thoughts about this art project

I’m having a lot of thoughts about this art project thing, thoughts which are currently full of enthusiasm, vim, and vigor, because I’ve only done two days of it and am not yet bored with having to work on my fucking perspective again, which is an attitude I expect to smash up against Quite Soon.

But. Like. It occurred to me to ask myself, last night, “What is it I want to get out of this project?” which you have to admit is probably a pretty good question. And the answer is a sort of vague ball made up of “get better at basics” and “fuck if I know,” the latter of which is definitely not a way to actually progress.

Yer man’s journey, the one I’m using as inspiration/following, is not precisely the one I’m going on. He was apparently a complete novice at art; I had something like halfway or 2/3rds of enough credits in college to get a minor in art. And I’ve just been glancing through what little of my stuff is still findable online, and…I used to be a lot better than I am now, tbh. Much more in practice. So hopefully that’ll come back, but also…

…stuff like perspective really isn’t something I was ever good at, because it’s tedious to learn, and I never tried very hard because I got bored and didn’t want to. So I would like to overcome my boredom on that front and become moderately adequate at it, because it’s aggravatingly important. I’m better at shading, but bad at light sources. Etc. So…basics, which is what the first forty hours of this project as presented are anyway.

Last night I made the terrible mistake of watching the first video they had linked in the ‘this is what I used for learning’ and it threw me into a tailspin, tbh. Too Much Information. Too much I wasn’t good at. Too many strong opinions on what was important to learn FIRST. (Well, everybody agrees on basic shapes and then developing the ability to break complex shapes into basic ones, honestly, but everything after that becomes a conflicting rush of strong opinions.)

One of this particular guy’s (Draw Like A Sir) Strong Opinions, unusually, was that you shouldn’t bother with shading until late in the game, because the underlying stuff is more important, gives you a great deal of the 3d aspect you might be looking for by adding shading, and shading itself isn’t that hard. I actually think that’s perhaps pretty clever, but also that shading gives people a feeling of progress, so that was mostly just something I went ‘interesting’ about, but some of the deluge of other opinions just overwhelmed me. And of course, it’s frustrating because the dude is really good at drawing, obviously, so he’s rattling off what he thinks is important and doing quick little doodles of perfection and you’re drowning, so that’s just, you know…stressful.

None-the-less, he did have a couple of basic shapes practice stuff that I thought were probably useful, which I’ll try to incorporate over the next few months of doing this (assuming, once again, that I don’t just get bored and quit, which is a Very Large assumption). He also talked about certainty of lines, but I think mostly I’ve got that.

…that was a sidetrack. I was actually trying to talk about where I think I’ll be going with this project (assuming, once again…).

Anyway, basics, yes, but yer man went in the direction of portraiture after that, which my god I understand that impulse, faces are fun, but I think, if I can get myself to accept the tedium, I might head in the direction of anatomy. If I could get myself to spend the bulk of a hundred hours on basic shading, perspective, and anatomy, I think that would level my drawing up considerably.

I mean, we’ll see. I’ll be impressed if I make ten hours, honestly, but…

…I still haven’t addressed “what do I want out of this,” have I.

“Get better at basics” is a big part of it, clearly. But I think what I probably want, honestly, is the confidence in my art that getting better at the basics would provide. I’ve always believed that I’m a good enough artist to know how good I’m not, and that if I practiced a lot more, that I’d actually be quite good. I’d like to see if that’s true, although I’m never going to practice as much as I need to be truly GOOD by my own standards. Like, Marvel or Wendy Pini are never gonna hire me. :D

But that comment does probably lead to where I ultimately want to go: to be able to tell a story with sequential art that I think looks decent. In black & white, bc coloring is a whole ‘nother THING that I’m not sure I want to get involved with. (This is a lie, I totally want to be amazing at coloring, but I feel it’s very far above my pay grade and possibly my real interests right now. I would also like to be a brilliant portrait artist, and able to doodle off a charming caricature that pleases the recipient. It’s not much to ask, right?) And unfortunately for me, my personal ground floor for ‘looks decent’ is…perhaps unreasonably high.

I think my current level of ability, though, is close enough to decent (even by my personal standards) that if I do this project, if I really actually put the time in, I might get there. I’ll get a lot closer, anyway.

wow, i really cannot find ANY of my earlier portraiture or anything online right now to show you where i was. OH NO WAIT THANK YOU DEVIANTART! these are all between literally decades old, and merely ALMOST multiple decades old, and some of them are pretty good, i think :)