Suddenly decided out of the blue yesterday to sign up for Watts. Definitely my biggest step since joining conceptart and taking LevelUp. Actually this is the best step I've ever taken in art education - everything else has been only a dress rehearsal. I felt like I was stagnating trying to self-motivate, and decided it was time - I had been planning to do this for some time actually. I also just ordered an Asaro head a few minutes ago - another step I've been meaning to take.
I think it was actually a good move to wait a while before joining - I've been watching all the Watts videos on YouTube - the Friday Night workshops etc, and learning a lot about how they do things, and I've had time to locate the materials they use, like the Conte 1710 Pierre Noire pencils and smooth newsprint. So many desperate comments from people who joined and now need to track down all this stuff.
Watched a bunch of the videos last night for Fundamentals phase 1. I had already found videos by other people about how Jeff wants you to sharpen the pencils - it's very specific and very extreme - a long taper that covers almost half the length of the pencil, which allows you to lay it down sideways when you want broad strokes. The 1710 is one of only a few charcoal pencils with a lead strong enough to allow this, plus you can easily get the full range of values depending on how hard you press - no fumbling with different grades of graphite or anything.
But now having listened to Jeff Watts rhapsodize about sharpening the pencils this way, I have a whole new level of respect for it. The pencils are your instruments - you have to learn this very difficult way of sharpening them and also lean how to hold them and rotate them as you draw so the point remains conical and round. Now they feel like little disposable violins that you get in boxes of a dozen and use them until they're little stubs before tossing them, and your job as art student is to become a virtuoso. The act of sharpening a few pencils before you draw is like a zen ritual where you ground yourself and get focused for the session, the way Sumi-e artists make a ritual of grinding their ink before drawing. He's also got me thinking of drawing in a whole different way - every mark being a thing of beauty.
Now I'm going in to start on Heads phase 1, which combines the Reilly abstractions with the Asaro planes and Loomis head construction. Exciting stuff!!
Thursday, July 9, 2015
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Saturday, July 4, 2015
Gurney does Speed
GJ Friday Book Club - Harold Speed's Practice and Science of Drawing
James Gurney has created this awesome little book club - they're starting off discussing Harold Speed's excellent book on drawing. Many amazing insights to be had there. Just wish I could find a quick way to navigate to the next entry each time - I've been clicking through each day of the week until I get to the next Friday... takes quite a few minutes. Haha - oh what speed freaks the internet has made of us all!
PS - just bought the 99¢ Kindle version of the book and reading it BIG in their cloud reader, utilizing all the real estate of my computer monitor - such a vast improvement on the PDF I had downloaded long ago, I think from Archive.org. Someone had laboriously scanned in their own very old, very marked-up and very very tattered and dogeared copy. So refreshing to see the clean white background now and the crisp type and clear reproductions of the art! Now it's a pleasure to read, whereas before, as excellent as the material itself is - it was difficult and frustrating.
PPS - just realized I made 2 posts today featuring the word speed..
James Gurney has created this awesome little book club - they're starting off discussing Harold Speed's excellent book on drawing. Many amazing insights to be had there. Just wish I could find a quick way to navigate to the next entry each time - I've been clicking through each day of the week until I get to the next Friday... takes quite a few minutes. Haha - oh what speed freaks the internet has made of us all!
PS - just bought the 99¢ Kindle version of the book and reading it BIG in their cloud reader, utilizing all the real estate of my computer monitor - such a vast improvement on the PDF I had downloaded long ago, I think from Archive.org. Someone had laboriously scanned in their own very old, very marked-up and very very tattered and dogeared copy. So refreshing to see the clean white background now and the crisp type and clear reproductions of the art! Now it's a pleasure to read, whereas before, as excellent as the material itself is - it was difficult and frustrating.
PPS - just realized I made 2 posts today featuring the word speed..
One step forward..
Well, I did a few good things today and a few bad ones. I squelched down that orange skin, but also made Fafhrd look soft and feminine and baby-smooth. Good rule of thumb - don't use a brush called soft round unless that's the way you actually want the character to look. But I think it was a good move to smooth out that turbulent sky a bit - you need a restful area juxtaposed against the more busy ones.
Ah well, it's good to be back to painting anyway. What inspired me to do this were a couple of Xia Taptara videos - his Mountain Versus Viper and How to Paint Metal. It kinda sucks when you think you're putting brush strokes down all over but it turns out it actually just looks splotchy and streaky - those big smooth areas and solid, hard-edged strokes are very needed.
Paint background figures (NO SPEEDPAINTS!)
No speedpaints - instead just paint background figures and landscapes/environments. The word speedpaint conjures ideas of something slapped down in minutes by a skilled artist showing off how good he is. I've heard it said on Conceptart that you can't do speedpaints until you're already good. Which sort of goes hand in hand with Dave Sims oft-repeated (by me mostly) saying: "First you get good, then you get fast, then you get good and fast".
But all of this isn't to say that you shouldn't do SKETCHES. A sketch really isn't a speedpaint - the point of a sketch is to roughly develop an idea without putting in massive amounts of time and effort doing a complete painting.
And suddenly it occurred to me that it would be more profitable to paint simple little background figures rather than close-up detailed ones; so you're only really paying attention to the basics like pose and lighting and form, using value shape and edges to do so. Landscapes from imagination are also an excellent exercise - I think that's where you can develop a lot of your technique for the rough loose painting, since hills and cliffs and trees don't need to have proper anatomy or lateral symmetry and all that annoying stuff figures have.
This is still me kicking around the same idea I have been in the last few posts - artistic shorthand etc. It gets pretty daunting painting a figure when you feel you have to do full anatomy and musculature on every one. And yeah, I know the reason I started doing all this Heroic Fantasy stuff was to get in a lot of anatomy practice and work on dynamism - but not every painting needs to be a half naked buff warrior dude. Muscles are minor surface forms - even the big ones - and first you need to work with the basic figure itself.
But all of this isn't to say that you shouldn't do SKETCHES. A sketch really isn't a speedpaint - the point of a sketch is to roughly develop an idea without putting in massive amounts of time and effort doing a complete painting.
And suddenly it occurred to me that it would be more profitable to paint simple little background figures rather than close-up detailed ones; so you're only really paying attention to the basics like pose and lighting and form, using value shape and edges to do so. Landscapes from imagination are also an excellent exercise - I think that's where you can develop a lot of your technique for the rough loose painting, since hills and cliffs and trees don't need to have proper anatomy or lateral symmetry and all that annoying stuff figures have.
This is still me kicking around the same idea I have been in the last few posts - artistic shorthand etc. It gets pretty daunting painting a figure when you feel you have to do full anatomy and musculature on every one. And yeah, I know the reason I started doing all this Heroic Fantasy stuff was to get in a lot of anatomy practice and work on dynamism - but not every painting needs to be a half naked buff warrior dude. Muscles are minor surface forms - even the big ones - and first you need to work with the basic figure itself.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Loosenatin'
Click on the first to open the viewer and then click on each one to see them build in sequence.
Just getting used to painting simple forms loosely.
Monday, June 29, 2015
Loosening up
I need to do exercises aimed at loosening up - my Flickr gallery shows me that my paintings are all too tight and hard-edged. I was beginning to address that in my paint-overs of some of my older pieces where I concentrated on composition and soft edges. Just gotta keep going that way and start doing some new pieces with it in mind. I went through a too-tight phase in drawing decades ago, and I got over it.
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