#026 Back to the Drawing Board

Two days ago I received a package from Amazon containing The Skillful Huntsman which I have mentioned in my previous blog post as well as Jurassic Park. Know that every art book you own as a PDF file is even more inspiring when owned in a non-virtual way; it’s hard to understand, but there is just something amazing about owning the real thing, the feel of the paper, the ink on the pages, it adds a new dimension to the book. I find that if they were inspiring on the computer, they are even more so when flipping actual pages. Although I am very thankful to own The Skillful Huntsman, I am even more excited at my Jurassic Park novel. I read it many years ago, but I was still very young and I had also read a French translated version. I’m enjoying this re-run through it and it has been keeping me up very late at night like it used to.

I have failed my goal to draw every day, mostly because of my job at the pet store, which has be busy all day and extremely tired at the end of my shift, but I finally got to draw tonight as I sat down for a Nocturnal Drawing Session with Dave! We still have them once in a while, but although we both keep saying we should have them every day like we used to, we are often given to the path of laziness and we frequently end up skipping them. No need to bring us down now though, because we did a pretty good job tonight. I worked on my Khamaeli lizardmen again (I am really aiming to deeply develop these so I hope you’re not tired of seeing them), once again giving to small rough sketches, although I also did a larger sketch, mostly emphasizing on the shape and silhouette. You’ll notice I used the Sharpies and Touch gray markers my wife got me from her work today!

In other news, I have started the planning of my next vivarium project and since this planning has come to the sketching phase, I thought I could include the sketch in today’s post. The sketch does not include vegetation. I plan on making a vivarium environment based on my 2009 illustration The Training Sanctuary, this vivarium is roughly 25 to 30 gallons (it is not standard sized so it’s hard to tell), is planned to be an aqua-vivarium and should house a mix of green/brown anoles, house geckos, green tree frogs, and if possible, blue-tailed tree lizards.

That pretty much concludes today’s update, I hope you have a good week; be creative and don’t stop drawing!

#025 Getting Out of the Mud

My pencil is sharp but a dull line marks my crumpled torn-off pages. I dive deep beneath the turbulent waters of my imagination, grab a concept with my bare hands and pull the fish up to my drawing board; I know what this should look like, reminiscence of my catch is clear, but only shallow bones remain on my soaked paper.

Avoiding art block or art slumps is not an easy feat; one day or another, every artist encounters them and must work to get through the rough patch. Although I am still young, I have been drawing since many years (my oldest coherent drawings date from when I was about three or four years old), and I have had the problem show up one time too many; I have actually been fighting off an art slump very recently and am only starting to see the end of it now. So what is the magic trick to get through the art block? I do not believe there is. I will however, share with you some tricks I find helpful to get it together on my end.

I would have to say that viewing art books is one of the best ways I get through harder artwork phases; the Internet is a great source to view artwork, but it is also a very discouraging place, there are so many excellent artists out there it can sometimes feel like we are lacking talent. This is not true of course, who knows what these artists have been through to get to the level they got to today? Can you say you draw one hundred figures a day? Maybe they have. Art books are a bit less discouraging in the fact that they are meant to be mentoring tools, you know these artists are good and you can often learn from them in the way you could learn from a teacher; nobody looks at a teacher with jealousy; so this is a good way to get inspired without getting too discouraged.

Dan Luvisi recently posted a list of what inspires him to do his wonderful artwork; now this guy inspires me quite a bit himself, but to know what inspires and artist that inspires you…man, I feel like I’m going to the roots of talent itself. Check out the books he’s got on that list; I haven’t been able to view them all, but I did find a PDF version of The Skillful Huntsman: Visual Development of a Grimm Tale at Art Center College of Design, the book was incredibly inspiring and it has given me the kick-start I needed to go uphill again.

 Taking a walk, taking a shower, activities that do not require your imagination or eyes as much as let’s say, reading a book or watching a movie; these “brain off” activities can help you reconnect with your thoughts. One of my teachers and mentors from the Ubisoft Campus, Edouard Kachaami, once told us that the world we live in puts us in constant stimulation, there’s always text at some place, music in our ears, a game to be played (you just lost “The Game” by reading this), a movie or television show to watch…this overstimulation causes us to lose creativity, because our brain doesn’t get a chance to think about stuff. Take some time off to do an activity that requires less brain and enjoy as it fills up on ideas. Feels good man.

While reading The Skillful Huntsman, I got to sketch some ladies from reference pictures I had kept from Yimmy’s Yayo (check out this blog, seriously, it’s nothing more than visual crack, he says so himself), I also followed the artists’ advice from the book and started sketching some thumbnails to capture the design of the Khamaeli lizardmen I’m working on right now.

#024 Daily Sketches 26-08-2010

Since I’ve omitted a few updates lately, I thought cool to upload some sketches I’ve done a few weeks ago along with the sketch that came from tonight’s Nocturnal Drawing Session with Dave.

I’ve been thinking about my version of a gecko such as my Standing’s day gecko Curtis in the God Metropolis universe for a while now, I’ve sketches some stuff lately (I won’t be sharing that tonight, sorry) and tonight, before our drawing session, I went to pet Curtis and he bit me pretty hard; the thinking and the violence of the bite got me in the mood for drawing the gecko.

Here are a few week-or-so-old sketches.

#023 Daily Sketches 01-08-2010

There isn’t much to say about this particular drawing session; it was creative that’s for sure, but it wasn’t exactly oriented towards anything in particular either. There’s nothing wrong with random drawing, although I was hoping for better results when I started.

I just went from basic shapes such as circles, squares and triangles, searching for faces through the shapes. I ended up with some fat guy, a slim happy man, a bald weirdo, some creepy old lady, a witch and two orc faces. Oh well, at least I drew.

#022 Daily Sketches 28-07-2010

I was absent for a few days, visiting my mother in Granby, but I’m back now with some sketches I’ve done a few days ago. I sadly broke my two day update streak (fail), but time, resources and similar factors rendered it impossible for me to update during my time away from home. On the upside, I’m back and by tomorrow, I’m hoping I can get back in the train of updating daily.

I didn’t draw with David that night since he was away; that didn’t stop me from taking a little half hour to draw a bit. I had been doing quite a bit of research on felines, considering I don’t know how to draw them; in order to change that, I decided to sit down with some reference pictures and sketch away. You should expect frequent drawings of felines from now on; I am truly trying to get the hang of drawing large cats.

In other news, not even art related, I have acquired a large 55 gallon tank which my mother’s boyfriend found in the trash near his house; the thing’s 4 feet long and I’m wondering what I should put in it. I also bought a fire eel today, to accompany my Oscar fish; it’s pretty cool.

This concludes that, I should probably end on an artistic note, and since I’ve been giving out tips of the day these past updates, I’ll go with this one: when you don’t know how to draw something, get the feel for it by drawing from reference. Have a glorious night people.

#021 Daily Sketches 27-07-2010

As I sat down at the dinner table to draw with David last night, I had a pretty good general idea of where I was headed; I had posted yesterday’s blog entry a few hours prior and was going to expand my whole body shape concept and style; as I said in my previous post, I want to push the sizes much further then what I already had, because when I look at a slim or fat guy in a Pixar movie, they don’t look as standard as what I had drawn and I’m aiming for something out of the ordinary. First things first, I dedicated myself to the slim shape yesterday and explored various ways to add style and body to this faceless character’s shape and posture. I found my first body to be a little stiff, but it was a start; the second one I liked because I love drawing low shoulders and long trapezius; in the third body, I tried to go for an in-between of the first two. The fourth figure I exaggerated even more, pushing the shoulders way down and drawing even thinner limbs. In the fifth, I didn’t quite know where to go anymore and just went with a more natural feel to the posture. By the time I got to the sixth figure, an idea sprouted: would a slim hero have the same posture and look as the other ones? I lifted that chest and gave more confidence to the shape; there’s our young paladin. Still in the same line of thought, I drew the final figure thinking of what a shady thief or rogue could look like, where he some skinny guy.

Tonight or some other day, I’m pretty sure I’ll continue expanding on these shapes; our slim figure might even get some more, who knows? My trick for today, in complement to the sketch I’ve posted, is to think outside the box when you think you’ve hit a wall. By the fifth figure, I was running out of ideas, but then I thought: “hey, these shapes are for characters, what would these characters be like?” and I got two more figures out of this; had I had more time to draw, who knows how many more I could have drawn? What would a slim archer look like? Or a slim warlock? Think outside the box.

#020 Daily Sketches 26-07-2010

David and I sat down last night at a late hour in the night to join pencils and create sketches whilst in the presence of another creative mind; our efforts were not useless. I will not recount his creative experience, for I have oriented this blog on my personal artwork, but I assure you he was just as productive if not more then I was.

 

I had been brewing the idea of a character body shape sheet for my God Metropolis project for quite some time now and had already tried my hand at it without prevailing; last night though, I got around to a satisfying result. I was able to get five major body shapes for the male human being, these are: slim, average, muscular, chubby and fat. I think it could be cool that a player could choose what corpulence his character has from the start; look at Guild Wars and World of Warcraft and all those popular MMORPGs’ character creation pages, I’ve rarely seen much diversity in body shape; I suppose that’s because designing custom equipment for X number of races and the additional male/female body shapes is quite a bit of work; various body shapes for all these would be terrible, but then again, I’m in no rush. These shapes are only the beginning; I plan on expanding the concept, since I can feel that my style can be found in these shapes, but I also think that I can deepen the styling to make a more caricatured and exaggerated palette, after all, this is my world I’m creating and I don’t see why I should limit myself at all. This is my tip of the day for you aspiring artists: explore everything; seriously, unless you’re in some kind of hurry, why would you place barriers for yourself? If you’ve got an idea, expand it, give it depth, and explore every door the first idea opens.

Inspiration was needed for the second sketch I tackled; I was browsing through my Magic: The Gathering game cards for general ideas of creatures or characters I hadn’t thought of; their universe is so vast and large, I was pretty sure I could find some stereotypes. I was not disappointed; after looking at a few cards, I stumbled upon a Bog Wraith card and decided to explore what the ghostly figure of a wraith would be in the God Metropolis universe. I went for a common wraith at first, this would be the type you could expect to meet in a haunted graveyard or mansion; the common wraith inspired me a grim reaper-like hooded figure with a large mantle and large skeletal arms with long skeletal fingers; the wraith would hover above the ground and so its garment would be whole and not torn. Then I rolled with the card and designed my very own bog wraith, the kind that would haunt dark swamps and marshlands; I thought its garment could be torn from all the brambles and thorns and low branches you’d expect to find in a bog, the bottom of the draping would be dangling with algae and foul colored water would drip from it, ball and chains would dangle from the figure, because these wraiths would represent haunting ghosts of people having drowned in the swamp, fungus could grow on some parts of the vestment. I started on an ice wraith but it was still too sketchy to be anything tangible.

I would say that concludes today’s blog message. Until next time (hopefully tomorrow, if I stick with the planned schedule), have a glorious night and be creative. Explore everything.