Learning to Love the Process. (Novic’s Art Blog)

Update: I feel I may have shot myself in the foot calling this a blog. While it is an attempt to archive my thoughts, I don't want discourage discussion, feedback, or other comments.

Indeed, I welcome them. Feedback and critique in particular I would love to hear. The whole point of joining a community is to get involved with other artists on a regular basis and work to grow together. So bring it on!

I've been messing around on the fringes of becoming a professional artist for a long time. Years in fact. I've drug my feet and doubted myself and my desire to become an artist and though I've worked semi-professionally on a few projects I've never really taken the plunge.

Now I'm starring down the barrel of a gun. My options are either do my very best to become an artist or find something else before it's too late. Despite the incredibly emotional struggle that my relationship with art has been I can't see myself doing anything else.

A couple weeks ago I decided that I didn't want to get to the point where I had no choice but to move away from art and feel like I hadn't done everything I could to avoid it. I decided that the best way to motivate myself was to take the plunge and start documenting my work everyday, and get involved in a community of other artists.

So here I am. Taking that step and determined to do everything I can to become a better artist so that even if that day when I have to walk away does come I'll be able to do so knowing that I gave it my all.

Day 14

Continuing an artist study of concept art by Cedric Peyravernay as well as some original sketches.

Day 15

Things are really starting to pick up. As I get used to drawing everyday again it's becoming easier and easier to just spend my free time drawing. This is something that I have consistently struggled with, though I've known the solution (draw every day) for years and even successfully implemented it at one point in the past. Just gotta keep pushing forward every day, no matter what.

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Today I started with 30 minutes of gesture work using The Line of Action. Overall I'm pleased with it though I still am struggling to get proportions accurate as I do them quickly. Likewise, in my attempts to keep pace, the feeling of energy and movement can easily get lost.

Continueing my artist study of Dishonored 2 concept work by Cedric Peyravernay. Mostly just feeling my way along and getting used to the process of painting. I'm enjoying it a lot and am fairly pleased with the results.

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Super quick paintover for the upcoming demo level of a small indiegame that I'm a part of. Really just a road map for future design work. I'm trying very hard to avoid zooming in more than 50% in order to just focus on the big shapes that people are going to see and hopefully avoid the tunnel-vision of focusing on details no one will notice. Not always successful in this

Finally, some original character work for a side project. Sketches almost done, going to do some paint practice next.

That's all for Day 15! More to come.

Day 16

Today was a bit of a struggle. There were so many other demands on my time that I just didn't have much left to draw, but I did what I could with the time I had and this is the result.

Part of my weekly routine is to alternate between gesture drawing and hand studies. Gesture drawing is a natural warm-up and I always find that doing gestures for any decent period of time (a week or more) improves my poses-from-imagination by a significant degree.

But the hands studies are all about improving my understanding (and practical experience) of hand anatomy. Hands, as I'm sure you know, are just a challenge to draw well and when adding the extra complication of drawing them from imagination, well, if you don't really know what you're doing you're going to have a hard time of it.

So I'm trying to get as good as I possibly can. For the most part I'm following David Finch's Dynamic Figure Drawing Vol. 2 - Hands and Feet from the Gnomon Workshop. His technique for breaking down the hand is easily one of the best I've ever encountered and is helping me to understand how this complicated subject works in 3D space.

On top of that I do some studies from photographic reference in an attempt to apply what I'm learning (and copying) by watching the videos.

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I constantly struggle with the idea of sharing this because I'm so self-conscious about it. It's so rough, so sketchy, so unfinished, and the fact of the matter is that it will never be finished. That is not the point of the image. It's never going to be something that I will take and polish up and design in detail, it's always going to be a sketchy mess.

That makes me want to hide it away from the world.

But it's also not entirely true. This is a sketch. Its purpose is to be a sketch. The final render will be in game and it will be polished and fully designed. That's what I'm working toward and that's what I have to remember. Both for my own sanity, and for the benefit of the project as a whole.

So that's day 16 all wrapped up. Hopefully I'll find time to do more drawing tomorrow, but I'm looking at my calendar and it doesn't seem likely...but I'll do what I can.

Day 17

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As usual there are some proportional issues, though mostly in the later, longer gestures. Something about having more time almost just means having more time to get in your own head and screw things up. I guess that's the point of gestures when you get right down to it. Don't think, react. Capture the moment as quickly and fluidly as possible and move on.

In truth I'm not even certain I want to share my incremental updates to this piece right now. Not that I'm ashamed of it, far from it. I know it's a long way from perfect but I'm actually quite pleased with the results. It's just that I'm at the point where everything I do to it will only create the tiniest of difference from day to day. Especially since most days I'm only spending about 30 minutes working on it.

However, at this stage I feel like I have a clear path moving forward with this study. I'm going to finish up the eyes (and immediate surrounding areas) and call it a study. I feel like I've learned a lot and the point of doing this was never to copy the original in every detail. Simply to learn what I could in a relatively short span of time. And it's time to move on. So once I finish the area around the eyes it will more than likely be back to doing a different quick study every day.

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This is not really what is intended for this image, it's just an experiment. I wanted to mess around with some of these techniques, but I didn't want to have to create something from scratch in order to do it. So probably the next time you see these they will be very different. Probably.

And that about wraps up day 17. Another one down and time to start all over again.

Day 18

To that end I feel I need to share something that happened today. After finishing up my drawing for the day I was browsing around the internet and stumbled upon a drawing. I won't go into too much detail here, but my immediate reaction upon seeing what I at first took to be a very detailed pencil drawing was "Why bother?"

I was shocked by the sentiment. It had come seemingly from nowhere, and for a few hours afterward I could think of almost nothing else. Were these my innermost thoughts, brought to the surface in a moment of vulnerability? Did this mean that I really didn't want to be an artist, that my time and energy would be better spent elsewhere. After a lot of tortured thought I was forced to come to one conclusion.

Maybe. But that doesn't matter.

I realized that, while there was a distinct possibility that it was true. That deep down in my soul, despite what I feel on a surface level, that art isn't for me. But that doesn't matter. I may not be able to say for certain what place art has in my life right now. What I can say for certain is this: if I give up now, it will be the same as if I gave in to apathy and never even tried. To me that is unacceptable. The ultimate conclusion of this experiment may well be the realization that art is not what I want to be doing. But I will not arrive at that conclusion without a fight, without trying everything I can to make it a reality.

So welcome to day 18 of my journey to become a better artist, and maybe discover something about myself in the process.

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For those of you who are growing tired of seeing this image show up almost every day, you're in luck. this is as far as I'm going to take it. I don't know how much of a difference is visible between this and the previous iteration, but I really tried to work the area around the eyes as much as I felt I could. Now it's time to move on. Someday I may decide to come back to this and do a bit more work on it, but I feel like I learned a lot from this experience and will probably just do something else the next time I feel like doing a long-term study.

Finally these are a few more detailed versions of elements from the demo level paintover seen above. There's something of a soft-deadline coming up on the project and the team wants to have some in-game assets ready to show off when that comes. So for now I'm putting a hold on the paintover itself and moving on to polishing up the elements that we are confident will need to be there.

In truth I hesitate to call these "concepts" as I probably won't do too many variations. There just ins't time. Gotta make a decision and move forward. Though there are a few things that I may try out some different ideas on. The various patterns of this hanging wall (directly above) are something that I may take some time to play around with, just as an example.

So that about wraps up day 18. More to come.

Day 19

So I've decided to alter my approach to things. I'm still in the midst of my artistic crisis (like an existential crisis, but centered around the pursuit of art) and questioning everything, but this blog is helping me maintain the focus necessary to push through it. Odds are this is just a passing thing like so many other artistic crises. I used to get them as regularly as once a week and, until late last year, had been blessed with a prolonged period of confidence that lasted almost two years. It was quite the shock going back into the realm of doubt and uncertainty, and that is part of what fueled the decision to start this blog in the first place.

So, as I said, I've decided to change my approach a bit. Life is busy and chaotic, and if I'm going to get through this artistic crisis then I feel like I need to be focusing as much as possible on the art that is important to me.

I used to say meaningless things like "I want to be the best artist ever." It's not going to happen. Probably. I mean, anything's possible, but I feel like in order to achieve a goal like that you have to be someone who loves art for art's sake. I don't. I love art because of what it can do. I love art as a medium for conveying ideas and telling stories. I'm getting to the point where I don't want to compare myself to other artists (a point I probably should have got to a long time ago) because it just makes me depressed about how far "behind" I am. And I put that in quotes for a reason. Yes, my artistic growth has probably been a good deal slower than would be idea, but that's not really important. It does me no good at all to compare myself to someone who's own experience I have no measure for. Maybe they've been drawing for half the time as me and are twice as good. Maybe they've been drawing for three times as long as me and are only twice as good. I don't know so comparing my work to theirs does nothing but give me a false sense of failure.

In an effort to give myself more time to work on the things that are important to me I'm going to change the way I study. Now, rather than doing gestures or a directed study followed by an artist study everyday (a process which on a good day takes a minimum of an hour and can take significantly longer than that if complications arise), I'm going to alternate between directed study and artist study making sure that the focus of each run parallel to each other. Then I'll take one day a week and do an hour of gesture and figure drawing, at least for the time being.

This should allow me to limit my study time to only an hour a day and hopefully free up time to work on those things that I really care about, while still learning and growing as an artist.

Hopefully.

This is part of my new approach. As I'm currently working on studying hands as thoroughly as possible I'm going to be doing my artist studies in such a way that line up with that goal. So each subject that I choose for the time being will now prominently feature hands in some way. This is "Bloodly Nest Keeper" (possibly a type there, but I couldn't say for certain) by Piotr Jablonski.

The goal as I see it is to draw as much of the original as possible, focusing on proportions, silhouette, and big shapes. Then fill in the details on the key area (in this case hands). Though you'll see here that I didn't get that far on this one before I ran out of time. "Aaron Bard" by Carlos Ruiz. To be continued.

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So these are pretty straight forward with the main goal being to figure out some kind of patterns. This is something that I have almost no experience doing and it took me quite a while to get something decent down. I actually started with the image on the right and really didn't know what to do. A fact that I think is fairly obvious. But by the time I moved on to the second one I was determined to take a completely different approach and, by and large, feel pretty good about the results. They are by no means perfect, but considering that I'd never really done anything like this before I'm pretty happy with it.

So that wraps up day 19. Hopefully I'll be able to push through this crisis soon and get back to being my normal chipper self.