Friday, February 4, 2011

Theorycrafting and push-ups

This next piece of writing is just me thinking out loud!

After doing a couple drawings from my imagination alone, without reference or anything like that, I realize I dont know shit when it comes to drawing! or atleast it feels like it... And that kinda woke me up a bit so to speak!
In order to become better you have to draw from real life... alot! all the time! Everyday! Building yourself a visual vocabulary in your mind, so that when you try to draw from your imagination you can refer to that vocabulary! (ex. in order to make an alien animal look believable you would benefit from doing studies of real life animals!) Drawing from life is like doing push-ups for the artist's mind!
When drawing from life you recreate what you see, down to every little detail as much as you can. All that detail can be used in your from-imagination drawings, taking the texture and shapes and adding them to your own piece! lets say you want to draw a hairy fruit; if you have done studies of animals with fur (or human hair) you would know how to make it look hairy!  (hmm.. I might draw that..)
One thing that is becoming clear to me is that drawing faces and hands are extremely important! In almost any artist job they play a significant role! Be it designing a character for a game or tattooing a portrait. (or something like that!) I try to do portraits once in a while, but I should be doing one everyday I think! Maybe introduce a 30 min or even an hour for just drawing portraits everyday to train that hand-eye coordination and add more to my "vocabulary".
Part from that, being an artist is not only about how well you can draw, It's also about how you see the world!
The technical aspect of drawing can be taught to anyone really... But teaching someone to make up weird stuff and alien worlds cant be done! (I think) That is something to be discovered by the individual artist. Some people can think of the most insane ideas almost on the spot, while others need to brainstorm a little first... However, this is what this post was really about! IMAGINATION! I'm trying to implement a second "push-up" device into my studies, and that is having someone draw a random shape for you to fill in with whatever you can think off!
I had my girlfriend draw my first shape:
This is what she gave me to work with... looks like a shoe right? those wooden ones.
But that would be too easy to just put in there... a badly shaped wooden shoe? I dont think so...
So I can up with these guys:

Some strange biomech snake things poking through a crack in something ;) and by something I mean what you are thinking about!

I'd like to put this into my weekly projects! (that was a hint to you S&P)

Hope something of this wasnt a waste of minutes cuz I cant give that back!

ciao!

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