Drawing for Illustrators: copying things

Oh dear! My last post seems to have been two months ago! A lot has changed in those two months-- I live in a new house now in Arlington and I am 25 now and I quit one of my jobs and I went to Ithaca and came back and I started a new art class. 

It is that last one I want to write more about-- my class is called Drawing for Illustrators and is the next course in the sequence towards my Illustration Certificate from the SMFA. It is a crash course in how to draw everything. We started with basic three dimensional shapes-- ping pong balls, wooden blocks and cylinders, then moved on to faces, eyes, shading, hands, and we will soon be doing fabric, the figure, and more. We spend about half of our time in the classroom studying from copy plates or still life setups and half of our time at the Museum of Fine Arts drawing from statues and paintings. 

I am surprising myself by really enjoying the copy plates because in every other art class I've ever taken, even waaaay back in middle school, I have always detested copying things. In seventh grade, a substitute art teacher gave us a packet of drawings to copy and instead of copying the drawings, I wrote her a long note about why copying things wasn't art or wasn't creative or was not worth my time, or something like that. She wrote me back a note about how no, copying things is a really useful tool as an artist and I should copy things. Her note did not convince 12-year-old me and I probably failed the assignment, but I didn't care because righteous outrage against The Man.

In eighth grade, we had an assignment to draw an oil pastel self portrait based on a photo that our teacher took in class and then for the background, we had to do a copy of a famous painting-- as though we had stuck ourselves in a painting. 13-year-old me again was outraged at being asked to copy another artist's painting (and working from a photo rather than the mirror?! All wrong!) and so to deftly avoid copying another artist's work, I chose to put my self portrait in an Ad Reinhardt painting. He was an abstract painter who painted a lot of solid black canvases, or grids of dark grey and black squares. Most of the rest of my class did Starry Night by Van Gogh. I was like, "Van Gogh is so overdone" while I filled in my grid of abstract black squares." (Now Van Gogh is one of my favorites though).

In my high school, I avoided art classes until my senior year and instead took classes at the Community School of Music and Art to build up a portfolio because I was a big art snob, basically. The studio art classes at my high school had the reputation of being a big joke that people just took to get their art credit out of the way and I did not care to be around that atmosphere (cough*art snob*cough). I did however take AP Art my senior year which included all the creative problem solving and self expression I had ever dreamed of! I was also taking a drawing class alongside it where I encountered, you guessed it: copying things. "Aaargh! Copying things!" 17-year-old me lamented, but I plugged through packets and packets of pictures of bones to copy. I got a 2 on the AP Art portfolio review. You don't have to be familiar with the AP grading system to know that 2 is a terrible score. I doubt it was related to copying things though.

In college, we mostly drew from life, but there was some copying involved. We got a book of master sketches and copied things from it every week. We did Da Vincis and Michelangelos and all those Italian guys and I didn't hate them as much as I used to, I just found them boring and I was really impatient about it. I have fond memories of 21-year-old me doing master copies from this book while watching the Colbert Report with my friends at their house during my last semester of college. 

So basically, I have never liked copying things ever, which is why I am so deeply and pleasantly surprised by this class! More than half the class consists of master copies and I really, really like it! I am finding it really kind of meditative and zen. I get so focussed and calm while I do these drawings! It is incredible! I think I have arrived at a place where I understand the lessons to be learned from copying other people's work (because you can never make it an exact copy, you are bringing your own eye and your own hand to it, you're not a machine. The practice can only help you). And Da Vinci for example, studied cadavers and understood that every shape your body makes is because of the muscles and the bones underneath and how they fit together and in fact, copying his work will make you a better figure drawer than drawing a living person because he knew what was under the surface and all of that information is in every line he put down and copying his drawings teaches you to see that way because drawing is seeing.

However, I do not think that I was wrong at earlier stages of my life. I think that developmentally, as a human and an artist, I had to go and figure out what I wanted to do before I would arrive at a place where I wanted to be learning these lessons. I guess 25-year-old me wants to learn these lessons. I needed to experiment and gather my own ideas about drawing first. The time is now right and I am speaking the same language as the copy plates. 

The darker image in all of these photos is the copy plate, 

the lighter pencil sketch is what I did.

The sketches below are Roman statues from the MFA.

The Most Interesting Mistakes

I am finally finished with my first screen printing project! I have two more projects and one more class in which to do them before the semester ends, so needless to say, I will be going into the studio as much as humanly possible outside of class and my four jobs. But I'll think about those later. The first assignment was to create a painting and then base a screen print off of that painting. I did a super detailed painting of a tall ship which turned out to be incredibly ambitious for a first screen print. My original intent was to photograph my progress as I worked, but I never remembered to bring my camera to class, so you will just have to envision the drawn-out, multi-stepped process I went through to create this finished product. I made so many mistakes that I am pretty sure I made all of them. That's right, all of them in the whole screen printing world. No, I didn't. They are infinite. 

I seem to recall a quote from somewhere that went something like this: "Make the most interesting mistakes you can come up with! Make mistakes no one else has ever made before!" If anyone recognizes this quote and can tell me who said it, please let me know. It summed up so many of my feelings about learning to screen print. Some mistakes I made were incredibly frustrating and others actually turned out looking pretty cool. In this blog post, I want to share with you the most interesting mistakes I made. 

This first one is pretty close to flawless, so you can compare.

This second example was one of my favorite mistakes: The ink in the sky had started to dry before I did the pull with my squeegee, and it gave it a really cool, grainy texture that I love!

The sky in this one however, did not fade the way I wanted. 

It came out blocky instead:

This one is totally misaligned. Don't see it? Look at the corners.

I think it looks awesome. 

There is one weird moment on the horizon, right behind the ship. I actually like the effect, I just wish it had happened at a different place in the composition:

This one moved between the time I lined it up and the time I did my squeegee pull and my print was like, "Surprise! I put the ripples in the air!" They kinda could be clouds though, right?

...right?

This was by far my most infuriating moment. Some mistakes look great, some are salvageable, but where you get a big, ugly line of black schmutz on your horizon, there's just nothing you can do about it. 

All things considered, I deem this project a success! For the second assignment, we are using computers to print photographic images. In photoshop we break down a photo of our choosing into four basic colors: Cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The computer separates the image out according to the locations and quantities of these colors and then we print out those images onto clear acetate. Those become the images we burn into our photo-emulsion-coated screens. Then we just print those same four colors, one on top of the other and we put the photo back together. It should be a much quicker project because the computer does all the work and I get to do the fun part, which is playing with paint, which is what I studied in college. 

The image I chose for the second project is this one, 

taken during my apprenticeship at Bread and Puppet:

I have always loved this photo, because I think I look really goofy in it. 

I also love the contrast of the serious faces with the bright pink leotards. 

I think it will make a rockin' screen print!

And on that note, I hope everyone reading this blog makes some interesting mistakes of their own!

No Firing at Random!

This Saturday I completed a painting for the USS Constitution Museum, where I now work one day per week. Because our visitation is slowing down with the winter season, we took the opportunity to focus on developing new programs and improving on existing ones. My project was to paint a battleship to accompany our educational program Boom which teaches museum visitors how cannons work through hands on demonstrations. Don't worry, we are only firing alka seltzer cannons, no shrapnel here! My battleship painting will, believe it or not, be used as the target for the alka seltzer cannons. I painted it in acrylic on a 46" x 70" (or so) wooden flat. I also included one of my initial sketches.

I am very happy with the way my painting turned out! So happy in fact that I may paint with acrylic more often. I studied painting with oils in college and I am also fond of watercolor. Two opposite ends of the spectrum of paint behavior, I know. Painting with watercolor is like controlling chaos, and while you can re-work it as much as you would like, every layer will be visible in your completed piece. The layers, transparencies, and unpredictability of the medium adds to the overall effect. Oils on the other hand, once you have the hang of them, give you complete control over your image and you can do so many lovely things with blending and texture. I like to mix some of my colors directly on my painting surface when I use oils. 

Acrylic is a medium I usually fight with. It dries so fast that there is barely an opportunity to blend colors the way I would with oils and getting the painting wet again doesn't allow me to re-work the paint like I can with watercolor. I thought of acrylic as the worst of both worlds. However this time, I think I got the hang of working with it. I believe there are also products like acrylic mediums that I can buy to help the paint dry the way I want it to. Also as it turns out, acrylic is significantly easier to photograph than oil. It is almost impossible to photograph an oil painting so that the colors look right and there is no glare, but taking a picture of this battleship? It came out perfectly.

Is Automatic Drawing just a fancy way of saying doodling?

What do you draw when you're not thinking about drawing? When you just want to do something with your hands but you're not trying to create anything in particular? When you intentionally give up control of the outcome? Automatic drawing is a concept that was developed by the Surrealists. Dalí and Miró were really into it (among many others). The idea was to create marks without using rational thought to make an image that was a direct expression of the artist's subconscious. Some spiritual type people say that automatic drawings are the shape of your soul. There are equivalent concepts in music and writing as well.

I have not, until recently, put a whole lot of thought into what I draw when I'm not thinking (duh), but I do actually always draw the same thing. It is spirals, but not just spirals, they are spirals that branch off from one another and make these cool tendril-like forms or conglomerates or river-flow movements or something. I have been drawing them since I was in middle school or so and, more recently, at work on scrap paper and I realized it was time to give them a spot on my blog.

The trick to these swirly-spiral drawings is to know when to stop. They could just grow forever if I let them. So... are they the shape of my soul or am I just doodling? Either way, I'm gonna keep doing these.

Truth

I'm taking a short hiatus from my Ugly Apartments painting to post pictures of my final Harry Potter potion jar. It is Veritaserum, the potion that makes you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This potion makes me wonder how different wizard trials must be from muggle trials. I mean, if there is a surefire way to make people not lie, and not even bend the truth to make themselves look better, then wouldn't that make a lot of trials more clear cut? 

I wonder the same thing about the pensieve (for you non-Harry Potter fans, that is what I imagine to look like sort of a magical fog machine that you can store your memories in. Like an external hard drive for your brain. Combination fog machine and hard drive, hookah and coffee maker!). 

This is a pensieve, according to the Harry Potter movies.

Um, anyway if you can take your memories out of your brain and put them in a magical fog machine, then recall them with a sweep of your wand, and/or allow other people to enter your memories and walk around and relive them sort of, then why not just use a pensieve for every magical trial? The jury could literally weigh one memory against another. However, as we see in book 6, it is possible to tamper with memories, BUT its super obvious when a memory has been magically edited.

But THEN we get into the idea that truth for one person may be different from truth for another person. Is there one universal truth or does each person see the world just differently enough to make truth more of a series of individual observations? And what I don't entirely agree with about the pensieve is that it assumes that memories are static and clear. You can walk into someone else's memory as an invisible third party as it replays like a virtual reality movie. Why would you be a third party in the memory? Why wouldn't you take the place of the person who remembered it? And if you did, wouldn't your experience of the memory be effected by the rememberer's emotions and state of mind at the time? And wouldn't you need to understand their entire life to get the full context of their memory? And don't you find that the way you remember things changes over time? How would that be encompassed in a pensieve?

Oh man, deep stuff, people.................

So here is the Veritaserum jar I made:

I am really quite pleased with the shape, my only complaint is that you can't really read "Veritaserum" on the side because of the way the glaze came out. I wonder if this has something to do with the fact that this potion jar is made of red stoneware whereas the other two were made with white stoneware. I guess I'll never know... because I can't make another one because they closed the Cornell Studio forever. I'm still really bitter about it!

Anywho, here is a closer detail of the lettering:

The "rum" part came out more clear than the "veritase" part. 

Alcohol does tend to make people more honest, I suppose.

Self Portraits; Portraits of the Self

For this post, I want to write a bit about the self-portrait. Self-portraits can say anything from “this is my face” to “this is my soul.” Sometimes people think self-portraits are a bit vain. Only someone who was really narcissistic would paint his or her own face over and over, right? No way man!

You see, faces are both really interesting to draw and really hard to draw. Hands too, and feet, but we’re talking about faces! If you are painting a tree for example, and you screw it up, no one knows. But if you screw up a face? People can see it immediately. Our brains are designed to recognize faces, so if a face looks wrong somehow, everyone can tell. Of course, some artists, like Picasso play with that and make CRAZY faces on purpose, and that is awesome, but I would argue that you should probably understand how to draw faces at least sort of realistically if you want to create a successful distortion. Don’t believe me? That’s what Picasso did!

Here is Picasso's self portrait from 1896. He was 15 years old. Jealous of his mad skills? Me too.

Here is Picasso again in 1907-- He was 26 and already a cubist badass, getting inspired by African masks and whatnot.

And here is another self portrait from 1972, a year before his death. He was in his 90's. I hope I am still painting if/when I make it to my 90's.

So anyway when artists want to practice drawing or painting faces from life, we either need to pay a model to sit still for upwards of forty minutes, bribe friends to sit for us (to which the usual response, particularly from college students is: “Only if I can do homework while you draw me” and then you have a sketchbook full of pictures of people looking at books), or our third option is to grab a mirror and paint… that's right! A self-portrait! It is basically free, you get eye contact, and your model is willing to sit there as long as you’re willing to paint her. Artists are often willing to put themselves through things that we would not want to put other people through… Like sitting motionless with the same facial expression for three hours.

Aside from being a staple of every middle and high school art curriculum, I also think that self-portraits can really be benchmarks of where you are as an artist at any given point (see Picasso... again). I think they sometimes say more about you than you realize at the time you painted them. I hear that half the subject matter is how you paint it.

To illustrate this, I’m posting some self-portraits of mine through the ages. Enjoy!

This one came from the same box as the work featured in this post, If you hadn't already guessed. 

I think I was about five? 

Middle school art was pretty horrendous, so lets skip to high school...

 Yes, it was my anime phase. As you can see, I secretly wanted to be a magical anime girl. Specifically THIS anime girl: 

It's Skuld from Oh My Goddess! Also, I wouldn't have said no to dating any one of these guys. Look at how 80's they are!!

...But alas! I wasn't actually an anime super heroine. I was a boring old three dimensional high school student... But I COULD draw myself as a cartoon super heroine, and that's the next best thing, right? Right.

My alter ego is making a more super hero-y pose than my super hero self. Hmm...

So then in 12th grade, I took AP art at my high school and painted more realistic things... 

with real paint and everything.

This was my "dramatic angle" portrait.

Now, if I remember correctly, I did this sketch during my freshmen year at college.

And here is my first self portrait in oil ever! This is the face I make when I am painting. 

I collaged some bits into it too.

And this is me painting the previous painting. I like this one better.

Here is a sketch I did at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. It was during my semester in New York, which was miserable. I went to New York directly after spending an awesome and glorious semester in Mexico, where I learned about murals and socialists and graffiti! After that experience, the Met just seemed so elitist... Thus, free the art! 

And finally, you can't talk about Mexico and self portraits without referencing Frida Kahlo. WHAT. A. BAMF. Frida Kahlo was known for her surrealist self portraits (though I believe she never really thought of herself as a true surrealist. She was painting her own experience in the most raw and honest way she could, and I find her paintings stunning and provocative. Like this one, done in 1943:

In fact, after I saw the film about her life starring Salma Hayek (which I HIGHLY recommend watching if you haven't already) I was inspired to draw some semi-surreal self portraits of my own, not in the style of Frida Kahlo so much as in the same train of thought, that is trying to tap into something deeper than just my facial features. They are sort of a mix of my old cartoony style and my current art skills:

This was based on a dream I had where I literally binged on salad and then cut my leg open and bled salad greens instead of blood. Weird, right?