My 90's Alternative Period part 3—The Trusting Line

Here's how I was drawing in the early 90's. Not the top one, the one below it. Note how hairy the line work is. (Incidentally, my line work looks a lot like like that now.)

I was studying anatomy at the time, from Hogarth and Robert Beverly Hale. This is the second rib cage I drew—the first one was un-see-able because of the scribbly lines, so I did this one. I knew I needed to get each line right the first time and not restate them. At that point I was doing it only for the sake of clarity, it was only afterwards I noticed how nice it looked. 

That little ribcage drawing looked so nice compared to everything else that it sparked a revolution. I decided to draw everything that way. 

It meant getting into the right mindset—sort of a zen state where you shut down conscious thought and just see where you need to put lines and execute them with pure confidence. Something like the mindset of a stuntman about to jump through fire, or an improv actor onstage. Sometimes I was more successful than others. 

I called this The Trusting Line. The need to totally commit to the line, trust it, and execute it without the slightest doubt. Sometimes the line was right, sometimes not so much, but when you get in the zone you can do a lot of good-looking drawings this way. 

Of course I was also influenced by expressionism at the time, by way of Kent Williams. This kind of commitment lends itself well to expressionist drawing, because it means a loss of accuracy but you gain something in the look of the finished piece, assuming it comes out well (which is sort of a crap shoot). 

A secret weapon for a 10 year old boy—the Famous Artists Course

 

I know, I was in the middle of going into some depth about my 90's alternative period and suddenly I'm posting all over the place. But hey, it's my blog. And this just might bring me back to drawing (and maybe painting) again. So bear with me.

This one is in response to the Kim Jung Gi and David Finch videos, about the importance of learning to draw the geometric solids. I got an early start at this.

I was about 10 or 11. My friend and I both drew, and we would get together every week at my house and lay out what we had drawn since last time to compare notes. There was mutual admiration, but also competition, a combination I would later come to think of as competition/camaraderie. And it was an amazing way for each of us to power our artistic development. It felt pretty good when the other guy obviously liked your work, and when his was better it made you really determined to be the winner next week, so you'd really knuckle down and draw more carefully. 

My mom was usually sitting in the living room for these little bullpen sessions and could clearly hear everything we said. One time after he went home she stopped me on the way up to my room and said "Hey, do you want a secret weapon?"

I had no idea (learned it that afternoon) that at one time she wanted to be an artist, but she did. It must've been when I was really young because The Famous Artist's Course was published in 1960, two years before I was.

It was the one with ads in magazines with a little drawing of a pirate or a turtle, and you were invited to copy it as well as you could. You then send it in and a few weeks later they send it back with a tracing-paper redline critique showing what you did right and wrong and a recommendation that you take the course. 

It was a subscription course, you give them your credit card number and they send you a big binder already stocked with the first few lessons, then each month you get a new lesson to add to it. She had the first 5 or 6 lessons, and I guess at that point she cancelled her subscription. 

Well, long story short, I studied 2 of the lessons—how to draw simple objects (called the geometric solids) in perspective and how to turn the human figure into a sort of mannikin built from those objects. They also showed how to modify and combine them to make anything at all—bowls of fruit, flowers, houses, airplanes, camels—whatever you want. 

The lessons on perspective and form also showed how to throw light on things. Well crap—how to draw form in perspective, how to build anything you want from those forms, and how to light and shade things. That's just about all you need! Spend grade school and high school drawing stuff for fun and using these principles all the time, then they're totally ingrained into your central nervous system (written on the spinal cord as I've heard it put). It becomes as natural as walking or talking—you don't even need to think about it anymore. 

I'm pretty sure I wrote about this before on this blog, just as I also posted my work from the 90's. But that isn't important. I'm thinking into it again, more deeply this time, or with a different focus. I think I'm preparing to move my main activity back to drawing and painting and to this blog. Time will tell.

Postscript:

Looking for pictures for this post I discovered the entire contents of the Famous Artists Course on Google Docs. I've downloaded a few sections, and I'll be studying the composition course. If anyone wants to see the lessons mentioned above, #2 is Form, #3 is Composition, and #4 is The Human Figure. 

Post postscript:

Soon after this I started winning all the time. He really liked the way I was drawing figures, with little spikes at elbows and knees. He thought it looked like a badass warrior robot. I let him take the binder home and study it, but in a few days he brought it back and seemed contemptuous or something about it—he hadn't studied anything and refused to. He decided to stop coming over and compare art after that. From that point on my art kept improving and his never did.

Gouache Again!

 It looks like everybody is using the airtight palettes. Is it just the latest trend, or something I should seriously look into? Especially considering so far I don't do much painting. I think I'll hold off and check into it, see what I can glean about it, and just get back to drawing for now. Maybe a gouache painting every now and then, but no new supplies unless I start to really like it (ie get better at it).

'Nuther great gouache demo

 Had to add this one to get a different take on how to approach it. 

Kim Jung Gi and David Finch on the importance of learning how to draw the geometric solids in perspective

 My thoughts:

I think it's vitally important that he draws things very realistically, even if occasionally more cartoonish. Drawing real things means sometimes you'll draw things sitting in front of you, and that's the best way to develop your accuracy and perspective sense, what I've called the mental 3D engine.

From what he keeps saying, it definitely sounds like he visualizes things in perspective a lot, I mean even when he's not drawing. I never thought to do that! Just now I'm looking around at things in the studio and imagining being a little mini-me floating around and seeing it from various different angles. Including the fish-eye lens he talks about—the 5-point perspective. I think practicing seeing things like that—visualizing even when you're not sitting at the drawing board—is an amazing exercise that will definitely develop your artist's eye. 

With both Kim Jung Gi and the David Finch video I just watched they really push learning how to see and draw everything in perspective, without using the guidelines and vanishing points etc, learning how to imagine everything as geometric solids that you can visually rotate any which way and throw light on however you want. Drawing this a lot helps you to visualize it. 

That's very much the same thing I'm working toward now with anatomy. When you've learned all the parts so well it sinks into the unconscious and you can draw it intuitively, that's when you can just spool off drawings fast and modify the body however you want. When it becomes intuitive you don't have to think consciously about it, and it emerges gracefully and fluidly (Hah! Fluid thinking again FTW!)

Here's the David Finch video:

Incredible gouache painting tutorial—looks like oils or airbrush

I don't know why videos show up so small in here, and in a square format with black bars top and bottom. That does not look good, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change it. But this is the best gouache painting tutorial I've ever seen. I got all excited about the airtight palette, found one on Amazon, but then remembered my past experiences trying that with Alkyd paints. Not good—they just dry out. I found a comment where somebody asked her about it, and she said hers tend to dry out too, and I assume she uses it just about every day. 

But I think (one) reason her approach is working so much better than mine is because she has all those well-mixed colors at hand—that's what I call a candy box. I mix mine on a butcher's tray and usually don't make enough colors or close-enough blends. I think I'm afraid of wasting too much paint. 

Another factor is she uses washes a lot more than I've seen before. Plus so many tricks—the ultra-fine miniature brushes, drybrushing etc. She was making a very detailed painting, whereas for the Watts method they're doing sketches. 

She said she's had talent from an early age and just studied every book she could find on art technique. I suspect it's a case of extreme patience and discipline, much like it seems to be for Kim Jung Gi. I watched a bunch of videos about him last night. Inspiration overdose. 

My 90's Alternative Period part 2—What is an Alternative Period?

A society goes through upward and downward cycles or phases. The upward phases are called Classical periods, when classical values are upheld by the majority of people and institutions. These are growth periods, during which the society prospers. But following a classical period there's always a decadent period or downward swing. 

The values of a classical period include things like strength, justice, grace, beauty, youth, courage and confidence. Masculinity is encouraged for men, and femininity for women. In a decadent period everything is reversed. The spotlight moves to everything that was repressed in the classical period, such as weakness, disease and poverty, old age, death, depression, and fear. 

Imagine a wheel painted with the Yin/Yang symbol that's half submerged in water. When the white side is predominantly up out of the water, that's a classical period, but as the wheel turns (inevitable forward march of time) the white (Yang) part starts to rotate back down and the black side (Yin) rises to take its place. This is inevitable and necessary, like the forest fires that purge dead wood and encourage the growth of new trees that would have been unable to get any light under the shadow of the old forest giants. Though it brings immense death and destruction, the fire allows for new life in its wake. Mythologically this is symbolized by the death and resurrection cycle—before you can be reborn purified you must die as who you were.

I drew monstrous goddess figures.
This one is based on Artemis, also known as Diana

Classical periods included Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the Victorian age. Each was inevitably followed by its antithesis in the form of Hellenism, The Baroque, and the Modern Art period . I see the Alternative music scene of the 90's as the shadow side of Classic Rock that preceded it. The strutting peacocks of rock were replaced by introverted, emotionally unstable goths who sang about how marginalized and anxious they were. After 2 solid decades of rock we needed to hear from the other side, though we didn't realize it. At the same time I went through my own dark underworld journey of depression that shattered my confidence and naive suppositions about life. It would be about 2 decades before I realized I was emerging from it and moving into a classical phase again, though now purged of naive illusions. 

We each go through the same up and down periods in our lives, in large and small scales. In the ancient world these phases were known as Eros, the movement toward life, joy, and love, and Thanatos—into darkness, disillusion, and ultimately death (yes, this was the basis for Thanos). Each was symbolized as an allegorical figure, Thanatos being a frightening one similar to our more familiar Grim Reaper, and Eros represented by a woman of beauty and grace.

In modern times Eros has been demoted to mean no more than sexuality and romantic love, but originally it meant everything positive and re-affirming about life. 

Here's an excellent breakdown that goes into much greater depth: The Ancient Dance Between Eros and Thanatos

Don't you love it when you go blog-hopping and unexpectedly get a dose of myth, philosophy and psychology? 

My 90's Alternative Period part 1

I know I've posted some of these before, but many of them were colored in, and that was when I was first learning digital painting (and using a mouse to do it I think). Now I want to present some decent images of them, just the pencils, as close as I can get to the way they looked in the 14 x 20 Strathmore sketchbooks I was using back then. I loved drawing in that big format!

I call it my Alternative period, for 2 reasons. I was really into alternative music at the time, and my drawing was very different from what I had done before. Inspired by a few artists I discovered in the pages of Epic Illustrated and 1984 I loosened up and went very intuitive, tapping into fluid intelligence rather than the learned and memorized procedures stored in crystallized intelligence.

Too Much Crystallized Thinking Lowers Fluid Intelligence

Can Physical Activities Improve Fluid Intelligence?

Why are smart people curious? Fluid intelligence, openness to experience, and interest

My Decade Away from Drawing and Painting

In 2001, while the world was still reeling from the events of 9-11 in fact, I took up stopmotion animation (as detailed on my Darkmatters blog) and totally stopped drawing or painting, aside from painting set-pieces, puppets and props, which just doesn't use the same skills. I did that for about a decade. 

In 2013 I took up the pencil again,

but was stunned to discover I had lost all my skills.I quickly went to digital, using a mouse at first, and then got myself a tablet. I thought I could bring my skills up that way, and rapidly get them back to where I had left off, but boy, was I wrong! Drawing on the tablet just wasn't the same at all. My hand didn't remember it nor did I ever take to it, at least for drawing. Over the last few years I started drawing in pencil more, until I decided to devote myself to it entirely, and then the skills did begin to return.

 

I started getting some training, first through Jason Manley's Level Up course @ ConceptArt, then Watts Atelier. All that training has been aimed at realism, which is what I wanted—I believe you need to develop the skills before you cut loose and try to work intuitively, and that was my shortcoming with all these drawings from the 90's. My skills were about halfway there, but they needed reinforcing. 

That's what my training has been for. Specifically I want to firm up on the structure of the figure and head, develop my anatomy, and draw from photographs quite a bit to learn what people really look like. I feel like I'm just about there on the structure part, but will be digging in on the rest of it.

Sorry these are getting weirdly tinted, I'm using an online image editor and it took me a few tries to really get it down. I might go back and re-do these later. I don't know though, they look kind of cool. I might just leave them.

 

95 and 96 were my best years. Most if not all of what I'll be posting comes from those sketchbooks. The one above I did after getting home from seeing Mortal Kombat.

In future posts I'll go into more detail about specifically what an alternative period is, in music and visual art (and in a society). After developing my skills to a certain level I plan to start going alternative like this again, but this time with better understanding. I love the boldness of these, and some of them look really nice, but I feel like my knowledge of the figure and the head and a lot of other things (composition) just was't there yet.