Art: The vehicle to using less

For the past month, I’ve begunto return to schedules and routines. Following my own advice, I’ve started taken my time layering new things a few at a time, and at embarrassingly low standards to avoid scaring myself off. This is the state of my current workplace. I’ve continued to make things difficult for myself by not refining and letting myself become distracted. Author Peter Walsh suggests in his book It’s All Too Much! invites us to “imagine your ideal house” or what our ideal living situation/room looks like. Once we have done that, look around you and your rooms. Are those items a part of that ideal? If they are not, why are they there? With this in mind, I decided to look towards my art supplies and see what could be done.

 

The art shoe box makes another appearance and inspired me to return to my current art workflow, and gear. First, the actual drawings
I had quite a lot of pens and brushes that I have always held onto the idea of using because it would either blow my socks off, or I would be able to use it in a gift to blow someone else’s socks off. My socks are still on, and the pens are still underused. On top of that, they do not fit in with my ideal of travel ready art supplies.

With several friends, I’ve gotten myself involved in a number of projects that have been put on massive hiatus while relearning how to be a grad student. During the slower summer, it has become rather clear that my style has some pretty gaping difficulties.

I had not been practicing well.

I did not have an understanding of values, volume, proportions, or a developed mental schemata for the things that I was hoping to draw or combine or practice. This started when I was getting ready to draw some concept warriors for a village. I considered their background, fictional history and then realized I really wasn’t sure how to really draw armor. I researched. As I got started it seemed it would be so much easier if I could better understand the empty space under the armor. If I wanted to do that, I needed to know how the body worked. If I wanted to know how the body worked, I needed to have a better understanding of ratios and angles, and…

Quickly I realized what I really need to learn to do was learn to actually draw.

What I have been practicing with has mostly been 30 second or 1 minute figure drawings. A model is presented, and once time runs out you move to the next one. I needed to fail often, and get repetition down in a way that I wasn’t able to make myself do. Before drawing practice meant maybe getting around to 5 or 8 faces or hands. I need to fail much, much more than that.

This is one of the later pages. I’d like to think that there is some improvement and even if there isn’t I definitely feel more confident getting basic poses or shapes in. I had never practiced drawing legs before, let a lone at this speed, and it really changes things up.

What I also am going to start bringing into the mix is masters studies. This is highly recommended by Noah Bradley, one of the youngest artists for Magic the Gathering. Putting in 20 to 30 hours into a drawing in order to precisely copy and see what the master artist is trying to do is completely new to me, especially for that amount of time. On very few occasions have I spent more than 8 hours on a given drawing, and even more than the actual skill, the time requirement is going to be an upwards battle for me.

A while back I got a wacom tablet hoping to reduce down my other art supplies. This has been a difficult front for me. On one hand, yes I want to reduce down. Other the other hand, I want to make use of the resources I currently have. I hardly use brush pens, or colored pencils, and a few others so I have donated or given those to friends who will appreciate them more.

The rest fall into a category where I will try my best to use them up and just not replace them once they are depleted. Effectively, I don’t use color much at all. My drawings and what is quick and fun don’t require it. It’s much nicer to play with color and effects digitally, or with water color, not with pens or pencils. With that in mind, below are my safe pens and pencils.

The main change here is the middle mechanical pencils. I’d like to work on a work flow that is somewhere in between Noah Bradley and David Revoy, the author of Pepper and Carrot. As of now, my hand and mind just work better with traditional materials. I can create and mess up way faster. If something does emerge, it is much easier to get detailed on paper, and then just feed that semi complete work into Krita. Essentially, I would like to move myself to practicing solely with my blue leaded mechanical pencil. If a sketch jumps out at me, then I could do preliminary inking with the other pencils. I currently suck at doing inking and outlining well in digital and this saves me a bit of time. It also all happily fits into a pencil bag so that I can even consider the possibility of doing mobile art things more often.

If I was really serious and honest with myself…

And even more serious… This is probably all that I really would need. They are by far the most used pieces out of all of them, and I could still accomplish quite a bit.

Why go through all this trouble? Why not just draw stuff and be done with it?

I find especially with artistic ventures it is very easy to get pulled into owning a wide variety of pens and tools to do interesting things. This down sizing of supplies has really been both a way for me to practice streamlining and letting go, as much as it has been finding my own natural tendencies about what type of art I want to be focusing on. Having all these tools makes me feel guilty and shameful when I look at them and know that I could be working to get better at that technique or skill. I need to be honest with myself and recognize that I have not used many of my pens or other things for multiple years. I could do without having the ghosts of my art supplies shame me for the future years to come.