#inter-lesson tangent

[drawing-with-lena]

INTER-LESSON TANGENT #1: LEARN THE RULES BEFORE YOU BREAK THEM

Not a lesson, but a bit of rambling.

Looking back on my art education, I’m reminded about all the exercises I bitched and moaned about and thought were stupid at the time, which I retroactively see the value in. But when I was 11 and taking an after-school art class, I didn’t wanna sit and draw fruit for 3 hours. I wanted to draw DRAGONS and X-WING FIGHTERS and COOL SHIT. (I drew a lot of X-wing fighters in my math book anyway.)

And yeah, now that I’m an adult I draw dragons and superheroes and I have a grand old time. BUT!

Drawing fruit was good for me. And I have to grudgingly admit it, as tedious as it was. Because it made me learn the rules and the basics which I was then able to apply to the things I wanted to draw (X-wings included). And while artists flaunt and break the rules and do stuff unrealistically all the time, it’s usually because they learn the rules first, and get comfortable enough with them to learn what they can and can’t afford to screw with.

See this painting here?

It’s nice, right? Realistic, evocative, well-crafted.

It was painted by Pablo Picasso.

Yes, THAT Picasso. Who later painted this:

Picasso trained classically before breaking convention with his work in cubism. e e cummings learned all the rules of language before throwing them out the window with his experimental poetic forms. Hell, even mathematicians and physicists had to learn the high-school level building blocks of arithmetic and basic physics before they got to play with all the crazy shit where the math doesn’t even have numbers anymore and quantum physics ignores all the rules ever (seriously, quantum physicists: what the hell??).

The same rules I learned for shading a bowl of goddamn fruit became the rules I applied for shading in a dragon’s scales. Knowing why certain guidelines and ways of drawing things existed let me know what impact I could have if I deviated from them purposefully (like getting a really surreal, weird scene by deliberately messing with perspective).

“But what if I just wanna draw cartoons?” someone invariably asks. “What if I only want to do stylistic stuff, and not realism?”

Well, you certainly can. Some webcomics pull this off just fine, but usually because the visuals are not a central focus. Most professional cartoonists do have some more formal art training.

And do you know what happens when you launch into the stylized stuff without ever really studying anatomy or learning how to draw realistically first?

Do you know what happens?

DO YOU?

YOU GET ROB. GODDAMN. LIEFELD. ART. THAT IS WHAT GODDAMN HAPPENS.

...

So I really encourage everyone to draw fruit, do the tedious Art 101 exercises, and learn the boring rules for drawing realistically. You WILL be able to apply them later, to as many dragons and x-wings and pirates and gay superheroes kissing as you want. Or you might toss some of the rules out, but you’ll be doing so knowingly, while making a strategic choice. And that choice gives you all the more control.

[drawing-with-lena]

INTER-LESSON TANGENT #2: REFERENCES AREN’T CHEATING

“How do you get that pose to look right?”

References.

“How do you make a drawing really look like someone?”

References.

“How do you get it to be so realistic--”

References. 

Trust me on this. REFERENCES ARE YOUR FRIEND. Though I also fully understand how we can feel sometimes like it’s somehow cheating to use them.

All through school, you were probably taught to memorize things; to replicate and regurgitate facts and equations from memory. Having notes written down was frowned on as cheating, or as a cop-out. I think this is a big reason why so many of us struggle with the idea of using references in art -- it feels like looking at notes during a test, when we’ve come to equate mastery with people able to do something purely from memory. But it’s better to think of an artwork as an essay than a test -- something where referring to and citing an outside source makes your work stronger, not less valid.

Sometimes I see people objecting to the use of references on the ground that it’s “copying.” Now, if you take another person’s artwork and trace it and pass the copy off as your own, then yes, that’s got some ethical questionability. But if you draw from a photo, or simply refer to another work while turning it into something new with your own twist, that’s something different altogether. And unless your replica of a photo is hyper-realistic to the point of being indistinguishable from the original -- in which case your technical skills alone would be worthy enough of admiration -- you’re going to be bringing your own artistic style and interpretation to the artwork. 

The other reason I see people balk is the idea that it’s “unoriginal.” Again, anything you create from scratch is going to have a certain amount of originality simply by dint of your having made it, and having the unique influence of your creative process and mark-making. Look through any fanart tag, and you will probably find at least one beautiful artwork that was clearly painted from referencing a specific screenshot or still or photo of the actor. But it’s still a beautiful artwork. The change in medium, change in detail, and/or change in color can also create a different impression, or evoke different emotions than the referenced material. The originality comes from you, the artist. And furthermore -- you can combine multiple references, referencing only parts from each, to create something entirely new. Maybe reference part of a pose from one photo, the details of an outfit from another, the head/face of the character from yet another photo, and then the background from a fourth. Maybe you draw the hand by looking at your own, or get a friend to pose a certain way so you can see  how their clothes fold in that position. You can combine elements from dozens of references, in photos or in life; you don’t have to stick to a study done from just one image!

And that goes to the last argument I hear against references, which is “I want to draw what’s in my head!” -- because while you might have a very clear concept of what the image you want to create is, most of us don’t have eidetic memories and can’t use memory/imagination alone as a perfect reference for detail. Close your eyes and imagine an image you want to draw. You probably have a good gist of what it looks like, or what you want it to look like -- but can you tell the exact line of your character’s jaw? Do you know how their shoes lace up? How bent all the fingers of their left hand are? 

Odds are, you started thinking of those details as soon as I listed them, but that’s because the image in your mind is malleable and shifting. It becomes more concrete once you put it on paper, and time spent studying anatomy and drawing from life will help you put it down more realistically, but just as details enter your mind, many of them slip out, or are only placeholders in your mind’s eye with no real detail at all (ie, you have the idea of an elbow being in a certain place, but not a clear mental picture of what that elbow looks like). But you can compile outside references that match up to the idea in your head, so you can create that imagined image using references to make it more accurate and realistic. 

And if you want to draw with any measure of accuracy or realism, you need to spend time working with references -- and to stop feeling like a cheat when you do!