Saturday, December 31, 2011

Daily drawings day 5! I really did not want to do today's drawings.. wasn't feeling it. I was trying to convince myself to do them tonight or do double tomorrow... scramble all you want little brain but we're doing this:)

I got a little lost today doing some of these sketches.. I started out thinking about an exercise that Tom did when I was TAing in his Super Heroes class. He drew a fairly pedestrian figure of Captain America on the wall and challenged the class to draw a much more dynamic Cap by altering the pose. So I tried doing some dynamic powerful male poses... your standard superhero fare.. and I really struggled with it. Which then led to the usual internal monologue when things start going wrong "why can't I draw better than this... this is embarrassing... 7 years and untold thousands invested in an education in sequential art and I can't draw a simple dynamic heroic pose!" which I flagellated myself with for about 15 minutes as I got more and more frustrated.

And then I stopped doing it.
Because that is one of my patterns... this isn't perfect.. why isn't this perfect... what an awful artists I am and an awful person and blah blah blah..
Hyper self scrutiny leading to self doubt then self abuse. How tragically dorky.
But I know I do this... so once I caught myself I dropped the bullshit and went back to what the intention of these daily drawings is... quick, gestural dynamic drawings.
Structure first... specifics later.
And the next 20 drawings were super fast and energetic and really scribbley and loose...
and I dug myself out.
Knowing your stupid patterns and the means in which you will attempt to kick the shit out of yourself when you are down helps if you can catch yourself doing it. I am getting better at this. Better every day:)




These are from yesterday.
Using the Scalera "People and Poses". I like the pose of the crouching male with the arms crossed over his face. I am always trying to think about silhouette... how the drawing will read if blacked out so there is no internal information, only contour. Even though the limbs are kind of stacked I think this pose sill reads emotively as a nice silhouette.
I find more and more how important this is. The figure has to be an easily and quickly readable shape otherwise the viewer gets confused. As drawing is a visual language the letters in your visual alphabet have to be quickly identifiable otherwise your "reader" stops "reading" and starts thinking "what the hell is all of this?" The "reader" is taken out of the visceral experience of "reading". Whether it is comics or movies or music or a video game or a newspaper article maintaining the connection with the audience is imperative.
Otherwise the connection is lost and the story isn't heard.
Which is why we are doing this, right?
Making a connection and wanting to be heard.

And making dough....
... tons and tons of dough.

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