The exercise starts off by telling you that it's designed to push you through a deliberate process. Well it did that, and really pushed me creatively too!
Realistic Stage
For this stage I had to draw a cat or dog from life or reference. I used a open-license stock photo website called Pexels to find a picture that I was happy with. I chose this photo of a Boxer dog as my subject.
The instructions asked me to draw it in a way that it seemed "real" and to capture the essence of the animal's personality. I think that I managed to do that reasonably successfully. I would have liked to achieved more contrast in the values of my drawing, and I struggled a little to work out how best to use the watercolour and traditional qualities of the pencils I was using. The proportions of the head are a little thin, and not everything is balanced as well as I would like. But perhaps, this is just the perfectionist talking?
When I looked at what I had managed in my sketchbook from a distance I was really pleased with the drawing. I have been struggling with the notion of "style" (which I suppose is the whole point of this section, right? To push one to examine and discover aspects of what makes something one's voice?). And how I "see" the world (and how that translates to mis-proportions) is actually an ingredient in the recipe of my style.
Line drawing
The next step was to draw the dog again, this time with no more than five lines.
Given the rippled and creased folds of skin on the face of my subject, I knew that the best way for me to approach this was to do a continuous line drawing. I sometimes to blind contour drawings for warm-ups, so it was a little weird to be able to allow myself to look at the page!
I managed to get most of the head done with only one line! I used the other four to add some definition to the body and represent the change in fur tone. I am SO proud of this drawing, I think it's great and still captures all the personality of the dog.
Have fun introducing surreal elements. Deliberately distort.
How far can you bend reality?
Collage
Step three was to re-create the image using collage from magazine or print-outs. We don't tend to have a lot of magazines in our house, but we did happen to have an old travel brochure. So I decided to use that to try and capture the image.
The instructions told me to "Have fun introducing surreal elements. Deliberately distort.
How far can you bend reality?" So when putting the image together I first thought about trying to think about bending some rules on colour. I originally started used blue gradients for the chest fur, but it ended up being a bit of a mess. So I pasted over that with a more textured photo of villas. As I started to construct the head, I couldn't find pictures that would really allow me to emulate the colours of either the photo, or a suitable alternative. So I started experimenting. I used pink for the nose, deliberately made the jowls longer and the ear way too big. At this point I was getting the proportions and shape of the head all wrong. So much so that it wasn't recognisable.
I was just about to rip the page out and start again when I forced myself to stop and just accept the mistake as the foundations of something I could learn from. I so I pushed the boat out even further. To cover the mess of the eyes, gave the dog massive 80's-looking sunglasses and a thick blue collar. At first I wanted him to look like a beach bum, thinking I could somehow leverage this for a narrative element for later in the process. Then my imagination kicked in and I started seeing the orange head as a helmet, like the dog was some kind of astronaut or pilot.
New Drawing
Step four was to do a drawn version of the collage. Given my experiments with colour I went all-in. I was turning this bad boy into an intergalactic alien space pilot dog!
I didn't worry too much about correctness, and tried my best to capture the essence of what I saw in the collage. I really tried to allow myself to have some fun with it, and I did!
I was happy with the notion of this character, and really wanted to see him on adventures. So I started to think about how I could put him into a narrative context for the final stage.
Final Stage
For the final stage the exercise instructed me to incorporate the last image into a bigger image, adding in a least one other element to add a narrative dimension. It also asked me to "Be creative but consistent in the development and rendering of this additional content." You might think from the photo above that I stopped to think about how I was going to do this, but I fell into the trap of doing thumbnails in my head and started directly on the iPad. It didn't go well.
As a rough linework and composition it's ok. The real trouble started as I started to render the image and build it up. I wanted to use it as practice for learning a more painterly style, and one that emulated an approach more like acrylic or oils. I am so inspired by concept artists and other painterly illustrators. I want so badly to be able to create, paint and evoke worlds and environments like they do. You can see where I got up to in the video below:
Now, a more skilled artist might well have been able to take this much further than me. But at the moment I just don't have the technical skill, and more importantly don't have the artistic aptitude to do this justice. I spent hours toiling over this - looking to reference, online advice, videos, tutorials. Anything that could help me break this deadlock. I started spiralling into a depressive thought pattern.
And then, the moment I learnt the most from this exercise. I stopped. I literally stopped and talked to myself. Thank goodness I was alone at home! I told myself that this didn't work, and that was ok. But it was only ok if I was going to learn from why it didn't work. After walking around a bit, taking some deep breaths to calms myself I tried a little bit of mindfulness to check in with my body. I could feel a knot of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. I was curious why it was there. What was it telling me?
A lot of the time it's easy for me to get overwhelmed by my anxiety - I have it most days to the extent it effects my blood pressure significantly. But a book I was listening to on the way to work came back to me. I can't remember the specific words but to paraphrase the essence of the point: Anxiety is there to tell you something. It's your body trying to tell you that you are out of sync with your needs. Like you are trying to swim against the flow of the river. So it's not a bad thing - it's not a good thing either - it just is.
My responsibility is to listen, and the only power one has is one's actions and thoughts. So I made a choice to try and not fight it. Doing this painterly style is hard, but with practice it can get better. But that's not today. I had to ask what could I do now, and more importantly what could I do that would just be fun. So I went back to my sketchbook to collect my thoughts. You can see my musings in step three, above.
Basically, I just needed to do it. Nothing would be lost from trying.
In sketching out little thumbnails it dawned on me that through this last section I have been really captivated by textures. This has already found its way into my work, like the museum poster. Maybe that's what style is all about - incorporating things that inspire you into your own work: from life, from other artists, from random glimmers of inspiration. Mix that with something to say and you might well have your style. But making that recipe - incorporating new ingredients. The only way I can do that is to do more. I realise why my tutor has been pushing me to use my sketchbook more. "Taking visual risks" might be better described as "Making visual risks". The more I can do, the more ingredients I can discover. Then I will have my approach to solving communication problems.
Perhaps, at this stage, I should worry less about the subject of my art, and worry more about the range and frequency of my art.
Anyway, back to the final image. I took the thumbnails and combined some ideas, putting them into a digital rough and then blocking out the shapes in a limited palette that I had created. I then experimented wit adding light and shade with textured brushes. The final result is not what I had in my head, it almost looks like a photo of an image I have rendered in plasticine. But I am SO proud of it. I would not have said I could have rendered something in that way if you had asked me before I did it.
What a happy little accident.
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