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

Foreground, middle ground, background, mean depth in a picture, it’s the very magic of drawing: a flat piece of paper looking like it’s got depth! Making that guy look like he is further away that this guy in the drawing, when in fact both are stains on a flat piece of paper!

That’s our topic  and quite a topic it is! Glenn prepared for us, as usual, a lot of video material, not just course but also demos, explaining each of his choices, each of his decisions while he draws and watercolours – 2 hours of video. Someone once said nothing is as boring as watching paint dry, well when Glenn draws or paints even the drying time become a highlight of your day!

I watched the video several times (in part for the sheer pleasure, in part to “get” the depth thing). We are in sketching class, so we are not trying to do anything smooth looking and finished, so rough and fast is ok. (which doesn’t mean sloppy and rushed!!!)

Copic markers had been good to me last week, so I stuck with them (and wore clothes with more pockets :-D).

I decided to be brave and go where I dared not go last week: where things move all the time, namely: the traditional bi-weekly street market. Want unprocessed food? Want hand-picked mushrooms from the woods when its the season? Farmers products? Sketching while going mad ‘cause that guy moved right when I was….. oh yes: I know it’s part of the game and art of sketching, but sometimes, you really feel like screaming “will you stop the hell moving all the time! stand still! stop breathing! and that goes for the wind too – stop blowing, you are shaking the trees!”

Of course you can’t say anything, being stealth is important or some people will turn away if they realise you are drawing them (in France anyway, I can’t understand why, as they pose very willingly for pictures, when asked by cute Japanese female tourists – ok, I don’t look cute, I get it – plus I look fat with all those Copics in my pockets!)

Here is the “thing”, as I keep on calling my assignments:

The one of the lower right is directly inspired by Glenn instructions of using alternating light and dark zones to get depth, I also played with warm and cool (it worked last week).

Glenn liked it, particularly the one I just mentioned. And interestingly, I realised part of me thought: “Oh com’on all is cool grey except the guy who is the main character, who is warm grey… how quaint can you get? This is SO last year”. Well, it’s not, I may know exactly what I did: cool, warm blabla, but a standard viewer will just get his eyes caught by the warm guy without knowing why.

I am beginning to get why Hitchcock said making pictures (he was a draughtsman by trade before they invented talking movies) was “manipulating” the audience. And there is nothing wrong with that, when you go see the Sixtine Chapel you are more than willing to get you mind blown off, when you go see Alien (the original one) you are more than willing to be scared to death and fascinated by the images.

Glenn often talks about going further, exaggerating, reminding us that even classic old masters did not do realistic portraiture, they exaggerated some features.

In love, war, and art is all fair? It would seem so. We tend to forget that, spending our days with fellow artists, reading about art, working on art, eating art, dreaming art, we know all the tricks of the trade, whether we can use them or still need to work at some of them. But the audience doesn’t know all that, has a more innocent eye and is saying to us “please trick me, please fool me and tell me a great story!” they don’t want to know how we pull the rabbit out of the hat, they are fine just marvelling “oh look: a rabbit out of a hat!”.

One student once asked Glenn during our fantastic two hour weekly video chat-drawing session: “I always draw the heads too big, what can I do” Glenn answered: “just draw the heads smaller!”

He then laughed but there is a lot of truth and depth there: we see and create complications where there are none.

We don’t trust in our art enough, we have to learn that trust. And it’s not just a drawing/painting thing. I chanced not long ago on youtube on an interview of Beatrice Arthur, in which she gave the following advice to young actors (outside of “never give up”): go further, far, far further than you think acceptable – you play a deadpan cynical woman? Make her more deadpan than anything you’ve ever seen. It’s a character for a comedy? Think Chekov! Be a Chekov character in that comedy, it will be a start. And that doesn’t mean hamming it up, hamming is faking, sincerity is the key in all arts.

Gosh I use big words these days!

Now go back to your drawings and have fun!

And now for something completely different!

New semester!

Glenn has been busy preparing two new courses for us online (the man is supposed to be retired????). Those new courses are: Sketching (in the street if possible – taking notes of moving people and things for future paintings, or making small casual works) and Anatomy – but anatomy taught differently from the usual way: most, if not all anatomy teachers teach you what the body is made of, and as a result if someone was to give you a human body in kit form (yuk!) with no manual, you’d have no problem constructing the body, knowing where to plug which muscle, how etc. Glenn is teaching anatomy used as a tool in a drawing – a drawing that is not an écorché diagram. Personally I think he should call this class Applied Anatomy.

Which one am I taking? Both, of course lol! Which one am I going to tell you about in this blog? (as I’ve received quite a few PMs here and on FB asking for a continuation). Well I’m going to talk about Sketching. Why? Well, picture this (if I may quote Sofia from the Golden girls): you are in the street, you notice a fleeting expression on a kid’s face when he sees the ice creams sold in a shop – but you can’t draw it, it’s already too late: the kid has rushed into the ice cream shop! So how do you draw that expression? …. out of memory? Impression? THAT is sketching, that’s the essence of gesture and drawing and I know i’m going to learn a ton through it! Plus Glenn Vilppu is The Master Sketcher: he draws all the time, and I mean ALL the time: during lunch break, classes, chatting with family – I’m ready to bet he draws while taking a bath! lol.

But don’t worry, I’ll also report about anatomy if there is something interesting happening to me, learning-wise 😀

This first sketching week, Glenn has us working in “point to point”, meaning “where is what” in relation to the rest: start drawing the ear of a person sitting in front of you in the bus and, by looking where  his seat is compared to his ear (two ears length below?) you can draw the whole scene just with a self-referenced first line.

Of course…. plan ahead or you’ll end up with an ear on a page and no more space to draw the rest of the bus as planned. 😀

This first week took place as I was away in the south of France, in the middle of nowhere (and I mean it). This was a problem, as in our street, when someone walks by, it’s an event! People come out of their house to say hello and….. chat (this is France!). So I could not stand in the street with a notebook and draw passers-by, first because there were no passers-by and second because after five minutes I would have had at least two elderly neighbours looking over my shoulder and yammering “blablablabla” but not letting me draw them.

I decided to draw some knick-knack that’s on the mantelpiece in the house of my in-laws, and I have to say “point to point” works wonderfully for little cups etc, each of the drawing of the thingies took me one minute or less.

The little landscape I did from the garden, in digital – the wacom companion is ok to draw in the sun, but for colours you can’t trust what your eyes see on the screen. Drawing on the companion is a piece of cake on the other hand.

But I had to draw some people…. I faked it (and told Glenn of course, he would have known anyway). I looked at some pictures on the net (apologies to the photographers, I did not jot down their names and I modified their work a LOT). What I did was this: look at the picture for a minute and a half (watch in hand) then close the page (and lose the name of the photographer…. silly me) and then draw what I remembered, imagining the rest – thus simulating what happens in the street when people pass you by quickly.

Here is the thing:

Glenn’s first reaction was that the green hedge in my little scenery was far too green – beware of green, it’s a tricky colour, particularly in digital, but also in traditional paint.

His second comment was about the cop and fat guy on his left. Glenn had a problem with the way I had “noodled” on the cop and fat guy, in the shadows. The problem was that I remembered mainly the shadows, and so drew them and filled them with pen before going to colour. The result – coloured shadow plus zigzag in black pen, is too much.

He liked the rest, especially the housewives (he spotted at once the fake digital watercolour on them cause the colours were “computer colours” – what an eye he has, lol!)

Just for the record, in Applied Anatomy week one (the head and neck) I seem to be, just as several of my classmates, in a “D’OH” mode, better explained by the sentence: “what the hell does he want?” I felt that the first time I did Composition One and Two, while when I redid the two classes I did a big leap forward, so I’m not worried, plus the two hour chat (weekly) allowed us “Homers”, to ask Glenn to show us what he wanted and what he doesn’t want. He did several demos, patiently answered our questions…. I’m not sure I could put it into words, but I think I understand better. Understanding the application of anatomy on a drawing that is NOT an anatomical diagram is going to be the topic of the whole class for me, and already know I’ll retake it, and I’ll, probably, make a big jump forward again 😀

I am lucky to have a patient teacher who takes the time to tell us to hang in there, that those difficult moments are good things and mean the brain is absorbing new stuff.

Next week more sketching – back in Paris!

comp2 week 9 painting mice and character placement

Another busy week, my fault again.

I started by correcting my flying draughtsmen, repositioning the drone (putting it in front of the crane’s cable seemed to me a good way to add depth to the picture: “this is in front of that” = depth!

I also arranged the paper flows as told by Glenn and added a correction of my own: I took all the characters except the crane, the boy and dog, and made them bigger (ah, the joy of working in layers in photoshop: in traditional media I would have had to redo the whole painting/drawing). I wanted them to be more clear, ok probably most people won’t deduce that that yellow bulldozer (don’t ask me how he got on a building’s roof, I’m only the artist here!) is remote controlling the drone used by the painting mouse at the top right, but “I” know I wanted that ‘dozer to be clearer hence bigger. I also wanted the rat seen in profile erasing his drawing (next to our beret-wearing mouse) to be better seen – I was happy with his expression of dissatisfaction about his art (even his tail expresses that).

Here we go:

And yes I forgot to add the (R) after the Interstitial Comics name in the copyright branding … ooops, must get used to doing this!

This week, the composition lesson (last-but-one week!) was much centered around modern artists, Lempicka etc. A really fascinating course as, like most of my classmates, I looked at modern art with the same expression you might have while examining the content of your plate in a very very bad highway diner. Glenn analysed modern works and explained what the author meant to do, pointing out who had influenced him or her.

Now, some of us still don’t like modern art, some love it, but in both cases our opinion/feeling is based on analysis and observation, not ignorance, unfamiliarity and hearsay as it was before (for me anyway).

My current view: there is some very interesting stuff in modern art, lots to be learned (and stolen :-D) from it. I’m not sure I’d hang all of them in my flat – but then again I would not hang some classic paintings in my flat either (Poussin is a genius for composition but his subject matters and even colors bore me to death – you can send me flames on this thread, no problem).

We (the class… not “we the people”) got much richer artistically this week.

Being in a cartoon mood, having to think deeply about modern art, and having to go on exploring my strange mice world, I decided to have some fun. (who would have guessed?)

I’m beginning to have backstories for the characters come naturally in my head: their names, why they dress like that, etc, this universe is building itself quite naturally in my head – good fertile toon land, probably lol.

I decided to laugh a bit at both modern art and it’s audience and detactors (no risk for me was involved: Glenn said “I dont know where you come from” to me while watching one of my works…. it means he can’t kick me back home: he doesn’t know where my home is – only kidding of course).

I decided my beret-wearing (no, he’s not French)  artist mouse was having an exhibition, and here is the result:

I’m not sure there is any need for comment here.

Glenn remarked on the fact that this was simple, clear, and really confirmed I had found my niche.

He also commented on the fact that, once more, I put the characters in the “audience” at equal distance from each other (this is a curse! I pay attention to it but I do it anyway!!) and that the yellow ‘dozer at left was only seen upon second “reading” of the picture – now THAT made me happy, as I had done it totally on purpose with that goal in mind (and I have a backstory for this yellow guy too!)

On an aside: several of my classmates commented on my finding my natural environement in a French-Belgian clear-line like style – ligne claire in French – a style formed under the influence of ukyo-e – japanese print – ligne claire most typical example is Hergé’s Tintin, but Asterix and other French-Belgian (so called because since half of Belgium speaks French and had super art schools it was often impossible to tell if a French language, ligne claire comic was french or Belgian, so “franco-belgian” became the name for them).

Now, being french, I grew up on Tintin, Asterix and the lot – ligne claire! I also grew up on Will Eisner whose old Spirit stories were republished in a magazine I read . To think I imagined him to be a young French or Belgian artist publishing these for the first time 😀 anyway, my mom still have the booklets I made out of the pages cut from the magazine – yes I kept the Spirits stories to read them again and again – they were so modern and crazy and inventive – but not ligne claire.

I always thought that I would never be able to draw in ligne claire style: too “out there”, no way to hide any imprecision or mistake, my plan was to never even try drawing like that – guess what came out when Glenn gently pushed me to follow my instinct (or subconscious mind?) It’s ligne claire that came out, I could not be more surprised!

I know I want to work on other styles, and you saw my attempts at dark heavy black Mignola or Sin City like styles – but these did not come naturally, I really had to struggle. And I plan to go on working on them, if only to improve my ligne claire (well… “almost” claire lol)

Next week is final week, let’s see what happens!

Back to work for me… and you’d better do the same!

compo2 week 7 weirder than this is illegal?

Last week I had my main character discover a secret night civilisation, and encouraged by Glenn who found that it was obvious I was having fun doing such drawings, I decided to stick with the topic. Glenn is always there to help us express our real style and self – if you could see the works of my classmates, you’d realise we are all getting stronger and stronger in our personalities and more secure in expressing them – thanks Glenn for that, he gives us the tools, we build what we want, he helps us do our sh*t, to use a familiar expression that always

makes me laugh.

“Do more, explore this!” he told me (apart of technical advices that allow me to move forward artistically).

OK, so what have I got? A boy and his dog…. not a very original idea, bulldozers, mice, skunks and other beasties being friends and having their own civilisation…hmmm better, but the real topic or genre of my work from last week was surreal cartoon or wacky insanity. I wanted to see how further into madness I could push.

I had an idea about all those machines and beasts having human like interests like sports: what if they organised a competition?

The possibilities were many, and my mind went on a roll: hopscotch for jackhammers, tennis for dustbins with pivoting top lid, etc, etc, the more ridiculous the better. Which one to choose, knowing that I would have to draw an audience for the scene?

I decided to be really insane and not just mad, and did a poster will all my ideas – that’s 4 competitions and 3 complementary images…. 7 images in all! As Dracula always says: I’ll sleep in my coffin :-D. That was indeed an allnighter job.

If this was going to be a poster-like work I needed (I decided) a border of some type to give it a touch of “the official photo set”.

With seven drawings and lots of characters – many in action poses – I did not have the time to draw the art déco border I wanted (it meant hours in illustrator) so I just went to creativemarket.com and bought the commercial and personal right to use one made by a designer. Yes, deadlines do influence an artist’s workflow. If Michelangelo lived today, he would work on a 27” cintiq (paid for by the Pope of course) to have access to Photoshop and it’s layers and control-z!

Here is the “thing”. I did not count the number of characters, but I think there are as many as in the School of Athens by Raphael, which I copied in markers a while ago.

While we are talking about the legal side of things, the fonts here are legally used and so are the ornaments around the text (commercial license). It’s too easy to forget such things, but if I want to have a right to get angry is someone steals an image from me, I have to be a customer of fontmakers, not a thief (fonts often are free for personal use only, beware and read the licenses).

I registered this work at the Library of Congress, it’s worth it, it wont protect you from theft, but it means immense damages for the thief to pay…. which should make them think twice.

Glenn’s reaction upon seeing this set of images was rather interesting: he laughed for about five minutes (particularly at the jackhammers doing hopscotch).

He had a few things to say about people and things in my audience being too at equal distance from each other, and a few other technicalities, but the main thing to me was he said that this was crazy (good!) that it was really me (the man knows me, lol) and that I should make a book or something out of it.

That got my brain gears working.

Glenn doesn’t know where I come from, well I don’t know where I’m going, but I do know that I’m having lots of fun, my crazy ideas come easily by the dozen, and the drawing style is super easy to me.

A book, hey?….. see you next week while I ponder!

compo2 week 5 where does this come from?

During one of the chats, Glenn mentioned once more he did not want to make “mini me” versions of himself, he wanted us to follow our own personalities and styles, which is happening in composition class: we are all soooooo different, and getting more different each week, that’s the nice thing with Glenn (*one* of the nice things, lol) he pushes you to go further along YOUR own road, no matter if he’s interested in it as a member of the audience or not, he gives us the tools to become ourselves.

While discussing this, he mentioned that being Botticelli was not the absolute goal: Dr Seuss’s drawings “work”, the Simpsons or Sponge Bob graphically “work”, same for Bugs Bunny and co, because they are consistent and expressive (my formula).

And I remembered an image I had seen about a year ago: I was in a street in the south of France, one street post lit up (night was coming) and I saw there were thousand of dead bugs (om mane padme om) in the lower part of the transparent globe containing the bulb itself. The kid in me saw an eye’s pupil there, and I could imagine the lamp post bending down toward me to better see who I was.

I get a ton of “images” like that from daily things, I store them in my brain for later use.

In any case, for some reason, it came back to me this week, and I did this:

It looks out of a children’s book, and some more “children’s book” ideas came back to me (see next week lol).

The main construction problem was using and magnifying the height: ok the kid is tiny and sitting, the eye of the lamp is just above him, but the drawing only has a meaning if it’s clear the lamp first stood tall and then bent down to read the comic with him.

So I did a long body for the lamp, but it looked….. lonely as a snake.

As I had drawn the background green (to better make the orange hair of the kid stand out and give a sensation of depth behind him) I remembered another forest scene: in the movie “Totoro” the meeting between Totoro and the older sister at the bus stop, by night, with the umbrella (see that movie if you haven’t!)

Yes: a bus stop! And this also explained what that kid was doing by night in front of a forest: he’s waiting for the bus! So I made a big tall red bus sign (should have written “bus” by hand instead of using a font, it would have better matched the rest of the image). That gave some upward space to the image by attracting the eye of the viewer: the lamp post had some space to stand tall before bending down!

Glenn loved it and laughed a lot (and noticed my use of the red sign 😀 smug mode engaged…..)

I got very positive reaction from several fellow artists: ok this was not the School of Athens (re last week) but it was far more fun and interesting!

Glenn has always pushed us to go “out there”, to have our work, failures and all on display, get some flamings, make friends, be an artist, not a closeted one who only shows his work to his mom who knows nothing about art (I got a lot of useful feedback from other artists on facebook!)

This blog is part of my effort to be “out there”: I’m not perfect, I’m learning, working hard, making the most of my having such a great teacher – some people wont like my stuff (and might be right!) it’s ok, I’m working on it!

I decided it was time to take a further step with this drawing: I registered it at the Library of Congress and European equivalent (reproduce it without my permission and you’ll have to face Wolverine and pay for all legal costs on top on what you’ll pay me buwahahahahaha!) and I then put the image in large size for print on demand at society6.com (under the name Anton Von Flugelhorn in case you want to buy one) The goal is not to make money, or sell a lot, but just to be “out there”.

I ordered a print of it myself, it’s giclée and it’s amazing quality, I was afraid the night scene quality was going to be killed by the printing – oh no! it’s superb museum quality print. Stunning work, society6!

I’m working on other images in the same style (got a lot of weird ideas in store).

Perhaps I’ll make a children’s book if I get enough ideas (I generally have too many :c)

None of this would have happened without Glenn kicking my ass (via internet lol). I’ve now been for two years studying with him and I see the result: did I even wonder how to draw the folds on the kid’s clothes or the kid’s cartoony face? Nope, I just did it – good or bad *I did it*! That is the result of hard work with a great teacher to guide you. and studying the old masters is a must-do when aiming to draw cartoons (cartooning is tougher than realism, but don’t tell anyone!)

Now…. to make even better drawings…. and have even crazier ideas! I rush back to my pens!!!

See you next week, draw draw draw and be free!