Illustration Fixation

Quiet Noise - Painting a City Scene

2012-02-27T05:49:00.002-08:00

This is one of four pieces I created recently for an educational publication dealing with poetry:

The brief for this piece called for a "busy city scene: skyscrapers, busy sidewalks and streets filled with cars, trucks, fire trucks, jets in the sky..." - words that would strike fear into the heart of any illustrator working on tight deadlines, myself included!

I started by looking at a lot of city scenes, just to fill my head with the feel of a busy city, and to load up on some of the various content you might see in such a locale.

The poem accompanying this picture is actually about how you often catch moments of quiet amid the bustle of city noise, maybe by ducking into a bagel shop, or whatever. The brief also added, "...perhaps at sunset to convey the sense that quiet is imminent." This was discussed with the editor and we concluded that flipping this around, setting the scene at sunrise would deliver exactly what we wanted, a sense of short-lived quiet soon to be overtaken by the impending day.

Surrounded by a ton of city reference images, I cobbled together this rough. It doesn't look like much, but it has a sense of place and light. The colors are consistent, the values are reasonably well arranged. There's a very simple color scheme, almost monochromatic (the lights are warm, yellow/reddish and the unlit areas are greenish).

This is a solid context for adding as much detail as I want. When I did this it was almost like rendering a dream image. Parts of it don't make sense, for example, the white square back of the truck is actually facing the wrong way. I'm not sure at this point if that's a one way street or a two way street (or a three way street, by the looks of it). But the right feeling is there - something I personally would never get from doing a tight pencil drawing at this stage.

Now where to start painting? A lot of beginning artists have trouble with that, so I'll say it again - it doesn't matter! Start anywhere. Wherever you feel like starting. Wherever looks easiest. Wherever looks like you have some idea what you might do there. Does any area, when you look at it, give you the feeling, "well I guess I could add some detail to that car..." or whatever? Or maybe, "I guess I could start tightening up the lines of those buildings on the left.

Maybe part of the picture looks pretty good but needs a little correction... sort of like you see a lion's form (or whatever) a cloud, but it doesn't look quite right because the eye is too high... it just needs a little re-positioning of the eye and maybe making the mane more symmetrical. Even if it's just one little thing, like, "I guess I could make the side of that building a little straighter" that's good enough. You just need to get going, then "the other you" will become engaged and take over!

Here's my first pass at adding some detail and tightening things up.

Even though, as I said, I could start anywhere, I want to be careful to not let any one area of the picture get too far ahead or fall too far behind. Once I establish the basic image, then get going, I continually scan for whatever is the least developed part of the picture, whatever is bothering me, and bring that up to snuff. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Stapleton Kearns refers to this as "herding sheep." That is to say, bring all areas of the image along together. Don't think this means all areas of the picture should, in the end, be developed or finished equally. Typically certain areas are much more finished than others. But within this general framework or target, don't let any one area fall too far behind relative to the others, and relative to its role in the overall picture. This is especially critical in a picture like this, because one false move and the thing will absolutely fall apart. In fact, right now that yellow truck is in danger of having that effect...

That little light triangle in the upper left is definitely a problem, definitely grabbing too much attention. At the same time, that relatively little and simple shape is giving some crucial form and space information. It's very often the case that what is making a powerful 3d statement is also at risk of killing the 2d statement. Most of it is going to be trimmed off, leaving just enough of the bottom point to serve my purpose, without being an eye sore. But I'll soften the blow a bit by making that area of sky darker than it logically "should" be, and also making the shape a bit more complex.

Note how those light lines I added to the building on the right (the window frames) sort of explain the loose, rough brushwork on the side of the building. With little areas of more precise detail in place, the eye easily makes sense of what accompanies them.

This image shows where the text will be placed over the picture (in case you were wondering about that huge open area of sky. The placement of the jet plane must work relative to the text. Also, while I could certainly get away with not finishing the buildings behind that huge white text box on the right side of the picture, I want to make sure the picture is presentable as a standalone piece.

Most of the light in this scene is faked, meaning that since there is really no direct light source in the picture (it's sort of all ambient), I can basically do whatever I want with the lighting. Everything is just generally lit from the top down, and the darkest areas are those that are completely occluded from most light (e.g. under the vehicles).

As is often the case with my pictures, working digitally I could very easily make all those geometric architectural lines perfectly ruler-straight. It's in fact much easier to do this than to laboriously paint them all manually. But that would completely kill the subtle wonkiness that's critical to the picture having a hand painted look. The slight irregularities are part of the texture. I'd rather have the picture look like a freshly painted wooden fence than a perfectly molded plastic one.

Now for some final effects... I darken and enrichify the less lit areas, and add a bright blast of... something, I dunno, pseudo light coming out of the main sky area. This is a good example of where digital tools can be used to add effects, without undermining the hand painted look and feel of the picture.

And, for continuity, here's the final picture again:

There's a saying, "the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." Take my advice, if you're ever faced with a challenging picture like this, don't procrastinate and don't be afraid. Just start moving. Get going on what you feel you can do, and the rest will follow.

Speed, Storytelling and Character

2012-02-22T06:17:00.000-08:00

This is a piece I did recently for The Weekly Standard. I think these guys feature some great art. Here's my humble contribution:

It's an illustration for an article called "Dances with Wolves", sort of a "man vs. car salesman" thing.

Turnaround times for weekly magazines are notoriously short. In this case the email from the art director came in at 11:00 pm on a Wednesday night.

Thursday morning I received and read the text for article, did some research, and started sketching. The rough sketches went out at 1:00pm. It doesn't take that long to actually generate the sketches, but it does take a little time for the ideas to "bake in", so to speak. You really need to get to know the character, his environment, how he might carry himself, how he would dress, etc. If this were an established character I'd only need to worry about conveying his story of the day - but here I need to first establish the character for the audience, and then also tell his current story. This means (as usual) everything in the picture must contribute to the narrative or it has no place in the scene. By 2:30pm I had an approved sketch and was ready to paint - the image was due 24 hours later, at 3:00 pm Friday. Of course I was aiming for earlier, and fortunately managed to get it out by 1:00pm Friday.

The art director, Philip Chalk, asked for one sketch - I told him I tried out three or four different approaches, to which he replied, "well don't do that again!" (meaning, "you shouldn't have gone to all that trouble!")

The basic story line is about a customer having to contend with a menacing salesman in order to get the car he desperately wants.

We talked about having the salesman sort of standing as a literal barrier between the customer (and by extension, the reader) and the car:

And more of an evil supervillain kind of approach with the car keys sitting on the desk. He's sort of saying, "if you do exactly as I say maybe you can have this car.":

He went for the last one, my favorite too. We agreed that given the small size (approximately 3" x 3") this would allow us to keep the character's face larger, and also the storytelling was more compelling, slightly over the top (maybe over the middle?). Kudos to Philip for choosing the layout and composition with the most potential, vs. just going for the one that simply happens to have been drawn better (I hate when they do that).

With an approved sketch in hand I got to work setting up the painting. First I tweaked the rough sketch a bit to make it graphically stronger. Using Photoshop's warp tool I bent and elongated the head, made the arms and body a bit more slender, and made the gesture more unified and powerful. This basically gives the silhouette a stronger footprint, so to speak.

Then I laid in some basic colors and values for the main elements, working under the rough drawing layer.

At this point my main goal is to get past the reliance on the initial line work, so the figure stands on its own with just value shapes. I start painting over the drawing layer, repeatedly hiding it to see if the paint work is solid enough to get rid of the line drawing. Almost there...

Finally I'm able to get rid of the rough line work and get the thing down to a single layer for the figure (plus one for the exterior, one for the window bars, and one on top for the desk). Now I'm really painting!!

I felt like the blue suit was a bit too colorful, so I toned it down.

After four hours of painting I went to bed feeling pretty good about where the picture was. "Probably shippable", as we say:

A bit of polish Friday morning... (those white styrofoam coffee cups are so 20th century... and that simple paper key ring had to go).

At this point I "remembered" (that is to say, I re-read the brief), that the character is said to wear "flashy shirts." Oops. Sometimes you get rolling so fast you neglect certain critical details. Thanks to Photoshop, of course, that is not a problem. I tried out a few colors for the shirt: yellow, pink... blue seemed to work best (looks flashy enough, but is not a distraction or focal point).

I also wasn't happy with how the head was melting into the background a bit due to the character's hair being white (which it had to be) against the light background. For some purposes this would be great - it actually focuses the viewer on the character's face. But for this application I wanted a little bit more of a flat, graphical appearance. So I added a tasteful (I hope) hint of an outline around the hair (and also added this to some other parts of the figure and the background, for consistency). This is, of course, kind of backwards... but whatever works...

The keys, documents and pen tell the immediate story, that a sale is (potentially) about to happen, while the coffee cup and mouse tell a more general side of the story (this guy's day to day life and routine).The character's facial expression and body language tell who he is in the general sense (his predatory mode of operating) and also what he's doing to the customer / reader right now.I think this is a good example of some simple but concise storytelling - just a few components to create the character, place him character in his setting, indicate what's going on, involve the viewer as well - all driven and tied together by some basic triggers that anyone can easily read and understand.

Painting White Part Two - Color

2012-02-13T05:57:00.000-08:00

If you haven't already, please check out Part One of this little series, which talks about how to create the illusion of white with proper value organization. Now onto color.

Ok, the color you use doesn't matter. The end.

What's that, you want more... ok, here we go...

As discussed previously, an object's reflective properties determine what wavelengths of light it reflects back, which also determines how much overall light is reflected. In layman's terms we can say simply that a red object reflects red light. As a side note, it's important to realize that just about every object in the real world reflects back a little bit of every color. That is to say, even the reddest red apple is not really all that red!

What color does a white object reflect then? All of them (same with black and gray, but we'll deal with them later). As such, white objects and surfaces tell us a lot about the lighting conditions in the given area of a painting (or in the real world, for that matter). So a white sheet in bright sunlight appears very nearly white; in shadow on a sunny day it may almost appear to match the blue sky (because only the ambient light of the sky reaches the shadow); if a red apple is sitting on the sheet then you'll see some reddish colors in the apple's shadow, and so on.

That's how it all really works, but in painting "reality" is only part of the story... Because value is soooo overwhelmingly important in visual perception, the fact is, the colors you choose to use in painting white don't matter all that much, in terms of potentially appearing to be "wrong." The question is, what do you want to do with color in your picture? The way white is handled in a picture tells what the artist is doing, because all other color factors have been filtered out, so to speak.

Sometimes there is a clear logic behind the handling of white, for example, here the warm light of the fire hits the white surfaces facing it, giving them a yellowish color, while those facing the other way (ostensibly lit by the purply sky) are cooler:

In this picture there is no such logic - the "shaded" areas of the white shirt are colored yellow simply so they harmonize with the strong yellow background. Many times it works great to simply paint your whites in colors pulled from the rest of the picture. Maybe that has the same sort of effect as "ambient light"...

These whites could have been painted very cool, which is probably how they would really appear in "reality."

In practice artists tend to move freely between logical color, abstract color, and color for design. The good news is, if you have your value organizations right, you have a tremendous amount of flexibility in how you handle color, without fear of the picture breaking apart. This is true of all colors, but as noted, observing how white is handled in a picture really exposes the underlying color approach. Check out all the "whites" in this picture:

Sure the warmer colors are allegedly coming from the lamplight, and the cooler colors from the sky, but as you can see I am able to move quite freely between blue, purple, red, pink, yellow, orange - whatever I want to make the kind of impact I want - without worrying at all about the picture's color becoming incohesive (spell checker tells me that's not a word, but I like it). Here's a selection of these "whites" from the snow scene, in isolation:

It can be really stunning to see that, basically any color can appear as white. Here are some notable examples of "whites" from a few of my pictures - a very wide range of hues, saturation and values:

And, for reference, the larger versions of the pictures these "whites" come from:

So if you're ever looking at some amazing painting of a white tablecloth, with all sorts of pinks and purples in the shadows, and wondering how on earth the artist could have mapped all those colors out, or observed them so carefully... remember that there is a lot more flexibility in how you handle the color of white than you may think.

The Walled Flower - a little perspective

2012-02-07T06:43:00.000-08:00

This is a cover piece I did for a book called The Walled Flower, just released today! It's the second in a series of murder mysteries set in Victoria Square, New York (appropriately named "The Victoria Square Mysteries").

The picture had to communicate that the house was under some renovation, without making it look dilapidated. I didn't simply copy an existing Victorian house, but rather designed my own after looking at a few dozen of them (thankfully the area where I live is rich in houses something like this).

Here's a detail of the image

As usual, this picture started with some thumbnails

Followed by some sketches...
You can see how I played around with the different foreground elements: the truck, the cat, the sign. The cat is a necessary element for all books in the series! The art director went with the third sketch.

I proposed adding the sign with the SOLD sticker for a couple of reasons:

1) to show that the house had recently been purchased (the book follows the adventures of its new owners)

2) to create a nice foreground element, allowing me to bring the cat forward, and therefore make him(her?) larger and more prominent, without standing out too much.

I think this is a great example of where narrative (storytelling) meets design (composition) in illustration. The SOLD sign is a great marker for "something has changed, and now interesting is going to happen." Lots of great stories start with someone moving into a new home.

For perspective, I usually just lay down a series of color-coded lines, each on a different layer, so I can hide and unhide them separately as needed (having them all visible at once creates a lot of clutter).

I don't necessarily make lines that exactly coincide with the main lines of the house - I just makes sure the lines are abundant and closely spaced enough that I can estimate pretty much any line I need to paint with some accuracy.

The house basically uses three point perspective (doesn't everything? - yes); in this image I used red for the upper vanishing point, i.e. the verticals (because we are looking up at the house), blue for the left vp, the green for the right (and black for the peaks - vp's four and five, but who's counting?).

For the lettering on the sign I used a little time-saving technique. First I quickly painted a rough version of the sign flattened out. I designed it to look something like a generic real estate sign:

Then I applied a perspective distortion, using the aforementioned perspective lines as a guide.

Because I want to maintain the painterly quality of the image, I have to be careful not to be too precise with the sign. So I use it just as a quick guide, which I then paint over. It's kind of ironic - with physical paint you may struggle to make the lines of the sign as straight as possible - with digital that's trivial, so you have to make some effort to NOT make them too straight. You have to resist the urge... Here's what the final painted sign looks like:

Observant viewers will notice the extreme shift in ambient and reflected light on the right or "shaded" side of the post. The upper part of the post reflects a lot of blue-purplish sky light, while the bottom portion reflects a lot of the greenish color from the lawn. This may look exaggerated here - but did you notice it earlier?

Here's the cover for the first in the series, called A Crafty Killing, which I also did:

The Walled Flower is available today, and can be purchased at your local bookstore, or from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Maurice's Valises on iTunes

2012-02-01T08:16:00.000-08:00

I'm thrilled to announce that the picture book I recently illustrated, Maurice's Valises (Moral Tails in an Immoral World), part one: The Beginning is now available on iTunes!

I had an amazing time collaborating with the author, J.S. Friedman on this wonderful project.
The iBook features sound effects, narration and animation!

You can purchase the iBook or download a free sample by clicking on the link above, or here.

Painting White Part One - Value

2012-01-30T17:58:00.000-08:00

A lot has been written on this subject before... many paintings ask the question, "what is white?" Viewers are often amazed at how many colors are visible in something that's purportedly "white"

All objects reflect back whatever light is thrown on them (including light bouncing off of adjacent colored objects). The more strongly colored the object in question, the more it filters this light. Neutral objects (black, gray, white) provide almost no color filtering, that is to say, they absorb or reflect the entire spectrum equally. That means that with a pure white object, what you are seeing is really just the sum of all the light striking it. As a result, the one color that white almost never really appears as is pure white.

But I'm not here to talk about color just yet - as usual, I'm her to talk about VALUE. First and foremost, the reason an element in a painting appears white is because it's the whitest thing in the painting - or the whitest (lightest) thing in a particular part of the painting, where a particular lighting condition has been set up. (This is in fact true of all colors - what appears as blue is simply the bluest thing in the painting, what appears as yellow is simply the yellowest thing, etc., but again, we're not here to talk about color).

Take a look at this painting, The White Bear (featured in Spectrum 18, a full page no less, thank you very much):

There are several "white" elements in it - the woman's head scarf, her apron strings, the bear, the girl's head scarf. Here are those colors sampled, shown on a pure white background:

And here's where those samples are located in the painting:

Apart from the intense orange edge light, most of the painting appears somewhat uniformly lit. At least, all the figures look like they exist in the same space.

But check out how dark the mom and dad figures appear in isolation. The value range for elements from the white apron strings to dad's dark trousers has been extraordinarily compressed - but the apron strings still read as white because they are the whitest thing in that area.

Now with the girl overlaid - it seems like she comes from a different painting:

She'd fit better if mom and dad were painted like this:

Something like the figures in this painting:

Or if the girl were like this, then she'd fit with the darker mom and dad:

So when you're setting up a painting, or struggling to fix one... or struggling with color, or struggling in general, take a breath and first identify the white in each area of your painting. Everything else in that area must fit between it and that areas's black - even if this means you have to deal with incredibly subtle shifts of value. I've said it before and I'll say it again - the illusion of light is about relationships and primarily value relationships, not contrast or saturation.

Be sure to check out Part Two of this series.

Where have all the book illustrators gone?

2012-01-29T13:41:00.000-08:00

This article got my gander up (and the ganders of a few of my colleagues as well). Personally I think there are more - many, many more - illustrators and artists of all specialties who can draw very well these days. The artistic community is open and supportive - even the most seasoned professionals are willing to reveal their hard won secrets and techniques, often for free. And the internet has provided the means by which this knowledge can be shared. There are a tremendous amount of resources available for artists to learn to draw, and my observation is that artists are achieving proficiency at a younger and younger age.

In my day we had the local bookstore to go look at covers done by established artists - and that was it! We would drool over the tiniest tidbit of "how to" information that might be gleaned from an interview with an artist, or passed on from a friend. It's a miracle anyone learned to draw at all given that, as the article does rightly point out, most art schools abandoned the grueling traditional drawing teaching methods (which are the only ones that work, btw, whether in school or on your own - practice, practice, practice).

Of course, all this sharing may be resulting in a certain homogeneity of style creeping in, since artists of certain genres tend to work digitally more than others, and therefore find it easier to share their methods, but that is a debate for another day...

Needless to say, this article is dead wrong - there are plenty of illustrators who are exceptional drafts-persons these days!!

The Illusion of Creativity

2012-01-28T10:38:00.000-08:00

Artists tend to imagine that there's this creative voice inside us that is trying to get out, to make itself heard. This is our creative mind, the source of our work. Conventional wisdom is that creative ideas come from some rich inner well... thesubconscious, the right side of the brain...

But maybe ideas don't really come from anywhere - maybe they don't really exist until you do something to bring them into existence. Perhaps the feeling that they exist, and need only to be expressed, is an illusion. It just seems like they already exist, but they don't. The really great ideas seem to come from nowhere.

Our creative mind may in fact not be a SOURCE of anything other than opinions, desires, needs. Our creative mind may not create things, but rather hunger for something that doesn't yet exist - something it can get only by forcing you to create it.

There are lots of rules to follow when making good pictures. It's relatively easy to analyze a picture and see if its underlying design (or composition) is solid, and so on. But what gets that picture started? What are the rules for that? How do we go about that?

The truth is, the so-called "creative" process isn't really so much aboutcreating as it is about getting started on something, anything, and then reacting - the starting point can be almost entirely random. The process is entirely reactive.

What's not random is the perception you have of thatfirst scribble, that first line of text - how it affects you, what you pick up on, and choose to enhance and develop, like a Rorschachtest that takes into account your entire life up to that point, your currentmood, feelings and thoughts and even your intentions (even though your intentions may have had very little to do with the nature of that first mark).

So if you're sitting around dreaming of the day that great idea for a book, picture, song, whatever is going to pop into your head fully formed, in some kind of creative lightning strike, I suggest you instead pick up a pencil (iPad?) and get working.

Snow White and Rose Red - process

2012-01-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

Here's a walk through of my process for creating my picture, Snow White and Rose Red. The piece was also featured in Spectrum a few years back.

Here's a detail of Red:

THUMBNAILS
You know the drill... just get your ideas down. Don't question them at this stage, just get them down and assess later. If one starts grabbing you, though, make sure to follow that lead.

It can be tough trying to turn that dreamlike image you get in your head into a tangible, viable real world space, while also retaining all its magic and abstract "oomph" - that is the challenge of realistic painting!

...starting to see an idea here... maybe if I have Snow White offset from the fire, against a dark background, with Rose Red darker, against the fire...

The basic value structure is starting to work, but I don't love the centered, one point perspective view.

This is more like it...

Here's the value study...

And some quick color ideas, and the rough is done!

Before I get to work painting the final image, though, I need to really absorb my subject. I don't do a tight pencil drawing to guide (I say LIMIT) my painting. Instead, I do a lot of different drawings to get to know my subject, using real life, photos, imagination - anything - as a source. Here is me getting to know bears:

And kids...

And bears and kids...

and mom...

and sheep...

and stuff...

I've included all these so you can see that this stage of the process is more about training, which in turn is about quantity (time spent), not quality.

Here we go painting... where to begin? Doesn't really matter... I know some artists start on the focal point, others mix it up a bit. I tend to loosen up by working on non-focal areas, then sort of sneak up on the focal area and take it by surprise! But I do generally work the WHOLE picture at once. Stapleton Kearns reckoned this something like herding all the sheep into the pen - you don't bring ONE to the pen, then go back for the next, then bring it into the pen, then go back for the third etc. - no, you corral them all at once, moving more slowly but bringing the whole herd along together. That's my approach.

Starting to see some form and light here...

Continuing to add detail... like a photo coming into focus...

More detail... (I really need to do some videos of this process, I know)

Now adding a lot of stuff on the walls - this is where all those studies come in handy. No shortage of ideas, and all I need to think about now is where they fit...

So here's where artists that are just learning get upset with step by step demos("just keep adding details and refining and voila!") - they're like, "you make it seem so easy!! I never know what to do next!!"

The truth is, I often don't either. I think Jason Manley once said, "think more, paint less" (could've been someone else, if so, apologies to you both). Anyway, believe me, I usually do not have a completely clear "vision" for the painting in terms of specific details - more like a specific feeling that I am roughly aiming for. Then I just follow the bread crumbs.

Making sure to maintain my simple value structure as I refine and add detail... all art is abstract - THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT ART!

This painting has a lot going on, but it's actually a very, very simple composition - basically just two values - a big dark area with a light spot in the middle. It's usually pretty straightforward to have large areas of the image kind of melt into darkness - but this is not always the obvious thing to do with light areas.

Check out the fireplace. Next time you're looking at a real fire in a real fireplace, you'll note that there are actually lots of darks in there, even if the fire is burning brightly. But if I did that here, say, brought some darks into the kettle and such, the fireplace would pop out like a yellow and black striped caution sign (they paint those things that way for a reason). The compression of the value range and overall monochromatic treatment of the fireplace interior is not just to give it a feeling of glowing warmth, it's also to create a flatter foil for the figures silhouetted against it.

Harvey Dunn would say, "it's ok if Rose decides to raise her hand, so long as YOU do not decide to raise it for her..."

At some point the picture has kind of arrived, and it's tempting to stop. You've done enough, it's all there, nothing left to do... then I ask myself, "well, if I WERE to do a little more, what might I do? maybe a little work here... the bear's fur could use a little more love..." and before I know it I've brought the painting to another level that I did not really foresee. That is one of the "secrets." All this little stuff adds up. For some painters, given their particular process, there are points at which the painting looks ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE, and they may not even have a clear picture of what it needs to end up looking like. What they do have is confidence that if they just keep going it'll get where it needs to be.

Everything in the picture has to contribute to what you're trying to do, or it will undoubtedly work against it. You need to think about it all - color, value, lighting, mood, viewpoint, content, facial expression, body language, costumes, things, stuff - everything! For "stuff", I like to think about what these folks do when I'm not looking at them. How do they scurry up that ladder when they go to bed at night? What is just slightly "off camera" that we may not be seeing? What's in that jug on the shelf? What kinds of visitors come and hang their coats on that coat rack by the door? Who winds that clock? What do the girls do during the day - I know, they pick cherries - there's a basket of them under the ladder...

Some final adjustments, and we're done.

The thing that's great about 2d still art is it takes just a fraction of a second for us to get inside the viewer's head.

DETAIL

Here's the same progression, focusing on Red.

She starts life as a blob... ok two blobs (don't we all?)

Working those values, starting to define her edges

Painters go on and on about values - and no one listens to us!!!!!
Look at Red here - you can easily differentiate her arm from her body, and see that the shoulder on her dress is probably a white material... but squint down and look at it again - everything within her form melts into a single almost black shape. Values in painting are sooooo much more limited compared to real life you've got to "stay within the lines." For Red, in this picture, that means using an extremely narrow range of values to depict the entire range of "local" colors in her, from white to dark red.

Value control is not just about depicting reality - it's about focal point and contrast. Notice how much darker the fireplace interior is to the right of Red's head vs. the left side, where it's in front of her face. I don't want that triangle of light behind her head to draw your attention... but I also of course staged the picture so the brightest part of the fire is where I want it - behind her face (I'm so clever).

Changing pose and costume at the last minute...

Here's a detail shot of the mantle. Red is more active and wild - she likes to catch butterflies, so there's a jar of butterflies above her. Snow likes to read, so there's a stack of books above her.

At one point in the story the girls are rescuing a dwarf whose beard has gotten stick in the split of a log. Snow whips out a little pair of scissors and cuts the beard, freeing him. There they are...

I hope this little walk through the making of Snow White and Rose Red has been helpful (and apologies for the delays in posting).

Don't give up! Draw!

2012-01-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

The main reason artists get good at making art is that they keep doing it. Sounds simple, right? Well, it is and it isn't. Staying in shape is simple too - just work out and eat right every day and in time you'll be in amazing shape! We know how that usually turns out.

As very young children we spend inordinate amounts of time listening, speaking, making pictures, singing and dancing. In preschool we still make pictures a lot, and start to focus more on words. By the time kids hit fourth grade or so they're spending most of their formal education time (maybe half their day) reading, speaking and formally working on language skills, plus math, and maybe an hour or less a week making pictures. Eventually the so-called "academic" subjects entirely eclipse picture-making for most people. The average person draws at a fourth grade level, but communicates fluently verbally. Having fluid verbal skills doesn't make you Robert Frost or J.R.R. Tolkien - but it certainly gives you the necessary toolkit.

It would be ridiculous to think that the majority of people (let's say everyone) can't learn to read and write - but this is what many people think about the ability to draw well and make pictures. We really take for granted the massive amounts of time we spend learning to do other things - well, learning to make pictures takes a lot of work too. The good news is, YOU CAN DO IT. I don't know who you are, but if you've learned to read this, then you can learn to draw as well as anyone else.

I can't say what your ART will be like - that's something else - but I can promise that you can learn to draw as well as you want to.

Imagine if all those hours reading and writing had been spent seeing and drawing. This is not a pitch to transform our education system (I've tried), but simply to convince you that competent picture making is not reserved for the few who are gifted - and its usefulness is not reserved for art-making alone. It is reserved for a select few, though, namely those who have enough self-motivation and perseverance to stick with it. You have to try really hard to learn to draw (you'd have to try really hard NOT to learn how to read).

I say "learning" but really acquiring drawing skills is more like TRAINING. The great thing about great pictures are they look easy, inevitable. The "secret" is there is an immeasurable amount of effort and sometimes struggle to train yourself to make them look that way.

Midtone Magic

2011-06-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

We've probably all seen this "illusion" before, or something like it. I've created my own ultra-simplified version of it using only three values and eliminating the alleged shadow caster. You can't get simpler than this:

The "illusion" is that C looks darker than B, when in fact they are the same value:

This is instructive because it demonstrates both the malleability of mid-tones (a single tone can appear as light or shadow) and our inability to accurately gauge them, even in relative terms (which is, in fact, saying the same thing). We have no difficulty identifying the darkest and lightest values in the picture, but when it comes to ranking the "two" in the middle we have trouble - we can't even tell that they're two different values. As a side note, it also shows that as creatures trying to survive, it's more important for us to know that B is a white square and C is a dark square - so we filter out the shadow effect and see B as lighter than C.

The other illusion here is that we perceive this simple arrangement of three values as something else - a checkerboard with a shadowed area, or perhaps an area with some dark translucent material over it (there is a very close relationship between the illusion of light and the illusion of transparency). As representational artists our goal is to be able to create that illusion at will.

This perception of light and shadow occurs (in the real world as well as in this picture) from a form of pattern recognition. We perceive a consistent checkerboard pattern passing under a consistent darker because the relationship between the white square in light and in shadow (A to B) is the same as the black square in light and shadow (C to D) and the relationship between the white square in light and the black square in light (A to C) is the same as the white square in shadow and the black square in shadow (B to D).

A:B = C:D and A:C = B:D

(this is cumbersome to say in words, but easy to see)
If you think about it you'll realize that if the first statement is true then the second one must also be true, and vice versa. If the relationship between A and B is the same as between C and D, then A to C will also be the same as B to D. However, in practice its easier to spot inconsistency by checking it both ways.

It is this set of relationships, fitting together like a value puzzle, that makes the illusion of light/transparency appear. This is what makes us see a pattern of light and shade, and also patterns of light and dark objects, from a simple arrangement of value shapes. It is not the fact that B and C are the same value.

Darker shadow
B and C don't have to be the same values:

darker shadow

Here I've made the shadow darker, like turning down the ambient light. I've made B and D darker, but the value structure outlined above (A is to B, etc...) is still valid. B and C are no longer the same, though.

Whiter white squares, blacker black squares
Here's another example where B and C are not the same value:

whiter white squares, blacker black squares

I've made the "white" squares appear much lighter, and the black squares much darker, by changing all four values. But still the structure (A is to B... etc.) is intact.

Mid-tones are special
The lightest value must necessarily represent the lightest object in full illumination, and the darkest value always has to represent the darkest object in shadow (we're excluding highlights and fully occluded areas here). By definition, anything lighter than the white's shadow must be an illuminated area, and anything darker than the black's lit area must be shadow. But every value in between, that is, the mid-range values, can be either an illuminated area or a shadow area. Darker mid-tones can be both the lit parts of dark objects and the shaded parts of mid-toned objects, while lighter mid-tones can be both the shaded part of light objects and the lit part of mid-toned objects. Put another way the closer a value is to either end of the range the more limited its role. That is the magic of mid-tones that, if understood, while make your values (and therefore your colors) pump out light!

This is why it is so important to apply mid-tones skillfully when seeking to create the illusion of light. This is also why the illusion of light does not come from simply increasing contrast, or lightening the picture overall.

Turning up the lights too high
Intuitively it seems like turning up the light in the lit areas will create a stronger sense of light. The problem, though, is the lightest color can become pinned against the maximum whiteness of the medium, and so the lit areas of the black squares move too close to them, and the structure (A is to B, etc.) breakes down. Turning up the lights does not increase the illusion of light if the value structure breaks down - and turning them up too high will cause the structure to break down!!

too much "light" = less light

The only difference between this example and the first illustration introducing the post is that the lit area of the black square is too light, which is, paradoxically, breaking down the illusion of light / transparency. The supposedly shaded rectangle is starting to split off from the checkerboard. We sort of don't know what to make of it. It looks like there's a haze over the lit parts, and then a hole in that haze for the shaded rectangle, or something. It's ambiguous - and there goes your illusion of light!

What's really interesting here, and even more stunning when you encounter this problem in a real panting is that to fix this image, to add more light we make a lit area darker. This isn't darkening an area to make another look lighter by contrast it's darkening a lit area to make it appear to have more light. This is a very practical situation that occurs in a lot of paintings. Don't fall into the trap of thinking lighter lit areas = more light.

The wrong way to increase contrast
In the "darker shadow" example above we made the shadow area darker while preserving the basic value relationships. If we make it too dark, what happens is the shaded black squares (D) become pinned (they can't go any darker) but the shaded white squares (C) continue to get darker, and hence become relatively closer to D, breaking down the basic structure.

muddy shadows = less light

Another way to describe this is that cutting off the low (or high) end of the value structure is actually fine, in terms of where the ends are - the problem is this changes the relationship of the middle to the ends.

Overall lightness or "high key"
Sometimes we think making the painting lighter overall will create the illusion of light. It's fine to make paintings light overall, but that alone does not increase or make more likely the illusion of light. In fact, in practical terms, by reducing your available range of values the job of structuring them properly demands more precision. Here is a high key image with broken value structure:

high key misfire

The picture is lighter overall, but the value structure has broken down because the shaded area of the white squares is too light, creating an ambiguous situation. Here's it is adjusted properly:

high key with working value structure

With overall lighter values you need to be a lot more precise in value management, because the range you're working with is smaller (which is fine of course, if that's what you want to do). So the high key picture is working, but is the illusion of light weaker or stronger than in "whiter white squares, blacker black squares," above? I think the "whiter white squares..." is stronger because it's using a wider value range (still a tiny fraction of the real world). Of course there are many other reasons to restrict your image to only light values or "high key."

Low key
We can even make the entire image very dark, while still preserving the illusion of light better than in the high contrast, but imbalanced examples:

dark image with working value structure

Ultimately you really need to learn to just see these relationships - but often we don't know what we're looking for. Our inability to accurately rank middle values is not a failure or shortcoming of our visual system. In painting, as in perceiving reality, we don't need to be able to tell what something is in terms of its value - just what it looks like it is. This is a gift - use it!

Look at a given object in your painting (or area of local color, such as the white squares in these examples) and see if it seems to be the same color as it pass into the shadow. Do this with all color areas. Then do it with shadow and light areas, like a cross-reference - see if the shadow seems to be equally dark as it passes over all the different local colors and see if the lit areas appear to be equally lit. If all those tests are successful, you'll have the illusion of light.

One easy way to get started is to establish the white object and the black object in your painting, and then in each sub area of the painting. Later we'll see how we might arrive at a solid value structure in a typical painting.

Dunn One-Liners

2011-06-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

Harvey Dunn was a great illustrator from the Golden Age. He was also a teacher, and has some amazing sayings for illustrators. Each of them is worth a fortune.

"When you add “interest” to a picture you take interest from it."

"Paint a little less of the facts, and a little more of the spirit."

"We have trouble because we demand something of the picture - pictures must demand something of us."

"A second thought is always dangerous."

"Action in a picture is the muscular action in the eye of the beholder."

"Let it be an expression rather than a description."

"Look a little at the model and a lot inside."

"A picture that is “fixed up” is never fixed. It’s somehow got to be good to start with."

Harvey Dunn in the studio

"The best picture you make you deserve the least credit for."

"Your good pictures belong to the world. The bad ones are all yours."

Those last two are brutal, but oh so true.

Art and Time

2011-06-08T10:57:00.000-07:00

It takes a musician exactly as long to play a piece of music as it takes the audience to hear it. By contrast, it may take you ten, twenty, fifty, even a hundred hours to create a painting - while it takes the viewer a split second to have his world rocked by it (or not). This fundamental difference is responsible for a delusion that causes much of the discouragement we feel as artists, especially starting out.

We can labor for as long as we want on a painting, and so sometimes we think that if we work really, really hard on a piece we can do something that's way above our current level. We can easily see what wonderful things are going on in some great artist's work, we totally understand it, and we know that making visual art is not about manual dexterity or keeping up with the beat, so we think if we just concentrate and work really hard we can produce a masterpiece. Maybe it'll take us ten times as many hours as the master artist, but we can do it. We can take as long as we need to mix those colors, and we can rework as long as we want. We'd never make that mistake with the violin. This is our delusion. So we try, and fail, then think something must be wrong.

In all the arts it takes years, even decades to achieve mastery. A decade or two of hard work and practice to masterfully play a three minute piece on the violin, or to produce a masterpiece of visual art. And making a painting is as much a performance as playing a piece on the violin. Sure, more time on a piece may make it more polished, and we all have our good days and our bad days (and we have pictures that seem to come together more easily than others), but the reality is your level of expertise generally advances at a steady pace, and no amount of concentration can change that overnight. What you can produce in a ten minute performance right now is probably about as good as what you can produce in a ten hour performance right now (just less polished, less finished). As artists, the more skills we have under our belts the more we start to realize the performance nature of the work, and do all sorts of things to coax a good performance out of ourselves.

This talk may sound discouraging, like "don't bother trying so hard, you're not going to get any better." Really the opposite is true! - you try hard, you work hard, and you get better. You still just draw, draw, draw, paint, paint, paint. But what you should feel about your work may be different - you should not worry that you don't have the "talent", or that you'll never get it right, just because you can't make something as good as you think you should be able to right now. You can't make something as good as what you think your current level of understanding is. Again, this is the visual artist's delusion, and it stems from the fact that ours is the medium where we can spend unlimited time creating something that takes the viewer a fraction of a second to take it in.

Progress in the visual arts is very much about quantity. Some artists say, "I did lots of bad drawings before I ever did a good one." That's a good way to put it, because you learn a lot from the bad ones. But you also learn from the good ones, and even the mediocre ones. The only reason an artist gets good is s/he keeps doing it, and the only reason an artist fails to get good is that s/he stops.

Here's the kicker - that unfounded discouragement is the main thing that makes us stop, or not work as much. How crazy is that? Try to find joy in your art every step of the way, and, take your time.

Circles in Perspective - Part Three

2011-06-07T10:36:00.000-07:00

In Part One and Part Two we saw how in many typical cases ellipses (circles drawn in perspective) do not seem to comply with the rules of perspective, for example, all three of these ellipses are identical, while the perspective squares that bound them are not:

The minor axis of the ellipse does not always remain perfectly vertical, however. Take this simple drawing of a pickup truck - how should the ellipses representing its tires be oriented in perspective?

This looks wrong:

Orienting the ellipses vertically looks better, but still not right:

As suggested before, if you imagine the ellipses (or the circles they represent) as the ends of cylinders, the answer becomes clear - the minor axes of the ellipses point toward the left vanishing point.

No other perspective lines define the orientation of these ellipses - only the center line, which aligns with the ellipse's minor axes matters in terms of orienting the ellipse:

And if we place more ellipses within these, say, to add wheel covers, they align on these same center lines:

Note how the right vanishing point is not needed at all for orienting the ellipses, even though the circular faces sit on the plane that goes back to the right vanishing point, not the left. The right vanishing point helps determine the relative sizes of the ellipses, but not their orientation:

That about covers the basics for drawing circles in perspective.

Color Connections - Part One

2011-06-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

We can consider color continuity in a picture in three main areas:

1) "local" or object color (e.g. the apple is red, the banana is yellow)
2) light source color (e.g. firelight is reddish, ambient skylight is blue)
3) global colorization (the whole picture is influenced by a single tonal center; there is no direct real world corollary for this, but it's similar to the effect of atmospheric perspective (haze, colored smoke, etc.) but without the reduction in contrast that occurs in those natural phenomena).

Each of these is rooted in real world visual principles, which our eyes and minds have been trained to decode. Our visual apparatus has evolved to automatically adjust for and filter out many of the things artists are most concerned with creating, and it takes a lot of training to be able to see objectively and subjectively at the same time.

Local (object) color connections only

These are not rules to apply when making a painting, but rather principles of perception to understand when assessing your paintings. That is, these are connections the eye naturally looks for, and finds. If parts of the painting are connected in one way, but other parts are not, the paintings colors can unintentionally become disjointed. This about learning to see these connections and exploit them, and/or correct colors that aren't working.

Light source colors overwhelm local (object) colors

This is not a full exploration of the use of color in a painting or of how light works - light does a lot more than this! These are just the three broadest types of connections we tend to look for in painting. Understanding them can really help you get a handle on your color work and identify problems, especially when you are not working from life or any reference.

All colors strongly influenced by a single color

The diagrams here are just that - diagrams. They are not meant to look "real" as they ignore many important areas of color perception and color in painting (for example, reflected light, variation of light within lit and ambient areas, specular "highlights", occluded areas not reached by any light, etc.).

For discussion, relative to this chart we can think of these as "horizontal" (the horizontal bands of local color on the block), "vertical" (the vertical division between the lit and unlit sides of the block, and the resulting vertical continuity within each side) and "global", respectively.

Three types of continuity, overlapping

Sometimes artists think "horizontally", that is, local colors dominate, light colors are underplayed or non-existent (light is white, shadows are black), and no overall colorization is considered. This is where most picture makers start off. If colors are not too saturated, they don't clash, and appear to work ok:

Local continuity only, but low saturation

This is where almost everyone starts (and many people stay). The middle stripe is red, the bottom stripe is yellow, etc. The color of the dark, "shaded" side of an object is simply a different "version" of the lit color (or both are different versions of some neutral object color without respect to any light source, as if such a thing could exist...). Usually shadows are thought of as black(er versions of the object color). Some teachers refer to this approach as "chromophobia."

Other times artists think more "vertically", that is, light colors strongly influence the apparent colors of the objects, though each stripe still reads quite clearly as green, red, black, etc.

Light source color is emphasized but doesn't overwhelm local colors

This approach considers the lit and unlit areas of elements as different versions of the main light and ambient light (or shadow color). Pictures like this can look "dichromatic" (made from two colors), especially when there is a single strong main light and a single strong ambient light, as in bright daylight.

Claude Monet

Note that there is no inherent connection in the physical world between the color of a light and the color of "its" shadow (e.g. "warm light, cool shadows"). In fact, by definition a shadow is an area not touched by the light in question. Making paintings with warm light and cool shadows (or vice versa) is of course, just fine, though. Distinguishing light and shadow by temperature variation can be very effective.

Many artists employ strong colorization to tie an image together. The image is overall reddish, but local (object) color distinction is still apparent:

Global colorization

This is one way in which color can be used for purely expressive or symbolic value, but also to create a limited palette, wherein a given color can appear as another color, which is visually gratifying in a way that is difficult to explain. It's sort of like... the painting truly becomes an alternate, though complete, reality.

There is, however, a big difference between a painting that is truly monochromatic (check out Mark Tansey's work) vs. one that is heavily influenced by a strong tonal center, but still appears to show variation in temperature, saturation and hue.

A true monochrome image

Strong tonal center but not monochrome

In Part Two we'll see how to identify the different types of connections in your own paintings, and, most importantly, to troubleshoot for disconnected colors. We'll also explore another form of vertical color organization.

Picture This! at Danforth Museum

2011-06-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Danforth Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts, is showcasing the work of contemporary picture book illustrators living and working in New England. Juried work will be featured in the Children’s Gallery. I've got two pictures in the show, and will be attending the patron's premier this Saturday. Maybe I'll see some of you there.

Follow this link for more information, and to download the exhibition catalog: Picture This!

Doubt

2011-06-04T14:54:00.000-07:00

I had a teacher in art school named Rob Moore. He was an amazing teacher, a great teacher, but he didn't teach us anything. The only he ever told us was, "I'm going to use the word "form" to refer to three dimensional things, and "shape" for two dimensional things."

Rob was a really nice guy, but also a bit intimidating. We'd all actually signed up for life drawing, but Rob made a mistake and thought it was basic drawing. No one had the guts to correct him so, fortunately for us, we got basic drawing.

Rob started by sticking two gray squares of paper on the white wall. One was lighter than the other. He asked, "which of these is further away and which is closer?" One student answered, "the light one." "Really?", Rob asked, "what do you think?" he asked another student. "The dark one," was the answer. "Really?" asked Rob again. "Hmmm..." he said. A lot of classes went like that.

For the first assignment Rob told us to bring in a drawing the following week that we felt showed form in space. A few of us brought in these fairly elaborate, tight, pencil drawings - something which would have earned me big applause in the illustration department. All of the drawings went on the wall. Rob paced back and forth, and asked the class, "which of these drawings shows form and space?" Students pointed to this or that drawing, and Rob went, "really? hmm..." Then he stopped in front of a very simple (we thought, horrible, lame, stupid) drawing of the corner of a table that looked something like this:

He pointed to it and asked, "what about this one?"

For the next week Rob told us to get a pad of 100 sheets of paper, a green bell pepper and a Sharpie. We were to make drawings of the pepper (at least 100 of them), using a line that did not vary in thickness or color - just a uniform black line. He'd flip through hundreds and hundreds of drawings, dismissing most of them. Maybe he'd stop at one and say, "what do you think of this one?"

Sometimes I'd try to trick him by bringing in a variety of drawings, each using a very different approach. I'd get to class before everyone else, and stick them on the wall, spread out. By the time the other students put their work up you couldn't tell mine went together. Rob would point at one of my drawings and say something like, "maybe this person thinks a cast shadow says something about the form that cast it - who made this drawing?" I'd have to respond. He did the same thing with another, very different drawing. "You made both of these?", he asked. Then he'd just smile. He knew I was trying, even though my work was always used as the example of what didn't work.

Then one time I met with Rob to discuss where I was going with my painting. He looked at one of my early acrylic illustrations and said, "well, you're obviously enormously talented." wha... huh... As if things weren't already confusing enough. I couldn't tell if I was being insulted or what.

Rob gave me doubt. Doubt is a really, really good thing. I was determined to find out what was going on, what I wasn't able to see, no matter how long it took. It took a decade or two, and now at least I can see what Rob was seeing, in some measure. Now I don't believe anything except my own eyes.

I dug out my class notes - stuff I'd written down with exclamation points and question marks, little drawings I'd made of the other students' work and what Rob was saying (or not saying, but implying) about it. It was like finding some ancient text and finally being able to translate it.

We lost Rob midway through classes in December 1992. Over the years I've flip-flopped in my opinion of his teaching methods. As I have figured some things out, learned to see them myself, I've sometimes thought, "couldn't he at least have told us that?" Maybe. But when we're told things really explicitly we may think, "ok, I know this subject now" and that's that. When a good teacher - I'll call him a master - is able to simply point you in the right direction then you just keep going. You never reach the end, because there isn't one.

What is (your) art?

2011-06-03T06:37:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we engage in big philosophical debates about, "what is art?" For the artist, though, the only practical question is, "what is your art?" Should be an easy question to answer, right?

I recently visited the new Art of the Americas wing at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It was amazing. I particularly responded to the collection of 19th century American paintings. Stuff like this, today, would be more likely to show up on conceptart.org than in a gallery:

Isabella and the Pot of Basil by John White Alexander

Today when we see stuff like this, we can't help but think, "illustration." You'd expect to see this in a Golden Age children's book:

The Drummer Boy by William Morris Hunt

The 19th century academic establishment figured out... or decided... what made great art, and everyone got better and better at doing that - and produced some great stuff. Really great stuff. They were trying to achieve perfection more than expression, and some came pretty darn close:

Nymphs and Satyr by William Bouguereau

Then the late 19th and early 20th century saw the dawn of "modern art", where things became largely about bucking the establishment. Artists were supposed to be undisciplined, outcasts, and poor. Some people think that's where fine art stopped being fine. There are entire movements (and accompanying websites) dedicated to the fervent belief that pictures like this are of no artistic value:

No. 3 by Mark Rothko

At the same time, advancements in color printing technology saw a huge rise in illustration, and the so-called "Golden Age":

One of Howard Pyle's many classic pirate pictures

The division between "fine art" and "graphic art" at my art school was distinct. I was on the fine art side, making small sculptures. The fine artists looked down on the "graphic artists" for being so mundane, for being more concerned about getting good at doing something that had already been done than about finding something completely new to do. Real art was not about, for example, telling stories. That kind of stuff was... quaint... it had a place in the world, but was not art. A Batman figure made out of Sculpey was not "sculpture" - real sculptors work in bronze. My (wearable) sculptures were sometimes referred to as "science-fiction".

Time - an early sculpture of mine

On the other side, the graphic artists didn't understand what was so "fine" about not being able to draw, or what was so admirable about not developing any hard skills. But many of the graphic artists focused exclusively on skills, and never really found their voice. And the graphic artist community was visciously (and unkindly) critical of one another - in the fine art community everything was all good. Whatever you wanted to do, that was cool.

It took me a while to find my place with my art, to realize that my art was largely about narrative. That is, I was "meant to" make art with a strong narrative quality, but I wasn't actually doing it, so I was doing nothing. I painted and painted and painted, learning a lot about light, color, form, space, but wasn't saying much. I had some pretty good tools, but wasn't using them to make anything.

A still life by me

Even my "illustration" attempts weren't saying much. I was making pictures that looked like they were telling stories, but weren't telling stories.

Explorers - an early attempt at illustration

Then one day I got an email from artist Daniel Horne - a guy who has created dozens and dozens of classic fantasy images. He said, "your work is really magical, never lose that, but, what are you trying to say with it?" I realized I wasn't trying to say anything. A light dawned. Something that had been right in front of me all along but I was ignoring it.

Now people tell me, "you have such a natural feel for narrative work" (they say that about my figure work as well) - I say, on both counts, tell that to the reams of drawings and paintings I had to do to get here (and I've still got a long way to go, at least I hope so). None of this came naturally - all that came naturally was the desire to do it.

Conspiracy - a recent magazine illustration by yours truly

Some artists are so concerned with doing something that's new or experimenting with different things that they may never achieve a degree of mastery over anything, and so may never produce their best work. In Zen I think this is referred to as "walking around the mountain but never climbing it", or something like that. That's ok by me. The world needs people like that. But I hate to see artists limit themselves because their peers have dismissed certain pursuits as unworthy, or because they think they could never paint like that, or whatever.

Others work really hard to get really good at doing exactly what they do really, really well, and are not afraid to follow other successful artists very closely. That's ok too. It's a good way to stay employed. :) But sometimes a little more exploration and a little less polish can reap bigger rewards. What's the worst that can happen - you do something stupid? Tell yourself you've earned the right to do something stupid.

So I encourage artists of all kinds to be wide open when considering what might be their (your) art. Don't be shackled by the irrelevant distinctions of history or your peers.

Anatomy once and for all

2011-06-02T04:52:00.000-07:00

We see the human body every day, it's completely familiar, but when it comes to recalling it accurately, we're usually lost. So we spend months and years in anatomy and life drawing classes, making tons of drawings, and still our knowledge and recall is relatively limited. This is because we do not remember things the way we think we do, in fact, we don't even see them the way we think we do. If you want to really know human anatomy (for artistic purposes) try this - it worked for me.

The program involves working entirely from memory, then correcting your drawings by consulting reference. You draw the different parts of the body in all poses, from all angles. The body is divided into six areas (with some overlap), and we focus on each area for a week (the torso gets two weeks).

Week one: Head and neck, partial shoulder girdle, (no facial muscles or facial expression)
Week two: Shoulder girdle, some head and neck, some chest and back
Week three: Torso (back) including some hips, some shoulder
Week four: Torso (front & back) including some hips, some shoulder & neck
Week five: Arms and hands, some shoulder
Week six: Legs and feet, some hips

You start each week by reviewing some reference material for the current area, then you put the reference material aside and draw from memory. Depending on your experience you might want to dive straight in just drawing from memory. All drawing is done from memory, except when you correct your work.

Your reference material should ideally be 3d - a skeleton and an ecorche type figure, plus a variety of pictures. The ecorche figure is great, it doesn't show you what happens when things move. There are some great books and websites out there for this. You need whatever reference material allows you to understand the forms clearly, especially as things bend and twist. Use a variety of different sources - you don't want to end up drawing forms just like Bridgman, for example - you want your own understanding and your own way of remembering and your own way of drawing these forms.

During the week the only thing you will draw is the part of the body you are working on, for example, in week one, the neck. Focus, focus, focus. That's all there is in the world - the neck. That's all you're ever going to draw for the rest of your life. That's all you need to know, but you need to know it as if your life depended on it. Forget everything else. All you need to be able to draw is the neck - any pose, any viewpoint. Don't avoid the tough angles or poses. Test yourself, "do I really know what the underside of the chin looks like?" Sniff out your knowledge gaps and hit them head on.

A variety of poses and viewpoints

When you're not actually drawing - study necks wherever you encounter them. Don't think about any other part of the body. Watching videos, eating at a restaurant - necks, necks, necks. As you see figures in life, on TV, in photos, etc., make mental notes of what is happening (try to identify what you are seeing in terms of anatomy), and recreate this later in drawings done from memory. You quickly identify the areas where you have been making the same mistakes for years, or avoiding entirely. In a mere week you will advance to noticing subtleties you were blind to before, as you build on your basic knowledge.

Draw the neck whenever you can - don't wait until you have a solid hour or whatever to dedicate to drawing. Thirty seconds is enough to test yourself. Think of it like giving yourself a pop-quiz at all hours of the day. Doodle on the napkin at the diner, doodle in your math notebook, do as many drawings as you can.

Avoid simple anterior (front) or posterior (back) views. These are easier to draw, but convey less information about form. Don't strive to create beautiful drawings. Do whatever it takes, using drawing as a tool, to analyze, to test and prove your understanding. It's fine if your drawings look "mechanical."

Cross-contour drawing to understand neck muscles

Try your hardest to get it right. Try, try, try, to remember and draw those bones and muscles, and how they look under the skin. At the end of each day, when you have a few drawings done, compare them to your reference materials to see where you went wrong, or where you can improve, then correct your drawings. Corrections can be made while looking at a reference but this happens only after thoroughly exhausting the attempt to draw and fix from memory. This is critical - once you have tried everything you can think of and still can’t get it to look right, the correct answer, once you look it up, will be seared into your brain forever - oh, that's what it's like! When you simply copy from reference right from the start you barely remember anything.

From week two: movement of the shoulder blades

I started each area/week by drawing the relevant areas of the skeleton. The skeleton is relatively simple, and once you get it, you have a framework on which to add muscles. Start by thinking of each muscle as a line or rubber band - all you need to know is where each end attaches to the skeleton (some facial muscles attach to skin and other muscles, but we're not doing those in this program). Once you know where they belong, work on their forms.

Each week ends with a test, where you draw the part of the body you're working on from memory of course, drawing what it really looks like (i.e. with skin, fat, etc.), in as many angles and poses as necessary to cover every possible consideration. You will probably be blown away by what you can do at the end of the week. Here's one of my final neck tests - I wish I had a "before" version:

The final test

Stay flexible and target your problem areas. I tended to spend a couple of days on the skeleton, a couple on muscles, and a couple on surface stuff (what it really looks like all put together). But I had a lot of trouble with the form of the pelvis, for example, so I spent a day on that by itself. In fact, the torso as a whole was my biggest challenge:

From weeks 3 & 4 - the torso

Stick with it! When you're done you'll be free to employ the figure in whatever angle of view and whatever pose you want with ease and confidence. Six weeks may seem like a long time, but how long have you already spent trying to master anatomy? You can take a 12 week anatomy class, and another, and another, and still be lost in most human body drawing situations - but if you spend one week drawing nothing but the neck you will never forget it. Just do that six times and you're done, once and for all.

The Natural Way to Draw

2011-06-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

This book by Nicolaides sat on my shelf for a couple of decades. I thumbed through it a few of times but never got much out of it. I didn't see the point - I didn't want to make drawings like the ones I saw in that book.

A year or two ago I picked it up again and this time actually did the exercises - and suddenly I was experiencing things I'd never felt before. I was approaching my own art in a different way. I started to see things differently.

We humans understand very little about how our minds really work. In the individual sense we understand very little about what's going on under the hood (or the bonnet, for my UK friends) at any given time. Fortunately as artists we don't really need to understand (maybe it's better if we don't) - we just need to find ways to get that mysterious, limitless source to give up its treasures. This is beyond what we normally think of as "creativity" - even the way we see and remember things is not what we consciously think.

I read in Art and Fear (great book, misleading title) that looking at a piece of art is not likely to tell you anything about the process that produced it (we're not talking about medium and technique). Having an artist walk you step by step through his/her process is not likely to get you to where s/he is. In fact, you will never get to where s/he is, because that's not your place.

That's why artists and art instructors have discovered and devised various methods, exercises, practices and mind games to help kick start the inner artist, to give you (what you think of as you) a taste of that other world, that other you, so that maybe once you've visited it a few times (or it's visited you) you have some chance of being able to reconnect with it reliably... at least kinda reliably.

As a student I didn't listen to my teachers very much. I have learned (and recent studies have confirmed) that in general we are really bad at predicting how something is going to affect us internally. We're really bad at predicting what we need. We pursue some things and avoid others based on faulty judgment (good for survival maybe, bad for happiness and growth). Often the thing that seems the most useless, or even harmful, is exactly what we need the most.

So some words of advice...
If you're a relative beginner - listen to your teachers and your artistic "elders." Give them the benefit of the doubt. Methods and techniques have changed tremendously but the journey of the artist hasn't changed much if at all. Don't take whatever they say as gospel - always test it out. There's a lot of misinformation out there, and ultimately only you can figure out how to make your art. But when they give you some seemingly useless exercise, or something that seems like it might be useful to someone else but not to you, take it seriously and honestly try it out. Invest in it, give it a chance, see if it pays dividends.

If you're more... mature, consider going back to some exercises or instruction that you may have ignored in the past, not seeing the value in them at the time. Maybe I could have appreciated The Natural Way to Draw when I was in my 20's, maybe if I'd been forced to check it out I would have gotten something from it, I don't now. In any case, revisiting these missed opportunities at a time when you may be on a long term plateau can be the source of tremendous growth for you as an artist. A lot of those exercises seem to scale to whatever level the person undertaking them is at.

Becoming one with the universe

2011-05-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

Zen master goes up to a hot dog vendor and says, "make me one with everything..."

When you draw from life habitually you begin to identify and empathize with your subjects in a way you can only truly understand by experiencing it yourself. You become them. Please, don't just read this post and say to yourself, "yeah, I should draw from life more" - go do it! There's nothing more for you to learn here! The real learning happens when you go do it. All I can do is to try to convince you to do it.

I could show you some drawings - here are some I did on one of my many trips to a local farm.

Down on the farm

Maybe they're not very impressive. Neither is listening to a violinist practice scales, or watching a ballet dancer stretch at the bar. What's happening in your brain, though, is pretty significant - and it comes out later in all the work you create. Drawing what you see around you should become a compulsion, like someone who is blind feeling people's faces in order to "meet" them, or like when you hear music and can't help tapping your feet and singing along.

Hanging out at the pool

With practice you begin to melt into the subject and the process. Eventually it feels like is your body is doing it without "you." You're just along for the ride - someone else is doing the driving. You get to enjoy the scenery and take the credit for it.

In the audience

Whatever your level, style or working methods, regular drawing from real life is a source of never-ending advancement. If you're at the beginning of your journey, this is how you learn to remove the wall between mind and hand. Keep drawing from life and eventually you will just "sort of think about water or sheep or leaves" and they appear on the page. You won't learn this copying photos - photos are an irreplaceable resource for artists - just not a good way to learn to draw.

Sitting somewhere

If you're more advanced, drawing from life helps you stay fresh, motivated and engaged, and also identify weaknesses. Of course you need to explore your own personal imagery very deeply, but it's also important to constantly expose yourself to new imagery, stuff you may never have considered, and more importantly, to take it out for a test drive. Drawing what we happen to encounter in our day to day lives encourages this, and seems to magically inform whatever "finished" work you have going on at the time as well.

Waiting for a table

Careful, precise and finished work and detailed studies are important, but sometimes we need to just pick up the instruments and jam - get down with the ever-changing parade of people, animals, objects and scenery all around us. It's ok if we sing off key or our instrument is out of tune - we're still exercising our artistic muscles, big time.

Violin lessons

Drawing things that don't standing still for very long freaks out a lot of artists, particular in the beginning stages. But the point of this particular practice is not to painstakingly copy what you see. The purpose here is to develop fluency, so you draw as effortlessly as you talk on the phone or jot down a memo to yourself. You get there by taking in and re-creating a myriad of different forms and gestures, until that process becomes second nature. Your drawings may not look like much, but that is not the point. I keep repeating this because when my teachers told me that I didn't believe them.

Ducklings

As a representational, sometimes "realistic" artist I am always humbled by what I see when I draw from life. I know I can never grasp it all, nor convey what I'm taking in, in my art. It's overwhelming, but also inspiring. Even just daring to take a few more steps down this path of exploration can have profound effects on your art.

At the park

Unfortunately... or fortunately... most artists don't take this practice to the point where it starts to bother people... if that happens, maybe think about backing off a bit - that's something to shoot for!

Just take your sketch pad, your note pad or your iPad and get going!

Circles in Perspective - Part Two

2011-05-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

In Part One we learned the basics of how a circle in basic one point perspective becomes an ellipse.

So how would another circle of the same size, say to the left of this one appear? Like this?:

That looks bigger than the center ellipse... maybe it should point to the vanishing point, like this:

Now that looks too small and really off...

In fact, in a perspective drawing like this, all ellipses on the ground plane will be oriented the same way - with their minor axes precisely vertical:

It might help if you think of each ellipse as the end of a cylinder. Since the sides of the cylinders are vertical, the ellipses are oriented vertically as well:

Interestingly, the same thing happens in two point perspective - as long as the sides of the (imaginary) cylinders are parallel, all the ellipses will be oriented the same way, in this case, vertically:

In Part Two we'll see how to apply this to a real drawing.

The Mighty Manikin

2011-05-29T05:45:00.000-07:00

The traditional wooden manikin has become an iconic symbol for the visual arts. They come in all styles and sizes, yet, it seems, most artists don't actually find them very useful. Their forms don't really resemble those of a real person, and their joints are greatly limited compared to what a real person can do.

So some artists use this guy:

He's very poseable, but misses the point. The purpose of a manikin is not to substitute for a real model or to learn anatomy - it's to study the human figure in simple forms, to learn about pose, balance, drawing and foreshortening.

There's also this unforgettable couple:

Again, TMI.

The simple wooden manikin helps us break down the figure into a few basic forms, and to see that the vast myriad of seemingly curvy and organic gestures are actually made from the relationship of very small number of rigid components, attached by simple joints. But even very subtle gestures require more joint movement than today's standard artists' manikin allows. Some older manikins have hinged shoulder joints, and a manikin I inherited from my mother has rotating hip joints as well. Today's off the shelf manikins have become almost useless so, not surprisingly, no one uses them.

Rather than take this lying down, I modified my manikin, as I did with my plastic skeleton. I made the shoulder sockets into vertical slots, so now the shoulders can raise and lower. Next I unglued the balls of the hip joints, and reattached them with springs. Since the manikin's forms are basically cylindrical (they don't represent real muscles) rotating and swiveling the hips looks the same as it would if they used true ball and socket joints. This means my guy can do great stuff like this:

His shoulders can't move forward and back, though. Stop motion puppet armatures can do this, but lack the rudimentary forms we need. Being able to adduct and abduct the hips (swing them straight out to the side, or in toward one another), means he can also ride a... horse?

And he's also almost the same size as his buddy, Mr. Bones:

An artist friend once told me, "when learning to draw people, draw things that are like people" (I think he in turn had heard this from someone else). It can be great practice to draw manikins from memory as well. You can see how the subtlest changes in angle and position of a few elements create very different gestures:

We read other people's body language naturally and automatically, and unconsciously "pose" our own bodies to communicate things. It's very hard to be consciously aware of what exactly the different parts of the body are doing to elicit the effect. Using a manikin as a drawing subject teaches us how to manipulate the basic building blocks of body language and gesture by stripping out everything else that is irrelevant.

Color Unbound

2011-05-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

Here's a painting I did a few years back called Porziella:

the original painting

Here's the same image in grayscale - all color (hue and saturation) information has been stripped out:

without color

And here's a color only version of it - all value differentiation has been removed:

without value

Without value you can barely make out the various elements. It's hard to see any picture in there. Value is a far more powerful force than color in how we perceive images, and the world around us.

Value is so overwhelmingly important that one can almost say colors don't really matter, that is, in terms of whether the picture works or not. If the values in an images are working well, almost any color scheme will work. Here's the same painting with a new color scheme:

recolored

And here's the color layer by itself

color only

I painted this in about 30 seconds, without thinking much about what I was doing. The color layout doesn't really adhere to the lines and forms in the underlying image at all. Nor is there any logic in terms of the color of the light source, the shadows, and so on. There are some vaguely warm splotches over the girl's face and hands, a cool color splashed across the sky area (and also covering much of the trees in the process), etc.

This haphazard approach unintentionally produces some beneficial results - different elements are naturally unified when given a single swath of color, similar to when light bounces back and forth between objects in proximity, or when they're bathed in an ambient light.

You can experiment like this using paintings or even photographs. Photographs are not a good way to learn about controlling value in painting, but for this exercise they're ok. MAKE SURE TO WORK IN LAB MODE when desaturating a source image, and when colorizing. RGB and CMYK modes do not accurately translate color to value, and do not accurately preserve values when colorizing.

Ultimately you want to be able to say something with color, whether you're creating a convincing depiction of a realistic scene, or using color more abstractly and expressively, or some combination of the two. In the beginning... and often for quite some time, though, getting colors simply to work, that is, to not look bad, can be a challenge for many artists. With opaque paint one must control value and color simultaneously. It is therefore critical to learn to see the two separately.

This little study should show you that color in painting is malleable, and even in representational painting is less bound to 3-dimensional reality than you may have thought. Value relationships are more critical - if you are having a color problem with a painting, chances are you are really having a value problem.

Words and Pictures

2011-05-27T06:19:00.000-07:00

Illustration is about communicating an idea pictorially. Sometimes illustrations stand alone, other times they accompany text. When words and pictures work together in harmony, the whole can be much greater than the sum of the parts - pure magic!

In a picture book, for example, words and text do not simply reinforce one another, they complement each other. They each provide different information. Each is somewhat ambiguous, possibly meaningless, without the other, and the reader's enjoyment comes (whether s/he knows it or not) from connecting the two internally to create a third reality that is not explicitly stated.

For example, the words,"Charlie had put in a long day's work" might accompany a picture like this:

"Charlie had put in a long day's work..."

Ok, so first off, Charlie's a pig. And he seems happy and proud of his work, not particularly tired or experiencing anything negative for that matter. I guess he's built a wall, so that's probably going to be important to the story later on. The fact that the final story is assembled completely in the audience's head, something like: "Charlie is a pig who just built a wall (for some reason we're going to find out about later), and is really pleased with himself (so I suspect things might take a turn for the worse at some point...)... and lots more things I'm sort of sensing but don't need to put into words..." is what makes the experience so deeply satisfying, and engages the audience in a way that is similar to what we all naturally experience in real life.

What if those same words accompany a very different picture? Something like this, maybe:

"Charlie had put in a long day's work..."

Now we see that Charlie is a person, in fact, a young girl. We don't know precisely what she spent the day doing - since we do see a picture of her but it's leaving that information out, it's probably not important. What's important is that she's completely exhausted. Something is probably going to happen because of that... maybe she'll fall asleep early and have a strange dream... or maybe she's coming down with the flu... We almost hear in our heads what the next phrase might be: "...and was completely worn out." For Charlie the pig the next phrase might be, "...building his wall." - his follow up looks backward in time, while Charlie the girl's looks forward, or to the present time.

This is truly a feat of conjuring - the story blossoms into existence, and in fact only ever lives in the mind of the viewer, from the seeds you have carefully planted there.

Too long or too short?

2011-05-26T07:38:00.000-07:00

Artists use various methods to measure distances accurately when working from a model or reference image, or to create realistic imagery from imagination (e.g. applying different rules of thumb regarding the relative proportions of the human figure, placement of facial features, etc.).

Often, though, fundamental drawing issues masquerade as proportion or placement errors. You draw a figure, maybe the right arm looks too long... so you shorten it, but now it looks too short. Back and forth, try as you might, you can't seem to zero in on the right length. If you are experiencing this from time to time, or frequently, chances are there are underlying drawing issues causing the element in question to appear to be the wrong size.

These two drawings use precisely the same outline. In the one on the left the boy's arm appears to be sitting tightly against his body, and his arm seems too short overall. In the one on the right, his arm appears to be extending toward the viewer, and is too long (click on the image for a larger version).

Note that even though the boy's hand in the image on the right is not larger than on the left, yet it still appears closer.

Here's a similar example. Even the ballerina's feet appear to be different lengths in the two images:

These pictures demonstrate a critical point about perception and basic drawing: shape is a more important and powerful factor in driving the perception of 3d than scale or perspective, and where an object appears to reside in 3d space has less to do with how it itself is drawn, and more to do with how it is connected to the "armature" (pun intended) that supports it. With proportion specifically, you can literally change the size of an element without actually enlarging it or reducing its 2d "footprint", by altering how it sits in space, via what's going on inside and around the given element.

Fractal Textures

2011-05-25T12:11:00.000-07:00

One thing that can add a lot of depth and interest to your digital pictures (and also save a lot of time), is the application of textures created by repeating shapes, patterns and forms already in the image. Fractal patterns are said to be "self similar", meaning that they are comprised of smaller versions of themselves.

With natural forms, rather than laboriously paint a bunch of little bumps and gullies, or use some generic bump texture, it can be very effective to simply create an overlay texture on the fly by reducing and repeating the overall form of the element to be textured.

Here's a basic painting of a rocky outcropping (click on any image for a larger version).

Basic rough painting

First I selected and copied as much of the rock as possible, scaled this piece down quite a bit, then pasted it all over the place on a new layer. The resulting texture looks something like this:

Rocky cliff sampled, reduced and repeated to create a texture

Next I applied this as an overlay layer above the main painting layer, and reduced the opacity a bit. This is the original rough painting with the texture over it. Even though the texture clearly repeats when viewed in isolation, this is not apparent when it intersects the larger, similar forms of the main painting on which it's based. Quite the contrary, in fact, the illusion of entirely new forms is created:

The two combined

If the texture layer's opacity is too high it looks cool, but may tend to flatten out the underlying big forms, or its repeating pattern may become evident:

Too much texture?

Fine tune areas of the texture that aren't working well by touching up with the rubber stamp tool, sampling other areas of the texture, and add a layer mask to control precisely where the texture is applied.

Developing a Character - Aging

2011-05-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

It can be fun but also challenging to depict the same character showing different emotions, in different settings, while engaging in a variety of activities as well. The character of the giant in The Selfish Giant not only had to do all these things, but he also had to age over time, while undergoing a transformation from gruff and grumpy young man, to playful middle-aged man, and finally kind-hearted and gentle old man.

To develop the character I started by doing tons and tons of thumbnails - some good, many not so good. You'll hear me repeat this a lot: to a large extent art is about quantity, not quality. Sometimes you need to focus to finish and polish a piece, other times you need to just crank out drawings until you get something that looks worth keeping. I drew this character from different angles, showing different expressions, concentrating on the face and head.

Youth
When the giant first appears, as a relatively young man, he's got thicker hair, the beginnings of a beard, and smooth, though heavy features. His hands are fairly meaty as well.

Middle Age
Later, after his great epiphany, the giant becomes the jovial playmate of the town's children. He's now middle aged - his hair is a bit thinner and just starting to gray, the flesh on his face is a bit looser, beginning to show some creases, his hands still strong but getting a little thinner, and his now shaved beard makes the lower part of his face appear slightly darker and less saturated.

Old Age
Finally, as an old man, the giant's stubbly beard has turned white, his hair is even more thinned out, and showing more gray; his face is a bit splotchy, his neck is wrinkled, and his hands are getting quite bony, with more pronounced knuckles and bluish veins showing through here and there:

This barely scratches the surface of this rich and important subject. The best advice I can give to help you develop in this area is to always keep your eyes open and constantly observe and study real people in the real world - and as always, draw, draw, draw.

You can see the full versions of these images, and other Selfish Giant pictures on my website

Circles in Perspective - Part One

2011-05-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

A circle

viewed from an oblique angle, or squashed (scaled on one axis), becomes an ellipse:

An ellipse is symmetrical on both center lines - all four quadrants are the same shape (some are mirror versions of the others). The long center line of an ellipse is called the "major axis", the short center line is the "minor axis."

But shapes in perspective are not symmetrical - they get smaller as they recede into space, right? For example, a square in perspective looks like this:

So how does our perfectly symmetrical ellipse fit into all this? Answer: the center of the perspective circle lines up with the center of the perspective square, but the center of the ellipse representing it does not:

So the top "half" of the perspective circle is a very different size and shape from the bottom half:

But the ellipse is still... a perfectly symmetrical ellipse:

Kind of odd, but there it is. In the next installment we'll see how to orient and fit ellipses into a perspective drawing - perhaps there will be some more surprises there...

Go to Part Two

Skeleton Model

2011-05-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

When studying form nothing beats working from a real 3-dimensional object. For learning anatomy, a good skeleton model can be a huge help in seeing what the various bones are shaped like and how they fit together.

There are countless plastic skeletons to buy out there, but many are not very good. Fortunately a company called Workman Publishing makes a very inexpensive model that is remarkably accurate, even compared to models costing many times as much.

However, like most skeleton models (and artist manikins for that matter – I’ll discuss that in a future post), this model can’t quite do all the things a real skeleton can… without a few modifications that is. The model is produced with the shoulder blades firmly fixed to the back of the ribcage, the hips and shoulders attached with pins (not true ball and socket joints), and so on.

So I cut the shoulder blades from the back, snipped off the pins that attached the upper arm bones and thigh bones to the shoulder blades and pelvis respectively, and I also cut the collar bones from their attachments to the top of the sternum, but left them attached to the shoulder blades. Then I reattached everything using soft sculptors’ wax. This wax has the consistency of something like a kneaded eraser, but it's very sticky. It softens when warmed by the hands, then hardens a bit at room temperature.

Now he's a fully poseable skeleton that can, for example, lift his collar bone and shoulder blade when raising his arm above his head.

Or swivel his thigh bones out to the side. Or even stand unsupported in just about any pose. Amazing! The only thing missing is a flexible spine…

For less than $20 this little gem can be an amazing tool for studying the human skeleton. Here are some drawings I did a while back when learning the form of the pelvis.

I would not have been able to undertake this kind of analysis of the form working solely from 2-dimensional reference sources. The great thing about this little skeleton is it's small enough (about 10" tall) to hold in your hand and rotate while you draw. Here is next to my studio phone and ancient I-pod:

You can buy this guy here: Workman Publishing plastic skeleton

Seeing the big picture

2011-05-21T10:48:00.000-07:00

If you get overwhelmed by extraneous details when making a picture, want to paint more loosely vs. following a tight preparatory drawing, or have trouble knowing how to leave parts of your work less refined, try this exercise.

Take a black and white photo and blur it (e.g. using Photoshop’s Gaussian blur) until it’s reduced to a few big unrecognizable blobs. Then paint or draw a copy of the blurred image, using a soft physical medium like charcoal, or painting digitally with a big, soft brush. Take your time to get those big abstract shapes and values just right.

Next, create a slightly less blurred version of the photo (it may help to create a few levels of blur in advance), and using this as your new reference, refine your drawing. You’ll probably find yourself simply subdividing the initial big blobs into smaller component blobs, but you still will have no idea what you are drawing.

When you’re done with that stage, refine the drawing again using a less blurred version of the photo, and so on, until you have something you can recognize (or keep going until there’s no blur left at all, if you want). Maybe you’ll want to refine certain areas but not others.

If you’ve done the exercise correctly, the less refined areas will not need any more detail or development to look “finished.” Maybe your background space is a big area of value, but it works just fine. If you want to add detail to some other area, you can see exactly where those refinements fit in.

You may be surprised to see that you’ve created a very accurate reproduction of the photo, without first creating any kind of tight drawing as a framework, or using any measurement devices. Here's the source photo I used for this exercise:

This exercise is not about learning how to copy from photos – it’s about seeing abstract shapes. Most of us have brains that are surprisingly good at seeing abstract shapes, but our analytical brain gets in the way. It may help you to try to recall the mindset you experienced while doing this exercise, when creating your art.

The exercise also demonstrates that it’s the big shapes and their relationships, not the small details, that create the illusion of form and reality in a 2-d image. Lastly, this exercise may serve as a guide for how to conceive, start and finish a picture, whether painting from life, a photo, or your head – get the big relationships down, then refine as you see fit, where you see fit.

Here's the same approach used with a picture created from the imagination:

Artists have employed various devices to help them see physical subjects and media like this, including squinting, and viewing through frosted glass.

What color is this?

2011-05-20T06:32:00.000-07:00

This is a painting I did a few years ago (click on the picture for an enlarged version). The palette is fairly limited, almost monochromatic.

All the colors reside within a narrow 75 degree area of the 360 degree color wheel - between hue 25 (orange) and 100 (yellow-green), approximately. Yet, the picture seems to have blues, greens, reds, even purples.

This is because, as with value, our visual system expands the existing range of colors to create the appearance of a full spectrum. That is, the bluest color in the image reads as blue, the greenest reads as green, etc. But what is the “bluest” color, if no color actually is a blue hue?

Plot out a few of the painting’s colors on a simplified color wheel and you’ll see the answer. The colors from the painting's palette form an elliptical ring – their own little color wheel, within the narrow wedge of the standard wheel. The center of this little ring is not truly neutral gray, but it is what will read as neutral (white, gray, black) within this image. The color (which actually is very close to a neutral gray), reads as blue within this image, and so on.

Though this works with every section of the color wheel, it’s most effective within the warm or “earth” tone area (oranges, browns, warm yellows, as in this image) for reasons we’ll discuss later.

This analysis demonstrates two important points about color: first, color is relative. We can’t really tell what a given color is by looking at it. Second, very limited palettes can produce color schemes that are very harmonious while at the same time seeming to employ the full spectrum of hue.

Read the CG Society feature article on how this painting was made

The indispensable mini-sketchbook

2011-05-19T13:53:00.000-07:00

You never know when inspiration will strike - a cliché, but so true. Sometimes you can’t find the groove, other times you can’t stop the images from flowing. I guess we don't really control this process as much as we'd like to think. So I am never caught without my tiny 3x5 sketchbook (I got sick of seeing those priceless scribbles on napkins, envelopes and paper place mats!).

When I’m working on a picture, or creating a character... I obsess... the ideas are swirling constantly, and I often find myself churning out the same drawing over and over, like some sort of lunatic. After tons of attempts (tons of practice?), finally it's, eureka!

Here's a drawing like this I did for The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde – a project I completed last year with composer Dan Goeller. I was stuck at a party (I’m inherently anti-social), so I grabbed some me time in the kitchen and whipped out my trusty sketchbook.

This drawing became part of the final cover painting I created as well (I rarely use a solid drawing like this when painting, but sometimes it works out that way).