Exactly 100 years ago today, the guns in the trenches went silent for a little while.
sketch yesterday ^^
also PLEASE READ~
I try to minimize my reblogs (mostly to just art-related Q&A stuff) but this one I could relate to a little bit and thought I’d add my story to it. I didn’t start “really” drawing until 11th grade, not quite as late as Polywomple, but definitely later than most my peers who’d been doing it all their lives.
There were a few points I can think of where I COULD HAVE seriously pursued art earlier and gotten better a whole lot sooner, but got swatted down. The most prominent was in 7th grade when I got switched away from my small rural school near the Pauma rez, to a bigger suburban/wealthier public school where pretty much everyone hated me on sight, and I had some ghastly trouble trying to function as a student.
Art Class was one of the worst classes for me. When the teacher assigned us an “Abstract Art” assignment, I thought she wanted us to be creative, so I drew little Terry Gilliam-esque airships flying above hills made of faces, which I got graded down for… Because it was “incorrect”. There were a lot of other things I did like weird perspective, awkward attempts at learning human figures, and experimental stuff that generally flew in the face of assignments we were given, not because I was trying to disrupt anything (I tried my hardest to blend in), but because it death by sheer boredom to follow her assignments precisely. Eventually I just stopped paying attention.
I ended up getting an F in art class. Not just a D, but complete failure. She made it pretty clear I was a problem kid in her class. I figured right there that if that’s what the art world was like, then I wasn’t supposed to be an artist. I wanted to be like Dali and draw amazing stuff and live life weird, not be told to sit still and draw cubes exactly like everyone else around me.
So I stopped drawing spent the next several years kind of aimless with what I was going to do with my future until discovering Elfwood in my Junior year of highschool, and deciding to start drawing every day in order to make it my thing again. But it felt like crap knowing I could have started on this a lot earlier.
So yeah, don’t let the squares keep you down. If you’re trying to master something and somebody says “NO” to you, they’re almost always the kind of person who can’t master anything themselves, and has to hammer everyone down equally to their miserable level.
Tell em they can go to Hell… and then draw them being devoured by skulls.
Going back home to rural California for a visit to the family usually means eating lots of amazing food you only read about in some of George R.R. Martin’s more hunger-inducing pages. Garlic-sauteed sheep liver, farm fresh eggs, raw unpasteurized milk, red wine, shawarma, fattoush and home-made baba ghanoush, and piles of fresh-off-the-land greens are consumed daily. Really healthy stuff that will feed mad gains.
But, like every trip back to SoCal, one of the first things I had to do after getting off the plane was get an Animal Style cheeseburger at In-n-Out. I got a few bites into it when I realized “I need to show everyone on the internet what I’m eating right now" and did a quick pen and marker sketch to immortalize the moment, and a quick sketch of the kitchen staff.
I’d say the best way to get yourself into drawing without construction lines is to gradually use fewer and fewer of them. Like let’s say you do the usual “oval with horizontal eye-line and vertical nose-line” thing for drawing a human head, I’d start by eliminating the vertical line and get used to mapping the head without it, then eventually get rid of the horizontal line too, and just dive straight in to drawing the eyes.
I should emphasize though that while it’s good to be able to draw without them when you’re going for speed or clean contours, I still use them for maybe half my drawings. Sometimes I can sketch really clean without any construction lines, other times I need them.
Also, if you draw in pencil, switch over to pens for a while. Force yourself to not erase. Aside from it teaching you to draw without construction lines, you’ll make a TON of ugly mistakes, which is kind of the point. If you make a painful drawing error that you can’t erase, you might remember it the next time you draw, thus making you less likely to make that same mistake in the future. That, or it’ll teach you to work with your mistakes… To where there are no more mistakes, just happy accidents.
Certainly. I use many pens but here’s my frequent favorites, with linked images to give you an idea for their ink characteristics.
From top to bottom:
Pilot 3.5mm Parallel Pen - Example. GREAT for really hard-edged, blocky chiseled ink shapes. Only drawbacks with this thing are that it’ll drain ink fast, and the ink tends to bleed horribly on certain paper types. It seems to do well on your typical Moleskine sketchbook pages though.
Sakura Brushpen - Example. Kind of like using a dip brush, except with a refillable/replaceable ink tube inside the pen. I have a love/hate thing with these. Some days I think I “get it” with brush technique, but most days I just feel like a caveman trying to build a ship in a bottle. Can’t stop using them though. You can also dip this in water to get interesting ink-wash effects too.
Sharpie Pen - Example. If you need something cheap, disposable, and replaceable, I recommend these. You can find them in just about any grocery store. They produce thicker lines than the Hybrid Technica, and have a tendency to make small bleed-dots at the start and finish of line strokes, I’ve noticed. Might annoy some people, or it could be a stylistic opportunity.
Pentel Hybrid Technica .03 - Example. Probably my favorite everyday sketching pens. They’ve got a really thin line quality that I love, and aren’t as temperamental with skin oil or debris on paper as most fine-line ballpoints are.
Pentel Slicci .25 - Example. These come in a wide range of colors, but I generally prefer red since it makes for a nice underdrawing if I want to go over it with black ink later. Normally I hate gel pens but these are exceptionally decent.
Ink sketch while listening to Juno Reactor.
It’s December, which is a very important month for me, and the cold dry air always brings back memories.
- 1 year ago this month, I received my Honorable Discharge from active duty.
- 2 years ago this month, I arrived in Afghanistan.
- 14 years ago this month, while downloading various trance songs off Napster I discovered Elfwood and was awed by a few key artists (Matt Rhodes and Tracy Butler mainly) who inspired me to start drawing.
Today in 1970, Yukio Mishima - poet, soldier, and bodybuilder - took over a JDSF command post in Tokyo in an attempted coup with a small group of students in his Shield Society militia. After unfurling a banner listing his demands and delivering a furious speech from a balcony to a crowd of agitated troops below, Mishima committed seppuku, a death he’d meticulously planned for years prior. Thus passed what was probably the world’s last samurai.
For more info about him, give this BBC broadcast a quick listen.
His book “Sun & Steel" was one of the most life-affirming and brutal things I’ve ever read, and he remains one of my key sources of inspiration.
I love old wood-panel station wagons. Found this Buick parked outside the CommArts building on Franklin St and gave it a draw.
Vehicles are hard to draw. So, solution is to draw more of them til it gets easier. This car was parked near Lamplighter on Morris St.
Found my old CD of :Wumpscut: - The Mesner Tracks from like 14 years ago, and decided to draw to it for ideas. I don’t care how overdone people in “the scene” might think it is, edgy grim martial stuff involving cyborg soldiers and steel helmets is always inspiring to me. Hanzel und Gretyl are also playing at Club Fallout in Richmond on December 20th and I’m definitely going to be there.
Speaking of memories, I’m coming up on 14 years of drawing in a month or so here.
It’s finals season at school, so things have been busy as hell and I don’t get much online time… But the sketchbook pages are filling up steadily, so I’ve got some scans on the way, starting with this urban elf I spotted at the VCU Compass.
Also, many thanks to Julia Liu for recommending these way cool pens to me. I don’t think I can wield them anywhere near as well as her yet but they’re a real nice break from ballpoints.
This was part of a class assignment to design a fictional CD cover for a an existing song/single. It being due on Armistice Day, I picked "Angriff" by Front Line Assembly. Take a listen, let me know if you think the art and song match up.
Drawn in ink, then digitally colored.
Check it out folks, here’s the thing I’ve had going in the background with Jennadelle for a few years now, now putting it up for project funding.
commissionsbyj:
www.empireofthenewsun.com | It’s official! We’re putting EotNS (formerly “EoNS”) to the test, and looking for support to continue working on it as a blog. If you’re curious and want to know how contribute, just follow the link.| Above, visual development for “EotNS: Cassul’s Story”.
If this reaches its funding goal, we’ll be able to run the site for three months, get a contributor “starter kit” going, and update regularly.
Like Anonmal, EotNS will be the single project marked for funding this year, and features similar funding tiers. If you’re interested, you check out all the details over at www.empireofthenewsun.com, along with samples and other content.
This week, we’ll also be giving away signed postcard prints for all donations over 30USD. If that’s something you’re interested in, please include a shipping destination with your donation. Each postcard will feature one of these images, and a small, hand-written “thank you”.
Both Reagan and I are really excited about this, and I don’t think we would have even considered a venture like this if it hadn’t been for all the support we’ve seen along the way for it. By all means, if there’s anything you want to know about this project or its world, please just ask. In the vein of the latter, I would love to have some kind of ongoing dialogue about the characters and the world they inhabit as a part of the content for this endeavor. I’ll be here until the end of the week being active on-site especially for this reason, and then I’ll be off to work on Anonmal’s second volume until its release.
