Draw what you See Something that art students are very commonly told when they're just starting out is, draw what you see, not what you know. This advice is poorly worded, and bears some explanation. It's good advice, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. When we are beginners, we can't draw what we know, because we don't know anything, and everything we think we know is wrong. By telling us to draw what we see, our teachers are really trying to get us to stop drawing in glyphs like children, and instead to start observing the world around us. But when we start doing this, we will soon discover that it's impossible to draw what you see. There are two levels of translation in every drawing. First, what you see needs to be simplified down to something that is possible to reproduce in the medium you are using. Even if you are using a graphite pencil set, you don't have anywhere near the value range that exists in nature. Even if you have a full set of ...
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New Project: Folk Arcana This is going to be a system-agnostic TTRPG supplement of folk magic items, inspired by the collection in the Oxford Ashmolean Museum . These are actual artifacts that people in the UK discover inside their walls, while remodeling old houses. So here's the idea: it's not so much that magic items in D&D are overpowered (although, IMO, they are), it's that they're obsessed with power. Their conception of magic is very tactical-wargame-y; this sword gives you a combat bonus, that potion gives you some hit points back, that sort of thing. These items are going to be more like talismans you might buy from a local witch or druid; they are meant to function more as writing prompts than as power widgets in a video game. Each item has a narrative behind it, and a down-side to using it. When you use magic, you are tampering with forces beyond our ken. You can't, as they say, get the genie back in the bottle. Even minor magic should not be taken l...
Sketching the James Hook Co. from the Greenway in Boston Quickie from yesterday; a gray, warm, wet day. The kind of day that makes you just want to go to sleep. Due to the weather, I only penciled it on-location. I inked it at home with a dip pen, and some diluted Aurora fountain pen ink for gray wash. Paradoxically, it takes a lot of planning to make something look spontaneous. Loose is how it looks, not how it was done.
What's all this Gesture Drawing Stuff, Anyway? The internet is full of tutorials on gesture drawing, and many of them are rather good, so I won't repeat that work here. Instead, I hope to offer a lucid explanation of what gesture drawing actually is, which is much harder to find. I think learning it becomes much easier if you understand the target, and a lot of the explanations I have found online are confusing and muddled. Let's see if we can't rectify that. Motion is something humans had never actually seen in detail until Eadweard Muybridge published his book in the late 19th century. Muybridge was an early pioneer of high-speed photography, and his book contained frame-by-frame stills of athletes performing various feats. The painter Francis Bacon heavily referenced this book for the figures in his paintings. However, this sort of high-speed motion goes by too quickly to be observed with the naked eye, so we are not accustomed to seeing it frozen in time. Because o...
Doing Fast Perspective Setups in the Field Part 5: Tips and tricks And now, a few helpful facts. To find the center of a rectangle, you can draw an x from corner to corner. This also works if the rectangle is in perspective. This is how you find the perspective center of a rectangular object. You can extend this fact to place a series of regularly spaced objects, such as telephone poles, out to the horizon, in perspective. To freehand an ellipse, start by drawing the perspective rectangle that bounds the ellipse. Then draw an x to find the perspective center of the rectangle, and draw a plus through the center. Mark each arm of the x about a third of the way in from the edge, and now you have all the points you need to freehand the ellipse. This is a very useful technique for drawing things like car tires. Figures of equal height will intersect the horizon line at the same point on their bodies. So if the horizon line is at head level, it will intersect the heads of all the...
Doing Fast Perspective Setups in the Field Part 4: Variations on Single-Point A way to further simplify your life, is to use single-point perspective. This makes your life easier, because there is only one vanishing point, and it is on the paper, rather than off the paper. It's surprising how far you can get with single point perspective. You can jazz up a single point perspective a little bit by throwing in some vertical convergence. This is the kind of shot that would result if you pointed the camera mostly straight ahead, but then tilted it up slightly. Technically, it is a two-point perspective. There is one vanishing point directly in front of you, plus the zenith overhead. It's a perspective setup you almost never see, but I find it useful. A similar scheme that Paul Heaston often uses, is a single-point scheme where the vertical convergence is downward, towards the nadir, instead of upward, toward the zenith. This is the kind of shot you would get if you put an extrem...
Doing Fast Perspective Setups in the Field Part 3: The Grid Now, finally, we are going to talk about how to freehand a perspective grid in the field. I actually don't like to start a drawing with the grid on a blank page, because it is difficult to envision how things are going to come out. Instead, I freehand the most important object in the scene, then reverse engineer the grid to fit it, so I know that the grid will make the most important object come out the way I want. But before you do anything, start by placing the horizon line where you want the eye level to be. Don't place the horizon line too high. If the point of view is higher than the height of an average person, the picture will end up looking strange because we do not normally see the world fro this point of view. Unless you want it to look like a picture that was taken by a flying drone, place the horizon at eye level, or even lower. Placing it at waist level has a dramatic effect. Next, freehand the most impor...
Doing Fast Perspective Setups in the Field Part 2: Some concepts I would like to start by preemptively answering the question, "Why can't I just copy what I see?" If you are able to do it, then it's an option, but I have tried this in the past, and everything I draw comes out just a little bit wonky if I don't bother to reconcile it with a horizon line and vanishing points. Some people get around this using tools like a viewfinder that has a grid on it, but this leaves you unable to change anything you see. While sketching outdoors, I usually cannot stand exactly where I would like to, to get exactly the view I want, because that would have me standing in the middle of the street. It's also helpful to be able to rotate things, move the camera up or down for dramatic effect, widen the angle of view past what the human eye can actually see, or introduce fisheye effects. All these things become possible with a basic working knowledge of perspective. Despite ha...
Doing Fast Perspective Setups in the Field Part 1: Books and Equipment I want to begin this discussion by emphasizing that the methods I am about to present are not shortcuts to learning perspective, they are shortcuts to doing fast setups in the field. None of these methods will work if you don't have a good understanding of how perspective works. In order to gain understanding, you're going to have to spend some quality time with a good book, a long ruler, some big sheets of paper, and plenty of patience. There's no way around it. However, the time you'll waste erasing and redrawing everything that comes out wonky is orders of magnitude greater than the time it will take to learn perspective. My favorite perspective book is Perspective For Comic Book Artists by David Chelsea, which itself is a comic book. I recorded YouTube video explaining why I like this book so much. I also give a bunch of other book recommendations. You can find it here. As far ...
Which Way is the Uncanny Valley? An Internet brouhaha recently caught my eye, about a twitter thread posted by a musician named Supercomposite, who claims to have accidentally used image generating AI to generate the world's first digital cryptid. The image is of an older woman whom Supercomposite has named Loab. Supercomposite claims that this image is adjacent to a bunch of gory and disturbing images in the AI's understanding of the world, and that crossbreeding this image with other images produces images that are horrific, disturbing, desolate, and bleak. You can see the thread here. Leaving the hoopla about digital cryptids aside, as an artist, I'm more interested in the application of this to horror art. The uncanny valley is a movie term that describes the creepy effect that occurs when an animated character is rendered too realistically to be a cartoon, but not realistically enough to look real, with the result that it looks like an animated corpse. ...