I think that sometimes the most simple pages are the most inspiring.
I've been watching some videos on youtube of first year drawing student's sketchbooks. Sigh. They fill me with regret. I've written about how I spent much of my first several years of college slacking. Lots of personal growth not so much academic or artistic. My 1st year sketchbooks were seriously lacking in care and effort. I'm pretty sure my professors were equally as frustrated with my lack of effort. That is not what this post is about. This post is about practice and sticking with something.
Previously (here) I wrote about how I got pissed off about my lack of skill in drawing noses and so I drew noses every night for a couple of weeks. It seems that I need to get frustrated with my art to work on it with any depth of effort. Most of the time, I skate through on my natural talent for color, color combination and composition than any effort. (This is the sort of shit that pissed off my art teachers in high school and my professors in college. Do you know how many times I've heard the phrase, "If you'd put forth just an ounce of effort…")
I've been drawing my sort of realistic but kind of off faces for a few weeks now, I've added a few to my art journal here and there. They all looked… The same to me. You could say that I have a style but really that style is lack of effort. I want a face so I look to my memory and draw a face that is strikingly similar to every OTHER face I've drawn in my life. Maybe the nose is a little different, maybe the eyes a little different…. But it's the same. What I needed to do was add a few more faces to my memory bank so I could draw from it a series of more faces. A series of different poses, eye shapes, lip shapes and different shading effects. So I've been going through image on flickr* and drawing, drawing like crazy, just like I did with the noses.
I'm working in one of my large jotter notebooks filled with inexpensive resume paper. 25% cotton, 24lb and with a laid texture. I'm working with 2 pencils the first is a 0.5 HB lead and the other is a 0.9 2B lead mechanical pencil.
Here you can see how I'm working with these images. First I lay in a rough and light outline of the face and interior of the face. I start by working around the nose area, add in the eyes then lips. I then lay in the lightest area of shadow.
With the second image here you can see that I then go in and add the middle darks and darkest areas of tone. It then tighten up the details. I'm not working super light with my pencil. I consider these sketches so I'm not looking for perfection, more of a good sketch of the person's face. I'm particularly looking to capture the eyes, nose and lips well.
This was one of the first pages I worked on in my quest to add to my bank of mental image:
I hit my drawing stride somewhere in the image to the far right of the side view. I then drew the eye detail. You can see how I've become more confident just in these 4 images.
This is another page where I start out rough. I've been forcing myself to work on tough views of the face and the full side view is tough indeed. I then chose another tough view and an overhead from an angle FB self portrait. I hit my stride with her nose.
In short you can see in just these few image how I've been training my eye to SEE the image and training my hand to render in the wished manner. It's been a lot of work I've been working hard on this, devoting about an hour a day to these drawings. I'm rough and out of practice but hte progression in just a few hours is heartening. I'm getting confident that I can pull from my memory a face that I can use in my art without too much trouble. Practice is what is making the difference here not some innate talent.
*because I knew I was going to show these images on here I looked for images that were tagged with creative commons and NOT all rights reserved. I DID NOT keep track of them because for the most part, they do not look enough like the original to worry about anything. I often just picked a feature out to focus on, eyes, nose or lips. In most cases I notice that the camera washed out my lightest lights with the pencil.
I hate that people censor their art for the online populace. it's ART not porn. Shoulda left the penis in. Nice drawing though.
Nice layout and lovely use of color. I like how the red heart really stands out on the purplish blue background.
I really like this page. The block of text blended with the page with white is nice and the simple black line work on the left really adds to the page.
I really like how this person integrated the text with the image. Very nice.
Do you read Robert Genn? If not you should, here's his facebook page. You can read his twice weekly writings via the FB page or you can find his website through the page. He writes short, to the point nuggets of artistic wisdom. His work is amazing. His site has years of his writing and it's all inspirational.
This week's writing was about hopelessness. An artist wrote to him about his deep depression and his unsupportive spouse. He included some images of his work, which, in my opinion were quite good. Having had an unsupportive significant other I can tell you how it eats at your self confidence and brings you down. The summer after we split up was one of the most gloriously artistic summers of my life. I had this crappy little part time job to pay the bills but I was selling my art on eBay and painting everyday. Suddenly I didn't have anyone bringing me down about my art. I was free to create as I wanted, with no worries she'd look at it an say it was awful. My work progressed leaps and bounds that summer. I had a definite style.
Today my significant other is supportive of all that I do and want to do. I know that is not the case for all of us out there. I guess the real question is how do we all deal with it? When you bring home a piece or share your art with your significant other, how do they respond? When I was first making books my ex used to ask me "What are you going to do with that one?* Now that you've learned this, what are you going to do with it?" With a final exclamation of "Useless." Sometimes it's not the hurtful statements but simply ignoring the art that hurts.
I'm often brought back to my college years when I think of hopelessness. My parents would tell you that even when younger, though capable of much more I needed extra motivation to get A's, if it had been up to me I'd have been a solid B student. In college I got just the grades I needed to maintain my scholarship and frankly I floundered in college art classes. I wasn't inspired by the art classes frankly I was bored in them. After 4 years of being allowed to pretty much do what I'd wanted in art class I'd been spoiled, being directed to make art in a specific way pretty much killed the urge to create. Add to that the the new freedoms I found in being away from home and I had a severe hopeless feeling. It lasted well into my 3rd year of school. I look back and regret that those 4 years I had where I could have devoted myself to art, I didn't. (Don't get me wrong I did a lot of personal growing in those years but I certainly was not as academically motivated as I should have been nor did I focus on art.)
I know what made me helpless do you know what makes you feel helpless. It's something to journal about eh?
Another sketchbook. This looks more like an art journal than some of the others I've posted. Lots of dense writing, lots of little sketches. Great stuff.
Love the thought of the day idea.
Most of my older journals are spare on the art side of things and focused much more on the words than images. In this case I glued in some business cards I picked up as we traveled my old stomping grounds in rural Maine. I wrote little notes about them. I used a waterproof ink in a rapidograph (shock) or something like a pilot precise grip or something else with waterproof ink. I let the ink completely dry and then work back into the page with watercolors.
When I wrote in these journals I purposefully wrote in chunks. Each idea or thought had it's own little section. Larger ideas had larger bubbles and smaller ideas smaller. In some cases I doodled outlines to the spots of thought, in other cases like this page I just used watercolor over the top of the ink.
I was working on 140lb cold pressed strathmore 400 series watercolor paper. At the time I used it because it was inexpensive, but also very serviceable. The page measures 5×7 and there were 24 pages in a journal.