A while back I saw this (taken with a grain of salt humorous) graph made up about what it’s like to be an artist.

I couldn’t appreciate stage 1-3 because I started out working with realism and not cartoons, but the gist of it I can understand quite well.  Especially the constant cycle of studying, assimilating, producing, and becoming dissatisfied. That frustration and dissatisfaction can be intense. I hit that mid-January with the Star Wars-themed fanart commission “Lucida”.

I was really excited about this piece as I worked on it.  The perspective, the composition, the figure, everything.  But when it finally came together at the end, I felt let down. I couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly. It was all “good”.  I asked for feedback here and there and the tweaks were minor. It just wasn’t where I wanted it to be or exactly what I wanted it to be. I’m still not sure why, though I think it’s a successful and very cool piece nevertheless.

I went into my next fanart commission with this intense desire to get right what I didn’t quite get in the last one. I wasn’t even sure what those things were. Maybe I just thought a little more, or got lucky, or something finally clicked into place. At any rate, I was FINALLY happy with a total picture.  Well, 98% happy. I wasn’t happy with her head. But everything else – the colors, the setting, the lighting – I was just thrilled with. And that doesn’t happen for me very often at all.

So I went from total frustration to total elation within about a week and a half. It was a milestone. And a huge burst in confidence, just to know that at least once – just once! – I was able to get a character in an environment and make it feel “real”.  Now the mark is that high – and beyond – for every subsequent piece I create.

Very refreshing after two intensive digital paintings, I finished part 3 of my current drawing commission and remodeled da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man for a personal trainer. I don’t know about anyone else, but even approaching copying a da Vinci is incredibly intimidating for me. I spent one whole day just figuring out the geometry of the proportions until I really understood it.  And I did so many studies that I think I finally know what a leg is shaped like now, thank goodness.  Four legs every time!  What was Leo thinking??

As much as I liked how this turned out (especially using the pastel dust from my pencils on the edges) I was unhappy with his head, too!

I followed through on one of my new year’s plans and got my first master-copy finished, of Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s gorgeous Empress Josephine.  The actual painting is one of those huge, wall-covering things, so taming it down to an 8″x10″ or so, and rendering it in pencil, was a bit of a challenge. I ended up working on it over 18 sessions, usually between 30 and 50 minutes at a time, carefully drawing it out then filling it in with my tiny .05mm lead.  It took 12 hours all together, which doesn’t seem very long now that I think about it.

I really enjoyed it and already have the next one picked out and taped up to start tomorrow – Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid.”   I chose something a little simpler because February is a short month!

Josephine’s head gave me a little trouble, too (sense a theme here?) so I’ve added another exercise to my daily stuff (still working on Loomis, though it’s tedious) drawing a random portrait in 30 minutes every day. It took me 4 or 5 to figure out how much time I needed to get a good block-in, and how much time I should limit myself to in order to get an expressive finish.  I’m hoping by repeating the same steps with different faces every day I’ll get a handle on the basic planes that make everyone’s face, and also the relationship of the head to the neck and the neck to the body. I’ve had trouble attaching heads to bodies for years, and I’m tired of it!

I’d love to work in another exercise drawing standing figures to help with some issues I’m having regarding balance and weight of said figures, but the schedule is getting a little full, and I do have work to do!

This month I’ll be starting a new private commission that’s very unique (more info to come) as well as drawing THE LARGEST DRAWING I HAVE EVER DRAWN. I’m not even sure how big it will be yet. But it will be very, very big.

Also! That standing desk thing has gone very well. I got used to working at the computer with it without much trouble, and I tend to move around A LOT. So it’s not just standing there while my feet get sore.  I’ve got a folded-up yoga mat to stand on for that, but I’ve found most of the time I’m moving enough my slippers keep my feet pretty happy.  If I really need to concentrate and hone in on something with great care, I’ll sit on a stool. The stool also comes in handy for evenings playing WoW or Star Wars: TOR, especially when I get sleepy. The only drawback I’ve found is that I can’t flop down to play PC games when I’m headachy or really tired because it’s just too unpleasant to stand or sit on the stool. Not a bad thing, really, as it’s more helpful for the headache to watch a movie or something.

The BONUS has been that I’ve dropped 5 pounds in January without too much struggle, which is fantastic for me. I’m exercising and watching what I eat, too, but it’s never quite been so easy!  Hopefully it’ll all keep up for the next month!

STAY TUNED.

What works for me instead is simply taking New Year’s as an opportunity to subtly shift some behavior or process into new territory. Like last year, I took my website – which I’d had for a while – and redid the whole thing. Sadly all that worked ended up trashed when I redid it this summer, but sometimes that’s how it goes!  This year I grasped three opportunities for some positive change and gave myself the January 2nd deadline on which to begin them (because we all know the 1st is a holiday.)

This Christmas I got two fantastic books as gifts, one from my mother – a massive book of all the paintings in the Louvre – and another as a gift to myself – a reprint of Andrew Loomis’ fabulous Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth. When I saw the Loomis book on Amazon I made happy little noises and jumped around a little.  When I actually held it in my hands I could have cried.  I had been gradually printing up the PDF in low-quality grayscale (and doing my Structure of Man drawings on the back,) so to page through every illustration and essay was just a beautiful thing.

The Louvre book spent a couple hours in my lap on Christmas morning. I only wish the pictures were bigger. But there are so many, and each one so inspiring.

I finished up my second Structure of Man course before the holidays, so these books ushered in the chance to do something new. I’ve been meaning to do some master copies for a while, so the book of Louvre paintings is going to supply some masters’ work for me. I’m going to split my daily practice time between copying masterworks (in pencil, to start) and spending time reading and drawing along with Mister Loomis. Both will test and develop my figure drawing skill as it stands, and hopefully guide me further in both technique  and polishing my own style.

The third thing is the biggest change and the most intimidating.  The night before New Year’s Eve someone on Facebook mentioned having ordered a GeekDesk adjustable-height desk, and it got me to thinking about it myself again. As anyone with a job that ties them to a desk or computer can relate, it can get pretty frustrating (not to mention painful!) being tied to a chair all day.  Not that long ago, too, that study came out that said even if you exercise daily, if you’re sitting for more than 4 hours a day or so you’re still screwed.  This didn’t come as good news to me.  I’ve been trying desperately to stay in decent shape for years now, and reading that, and knowing how long I have to be seated at a desk in order to get a drawing or painting done, I thought I was pretty much DOOMED.

But the there’s the idea of the standing desk. I don’t have the funds for something new, but I did recall that my old drawing table (a gift from my dad on my 16h birthday, long ago) could be fixed at that height. So I spent New Year’s Eve moving furniture around.  I took out my current computer desk and went from this:

To this:

I felt very lucky I was actually able to arrange everything in new places (even found an old shelf for my beer-bottle collection!) and as usual tried to make sense of the mangle of wires that inevitably come to inhabit the backsides of desks. (The wires are covered with the paper screen to prevent my cat from nomming them as if they were a delicious buffet.) I made the mat to stand on from some laminate-flooring underlayment I’d saved, but I hope to get a proper anti-fatigue mat soon. The keyboard and tablet have to be moved to use one or the other, but it’s really not a big deal to switch their places.

The first night I had it together I STOOD and played Star Wars: The Old Republic for about three hours.  Three hours during which I moved around, danced a little, stood on my tip-toes, and so forth – three hours I would have spent sitting in a chair.  It’s one thing to be tied to a chair for work, but quite another when your main hobby also ties you to a chair.  I haven’t added up all the hours sitting I’ll be trading in for standing, but it has gotta be… quite a lot.

Yes, my feet got sore.  Yes, my legs were sore when I got up the next day. But hey, that shows it’s WORKING.

The even bigger benefit is that I prefer to draw and paint standing up.  I love to work at an easel, and always imagined having a big Cintiq on some kind of wall-mount that would replicate that. Of course I probably won’t be getting a wall-mounted Cintiq any time soon, but this will definitely be a step towards that. Drawing standing up, it’s easier to step back and see work from another viewpoint (I always like to step back about four or five feet and tilt my head upside-down) and it’s also easier to draw from the shoulder for more expression and looser block-ins. I haven’t tried drawing or painting at the desk yet, but I’ve got something lined up to start tomorrow and I’m very curious how it will work out.

Despite the sore feet.

So those are my unresolved plans for 2012.  I have no idea where they will take me. If I lose 5 lbs. standing at the desk I will be happy.  If my art gets closer to where I want it with Loomis and some master-copies, I’ll be even happier. The important thing is simply moving forward, a little better than before.

Many wishes for happy new years, little changes, and small triumphs for everyone out there.

When you’re an artist, there’s really only three motivations for producing art:  You can create for yourself, drawing and painting the pictures you want to see, or those you want to apply to a personal project either of your own or shared with friends; you can create for a larger purpose, whether a business or an IP or an idea shared by many; and you can create what someone else would like drawn or painted, someone else’s idea that they can’t realize the way you can, so they ask you to do it for them.

Every piece of art has its own purpose and is loved for that alone, but there’s something that really gets to me about that last sort, private commissions. The excitement that comes through the initial request, the challenge of creating something to someone else’s standards, and then the often amazing gratitude expressed at the final product. It’s a very personal exchange, to be entrusted with someone else’s vision, and I never quite get over that dash of humility and “Aw, gee, shucks,” at being able to create a picture for someone. I guess it’s something I too often take for granted myself.

I’ve been asked to draw children and pets, cars, houses, aircraft, sailing vessels, flowers, birds, and once nothing more than a large red rose. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of fan-art commissions for World of Warcraft, and now for the new Star Wars: The Old Republic massively-multiplayer games. When I was young I played Dungeons & Dragons with my brother and tried to draw my Cavalier. It all comes from the same place, a highly imaginary realm constantly being manipulated and adapted in a thousand different forms by people all over the world. It’s such a rich place to draw from, with every idea that comes to me arriving with its own unique needs and challanges.  And there’s five reasons why I’m simply loving it.

1.) Things I Never Thought I’d Draw
It’s often said there’s nothing new under the sun and all things are derivative, and that could very well be true.  But I’m constantly amazed by the unique combinations and subtleties in each commission idea. I may have a mess of characters in my own mind, but none of them are like the characters in *yours*. Distinct looks, ethnicities, races, clothing, equipment, environments, little details – personalities – each one is different and fascinating, and brings me to look into things I’ve never thought of drawing before.

2.) The Challenge
Drawing for someone else is always a challenge in itself. I never know if my vision will line up with the client’s, and sometimes adjustments need to be made. Beyond that basic challenge, however, lies all this new stuff I need to learn how to draw. The experience built into every commission is like an entire drawing and painting class in itself. Even if I have drawn and painted most of it before, there is always some difference in lighting or presentation – or simply finding a new perspective and composition – that challenges me to develop new techniques and approaches.

3.) Practice, Practice, Practice
One of the keys to developing as an artist is to draw every day – and it sure helps to have something waiting on the drawing board to work on. Every commission I consider not only someone else’s hard-earned piece of artwork (for which they are paying me), but also a potential portfolio piece for myself.  The hours spent completing a private commission are hours spent with a pencil or stylus or brush in my hand, and every minute of that goes towards that oft-spoken-of “10,000 hours for Mastery.”  I don’t believe there’s ever such a thing as total mastery in art, but I do find my skills just a little sharper with every piece of artwork I create.

4.) The Best Motivation
The business end of a commission deal, for me, is based on trust. I always request either a large downpayment or full payment before I start to work, mostly because I’ve been burned and used too many times in the past. But as soon as someone hands me their money, I immediately feel I OWE THEM. They gave me their money; I owe them the very best piece of artwork I can produce. Every day I wake up with commissions to work on I feel that sense of debt driving me onwards. Nothing else makes me work harder, personally, than knowing someone is expecting something from me on the other end. That may be my own psychosis, but it sure works as terrific motivation!

5.) Giving a Gift
I get so excited when it comes time to show a client their finished piece. Excited, very anxious, very hopeful. Because I usually work with people along the way, I generally have a feeling they’ll be satisfied, but I never quite know how much. It utterly kills me – smites me down into a gibbering, grinning mess – when people tell me “I love it! Thank you!”

You gave me *your* idea.

You gave me *your* money.

All I did was make you a picture.

I’m well aware that not everyone has the motivation or time to learn to draw and paint (though I certainly believe they could!) I’m also well aware of the time and effort it has taken me to get the skills I have, and the further time it takes to develop a painting from beginning to end. I know these things, and yet I’m still floored by the “Thank you”.  I admit I love to make things for people and give people gifts – it’s always been a source of joy for me – but to have that become a part of my everyday work, part of my career, is amazingly fulfilling.

As much as I hope to one day work for companies and have my artwork published in books and gaming cards and so forth, I don’t think I could ever completely stop doing private commissions. It’s too personal, too practical, and too rewarding.  Help me here, Google Translate…

Mi pincel es su pincel.

My paintbrush is your paintbrush.

It always feels good to get a big project behind you. I’ve had a little bit of Mountain Road up on the site here before, but a bit over a week ago I finally finished. I’ve never done a picture before that took so much planning and studying. So many flowers. So many train parts.

It is a cacophony of flora. I was so pleased to see it come together as it did in the end.

I got another interesting commission while I was painting Mountain Road, which gave me something to work on while the paint was drying.  After seeing some of my academic charcoals up on eBay, I was contacted about doing some larger charcoals from various photo references.  There was some changing up of heads and faces and adjustment with lighting, but it was great fun to apply classic charcoal techniques to such modern models.

The first three of those are poster-sized, at 20″x26″.  The last is a pretty huge 40″x40″.  I have a picture of me with my cat standing in front of it… let’s see…

A little blurry, but you get the idea.

And yes, I had to draw all these taped to my wall, because I had no board big enough for my easel (which was occupied by the train anyway!)

At any rate, if you’d like a print of anything in this post (aside from me and my cat) you can find prints at Imagekind in all different variations and sizes.

The past week or so I’ve been doing some fun digital stuff.  Another update soon!

Yesterday I finished up the first two courses – 54 hours – of Riven Phoenix’s The Structure of Man figure drawing course.  If you are at all interested in drawing realistic figures – human or creature – get ye to his website, try out some of the preview lessons, and see if you’re not hooked.  This course is exactly what I’ve been searching for all my artistic life.

I’ve talked before about the difficulty I’ve had being an observational artist. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on figure drawing courses and resources, but in the end they always came down to simply copying another object in front of me or photograph or image. Over the years I’ve gotten very, very good at this copying, but it does me very little good when I want to draw a scene out of my head with no references.

No matter how many mannequins, proportion systems and little stick figures I learned, none of them helped me *really* put a figure together. Because every time I learned one, I was simply copying it out of another book or from another website. It wasn’t something I understood in my mind, so the moment I had to manipulate it, the entire thing would lose cohesion and I’d end up faltering, messing up, and eventually giving up on every drawing I tried.

It was tremendously limiting because I couldn’t just sit down and doodle the way I wanted to. I always had to have a photo reference. I always had to be looking at a picture to get the kind of quality and realism I so desired from my artwork. I envied cartoonists and those who could whip out characters from formulas. I tried to figure out a formula for a realistic human figure on my own, but it was so far beyond me.

Then one day, reading a discussion on a blog about figure drawing, someone linked Riven Phoenix’s site. I tried out the sample tutorials. I was immediately hooked. Since the end of September I’ve spent a portion of almost every day working through a handful of the 189 lessons in his first two groups of tutorials. Yesterday, when I finished, I was just amazed. I did some “after” drawings with a few old (and very rare, since I was always dissatisfied and tossing them out) drawings I’d done with no references. I’ll post them in a bit, I just want to go through what this course did first.

From the beginning, the program breaks the human figure down into basic parts and then gradually adds complexity. The trick is, you draw along with the videos. There’s nothing to copy; you draw what Riven draws as he draws it. The production is incredibly simple: a piece of paper, a hand with a pencil, and a man’s voice. No graphics, no Photoshop, no music, no distractions. You sit and you listen and you watch and you draw, working from a basic stick figure up to a fully-muscled human being.

Every bit and piece is broken down into mathematical ratios. You draw the front, back, and sides, and then use those drawings to create the three-dimensional form. Every important bone in the body is “created” this way – not copied, but created in your mind, with your own thoughts and decisions, so that you know and understand the form completely. It’s not a copy, but an invention. An invention that just happens to look a whole lot like the real thing.

This method works incredibly well for difficult, often-moved parts like hands and feet.  I’ve always been pretty okay with feet, but so often you get to them and they’re a bit of a struggle. Analyzing them in this three-dimensional way profoundly effected my understanding. Likewise for arms, hands, the skull, the hips, the ribcage – everything.

We did eventually get to a familiar type of mannequin system, but because I understood the underlying bones and proportions so much better, it made a great deal more sense to me. I found I could MOVE the mannequin in my mind much easier, knowing where and how the spine bends, the way the shoulder-blades connect, and so forth.

With the bones and the mannequin stable in our minds, we moved on to adding muscles. One muscle at a time, drawing out all the connections. Just last semester at AAU I took an anatomy class and copied an entire ecorche figure muscle by muscle. That did nothing compared to the careful, tedious explanation and addition of each muscle onto the figure that The Structure of Man put me through.

During one figure drawing class, in which we were given planar drawings as references, I made about 100 copies of various angles of the arm. You would think after all that I would understand the tricep and bicep and how they interact, and the way the forearm muscles twist around the radius and ulna. But no one ever lettered and numbered the muscles for me before. No fancy Latin labels. No inexplicable, unnamed curves and contours.  Just 6 and 7 going their way and 4 coming down to where it ends and everything coming together and making sense, one bit at a time.

And it all eventually came together to create a full figure, drawn without any references, completely from memory.  It’s not perfect. I still make mistakes. I still have to brush up and review. And of course I still have to practice drawing with reference. But at least now I can pull a figure out of my head easily and with confidence.  That alone allows me to explore and motivates me to draw more, without the “crutch” of needing reference that held me back for so long.

I forced myself to go back and find some sketches I had done before starting the course, drawings I had just attempted one day without reference. It’s difficult for me to post because generally I try to polish up everything I put online, because when I use all my available resources I generally produce some good drawings. But these show so very clearly how handicapped I was, especially in comparison to what I can do now without looking at anything at all.

There’s still a long ways I have to go, and much I have to apply my new knowledge to.  Lots more figure drawings to be done. Still more courses in the The Structure of Man to work through!  But the last three months have been a breakthrough for me.  I don’t understand WHY schools don’t teach anatomy first – detailed, step-by-step, built-from-nothing anatomy – and THEN move on to Life Drawing. Because without the understanding, you’re just copying the object.  Sure, eventually you will come to understand the object through drawing it – you’ll know the figure from drawing it over and over so many times – but like disassembling a clock and then putting it back together, wouldn’t you understand the whole so much better once you’re familiar with the parts?

All I know is that I’m very grateful to Riven for creating these courses and putting them online.  For a *tiny* fraction of the cost I’ve spent on art schooling I made the biggest leap I ever have. Again, I urge everyone with an interest in realistic figure drawing to check out his website.  And please BUY his videos and not find them and download them elsewhere.  They are well worth the cost.

I’m just looking forward to the next part of the course, and seeing just how much farther it will take me.

One of the interesting things about oil painting while having a familiarity with digital painting is how creative you have to be with the brush.  I’ve been using some synthetic filberts for the flowers and all, which can give a nice variety of strokes, but are still limited by being a bunch of hairs on the end of a stick.  At the same time, are all those leaf-shaped and flower-shaped and tree-shaped brushes in Photoshop really necessary?  Sure, they can be quick, but like any cookie-cutter stamp, what do we learn and understand by using them?

I found while painting this the big thing about landscaping is understanding growth patterns.  How does a dogwood look different from a Japanese maple?  They’re both trees, after all.  How does wisteria climb and spread differently than ivy?  Of course, it took a lot of studying references, but with just those growth patterns in mind, the nature of the plants came through even with just a simple brush.  That’s something I’m going to keep in mind next time I’m digitally painting.

Of course, even with a canvas this large, I can’t zoom in super-close, either.  But then again, how necessary is that most of the time??

Because I wanted the train to be unique for the painting, I didn’t have any really definitive references to work from. There was a bit here, a bob there, a thingie from this and a whatsit from that. It started getting really finicky around the wheels especially, and I had to take a day or two away from it just to clear my head of the frustration of figuring it all out. Once I got back to it I just tried to keep it simple and clear, as the locomotive – though essential for the painting – isn’t the main point of it, either. It’s driving through the floral landscape, but it’s really the landscape that’s on display.

I had to tell myself over and over again to relax with the details, and that helped more than anything. I have a tendency to push towards detail, but this isn’t like a lot of aviation art I’ve done, where it’s All About the Machine. I reminded myself the whole painting is about a scene, a moment, a place. The locomotive has to somehow blend into the flowers, too. I loosened up. I let it be what it was in places, let the story unfold instead of defining every lever and rivet and thingiemabob.

There’s still some touching up to go as well as details like the numbers on the front and side, but they needed a good dry surface. After that, I’m going to let the train go and move on, and later on balance out the detail between the flowers and trees and that of the train, with an eye for the distances and focal points. Certain parts of the train WILL attract attention no matter what, but it does deserve to get a bit of spotlight among all those flowers and trees!

I’ve been drawing a lot in the evenings (while watching Food Network!) testing some of the studying and practicing I’ve been doing.  Usually I just do little character concept portraits and the like.  The other night, inspired by my roleplaying event in World of Warcraft, I doodled up a little sketch of the quiet evening. I got to play with my figure drawing skills, composition, perspective, lighting and rendering. Sure it’s just a pencil drawing on sketchbook paper, but it was the kind of refreshing experiment that makes all that repetitive practice worthwhile.

In the meantime, I’ve been juggling some big charcoal figure drawings on one hand, and the continued painting of Mountain Road on the other.  I’ll have some of those images up soon, but for now, it’s just nice to relax in this little scene.  =)

Months ago I was contacted by a friend of mine, who happens to run Mountain Road Nursery in Virginia. He had the idea for the train and the tunnel surrounded by flowers. That kind of thing, especially with a personal touch, has to be created from nothing, built from the ground up. He wanted a large oil painting, too. This had to be something special.

It started with a very simple thumbnail, mostly to establish which way the train would be going (the direction of the train became a running joke between us, as it was easy to change early on but I kept warning, “When it gets on the canvas…”)

I then had to figure out the train. After doing so much work with airplanes, I really figured a train would be much simpler. Little did I know!  With so many endless types I ended up “creating” a steam train of my own, of the kind of size and complexity I wanted for a rustic mountain path surrounded by flowers.  After all, you wouldn’t want a massive Big Boy barreling through the daisies.  I ended up drawing something I thought held the charm of locomotives but still appeared realistic and practical. So many references were used to get the structures of the cow pusher, the walkways, the various do-dads and whatsits. I learned more about steam locomotives drawing this thing than I ever have living 12 minutes from Steamtown USA!

I hadn’t done so much work with perspective in a long time.  Went through lots of tracing paper to get that locomotive and tunnel!

After the train and tunnel were drawn and I had some idea about the surroundings, I had to “landscape” it. This is where the versatility of Photoshop is really helpful. I collected dozens and dozens of photos of flowers and trees and so forth, then just started cutting and pasting and compositing in Photoshop.  Soon I had a madly blooming foreground and background!

One of the wonderful things about this painting is how personal it is. I was given a list of requested flowers and the freedom to add some I’d like, and each one ended up making me smile.  We have Dogwood and Mountain Laurel for Virginia and Pennsylvania respectively; lilacs and peonies remind me of my grandmother; ferns have always been a big part of the summer woods. Wildflowers like daisies, queen anne’s lace and black-eyed susans seem to connect with everyone in one way or another.

With some idea down about where the flowers would go, I sat down and drew them all in, getting a feel for their shapes and silhouettes and how they would grow together.

Then to get to know the colors and values, I roughed it out in Photoshop:

Then it was time to finally – FINALLY – start painting.  It took a couple days to wrestle the drawing onto the 22″x28″ canvas, and then do a rough underpainting in warm sienna.

This is where it becomes difficult to photograph, too. Alas! But so worth it otherwise. I haven’t tackled a *large* oil painting like this in a while. I lined up all the tubes of paint I might use…

(Well, that’s actually only half, though I’m limiting myself to a fraction of those shown, trying to keep my palette simple for this.)

… and got started mixing and painting. There’s something so wonderfully tactile about mixing colors with oil paints. Feeling the dip of the brush, the swipe of color, mushing it together. Sometimes you get such lovely surprises as a touch of one color suddenly shows up in another. I’ve been reveling in it and the smell of linseed oil.

By the end of this week I had the canvas covered with a “first coat” – just establishing base colors and values, more or less, as all of this will be refined and possibly even covered over.  I tend to be detail-oriented, so this is an important step for me. I was very happy to see the strengths of the drawing and rough drafts still shine through on the canvas.  Now it’s just a matter of carefully forming up and detailing out the train, tunnel, and all of that lovely flora.

I’m going to try to keep updates going as I work on this, as now we’ve gotten to the exciting part where it will become finished sitting by sitting. I haven’t done so much development work on a painting in a long time, but as I first said, this is a very special painting.

Don’t let me forget to add a butterfly or two!

One of the most intimidating milestones that loomed before me when I chose to pursue art and illustration was “developing a style.”  I have always been an observational artist; for over half my life I’ve been drawing and painting from photographs and the world around me.  I never could quite figure out what my “style” was supposed to be when my main concern was always copying what I saw as authentically as possible.

The last several years changed that way of thinking tremendously. I had dabbled in trying to create my own scenes before, but had always given up due to lack of references and figure-drawing knowhow.  Being an observational artist was a big handicap when approaching fantasy art.  My first solution was to give up.

Poking around online, I soon discovered that comic artists could just draw up all their own scenes, whether simple or complex.  Seeing that, and some of the wonderful comic work of artists like Adam Hughes, I thought, “Oh! I’ll do that. I’ll figure out how to do that.”

So I began trying to simplify my approach.  I pushed myself towards thinking about line and areas of shadow and color, that expressive, design-based approach.  Even everyday comics had such vitality and apparent ease of creation in every panel. Sure the anatomy was often off, but the story was being told.  I couldn’t seem to get a story told at all, ever, with my current approach. I looked into the basics of anime and even thought about my own webcomic. I was really keen on the idea.

The thing is, I’m not so sure if we can “choose” our style.  The art we create is tied closely with the way our brains work; there’s a big difference between the approach of a playful, stylistic cartoonist and a dedicated realist. The problem was, as much as I wanted to be slick and quick and stylish, no matter how much I tried it simply wasn’t working for me. I would get all antsy and unhappy and completely unsatisfied. But I kept trying, because it felt like the answer.

It was a little like trying to make yourself at home in the wrong town.

On the night of my birthday I had a bit of a revelation. I was doing what many folks do on the night of their birthday, thinking, “What will I be doing in ten years?”  I tried to visualize my artwork 10 years from now.  And it wasn’t at all what I’d been focusing on. It was what I’d put in the backseat, because it just seemed to big and too deep to apply to the subject matter I ‘d been playing with. It was also what had shone forth in my academic work, my figure drawings and charcoals in particular, probably because I felt it should shine there, if anywhere.

My initial love for Classicism goes back well over ten years. In 1998 I was visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my mother. We’d come to New York City for a day, to visit the museum and walk through the park, not much more. While at the Met, we walked into a exhibition of the drawings and paintings of Pierre-Paul Prud’hon. At the time, I wasn’t really drawing or painting.  I loved old classical works, but had no ideas I could ever recreate them.

The first painting covered an entire wall as you entered the exhibition, an elegant female figure, ivory-white, wings spreading to just lift her from the sea-sprayed rocks at her feet, a red sash like a banner.  I stood and stared.  I can still see it in my mind to this day. Within, we found further lovely pieces, French Neoclassicism shot through with a touch of the Romantic. The sublime full portrait of Empress Josephine. The allegorical “Dream of Happiness.” The mythological Andromache and Astyanax.  And, in my opinion, some of the finest figure drawings ever created.

I bought a book of his biography and works and took it home. I read it and set it on a shelf. It was the first art book I ever owned.

Time and time again, when I would be asked my inspirations, I’d mention that Prud’hon exhibit.  Later on I learned more artists I loved, from Prud’hon’s contemporary David, to the Renaissance masters Titian and Raphael, to the Northern European artists Dürer, Vermeer and Rembrant.  Manet and Degas grew on me slowly. I eventually came to appreciate Impressionism. I even opened up to modern conceptual art and abstract art.  But I never, never moved from that root Prud’hon had planted.

And when I envisioned the artwork I would eventually create, ten years from now, it was those full figures, those rich backgrounds, those graceful hands and expressive faces I imagined. They say to do what you love. It was time to return to what I had first fallen for.

The problem, of course, is learning how to get there.

My school courses had been sadly lacking in the figure drawing department.  To be entirely honest, in two years I had basically gotten very good at copying photographs in charcoal. My sensitivity with charcoal had grown immensely and I knew how to measure angles and relationships. I could also name most of the muscles on the body and locate them on a skeleton.  But I still had very little concrete understanding about how the figure was constructed. That was the first major stumbling block.

A comment on another art blog lead me to the website of an art teacher named Riven Phoenix, and his incredibly detailed video courses on The Structure of Man. I worked through the first 19 free videos and couldn’t believe the amount of information I had been missing for so long. For a fraction of the price of college courses, these tutorials present the human figure the way da Vinci and Michelangelo worked it out – not just through copying, but accurately re-inventing.  Holding an invention of the human form in the mind is incredibly powerful.  Within two weeks I saw my figures and portraits evolve into something so much more real.

A long way still to go, to be certain.  I’ve only, so far, neared the end of the study of the skeleton, without yet touching the muscular system. There are color palettes to become acquainted with, perspective to practice, hundreds of paintings to study.  But all of it is fascinating to me, a complicated puzzle to work through and come to understand.  It’s the town I want to live in, the adventure I want to take.

Having that direction, right now, means everything. You know what to pack when you know where you’re going.  And there’s a well-worn track, right before you, to follow.