted out the perspective grid with careful math and geometry and stuff, with the convergence point just under She-Hulk's knee, and arranged all the other page elements so that they were either moving toward her, or looking at her, or in Lobo's case, moving away from her. But she's still the center of gravity here, and the story of the page is all about her.

Once I finally got all of that sorted out, I went to full-scale 11x17 comic art board.

Right about there was where I decided to play to my naturally cartoony drawing style. Then it got silly. Here come all the Avengers, all geared up for a big battle, and it turns out to be nothing. Squirrel Girl came out a little more sinister than I intended, but it's all in good fun.

So, yeah. Turns out, it's a girl fight.

Bringin' it

Of course I did not win the art battle. But I drew something I don't hate, and that's worth something.