David Finch on Drawing Superhero Capes

 

David Finch on Comic Book Composition

 

Posted my drawings @ my Flickr gallery

I tried for a while to add a gallery here on the blog as a separate page, but it only gave me a massive headache. So I finally decided to upload them to my Fickr gallery. I made a link for it (right under My Paintings @ Flickr) in the sidebar. Eventually I'd like to work them into some kind of order*, but that's going to be a massive undertaking. Apparently my camera(s) don't have the right date encoded in the metadata, or it gets all screwed up in the upload or something, they were just randomly scattered. And also apparently, I can only move one at a time. So it'll be a long hard slog. But I'll get in there and move things around a little at a time. 

 I also added a few paintings that weren't up there yet to my Paintings gallery. Nothing that hasn't been posted on this blog (that includes all the drawings too). I just wanted them all grouped together for easy viewing so you don't have to scroll through page after page to see years' worth of my stuff. And I also finally fixed something I should have addressed long ago. I noticed that for some of my paintings I didn't have the latest or best version posted. So I fixed those too. 

* I've now got them grouped by year, and that's good enough. I'm not worried about grouping them by month or day or anything. But I do like to see what year something was done. Hell, who knows, one day I might be really bored and go in and start putting them in absolute chronological order? But not today. Not today. 

David Finch on drawing female hips

When it rains videos in here it seems it pours. Each time I find one really inspiring video that makes me want to post, it's followed by several more. This is far and away the best method I've ever seen for drawing the pelvic structure. Getting the bottom line of that bowl shape really places everything precisely. I used to put all those things wildly out of place. Plus I never liked how the standard method involves drawing forms right through other forms (the tops of the legs passing through the pelvic block as if it's intangible). 

Of course seeing it is one thing. it remains to be seen what I can do with it. 

Gesture, Composition, and Design

Ryan Benjamin has incredible enthusiasm and passion for what he does, and for art in general, especially comic art. I love listening to him talk about it, and even more so watching him create it spontaneously. 

This is a much longer video, but it goes into great depth about what design is in composition and in the figure. Both videos deal strongly with gesture, one of the important principles in making good pictures. 

And this guy (Sorry, I didn't catch his name) goes so far as to say that the principles of design and composition apply as much to individual figures as they do to an entire image. That's something you don't normally hear. He seems to fall into the common belief though that a figure means only the human body, and possibly animal bodies as well, but from thinking about the word and its various meanings I've worked out that a figure is any individual object once it's been drawn or painted. A building, a car or a tree in an image is a figure. I might go into that in more detail later, this isn't the place for it. 

But all this stuff these guys are talking about and demonstrating is exactly what my work needs in order to break free from all this very literal and detailed drawing I've been doing. I used to draw much more gesturally and subordinate detail in places strategically. In fact to some extent I used to use just about all of the principles discussed in the second video, but since in recent years I'm concentrating on bringing up my anatomy and (human)* figure drawing skills, it's been necessary to draw everything with equal emphasis and great clarity, and all of it entirely literally. No abstraction or blurring of shape. 

This probably accounts for why I don't get excited about drawing like I used to--when you approach it like I've been recently it isn't dramatic or powerful or evocative. An image made using these principles of design grabs your attention, it has mystery and power. I think I need to start alternating between the crisp and clean learning drawings (with no caffeine) and the evocative drawings, where you let things go in and out of focus and let the light move sporadically and fitfully over the entire image. 

All of this falls into the purview of this statement, that I've posted several times and has been one of my guiding principles ever since I encountered it:

"Learn as much about composition as you can, and put it all into practice as much as possible."

* And here we see exactly why the term has come to denote only the human figure. It's awkward to have to specify when you mean the human figure as opposed to the figure of a horse or a refrigerator. 

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.