Getting the hang of perspective......

     In terms of perspective, and yes I'm talking about the technical kind, I was fortunate.  In college, Architecture was one minor course of study I had when pursuing a degree in construction mgmt.  Drafting class after drafting class taught me a lot about linear perspective and why certain angles complement each other in terms of the human cone of vision.  This was a great complement to drawing skills I had practiced all my young life and really helped me become a better artist.  Now years later I have learned other important lessons regarding the use of linear, artistic as well as atmospheric perspective systems.  Some of these points I thought important to share.  First one is probably the most important which is yes you must actually struggle through and learn academic perspective inside and out so you understand spatial relationships and how they work with perspective systems.  This gives you your base in terms of that ever important artistic problem solving repertoire that you will indeed use your whole life as an artist.  While this is important to learn it brings me to my next point regarding perspective usage.  One of the most important reasons to learn about perspective systems is not what you'd expect.  You have to learn how to use perspective so you can then learn how to break the rules because at times your perspective will be technically correct but guess what?  Your drawing looks stiff, or wrong and you have to nudge something out of the technically correct perspective arrangement in order to get back on track.  This is a much more subjective thing and will only come with time and lots of practice.  I mean read all the books you want, look at tutorials, etc.  They are fine but nothing will teach you like sitting at your drawing board or computer and simply drawing, and that includes drawing terrible stuff.  You have to mess up to progress so don't be afraid to erase something or toss out something you've messed up.  Embrace the failures and study how you went wrong so you can learn from it, then they cease to become failures but rather become tools.  Next is you have to learn another subjective lesson.  In various types of work some forms of perspective take precedence over others.  When drawing vehicles you will most likely be adhering to a linear perspective true, but what about drawing panoramas or sweeping vistas?  Well they really call for knowing how to use atmospheric perspective effectively.  Sometimes a combination is in order.  You must decide how and when to use each type.  Finally there is a mistake I see in work all over the place and I feel it is a result of how perspective is taught rather than misunderstanding on the students' part.  DO NOT make every item in your drawing follow the same vanishing points!!!  This is ultra important.  Every single item in a picture, unless it is completely parallel and in line with another has its own vanishing point(s).  Sometimes, ie cityscapes,  you can cheat this a bit so you don't go nuts but in most pictures you have to take the time to draw most features with their own perspective.  Another overlooked point in perspective is that curved lines work in nearly the same fashion as straight lines and using them adds live to your drawings rather than using straight, stiff grids all the time.  One last thing, simply think of your visual field as a cone that deforms all you see.  As items retreat from you into the smaller part of the cone they get smaller and closer together no matter which direction you are looking or what point perspective you are viewing them in.  I know this is all pretty basic stuff but I feel they are points that are very important in getting your work to look great while adhering to the correct perspective.  Get really comfortable with perspective drawing so you can play around with it and really start to make things happen with it in your own way.  I hope my perspective on perspective is helpful.  Best Wishes.

IIId

***Perspective For Artists by Rex Vicat Cole is a very in depth book that a lot of great artists refer to.  I certainly own it.  It's a bit tough to read but it covers a great deal concerning the technical aspects of artistic perspective systems.

Don't forget the Silhouette......

I do not write tutorials as I think that you should really find your own methods for accomplishing tasks or overcoming challenges within your artwork, ones that fit within your personal working style, but I do like to give pointers and tips on things I feel are important. Silhouettes I feel are very important but often ignored. When we are working on a new composition there are a good number of reasons to draw traditionally instead of composing with random brush strokes. The most important of which to me is silhouette and how they actually 'read' within your composition. Starting with the silhouettes first and then moving inward in not only logical it allows you to really check your composition quickly and effectively while seeing how its individual components read within it. This allows you to make fast and effective decisions about moving forward with a particular piece without wasting time and energy on details, evaluate negative space within the piece, etc.   The silhouettes within your work should be the starting point and almost never a result of piecing details together. Okay you say but I work digitally and I use a lot of random Photoshop brushes to generate ideas and use the random happy accidents, and chaos in these rapid paintings as starting points. Not a problem. I do it sometimes too, especially when I'm just not having any strong visuals come into my head or I'm tired, or whatever. I use a special set of inkblot brushes to do this, but I've seen many approaches to it and I feel that they are all valid as long as they allow you to recognize shape and silhouette cleanly. I love the way the Steambot cats do their thing this way but it has never worked well for me so I had to find a different way to go about it. Inkblots have a quality that builds silhouettes rather than details inside them so for me it works better and composition jump right out at me. Scott Robertson also has as awesome way of doing this that he details in a Gnomon DVD entitled 'Creating Unique Environments' where you use initial marker sketches and varied blending modes to composite them within Photoshop. Any method can really work, it's all about finding the shapes. The big initial read of the shapes and how they form the initial composition is the key to a strong read early on and hence a strong foundation to build on. This is a very simple concept but very easy to overlook and when used will strengthen you artwork every time. Good Shapes! D  BTW-If anyone wants my inkblot brush set to play with(PS7 or above) just email me or leave a comment. I have no problem emailing it to interested folks.

Why I Left DeviantArt

Let me first say that I've been a DA member for a few years and have had reasonable success in generating a buzz for my artwork there and feel that it is a great community and resource for artists of various mediums both traditional and digital. It really is like no other place online. With that said I recently deactivated my account there for a few reasons that to me were important. Firstly the art theft thing. I realize that when you publish any piece of artwork online you are taking a risk, but in most cases the benefit outweighs the risk. When I first started uploading work to DA I never had to refuse permission for downloads but when I started seeing various pieces of my artwork on other profiles, either cropped or recolored, etc and signed by someone else, I had to start refusing download permission on all of my pieces. I didn't like this, and not because the thefts upset me, but because I feel that the key to being a good artist is simply TRYING. I didn't like not being able to share my artwork with people who simply wanted to download it for inspiration. Simply grabbing various pieces of artwork from various artists and photo-shopping them up, and then claiming them as your own is just silly and forces artists to withhold their work from good people with no ill intention to protect themselves from the ones who have ulterior motives. One great comic book artist named David Finch had to nix his whole website due to this very same phenomenon. Which to me was very sad as he was a true inspiration and remains to be for many people who would love to see new work from him posted online, but as he stated on his now closed website, too many people were stealing his work and claiming it to be their own. To what end? Who knows. I guess they figure getting attention in the short term is better than working for years at their craft and really becoming great. The next reason I decided to walk away from DA was that I kept seeing their contests pop up and even entered one, which really isn't my bag, but I did it. I just kept noticing that most of the winners or finalists over there were either borderline or outright plagiarists. In contest after contest there were many many outraged people who were all asking the same question of DA. If I produce a composition from scratch and this guy just tweaks and bashes photos how can you choose his work over mine? This is the rub. In all of these cases DA defended it's position and actually endorsed the plagiarism. To me you can't on one hand state that you are trying to further the arts while on the other hand awarding and endorsing plagiarism in any degree or form. It was rather distasteful for me to look at pieces that I knew good people spent a week on, lose to someone who pushed a couple of buttons , ran a few filters, etc and in 45 minutes produced, voila! A winner.... Sites like CG hub will actually disqualify you from their jams and contests for the same actions that DA endorses in their contests. In my opinion CGHUB has it right as the point of competitions is to test your skills, against your peers, in a manner that it outside your comfort zone-which is usually the point of competing against others! Lastly I decided that in order to really focus on my craft I had to pare down my online presence' as I simply was finding that I was spending too much time administrating them, answering emails, etc. This was a personal choice and really a matter of time management and had very little to do with DA other than me having to make a decision about which online arenas were productive for me to be involved in and which weren't. Of course the above reasons were a factor in this decision but not the only factor when weighing both the pros and cons associated with DA membership. At present I really need to focus on work and anything that I find is a detractor must be weeded out. I am a bit down that I feel that I cannot share my work on DA anymore and maybe down the road I'll take another crack at it, but for now I'm cool with where I'm at with the whole thing and feel I made the right decision. D

Norita Graflex 66 UP!!

Wow are we ever fortunate! My lovely girl JAG was at an estate sale recently and picked up a Norita Graflex 66 with the legendary 80mm lense, and the prismatic viewfinder! I mean to folks that know, this camera has no equal in terms of medium format cameras and no digital SLR even holds a candle against it. Now JAG is much more of a photographer than I but now even I'm feeling the itch to snap a few rolls. I mean the variable depth of field on this camera is flat out amazing! It actually feels like cheating when you use it! She picked up a Mamiya medium format studio camera as well and they are great but we haven't even picked that up yet. It will be fun to play with down the road. The last camera she bought was a 50's vintage Kodak Medalist, pretty much an American Leica, and we ended up selling it to a very nice gentleman in Tokyo! They are very popular in Japan I guess. I'm sure he's rocking it hard. Good fortune! Best Wishes to all. D

Free Analog Sketching for Design instructional video with Mikael Lugnegård.

Mikael was kind enough to produce and share this video about analog sketching for design, free of charge and even encourages sharing it!  I found it informative and quite inspirational.  He's quite and artist and a very positive individual.  Check it out.


The techniques of Mikael Lugnegård from Mikael Lugnegård on Vimeo.

Being a process junkie and using process to your advantage...

     I love watching other artists in my and related fields display their process in instructional videos, books, demos, and the like.  I've watched a ton of footage regarding comic creation, concept art, design, etc.  I'm just a geek for it.  I always learn something but I must say that the most important lesson I've ever learned from watching all of these great artists is an underlying one.
     Sure you can pick apart a great artist's process bit by bit and say well I really want to do what he does and be great like him so I'm going to do my artwork exactly lie he does and in no time I'll be kicking ass and taking names like him.  This mindset is all too common these days in the arts and in short it is akin to simply missing the point.  When you see a great artist or better yet a number of great artists demonstrating their ways of accomplishing the artistically incredible, they are essentially letting you in on the way they problem solve throughout a project.  This is helpful in many ways, and you can always learn something from a great artist if you pay attention.  The truly meaningful lessons we glean from educational material in the arts are those one or two solid things we can really incorporate into our very own, and very personal process.  You must establish your own 'pipeline'(to what degree really is subjective in terms of each artist) but your artwork will always lack something if you simply try to be someone else and never establish your own set of problem solving skills and hence your own style.  You may even produce some cool work that looks like this guy or that but deep down you will never feel that it is your own.  I mean really watch a guy like James Clyne, or Aaron Limonick, Christin Lorenz Schurer,  Mikael LungneGard, Ryan Church, Syd Mead, Feng Zhu, Etc.  They are great for one reason they toiled through the hard, difficult and often times lonely process of each finding their own style and working methods.  They may have gleaned a tip or two from here or there but they don't copy anyone in any fashion.  Their various instructional materials are meant to inspire, educate, and show that it is indeed possible to create great artwork, but there are no shortcuts, and it is a lot of work to acheive any level of greatness in any field, especially those in the arts.  We all need to have enough confidence in ourselves to walk our own artistic path and at the end of every project know that on the next one we can indeed do better by some measure.   I think that finding out who you aren't is just as important as finding out who you are as an artist so indeed read, watch, learn, work hard and be proud of yourself every day for your accomplishments.

Below are links to a few vids that I've found rather helpful over the years...