ART – What Yoda Taught Me About Painting

What does that video above have to do with painting?

In my last painting post I wrote that I was going to count my loses and move on.  I fully intended to until I spoke to my friend Paul about my failed attempt.

I asked him what he thought my problem was. You know what he told me?

My head construction fundamentals where off. The basic principles of my head construction were not working.

Ouch.

That was the last thing I expected to hear. Once again, getting cocky failed me.

The reason I wasn’t able to get a handle on the painting was because the structure of my drawing was too nebulous.

After a conversation with him about drawing and painting heads, I came to the conclusion that I needed to work out and plan how I was going to paint my piece by drawing it first before painting it.

It turns out that the same technique I was using to paint in gouache, I could apply to my digital painting.

What technique? Click the links below to read the relevant posts on the subject:

• Working on an episode without a Director. Finally a painting breakthrough! Tips on face rhythms, planes and tones.
• Final cover painting. Marcelo Vignali interview

It’s ridiculous that I thought the process was different because I was painting in a different medium.

But as Yoda said to Luke:

Photo courtesy of: http://quotespictures.net/18939/no-no-different-only-different-in-your-mind-yoda

So I’m doing it all again. Starting with a line drawing. So here’s what I’ve got so far:

In the drawing above, I first started by constructing the head and then mapping the rhythms of the face.

I then added a layer and using the rhythms, looked at my reference and worked out the shadow patterns.  I drew ONLY the darkest shadows.  I left out any light midtones.

This was the one thing I realized I was not thinking about when painting this piece the first time.  Separating the darkest shadows from the slight midtones in the light is key.

It can often be, the hardest part of the process and requires a ton of squinting.

What I ended up with is the drawing below:

I will tell you this, doing the drawing first has shown me all the things I was ignoring and wasn’t thinking about when doing the painting.  I’m amazed that I neglected so much.  No wonder I lost control.

Trust the process. If you do it well, it will make everything easier.

The further down the drawing I got, the sloppier I got. That’s okay, I don’t really need the hands to be perfect, I’ll mostly be concentrating on the face. I may crop that area out in the final version.

This will be my final attempt. If I mess it up I’ll move on.  I’m getting tired of repainting this one piece. I need something new to get me excited again.

I also need a “win.” Perhaps, I’ll try something a tad less ambitious next time.

In a way, I already “won,” the process has taught me so much already. Still, I’d like a make a pretty painting at some point.

I’ll see how far I get by next week.

So yeah, I should have listened to Yoda from the start. I thought it was different, but it was only different in my mind.

ART – The Making of a Time Travel Anthology Cover

I put my painting practice on hold this week to create a cover for a time travel anthology, Creative Alchemy Inc. will be publishing in a few months.

The book is called Masters of Time: A Sci-Fi and Fantansy Time Travel Anthology.

I spoke about the cover with my wife, who’s editing the book and also contributed to the collection of stories.  We both agreed we wanted a retro Science Fiction feel to the cover.  Something graphic simple.

I’m not a fan of photo covers.  I much prefer drawn or painted ones.  Also, there’s so many photo covers out there that a cover with artwork tends to stand out more.

My wife showed me a photo she thought had the feel she wanted and I went off from there. She wanted all the characters in the anthology to be represented in the cover.

The first thing I did was to sketch out a rough, to show her the direction I wanted to go.  Here it is below:

The intent was to show things in the cover that would immediately evoke the theme of the anthology at a glance. I thought it would be good to use time travel cliches and tropes to get this across. I decided to go with the characters coming out of a “time vortex,” in silhouette and I added clocks so you’d know it wasn’t just a portal.

She liked the concept, so I moved on to make the final cover. Unfortunately,  I didn’t record the process. It took about a week.

I used a lot of reference photos to get a real world idea of what I was going to abstract.  Then I began the tedious work of constructing the assets for the cover.

It was less like drawing and more like cutting out lots of different shapes out of colored paper and gluing it together.

Even though I’m still not sure about the fonts, the final art for the cover turned out like this:

Personally I think it turned out okay.

What do you think? Did I accomplish what I set out to do?

ART – What to Do When Your Art kills Fail You.

What do you do when your art skills fail you? Chalk it up to getting experience, move on and try again with another piece…and another…and another.

That’s the conclusion I came to, AGAIN.

It’s a simple lesson that’s so easily forgotten when you’re emotionally invested in the drawing or painting you’re trying to create. EVERY piece you make is a step forward.

You learn something from everyone you make.

Here’s what happened to me this time around. I got cocky.  I should have known better. Every time I get cocky, I fall on my face.

I’d been doing color studies for almost two Months now.  The more I did, the more comfortable I got with them.  They started to become second nature.  Which gave me confidence.

Too much confidence.

I thought to myself, “Hey, this stuff is so much easier now. Now that I’ve got this down, I could do a finished painting easy.”  I was sure I could do it.  After all, I could do step one easily.

Nope.

Problem was that I thought that getting step one down would make me automatically able to get the last step down as well.  Not realizing there were more steps along the way.

I didn’t realize there was a step two. Until step two kicked my butt.

I ended up with this painting I lost complete control of and didn’t know how to finish.

It’s time to chalk it up to experience.  Now I know what my limitations are and what I need to work on next.  Namely, step two.

That said, I’m going to ask my friend and mentor Paul Wee for some advice. Hopefully he can clarify for me what I can do to nail down step two. I’ll let you know.

Unfortunately, I have to take a small break from painting because I have a book cover for a time travel anthology to do.  Perhaps I’ll write about that next week.

ART – Figure Drawing Painting Practice

I figure draw every Tuesday night at work.  The studio provides us with the opportunity.

Since I’m trying to get better at opaque painting, I thought it would be good idea to practice it during figure drawing.  I used my  Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 and the Sketchbook Pro App.

I don’t do this in color because it would be too much to think about.

The top painting it a two minute pose. The second one is five minutes, and the last one is ten minutes.  There isn’t much time to get a finished painting.  Just the impression of what you see.

Doing this made me very comfortable with laying in a figure fast.  I highly recommend it