Weekly Art Blog 8/17-8/24/2024

I spent about half an hour doodling with a pen, and it fried me. I am getting to the point again where I don’t know how I draw, and it really bothers me. I’ve been doing this for so long, and I don’t have much in the way of conscious choices or ideas behind any technique I’m using. With a pencil, I know what I can draw and can explain some of how I do it. I can’t get into all the details, because I also wonder how I get to any level of precision with my unsteady fingers. There’s a nuance to it that I grasp intuitively, that I’ve developed through sheet repetition. I’d be thrilled if even a little of that nuance was knowable, because then maybe I’d have a clue for using any other tool. There’s enough similarity that I can do some things with pens. I can’t draw the same way with a pen, though. I don’t know how I draw.

I’m worried about that because I’m also trying to get a handle on my style. I’ve seen the direction, and I want to be able to point to the thing that makes my art distinct. I want to deliberately work towards that and make use of my strengths. All I’ve ever seen are the ways I’m not doing what I want, how I’m not quite where I want to be. I’ve been satisfied by what I end up with, yet never certain that it’s what I wanted to do, what I can actually do. For whatever reason, I feel so much closer lately, but I’m still knocking on doors.

I have things I want to try, and since I’m writing this draft on a Wednesday, maybe I will have done some of them by the time this comes out. I want to look at old drawings of mine, from before I employed any underdrawing. I have a bunch from high school, and I was somehow putting stuff together then. Maybe I’ll find a little gem about my line work or something there. I want to try going over a drawing with a colored pencil instead of a pen. Past experiences with darker, softer pencils tells me it may not be exactly what I want, but it also seems like an obvious experiment to keep with pencils while still going dark enough for finished work. It’ll probably be fun, too, and I can do stuff like outlining eyes with color. I want to practice more with a stylus, and maybe replace the pen stage with a digital line over the pencil sketch. There should be more I can do digitally if I have digital lines, after all; I can’t do a full drawing on a screen, but part of a drawing could be doable, as I have done some in the past. That said, I also want to focus more on how I draw at the moment, which means I might stick with black and white more often. Colors are hard, a totally separate skill I’m only barely starting on. I also want to do more with shapes. I was right that they would be important for me to work on. I’m starting to think that stick figures are stiff and can’t do what I need them to do, at least not in many cases. My spinning, beanie wearing woman feels a lot closer to what I want to be doing than most anything else I’ve made, and she was all shapes. Goes back to the first step, actually. Before underdrawing, I went straight to the final outlines. My underdrawing skills are decent enough that I should go back to what I was cutting my teeth on.

Some of these ideas are inspired by my recent reading. I just went back through Sakamoto Days, and I came away with two conclusions: First, while it’s inevitable that she got left behind on the past couple big missions, Kindaka’s training is the perfect time to bring back Lu, and she offers exactly what the series needs right now; Second, I’m in love with the motion and lines of Yuto Suzuki’s art, and I think I might have something in common with them. At least, I think that might be a direction for me. I’m not sure how to describe it, there’s just something in the flow; I was especially caught up in the wrinkles in Haruma’s shirt. I also went through Kagurabachi, and I have similar feelings about the motion. There are other little things in it I quite like, and I’m especially attracted to the presentation. So much of the humor, tension, and impact of the scenes comes from how understated it is. A character is simply there when you don’t expect it. We see where the movement was. The dialogue doesn’t dwell on the joke or the threat very much. When there is more flare, it has that much more effect. I really respect that sort of style; like, it often works more than it doesn’t when an artist goes big and really drives everything home, but it’s also a huge stumbling block for many, who do too much to make something look impressive or ruin every joke by dissecting punchlines and dwelling on them as “established” things. I’m definitely the latter type. It’s there, I have to use it! It’s so important now! So I’d like to do more with less. I want to let go and get to the point. In general, I think I’m getting better at telling when something is the actual thought or feeling, and what’s the abstraction noise echoing around that. I don’t want the noise to fill up my art. 

UPDATE

I’m now writing this on Friday, and I’ve kept this format because I have done a thing like I was talking about. I’m feeling much more positive than I did Tuesday night. Still no clue as to how I literally draw, but also am not worried about it. I’ve drawn a few things with shapes mostly. A man pointing like in an argument, which has more character than if I had done it otherwise. A woman taking a bath viewed from above, which had some tricky perspective stuff for the walls since I didn’t pick a vanishing point ahead of time. I just finished the pencils on draft 2 of a character, Echo, doing a karate thing. That one was especially fun because I had to do the shape breakdown part for how arms look when you look straight at them and they’re bent away from view, using myself as the model. I’ll try both a colored pencil and digital sketch for that, see how they go. I’m looking forward to it. That’s how these loops and spirals go: I’m down the drain in a single night, but I’ll jump straight out the next day.

Oh, and at the top of this, I have posted a picture I made of a person leaning back with a stick cradled under their chin. I drew it because I wanted to do something with an overall shape to define it, and triangle seemed easy to start. I was flipping and waving around a rod from a bird feeder while I thought, so I was doing that pose with the rod, and put it into the sketch. The opposite foot being the one looped over adds an extra S pattern that I like, though when I was literally sitting in that pose, it was the same side foot. I do model for my own drawings a lot, actually. They’re not flattering photos.