Anton von Flugelhorn – Studying online with Glenn Vilppu, an adventure in art!

Head week two: define “realistic”

You draw a realistic head, render it a bit, using the usual realistic methods of shading in order to show the planes.

OK so far so good.

But what happens if you try to apply these methods – or should I say techniques – to a cartoony or slightly cartoony head, such as could be found in a comic book (and as you’ll remember…. I hope :c lol…. I’m currently drawing a comic).

I can’t resist a challenge, and as I always say: If I must fail, then I want to fail real hard! “Do or do not do, there is no trying” as a green friend of mine says (no, not Kermit the frog!).

I tried several degrees of cartooning from “no cartooning” to “really zany” (I also did a few ugly drawings in these, but they are not part of the experiment, just the proof that I’m still able to do crappy drawings and will for a long time!)

On all of them I applied the same light rendering I would apply on a quickly done realistic head drawing, and I sent the result to Glenn. I knew he would spot at once what I was trying to do, and ignore the bad drawings – or tell me with one sentence how to repair them.

Here is the “thing” of the week:

 

Glenn commented first on the guy in the top right corner (with the disk-like eyes), saying that this is a mix of 2d (the eyes are flat) and 3d (an attempt at it anyway) re: the tones used. As usual he was not judgmental at all, and even said that this could be a design style (it would need some more work obviously).

It’s true that that character looks strange (now that I look at it). Glenn then moved to the next guy (top row, middle, the one with the “I boxed a lot and was bad at protecting my nose” face). He amplified and simplified the planes, using tones to show a simple plane change each time, almost reducing the character to the minimum tones and lines – the result looked very much like a standard type of comics character.

 

Tone shows a change in direction in the planes. I think now I sort of know the planes of the head, the problem is showing them in a way that is compatible with comics, especially with cartoon comics.

And yes, you guessed it if you read my blog old entries: we are back to my search for the black-and-white no-grey style – not one I would use in my current comic (which is very French-Belgian in style – hey, I’m French and I grew up on those comics!) but for a future one I’m thinking about already: dark, no color, no grey, with a violent story – think Sin City.

 

Ok, I know what direction to work in, and that is the advantage of having a mentor who is respecting your personality, and helps you find your style (instead of trying to make you a “Mini Me” like many teachers out there tend to do).

 

So get ready to see the world in black and white next week!

I keep working on my current comic, I’m doing the storyboarding of it – camera placement, text fitting in the panels etc. and so far it works ok.

 

See you next week for more unrealistic realism (and the reverse… er, no, there is no reverse, sorry lol)

 

Draw draw draw!

A.

 

Sketching week 10: From photo but not from photo, penguins!

What are the pros of working from a photo?

1/ it doesn’t move.

2/ the weather in it is just an image, meaning a photograph of the north pole won’t make you freeze, you can take your time.

3/ it won’t fall on you, contrary to some models who stand in a pose for half an hour, fall asleep and collapse off the stand – if they are lucky they fall onto the students who catch them before they break a bone (then the model has to help looking for the pencils and watercolour minuscule tubes that flew everywhere during operation “catch the muscular guy”). (I’ve seen this happen twice, plus the classic lying pose “dead roman soldier” style and suddenly hearing “rrrr…zzzzz….rrrr…” in which case well, we let the model sleep as long as he/she doesn’t move, and we keep drawing… lol.

4/ if you use a picture you have taken yourself, you have no worries about copyright or someone coming to say: “it’s from a picture – look, I found it on internet too”

At this point you would probably say working from a photo is pretty cool and positive. Now, the topic has come often in the two years I’ve studied with Glenn, and the following is **MY** understanding of what he thinks about… what happens to be the topic of the week.

Photo? Yes it is cool in some way, you can draw a church that is in Rome while being in Paris. It’s used all the time as reference by most professionals in animation, comics, you name it.

But, and it’s an enormous BUT, if you copy the photograph you get into big trouble and you’d be better off working from imagination.

The cons of working from photos:

1/ you have to check for copyright first, of course

2/ it’s deformed, almost no photo, unless taken with an old fashioned “accordeon type” view camera with tilt / shift settings, will have massive distortion in the verticals, but we don’t see all the other aberrations because we are so used to watching photos.

3/ photos are (unless done by a pro) poorly lit, no sense of “the box” – the side of the building and people don’t look any different from the front, a photo is super flat, but again it’s a photo so we don’t question it (trace a bad photo and people will say “this drawing is wrong!” but the photo will look right to them ). In one case (photo) the brain will auto-correct the perception because the photo “must” be true, whereas it will not correct the perception of a drawing because it’s already labeled as a “interpretation”.

In short: drawing from a photo is in fact much more difficult than drawing from life or imagination, you have to unplug the bit of your brain that says: “it’s a photo everything on it is normal” and ask yourself questions about everything, you must simplify (are you going to draw each tile on that roof – huh? each one???) in a way that fools the eye, invent a light if there is none, calculating it in your imagination – you’d better know forms quite well before doing that, tough!

you can’t always change the point of view – you can if you know the place well, or have tons of photos of the same place.

A photo is a tool, and being dependent on it would be like taking a cab driven by a blind man and thinking “I can relax, I’m in a cab”. (apologies to blind people I was thinking of that old ad with the great Ray Charles driving a car on the dead sea and obviously having the time of his life)

In short: you want to draw a penguin – what do penguin’s feet look like? you are not too sure (neither am I – lol), so you dig out reference: photos and photos of penguins and you draw your own penguin, you don’t copy just any photo, you draw the image created in your head, “your” penguin.

It’s all drawing from imagination in the end.

I chose to take an old picture I took in Rome when I lived there, and painted digitally from it. Here it is:

 

The original image was very dark (crappy photo), no clear light direction. I had to simplify the architecture (which in real life is full of little itty bitty thick “lines” things that I don’t know the architectural name for.

The windows were black, I chose to invent what they looked like. Also I decided to indicate only a few bricks and a few tiles of the roof (your eye got fooled, I’m ready to bet: you think this building is all brick…. even though there are only a few showing, whereas on the photo there were bricks showing everywhere on the building!)

Glenn liked it but thought I could add to the 3D aspect of the building by playing with the light. there is no real light in the photo or in my painting, and I could invent one. he painted over it, during the critic and yes, of course, having one side lighter, roof walls shadows and all made the building pop out in a magnificent way. Glenn is not scared of changing things, I am, I am in fact confused by reality, he looks at it as just a starting point, all he does is really from imagination.

This was the last week of the sketching class! I can’t recommend it enough, I learned tons, and had really a lot of fun doing it. I’m going to do it again soon.

The next class session is at the end of september (writing this in 2015) check out vilppuacademy.com to find out more.

In the meantime Glenn is doing a sketching tour in London and Dublin, I can’t go but I wish I did, they are going to have such fun!!! He’s also going to teach in Santorini (a greek island that look like paradise on earth, Portugal and…. do some animal drawing in Paris (and i’ll be there!!!).

Look at the academy page for details, and if you really live too far from Europe, sign on now for the next semester, for there are a lot of people who want to sign up and only a limited number of places.

I can’t give any better advice to anyone than “work with Glenn, you’ll learn more in a week than in a year in a good school”. Everybody agrees with me (and I’m not getting paid to type this – don’t I wish I were! lol, I just want more great artists around cause I want to see great art, read good comics etc).

Make the most of your summer, change between media (I will), discover new ways of drawing and have fun!.

And see you in September, I’ll be redoing head drawing for the fifth time but from a comic book, cartoon point of view, it should be fun (hopefully it should be fun for Glenn too, I’ll do my best to draw fun characters).

And if you need something to read on the beach:

Herrigel: “art of Zen archery” (I’m not kidding) it’s public domain

Stephen Pressfield: “war of art” (and NOT “art of war”)

and of course Glenn Vilppu’s Sketchbook of drawing manual (on vilppustore.com)

Best wishes and see you soon, all sunburnt and relaxed!

Sketching week 8 3d round and round! …and old masters on top

Exhausted, the heat is particularly hard on me and 100°F in Paris is horrible: we are not equipped for this: no air conditioning no fan (well, I finally found one in a shop, almost had to fight for it,  but it’s a pretty useless thing) no pool and most of all no air – no wind at all just pollution, red alert for small particles.

I started the week feeling like a 90 year-old and wondering how the hell I was going to do any assignment for Glenn.

Of course this week is a tough one: 2D giving the illusion of 3D in our drawings of people – done on flat paper.

Drawing is a trick, who needs 3D movies and glasses when you can give a sense of depth with a simple pencil?

I decided to try and be intelligent and humble (“for a change” …. who thought that? I heard it!). And look at one of the masters of tri-dimensional characters: André Franquin.

If you are European you know him, if you are American you don’t. Suffice it to say the man was a master, a god to many (me included) the quality of his drawing, the quality of his stories and jokes made him a star of french-belgian comics. (Belgian actually, but french-speaking belgian – sometimes it’s hard to say who is French who is Belgian in a French-Belgian comic, hence the name, plus the fact that you get mixed up countries: the streets of Paris with postmen in Belgian uniform, that kind of thing).

In any case I unearthed my old hard back comics from when I was a kid (well worn books, I read them so many times) and started copying…. and laughing, I have to confess.

When I was 9 years old, I used to do this already: copy Franquin’s work. I’m back at it, but now I know what I’m doing, and I can see the reason behind each line. Not one line is random, every line has a meaning a usefulness. I have to say Franquin went even higher in my esteem, though I did not think there was any room left in the up direction!

I ended up so fascinated and learning quite a few things from pages I knew by heart (or thought I knew by heart) that I copied the characters of about 3 albums (which are 40 pages each).

There is something soothing in copying: you analyse the original, you draw, you correct, you realise the gesture is behind every line…. I woke up from my copying trance on Sunday with a pile of copies and an assignment to send!

I chose the best copies (or least bad), scanned them and put them together in photoshop and sent them as an assignment.

And here it is.

Bear in mind Franquin is a hundred times better than these poor copies:

 

A crowded page hey? and it’s only a tiny part of what I did during the week lol. I seem to have a manic obsessive streak (of course I have: I draw!).

I was worried Glenn would say “this is not an assignment, these are copies” but he did not. He first expressed his admiration for Franquin, then commented on the fact that I clearly tried to get the why and how behind each line. The quality of gesture (lower right: the guy with the M shaped legs) of the action poses works and that shows I “got” what I was reproducing.

I have to say it takes a pretty fierce hand to get those dashing lines – took me a while to get that! And I’m still copying some Franquin as I type. It seems it’s good for me, even if sometimes I laugh so much I almost fall off my chair (some expressions of his characters are incredibly funny).

All legs and arms and trunks have lines going round them, indicating they are 3d….. Saying it is easy, but feeling it and doing it are quite another thing, and thanks to Glenn’s classes I seem to start understanding “something” about it all – I must draw more, sketch more, do more old masters studies (Franquin sadly left us a few years ago, I count him among the great masters).

For those interested: read Gaston volume 13 and Spirou et Fantasio: QRN on Bretzelburg even if you don’t understand French. The series were continued by other artists after Franquin left, forget them.

Funny, I read on facebook a meme saying: “if your 9 year old self saw you today what would he/she say?”

Mine would say: “oh, still copying Franquin? hey, you got really better!!” – thanks to Glenn’s dedication to have us, his students, improve. In the critic, he analysed some of my copies, commenting on why Franquin had done this line, why I had seen it and reproduced it, very comforting to know I got something right. I know that, six months ago I would have missed half of what I saw this time.

I happened to come across some six months old drawings not long ago. I was shocked: they are ok, construction ok, I clearly knew what I did, (after a year and a half with Glenn that is not surprising :-D) but since then I’ve learned a great deal too – and looking at the same time period on my blog (this one you are reading) I realised I made a lot of mistakes that Glenn helped me get over – you can’t learn without making mistakes, you can’t learn to walk without falling first.

The important thing is to have someone pointing you in the right direction so you can pick yourself up and get walking again, even if you have bruised knees.

More soon (more entries in the blog and bruised knees too lol)

Draw everyday boys and girls!.

see you soon.

The topic of the week is “quick sketches” and Glenn starts his video (of teaching and demonstrating – an hour plus, worth looking at several times) by asking: what is quick sketching?

Being the idiot I am, upon hearing that question I immediately saw a  Roadrunner, equipped with a sketchbook and a pen, zoom towards an innocent coyote, sketch him in a second, then zoom away “beep beep! flblflbl!” leaving the coyote in shock: “Gosh, sketched again! Curse those roadrunners!”

Of course Glenn’s answer to his own question made far more sense. And this is what I understood with my silly yet avid brain:

any sketching is fast, you get to the essential, in quick sketching you make sure you don’t accidentally start refining a sketch, you go for wash (and pen or water-soluble pencils etc) and work with a model that moves all the time. Anyone who has kids, kitties, doggies, or lives in a war zone, has natural models all around them. (guess the bit Glenn did not say and I added…. ahum, I’m 7 years old, inside, I can’t help it).

More seriously, quick sketch is to sketching what expresso is to coffee. Work from imagination and memory,  because your model will be gone, or will have moved almost as soon as you start drawing.

This said, and to quote an old Greek philosopher whose name escapes me: make slow haste! No panic, no rush, put down every line carefully, for every line counts in this game, as does every stroke of the waterbrush for the wash.

You can also do quick sketching with something that won’t move, like a building (imagining a building dancing the Can-can while you draw it, just to annoy you). You then really reduce it to the essential, to what makes it a special building, gives it its “personality”.

Of course I had to be unwell one day of the week, and I had not finished my assignment, so 2 of the following drawings are from  photos and not from the street next to my place. (with the photos I did what I always do: look at the picture 5 seconds, close the page – thus loosing the name of the photographer and being unable to say “thanks” – and then I draw only from memory and imagination, from what I “felt” watching the image. But live sketches, the rest of this page, are mainly done in the same way, humans having the nasty natural tendency to move all the time :-D)

Here is my assignment: (the white rectangle hides some personal info, not a drawing)

Glenn immediately commented on the girl walking towards me on the left: “she is great”, he said: you can see the construction in it, simple but there, the thicker line on the outside makes the form immediately read.

The rest is ok, somme good simplified “gestures”, nice feeling of wet ground for the two old people climbing the stairs (old? They were not THAT slow, I assure you), all in all a good submission. I may have gone overboard with details in some places, but working in pen again means doing a lot of lines so a lot of details come naturally (bazinga! I’m back to pen, last week’s “you must use a pencil this time” made me long to go back to pen).

Talking of  “I hate anything but pen”….. my submission for this week in anatomy class (not shown here) got the following reaction from Glenn: “next week use anything BUT pen”. (insert image of Terminator sinking into molten metal without moving or saying a word)

Ooops. How annoying to have a master who reads your mind! LOL in fact : how *wonderful* to have a master who sees where you are, what you are doing, and even what you are thinking while you draw, and can tell you what to do to get better. Glenn has so much experience, I guess he could “read” my thoughts in my  drawing if I sent him a drawing done with my foot (a standard way of drawing for some, but a very very difficult one for me, if I tried).

He can see behind the symptoms in the drawing – straight to the underlying cause and work on it. Other teachers work only on the symptoms and don’t help you at all or so slowly you lose your nerve very quickly.

With Glenn, from one week to the other you progress, yes if you draw during the week, applying what he told you during the “crit”: you progress, one week to the other. It’s….. exhilarating!

Go back to drawing, reader! And draw a lot, and see you next week!

Cheers (back to…. “something other than pen” for me……..)

Black and white, dark and light…. even if the world is made of shades of grey, both physically and philosophically, light and dark are keys to giving depth to a drawing, we saw that last week already, and this week we are going to go more in depth (haha: pun!) on the topic.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you might remember that, during the composition class, I tried my hand at a totally black and white (very “Sin City” like) style of comics. I temporarily gave up on it, feeling I did not master the form (the drawing of object showing their 3D aspect) to draw in such a limited-tools style for pages and pages (plus, I found that zany cartoony comics come so easily to me that it would be a pity not to explore toon-like comic making).

I confess the topic of the week brought the idea of black/white comic back, but I did not dwell on it as I went out sketching.  After all: this is a sketching class, you draw what you find in the street.

I started by doing a series (only one of them made it to the assignment, as you’ll see below) of colour marker sketches, playing with dark and light (not really black and white) and also my new friend “warm and cool”.

As I walked back home I chanced on someone taking pictures of kids (some relatives: they spoke to him while playing) having fun in the inner courtyard of a building. The hunter instinct woke up in me: bingo! This guy had not seen me, had his back on me, and was likely to stay there for a little while. He was mine!

The pattern of the prison-like bars, and the dark clothing were easy to exaggerate and make into black/paper-white patterns: the light in the street plus the light from the courtyard were violent enough that by half-closing my eyes I could “see” the image I wanted to draw.

Enough description, here is my assignment, I’ll tell about the third image (the people in the street) later.

 

I had to “cheat” a bit (in love, war and art, all is fair) and actually took drawn “notes” (that’s what sketching is about) as to what the bars looked like, what the clothing could be reduced to, etc. Back home, I filled the black areas (which I had marked with an “x” in good comic and manga tradition – except normally it’s an assistant who fills with solid black the x zones – I’m my own assistant :c) and cleaned the drawing. So as it is now, it’s, to me at least, a little more than a sketch, a slightly more finished or sophisticated that a street sketch.

Before I tell about Glenn’s verdict, let’s talk about image 3, the crowd and their shadows.

No, in my neighbourhood men don’t war hats (except hipsters…) and women are rarely in tight business ensemble with skirt and lovely hat (not even female hipsters! Women have more common sense than men!). So why do people on this image obviously have hats and… look like they are out of the 50s?

I confess: I looked for another opportunity to draw in pure black and paper-white and found an archived image in the Library of Congress public stock (in shades of grey, your standard plain photo) that was easily turned by my wicked eye-squinting into an extreme image – plus the shadows were fun to play with: if the shadow touches the foot, then the foot if on the ground, if there is a space between the shadow of the foot and the foot itself, then the foot is not in contact with the ground… fun, fun!

But let’s step back a minute here:  the girls are in skirts and pretty little hats, the men have old fashioned hats…. how do we know that on my image? Cause…. hey, look closely (click to make it bigger) the shapes of those people are totally abstract! Add to each person his or her shadow and look even more closely: it’s total abstraction! Yet, when you look at the drawing you see clearly men and women dressed in 50s style. And yet I only made stains on the paper (and this time I’m not talking figuratively: these shapes could be ink stains, accidentally made).

So how does the abstract shapes turn into, not only people, but people wearing specific types of clothing?

It happens in your brain, buddy! lol. You have see enough 50s movies, images, comics etc that the clothing is familiar to you (even if you try to escape “It’s A Wonderful Life” round christmas time you wont be able to: the movie is public domain, you are doomed to see Jimmy Steward and co in 1946 gear!).

Also, humans see humans everywhere (look at a power socket and try not to see a face there!).

The shadows are imperfect inverse images of the people – easily recognisable as ”almost people”. And when our brain sees an upside-down “almost person” under a person it thinks “shadow!”

I’m rather happy with myself on this one: I made something while taking into consideration the eye and brain and experience of the viewer.

OK, end of the minute of self-satisfaction. Let’s see what Glenn had to tell me:

Clearly the one image that interested him on this assignment was my colour marker one (he had seen me do the other style before and knew I’d try it again, I had warned him lol).

Before his critic video comments and draw-over, I did not think much of this colour marker sketch, but then Glenn pointed out the interesting points: large “boring” brown green plane on the left, a vertical white band, making the main character stand out, a complex set of steps contrasting well with the boring wall, two characters up the steps in the distance, who could remain unnoticed, if it weren’t for the green bush on their right that echoes the green above the boring wall (but in a desaturated way that says “this is far away from you”) and the touch of warm colour next to them that attracts your eye and makes you notice them.

If he had not analysed all this, I would frankly have thought very little of this sketch. That is why it’s so important to have the feedback of a master: he spots everything: the good, the bad, the ugly, the “how to improve”, the “what to go on” with.

As for next week, it’s going to be a nightmare: pencil only!

I hate pencil, I despise pencil (hey, pencils do despise me, the feeling has to be mutual) I never find a paper that seems to work, I don’t even know what I want from a paper, or from a pencil. I was taught at school when I was a kid that a 2B and an HB were the same thing, you only have to press harder with the HB (and damage the paper) I can’t draw lightly in pencil as a result. I might need a psychotherapy to come and make peace with pencils! (oooh expensive! lol)

So expect a self-deprecating blog next week!

Translated into plain english: I HAVE to work more often in pencil only!

Glenn has a bad influence on me: I’m beginning to like working on my weaknesses! 😀

See you next week, and keep drawing!