compo 2 week 6 “you’re weird!” yes I am, and I plan to make a living out of it! 😀

If you read last week’s entry you know that I used, in a drawing, a strange vision I had had about a lamp post.

Considering Glenn’s very positive reaction and his laughing, I started digging mentally into my “ideas stock” (all in my head – I don’t jot down ideas, if they are good I’ll remember them, if I forget them it means they were not that good, works for me).

I remembered an old concept from years ago: why aren’t traffic lights made more useful? When there are no cars around, they could be used as a source of color, for example, a 3 color palette. But who would use these palettes, and to do what (…when there are no cars around… night time?) ? A bit more thinking later (if you can call it that, some would call it delirium), I created this rather strange image:

I also registered it at the Library of Congress and will put it up for print on demand (let’s face, it I’m writing a children’s book here – see in the coming weeks – and yes, you guessed it, I’m late in my blog so I “know the future”! The short term one, anyway).

This version is the “corrected” one, done after listening to Glenn’s crit. He laughed, liked it, but was confused by the shadows of the traffic light posts that in the original were much longer, they looked a bit like legs. Also the dog was standing right on the bottom of the image, killing any illusion of 3D (something I had not seen at all until he said it, it then became the only thing I could see in my work, that’s what great teachers do: they zero in on the errors you did or weaknesses you did not notice – after that it’s up to you to work on it). So I moved the dog up a bit, making sure he was still looking like he was staring at the scene in front of him, I finished his legs ands paws, and for good measure I added a tiny bit of space to the picture, right under the dog.

The most difficult thing in making this image was the color (and yes I know: it looks childlike, and believe me, it’s tougher to do than an academic drawing….  plus you don’t need “ideas” in academic drawings). I did not want to go complex with the color, my idea was to stay close to “cell shading” style, the type of simple color used in animation. I had to have the side of the yellow machines in shade for example, so it really looks like night/early morning, but without gradient. Took me a while to find the right color.

In the same idea, I wanted the mice to stand out, but they are grey, the ground is grey, the skyline is grey, just using “another shade of grey” was not enough to make them feel alive and not part of the concrete world around them. Here I used a trick Glenn taught us and pointed out many times in old masters paintings: warm versus cold. A grey with a touch (you can’t really see it but you feel it) of red is warm, a grey with no colour inside is neutral, with a bit of blue inside – cold grey (if you want to explore the idea look at the Copic marker list of colors, they have 3 lines of greys, both in real marker and in sketchbook pro where they have their swatch). Neutral grey scenery, warm grey beasties. I have to say I felt deep satisfaction having solutions to my problems: we never specifically worked on cold versus warm, but Glenn points out again and again tons of such things that stick in your mind, and I found after chatting with my classmates that they too felt they had tools at their disposal, ideas to use, “tricks” to put to work. Most teachers teach you how to “paint a lilac flower on a sunny day” ok, what do you do if you wanna paint a rose at sunrise? How do the colors work??? Same for drawing. Give a man a fish…. teach a man to fish… you all know the story. Glenn teaches us to fish and further than that: to live off the land – by that I mean he teaches us to see, and gives us tools that will be useful to us if we start painting or sculpting (he’s a *drawing* instructor in theory, but he is much more than that – the only thing I disagree with him about, apart from his love of coffee and my hatred of it, is that he says that color is not really his thing, so he’s not teaching it….. wrong! it is one of his many “things” and he is teaching it to us, unseen, stealth, without us noticing.

Yea yea, I’ve got a bad case of hero worship (like every student of his) but it’s normal: before working with Glenn (B.G.V. aka “before Glenn Vilppu” as I like to say) I used to have ideas, but each time I took a pen I could only *hope* that drawing would go ok. Would it? Sometimes yes, generally no – not good for self confidence, not surprising so many young artists give up.

With Glenn’s teaching and most important, his critics, in which he shows you what you should work on and how. You only have to work and you progress and reach a point when you “know” what you are doing. If the drawing goes wrong, no big deal, you see why, you correct it, or even better you redo it. You have a problem with hands? Fill a sketchbook with nothing but hands – go for the non-comfort zone and work on your weaknesses.

I’ve just done something I never would have had the guts to do a year ago: as an exercise I did an inking (comicbook  terminology, never mind) of a Dave Finch pencilling. I posted it on Facebook in a group led by professional inkers, and asked: “hey guys: tell me what is crappy in this, it’s my first, what is the most shocking to you?” A year ago, I would have feared the response, probably felt hurt by the answers (mainly: “your lines are wobbly” – a cardinal sin in inking) Now I thank the guys and as soon as I have the time I will indeed work on my lines (we are talking free hand lines and circles here): I’m happy I know how to improve.

This psychological evolution is very important, it changes you, it makes you consider yourself as a work in progress, you are not anymore an ego that gets hurt by anything that is not a stellar compliment (and compliments… are they real compliments huh? paranoïa goes hand in hand with self doubt).

So, back to work! the more I draw, the more I learn, and frankly the harder I work, the more fun I have!

See you next week and draw every day!!