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.

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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.