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

[novic]

Day 34

Day 34 has come and gone and for the most part I'm happy with what I've accomplished today. Though there has been so much going on lately and I've been pushing myself so hard that I fear I'm on the cusp of burnout. I need to work to avoid that as much as possible while still finding the time to draw everyday. Not really sure how I'm going to manage that. But I'll find a way.

Today I spent an hour or so and "finished" this character portrait. I say finished in that I mean I don't intend to work on it anymore. There's still a lot that could be done to it. I'm almost tempted to spend a little more time on it just to fix that ear alone. But no. I think I've learned everything from this painting that I needed to learn for now and, given that it was only supposed to be a quick experiment in the first place, I don't see a whole lot of point in continuing. Better to take what I've learned and move on to something new.

For my part I've taken two major lessons from this.

1: Value and texture is more important that color. Get those laid in as early as possible as accurately as possible and gradually turn up the saturation as you go.

2: Good shape is super important. Not just the big shapes, the silhouette and contours, but the graphical shapes that make up the form. The big value shapes. They should be purposeful in their design, as purposeful as the image as a whole. Even without things like details and "blending" good shape will read clearly and be good in its own right.

Valuable lessons I feel.

So that's all from day 34. More to come.

[novic]

Day 35
Recording error so no video today. Not a great loss, unfortunately.

What a disaster of a day. In truth I don't even want to share my work today, such as it is. But not doing so would defeat the purpose of this, so I will.

This was a study. A study of fan art for fan art. The art is The Legend of Zelda - Tetra by Gonzalo Ordóñez Arias and I don't do it justice by half. Even getting it to this point was a struggle for some reason. Then the rest of the day just went sideways. I had planned on doing a few more studies at least, but I just never managed to get back to it. I also have to state that it was only partially out of my control.

Yes, things went sideways. Yes, it was a busy day. But there was a point by mid afternoon where that was no longer true. But by then I was just so drained and demoralized that I had no energy left to commit to drawing.

Yet that in and of itself is a problem for me. Because I'm beginning to understand that if I don't work. If I don't remain at least somewhat productive, I get depressed. That depression then makes it really hard to do anything productive, which leads to more depression. I've got to find a way to break that cycle, especially on the weekends when my day is nowhere near as structured as it usually is during the week.

But I feel like I've learned a lot more from this as well. Both the events of yesterday and just the process of making sure I draw every day and doing this blog/vlog. I've heard a lot of artists say that to be successful as an artist you either have to love the process, or you have to learn to love the process.

I don't love the process. In fact, nine times out of ten I am either bored or frustrated by the process. Oh sure, I have those moments that every artist has where the flow state is easily attained and the image seems to draw itself while you watch. But as we all know those moments are few and far between. Is that enough? I don't know. But I do know that I need to learn to love the process or this is never going to work.

I think that part of the problem comes down to the fact that I'm still just doing studies most days. I still am falling into that trap of doing the thing that is easy and not the thing that is harder but more fulfilling. Studies are important and I really believe that right now especially I need to be doing a lot of them. But I cannot only do studies. I have to do art that I care about. If I'm not doing art I care about then the studies are for nothing.

In an effort to change that I'm adding more to my minimum required drawing each day. Now, in addition to an hour of studies every morning, I will commit to an hour of personal work as well. That way at least some progress is being made and, hopefully, it will start giving me enough momentum to come back to it later on in the day when I find myself with extra time.

Hopefully.

So here's to learning to love the process.

More to come.

[novic]

Day 36

So I'm struggling. Struggling to do this everyday. Struggling, somewhat, with my own personal resolve. And those are really two different struggles.

I've got so much going on right now that I just don't know if I can keep posting every day, not just here but the videos as well. It seems like it's not that bad. On a good day it takes me only about 30 minutes to write these posts and edit the video. But some days it takes an hour. Some days even a little more.

Even 30 minutes seems to eat in the time I have to actually draw. Right now there are so many different demands on my time I don't feel like I can keep up with all of them, but they are all important.

So I may decide to do a vlog/blog once a week instead of everyday. But I have to admit that the thought makes me sad because the whole point of this was to track my work daily. To motivate myself to draw daily. Switching to once a week opens the door for an excuse to be lazy and not draw something. Hmmm.

I'm not making any decisions yet. I just need to think about it.

So today I'm back to studying hands. I'm done with the DVD and am on to studying some Bridgman. Today what I tried to do, and hope to continuing doing, was to study one of his breakdowns, and then draw a similar hand from photo reference in an attempt to immediately apply what I learned.

I would say that this feels fairly successful to me. I think that my finger widths and placements are a bit off, and I still feel some flattening around the base of the palm where it connects to the wrist. I should really watch out for those things, but over all this felt mostly successful.

The least successful part was my attempt to find a similar hand gesture. A process which took a great deal more time than it should have. I think in the future I will just go for something close in my existing collection of reference material rather than wasting time trying to find something that matches almost perfectly. A thing that I long ago discovered is virtually impossible and I don't know why I thought I could do it in the span of a few minutes in this instance.

More to come.

[novic]

Day 37

Things are changing. I once again find myself struggling to push forward. I'm seriously contemplating moving to once a week posts/vlogs rather than daily, as much I don't want that to be the case.

But I'm faced with two serious obstacles right now. One is time. I just don't have enough of it right now. I'm stretched too thin and have too many commitments that I can't walk away from. Taking 30 minutes to an hour every morning to write up posts and slap together a vlog just isn't a viable option at the moment.

The other is my study tunnel-vision. I want to do studies and really emphasis learning and getting better. But, because of that first obstacle, I don't have the time to regularly do studies and my own work. I need to be able to take time to make art that I care about because the lack of it is making me not care about art.

So I'm going to try changing directions. I still haven't made a decision concerning what to do about the daily stuff, but at least for a while I'm going to experiment with focusing primarily on my own work and trying to find those things that I still care about.

I don't know if I'm truely cut out to be an artist, but I do know that the surest way to drive myself away from it is to force myself to focus on things that I don't care about.

Today I did a study of some more of Cedric Peyravernay's concept art for Dishonored 2. Still focusing on the hands. This was a surprising struggle. I think I may have tried to make them too big early on and spent a lot of time and effort working to correct that. There are definately other proportional issues, such as her right art being too long and, I believe, her body being too wide. The latter there also contributed to my struggle with her left hand since I measured its length based upon the position of the shapes of her clothing and that in turn made the hand far longer than it needed to be, initially.

From there I moved on to some personal drawing. Just quick sketching. Trying something a little different than my usual approach today. Just started laying down lines without any real plan. Tried to keep my stylus on tablet as much as possible and just draw, gradually pulling out the lines that I found to be working more. I feel like there's some success here. While it's all super loose and some of it just plain bad, there were certain areas where it helped me to discover shapes I would not have thought of had I been drawing more purposefully, and that was an enjoyable and enlightening experience. Expect to see more of this as I focus on drawing for myself for a while.

Well, that's it for day 37. Hopefully this artistic crisis will pass and I'll soon be back to my old chipper self.

More to come.

[castonia]

You're hands are getting so much better, keep it up !

[novic]

@castonia Thanks so much! I'm gonna have to take a little break from only doing studies as I was about to have a mental breakdown from stress, but I'm glad to know that there is visible improvement. I'll get back to them before too long.

Day 38

So I almost walked away from things today. I was so stressed out, I felt like a complete failure, I didn't even know if I wanted to be an artist. But I convinced myself that the main source of my stress was the fact that I had been focusing all my energy on studies and had no time to do any more creative/personal work. So I decided that for a while I'm going to step away from the studies and just focus on drawing for myself.

I literally had to force myself to sit down and draw after making that decision because, though I believed it academically, I didn't believe it in my soul. I'm so glad I did. Within minutes of just sitting down to draw for myself I could feel my stress levels dropping. They dropped so rapidly and to such a degree that afterward I found myself thinking "Maybe I'll do some studies tomorrow."

While I feel like that's a good indicator of an improvement in my mental state, I'm not just going to assume that it's all good. So I'm going to take a at least the rest of this week, maybe longer, and just draw for me. Then I'll reevaluate getting back to doing regular studies.

And who knows, a study or two may creep in this week. The difference would be that it's a study that I'm doing because I'm faced with a specific problem/question that I want to explore, not because I feel like I have to do studies every day.

So for today I just continued my super loose free-form zero plan sketching. Just started throwing down lines and seeing what happens.

I feel like this is good for me for a number of reasons. Number one, and most interesting to me, it gets me experimenting with shapes that I may not have come across any other way. So far both yesterday and today I've found myself, in at least one notable instance, drawing things in a way that I probably wouldn't have if I had taken a more structured approach.

The second is that, in conjunction with this blog, it really forces me to get over showing things that are polished or "complete" in anyway. These drawings are little more than scribbles. There are certainly a lot of ways in which they could be improved. But that's not the point. The point is to draw and draw whatever. If I find an idea Iike then I can take it and refine it and make it more "complete."

This is piece I've been working on for, well, a lot longer than I would like to say. This is actually version 3 and will be the final redo of this character. Today I just took some time to block out the pose a bit and started sketching in a few of the larger details.

This is a part of a "Draw it Again" meme that I've been wanting to do. I'll keep the original held back for now so when it's finished we can have a more significant comparison.

Well, I can say that I feel so much better today. Still a little stressed, but nowhere near where I was. We'll see what the next few days bring as I focus on just drawing for me. Who knows what interesting things I'll discover.

More to come.

[novic]

Day 39

I'm going to try and keep it short today. We'll see how that turns out.

I believe that I'm going to have to start moving to once a week posts, at least here on the forums. I will probably try to continue my daily vlog at least for a while simply because it has been such a powerful motivator for me, but that in addition to these daily posts take up so much of my time right now. Time I can't afford. We'll see what actually happens, but right now I plan to continue posting daily until Sunday, and then I'll move to once a week.

So right off the bat I feel like we have a good example of how I would like to move forward with things for a while. Yesterday during my quick sketch I drew a character with glasses. I had wanted to have him posed as though he was adjusting his glasses, but I struggled figuring out the hand gesture and just couldn't get it right.

So today I took some photo referance of myself adjusting my own glasses and used that as a reference to try and figure out that hand gesture. And for the most part I feel it was quite successful. After a couple of attempts.

Then, after my usual "I don't know what to draw so I'm drawing a face" I managed to sneak in a few things that were outside my normal comfort zone. A few super rough in perspective forms.

Continuing work on this character I'm trying to block out the big details as much as possible. Got most of them at this point, though there are still a few that need some work or are just absent.

Doing this today put me in mind of something that Scott Robertson talks about in some of his videos. That a single line, even if it's a little shaky, will always read better than multiple lines drawn on top of each other. The multiple lines create a contrast that may not be wanted in the image and the viewers eye is inevitably drawn more to them than other elements that may be more important.

This is something that I think I'm going to work on applying, even in my quick sketching. Trying more often to just draw one line, even if it's not a perfect line, and conveying the idea that way. It can always be cleaned up and "designed" down the road.

Good things to think about. Always growing, always learning.

More to come.

[novic]

Day 40

Really not much to say today.

On a few occasions throughout my life when faced with a difficult situation it has felt like a switch in my head, perhaps labeled "I can do it, it's easy" on one end and "I can't do it, it's hard" on the other, has suddenly flipped. When this happens things that I previously struggled with suddenly become simple, straightforward, a matter of course, without bothering to pass through any other stage.

It doesn't happen very often, and I wish I knew what triggered it. But I almost feel like that happened with my art this past week. Not that I've suddenly improved or gotten so much better at things than I previously was, but simply that the mental blocks I've faced, the incredibly self criticism that wouldn't even let me just mess around without feeling like it had to be perfect, have somehow disappeared.

Maybe it won't last. Maybe it's just a temporary thing, but for right now I feel like I'm seeing things differently than I ever have before.

I feel like I may truly be able to love the process and not just the product. I hope it's true.

So today I just wanted to try and apply what I studies yesterday. So I redrew an approximation of the same character in the same pose and tried to get the hand looking right. Didn't quite succeed, but I got a lot closer than I did the first time and I feel particularly pleased because this is all purely from memory, didn't have either of the previous images open or any photo reference while doing this.

Really worked hard to just draw the lines that were needed. One line at at time. Evaluate, then either correct or move on (usually to come back and correct anyway after a few more lines are in place for comparison). It's a difficult process and one that is counter to how I've often worked before, but I think it's good for me to keep trying it. It gives my lines a confidence and clarity that I usually don't see.

Although I've just noticed an unfortunate near-tangent on his ear that makes it look like his glasses go over the outside of his hear rather than behind it.

Continuing to block in the major details on this character. After some considerable effort I feel like I've got that hand holding the gun looking good. Not perfect, I'll have to do something about that right side where the grip of the gun seems to merge with the side of his hand, but a solid start and probably one of the more challenging elements of the image all blocked-in.

So that's it for day 40. It is now the weekend and I really hope to be able to use my time and draw a lot more. Maybe make some significant progress on this character. We'll see what happens.

More to come.

[novic]

Day 41

This is probably going to be my last daily post for a while. It just takes up too much time each day, time that could be spent doing more drawing. I may get back to it at some point, maybe I'll find a way to do things more efficiently, but at least for now I'm going to scale things back. So for at least the next few weeks I will be doing once a week posts instead.

For now I will continue doing daily vlogs, which you can find here. Though even those may at some point have to be scaled back somewhat. We'll see.

So for today's quick sketching I decided to do some free-hand constructive drawing. Been a while since I did any of this and it's not feeling hugely successful to me, but I guess it's not terrible.

Though I must say that this cleaner, one line (or at least attempted one line) approach isn't as conducive to exploratory sketching as the scribble method seems to be. Maybe it's just a lack of experience and the more I do it the easier it will become, but right now it doesn't really feel like it. Still, I'll keep trying, though I may eventually decide to use the scribble method for exploration and the one line method when I actually have a specific idea in mind.

Struggling a bit with this one. Changed the face, again, and I'm willing to bet money (anyone care to take me up on this?) that I'm going to change at least one more time. Also tring to fix that right art (his right). It's just off. It was too long, now I think it may be a little to short. The pose is too stiff, and the less said about that hand gesture the better. I'll figure it out though. One way or another.

So that's it for day 41. I didn't get a lot of extra time to draw. It was a busier day than I had anticipated, though I can only blame so much on that. A good part of the reason for my lack of extra drawing comes down to me being super distracted by every little thing for about 2.5 hours before I finally got myself under control. I hate weekends so much right now. They just complicate things. One of these days I'm going to figure out how to be consistently productive with my time on the weekends without the structure of the week. Someday.

More to come.

[novic]

Week 7, Day 48

Well, it's been an interesting week. So far I would call it mostly successful since I've still managed to draw every day and put up my vlogs, and have definitely had a lot more time to work with. I'm thinking about changing the format even more, but I'm still not certain about that. It may just end up complicating things again and right now I'm feeling very much that if it's not broke, don't fix it.

This has been a week of self discovery as an artist. I have done 0 studies and feel pretty good for it. Oh, I fully intend to return to my studies starting this week, though with a slightly different daily approach. Right now I feel like there are two really important things I need to be doing in order to grow as an artist. The first is to find regular time to study, both the fundamentals as well as other artists. The second is to draw for myself. To explore who I am as an artist without worrying about turning things into a project or making a pretty picture. So for the foreseeable future, those two things will be my primary focus.

This is the culmination of my daily quick sketching this week. This is drawing for myself and it has been an exciting and enlightening experience. I've always struggled to draw without a plan. So much so that it's been my philosophy for years that I don't draw without have a specific idea about what I'm going to draw, having done research, and gathered at least thematic reference if not specific reference.

But I've always wanted to be able to just sit down and draw and end up with something that I was happy with. This week is the first time in my life that I have ever been able to do that.

Strictly speaking it's not like I didn't have an idea going in. All of these characters (with the exception of the old man and the knight at the top) are from the same story. But I did no research, didn't look up any reference. Just started drawing. What I found was that not only was I capable of producing flawed but interesting work that I was nevertheless pleased with, but it also pushed me to experiment with things that I may not have done had I prepared in more detail. After the first few faces I started to mess around with things like facial expressions and more dynamic angles. Admittedly with varying degrees of success, but at no point did I feel like I failed or like I couldn't do it. At worst I felt like I just needed a bit more information.

The most significant example of this can be seen in the lower left where I attempted to draw the face from a more elevated angle. There are so many issues here it's not even funny. The most significant being that the little simplified version that I used to "correct" my earlier issues was itself incredibly flawed. A fact which I didn't notice until I reviewed my footage this morning. The end result is that the face is really skewed in perspective and it just looks weird. But we live an learn, and that's the point. I'm going to be doing a lot more of these in the coming weeks and I couldn't be happier.

Wow, in truth I forgot that I even worked on this character this week. This must have been done first thing last week and then I never touched it again. Struggling with his right arm quite a bit. I just can't seem to find a good pose for it. And, as I'm sure you can see, once again I've completely redone the face. Getting closer to what I want, but still not their yet. I may shift my focus back to him this week when I have time. This one's been around for a long time and I really want to finish it.

This final image is an experiment. A natural evolution of my quick sketching, if you will. The whole idea here was to choose a topic/theme and just draw. No reference, no planning, but more than the quick sketches that I have been doing.

I also really wanted to try to build up from gesture, through constructive forms, and into the illustration itself. A very simple and not particularly technical variation of the process, but one that I've found incredibly helpful and instructive so far.

Though I struggled early on. If you watch the video you'll see that I screwed up the initial constructive block in on that left character it it was really screwing me up for a long time. There are still some significant issues with it, but I think I've resolved the worst of them and the pose and proportions feel at least a little more natural now.

I hope to continue this at some point, though maybe not right away. And I hope to make a project like this a regular thing on the weekends when I have the time to devote to it.

All in all an exciting week of art, and there's plenty more to come.

[novic]

Week 8, Day 55

This week has been a real roller-coaster of emotions. Last week I was flying high with confidence after one of the best weeks I've ever had, at least mentally. But a seed of doubt crept in immediately following and I've been fighting against it ever since.

Part of that was stoked by the fact that I attempted to make some significant changes to my process this week. Specifically I attempted to switch from a pencil tool to an inking pen tool in Sketchbook Pro. This is similar in nature to Painter's Scratchboard Tool. It's a brush that I've seen many artists do amazing things with, but it's execution requires a level of confidence that I still lack. Possibly because I don't use it that often, but possibly for other reasons as well.

And I know that there's at least some truth to the idea that if I had simply said "I'm going to work with this until I get it," and acknowledged that my work would probably really suck for a while, I would be willing to bet that within a few weeks (maybe even less) I would be drawing with the inking pen like it was nothing.

But doubt had crept in, my confidence was shattered, and the trials of the inking pen were the straw that broke the camels back. It was too much and early on in the week I was plunged into one of the deepest times of depression and doubt that I've had in a long time. Even though I didn't really notice it until later. I think on more than one occasion I said something along the lines of "Yeah, I'm struggling, but I've had worse." And while that's probably true, looking back I realize just how hard it really way.

My confidence still hasn't fully returned. Doubt still sits, unshakable, in my mind. There are important questions that I need answers to. But I had a major, yet perhaps somewhat obvious, revelation a few days ago. It's about will, not about skill.

I will probably never be a great artist. I can only hope to be good enough. But the issues I'm struggling with are not issues of "I can't do it." because I totally can. The issues I face are ultimately "Do I want to do it?" The fact of the matter is that I have never pursued art for art's sake. This is something that I realized a couple of years ago. Art for me is a means to an end. Don't get me wrong, I love art. I love virtually all aspects of it. Even the parts that I really dislike I still actually kind of like. But if you take away everything else and just leave behind art, I probably wouldn't actually want to do it.

For me it's about stories. I'm a visual thinking and a storyteller. So it has always felt like the two should go hand in hand. But I don't know anymore.

So the question is this: is art the medium through which I can happily explore the stories I want to tell? Or is there something else that I would be better suited to exploring.

So with it's ups and downs this week I struggled to get a lot of art actually done. One of them is that I only managed a couple of artist studies. The failed attempt with the inking tool is "Sister of Gold" by Manda Schank. It's followed by "Raul Moreno 05" (I couldn't find any other title) by Raul Moreno, and "Illustrations by Ricardo Bessa" (again couldn't find an actual title) by Ricardo Bessa.

Aside from that first one I felt like the other two went pretty well. In particular the boxer by Raul Moreno, an image which I've been looking at for probably a couple of years, and seem to have seen for the first time while studying it. It's all the more impressive to me now.

Continueing with my Bridgmen studies, still working on hands. Interestingly these actually seemed to turn out mostly okay with the inking tool. My own study from reference (top right) not so much.

Quick sketches this week. Lots of ups and downs. Struggled a lot even after switching back to my pencil tool. But had one or two good days. Also, I'm working hard to actually get back to the spirit of the "quick" sketch. At times I get so wrapped up in these that I spend the whole 30 minutes on one image and that's not the point.

I think pushing myself to work faster in this is actually a good thing. It forces me to make decisions on the fly and move on and gets me out of that head space where everything has to be "perfect."

Finally, I took one day to do some gesture work. Trying a different technique and attempting to stay using the same brush the whole time. Moderate success, though I need to get a little better about thinking through things as I go. The speed pressure in this case makes me just want to desperately make lines at random and hope for he best, but that virtually never works out. Gotta take even a few seconds and try to think about what I'm doing before I do it. I think they'll be better for it.

It's not about skill. I may not ever be the greatest, but I know I can learn. I'm a fast learner and the more I apply myself the faster I'll get better. But there's a lot I have to work through that has nothing to do with technical ability. Fortunately I've got this nice theraputic blog to dump all my thoughts and insecurities into each week so they don't get all bottled up inside.

I know I'll figure things out.

More to come.

[novic]

Week 9, Day 62

This has been a week of upheaval. Not artistically. In terms of art my mental state is actually pretty solid. But in the direction my day to day life has been going for at least two and a half years, maybe more, there's been just about as big a change as is possible. There are a few things that could be bigger, stopping art altogether being one of them, but not many.

I guess I'll just have to see where life takes me from here, because right now I don't have any idea.

But, as I said, art is pretty solid. I feel pretty good about what I've been able to accomplish this week.

This weeks gesture work is kind of a mess. Maybe a little better than last weeks, but still struggling. The loose, confident lines that I'm trying to move towards are so far eluding me when it comes to gesture, though I feel certain that it's only a matter of time. I aslo feel like I started to get the hang of it, at least a little bit, with some of the last ones I did. Though they were a minimum of two minutes each and five minutes for the final one.

Really gotta work on cutting out everything that isn't necessary to express the gesture.

Contrary to my continued study of hands, this weeks artist studies emphasized eyes and noses. Mostly eyes. This is because I've always felt like my eyes were too flat. Like I just stamped them on the surface of the face and they have no depth to them. So I really tried to emphasize looking at how various artists simplify the details of the eye while maintaining a degree of three-dimensional form. While I've still got a ways to go I feel like I'm already seeing improvement in my work.

Starting at the top left and working your way across and down the images are C o z y by Angel Ganev, Golden Prayer by Georgi Georgiev, Dishonored 2: Aramis Stilton by Sergey Kolesov, and Lord Lawson by Joseph Weston.

One item of note. As you can see on the first three my hatcing is very simple. I'm thinking about light and dark only. But with the final image, Lord Lawson, I started trying to think about the form as I applied my hatching. Though it's fairly simple at the moment, I really feel like it's a major improvement and intend to keep attempting that from here on out.

Still studying Bridgman for hands. Feeling pretty good about most of these. Though I stopped a bit prematurely on my final render there. Ironic because I actually put more time into it than I may have otherwise done.

Finally, my quick sketching for the week. Still mostly just drawing character portraits and broadly trying to move away from neutral expressions. Still not using any reference or really doing any planning.

My intent here is all about making myself think about what I'm trying to achieve. So often in the past I've just wanted to sit down and draw without planning, but I tend to mistake a lack of planning with a lack of intent or specific thought while drawing. I seemed to have this expectation that images I liked could just flow from my pencil (or what have you) and onto the page. Thinking about specific characters, who they are, what they may be feeling, what I want the audience to see, is all helping me really explore my ideas visually.

It's also turning out to be quite fun to just sit and noodle around with details and try to figure out how to make something work even when I don't really know what it looks like. This is no replacement for reference if I'm trying to capture something specific that I don't actually know how to draw, but it's a fun exercise when I'm just sketching.

So that's it for this update. The big life changes may mean a big change in the way I approach art. I don't know what things are going to look like moving forward, all I can say is that there's more to come.