I have officially decided to withdraw from CNM (college).
I've taken on a couple of new work projects... and earning money trumps art. ...For now. Thus, I've gone to my last art class for a few years.
A little sad, but necessary. ...Also, I learned that the class was, for the most part, superfluous. It was an excuse to draw on a regular basis. ...If I need to learn more in the future, I know that the best way to do that is to draw on a regular basis.
My first real attempt at ink (sumi brush, with a few details in fine brush):
... I kinda missed the point of rendering in ink, which is to say I was way too focused on the details (actually, the sketch before I started was actually pretty cool--I probably should have kept it in graphite).
The assignment here was to draw something tiny and capture the detail. I chose a gourd with a hole in it--you can (I hope) see the fibrous texture inside the hole. The cropped area I used as a source was about 1 inch wide: the paper is 24 inches wide, and there's a 3-inch border... so I was drawing at 18x life-size. It's charcoal, of course.
I'm actually somewhat pleased at the result... it was sucking hardcore before I was done, so I feel like I salvaged it. In fact, I might actually hang this one. This is a style I really like: realistic, but abstract.
Boo!
It's my first self-portrait ever, and my third contour drawing... so please be kind: the point was not to lift your pen off the paper, and to only look at what you were drawing periodically.
Aww, who am I kidding: you can laugh now.
My second one came out much better, I'm happy to say, though it's still countour, so that's not saying much. ; ) I had to turn that one in, so I can't post it until it's graded. Same story with the second countour drawing (more glasses).
I finished the self-portraits way early (like, 90 minutes?), so I asked if I could do a third. The teacher told me that was fine, but if I wanted to, I could draw another student. (!)
I happened to be sitting next to the nicest girl in the class, so I asked her with folded hands if she would mind being drawn while she worked. She agreed, and I did it. Three things to note:
Here's the source. I wasn't actualy working from the photo--this is my house, I was sitting in that location. That said, I did use the photo to get the composition, and I took four reference points from it (a prominent feature in each corner) to start with (so you'll notice the drawing is quite similar, compositionally). But that was it; I put the camera away after those four reference points (and you can tell because I was way off on a few key features, blah).
Here's the first step, after about four (!) hours:
Here's the second step, this was about six hours in. At this point, the light was completely different (it was almost night), so I did bring the camera out now and then to gauge light levels--making a few liberal changes (for example, making the desk and chair much lighter to be consistent with the "frame" of the near wall):
And here's the end result, after seven hours of work:
I expected this to take maybe four or five hours. Sheesh! Anyway, I learned to like charcoal more after this (it's all about the chamois, soft eraser, and torchon, not the charcoal stick). Still not something I think I'll use when I don't have to. : )
I am moderately pleased. I think it "works" as is, though I'm a little disappointed at how "flat" it ended up (in terms of visual depth--the distance to the far corner you see there is considerable, and this view makes it look a few paces away). I got a few angles grossly wrong (the table that the TV is on, for example, should have been more foreshortened), and a couple of other proportions are off... I thought I knew how delicate perspective was, but this really taught me the effect of moving my head just an inch or two. It's one of those things that you don't really "get" until you work on something from life with serious depth.
Anyway, the point is, I actually learned a few things from doing this drawing. That's all to the good. So I don't much care that this isn't a drawing that you would want hanging in your house. ; ) It was an experience.
I spent about four hours today sketching.
Not drawing, mind you. Sketching. In fact, I would say that today, I learned the difference between the two, and I am here to tell you: sketching is harder than drawing.
This is, of course, counter-intuitive. One would think that the rapid nature of sketching loans itself to greater sloppiness, and therefore the results are less prone to overt error. I can't exactly say that "the opposite is true", but close enough! In drawing, you are rendering what you see. I'm reasonably capable of doing that. In sketching, you're trying to... I don't really know... capture... or interpret what you see.
Truth be told, I'm working from a book called "Life Drawing", which, in addition to being a suitable substitute for soft porn, seems to be an excellent guide to learning the art of sketching. The very first exercise (apart from making lines on the paper to "get a feel for it", uh-huh) is something they call "rhythm and curve". I spent about two hours on that one alone... and each attempt is supposed to take three minutes. (Granted, I made about 20 attempts, but I was obviously still going over.) The idea is to capture a figure in as few curves (no S-curves) as possible.
This is much (much) harder than it sounds! I finally got it "right" after much tribulation. The bad news, aside from the time it took, is that it got me... frustrated. I was literally growling and rolling my eyes and heaving big sighs and coming this --> <-- close to snapping at family members for no good reason.
I have noticed that my response to frustration is one of two things: walk away and never think about it again, or dig a trench and refuse to leave until the problem is solved. I (clearly) chose the latter... and in this case (indeed, most cases), I am glad I did. I cannot claim that anything I ended up drawing was worth keeping (thus, no link to flickr or the like)... The second exercise, which I was all to happy to switch to, was "circling"... reducing everything to the most basic shapes (usually circles), just to get the placement and proportions right. That I did much better at, and rather enjoyed... though I must admit, I'm more of a "tone" guy than a "line" guy, and often found myself circling areas of shadow rather than shapes, which the exercise called for.
After that, I took a moment to browse back through my older stuff. Instead of seeming "somehow wrong", the errors seemed much clearer: the eye in this profile was too far forward and too small; the left side of that face was drawn too wide... things like that.
All this definitely put me in a drawing mood, and I spent the remainder of the day attempting to make sketches of whatever possible, wherever possible. ...Most of them while finishing off Season 2 of Star Gate: SG1. And there I have another observation: trying to sketch from television is really hard. The whole "MTV" thing is too prevalent: it is very, very, very difficult to get enough usable information about a subject in a second or less... even if they keep cutting back to it periodically--the other shots interfere with one's memory. This didn't keep me from trying, however... and nothing good (visually) came of it. But I can say that I was enjoying myself at that point. As with going through old sketches, I could "see" what was wrong, and had at least some idea of how to correct them--often failing at that, but it still felt like I was making progress.
...And when the missus stepped out to go to the bathroom, the 'pause' allowed me to do some longer (albeit "short", in the vocabulary of sketching--3 minutes, tops) studies. And those tended to suck far less.
The most significant thing to come out of this is that I feel like I've tripped some switch in my head: it feels to me like becoming "an artist", whatever that means, is now inevitable. I'm seeing things differently, and drawing (sketching?) is no longer arduous, but intriguing. Almost addictive.
That, and I burned through probably 40 pages of sketchbooks, and dulled four pencils at least three times each. : )
Drawing is not my only obsesssion at the moment. On Thursday (I was home sick), I wrote a new Rails application for my role-playing game. That was fun. And today I watched a video on RSpec for test-driven development, which I feel like I will be adopting this month, painful as that will be. In my spare time, I'm learning "Contact Sign", which is like a watered-down version of American Sign Language, and I am really enjoying that. I've tried to learn sign at least three times before, but this time it seems to really be clicking. ...I also picked up some audio courses for Spanish (it's about time to learn the damn language, which I actually have some hope of using around here)... AND I've written two new songs. ...Well... one new song, and some scaffolding for a second, which needs major revision. Lastly, I've ripped through more than half of the "Psytrance" collection I recently acquired... several days worth of music, in all: I'm trying to whittle it down to the 1/8th that doesn't suck. : )
In short, keeping very busy. ...But really enjoying myself, on the whole.
Introspective week.
[Now Playing: "Square Lamp" by esem... damn, what a fine track this is.]
I've been thinking a lot this week. About work, about quality, about ruby, about miniatures, about drawing... the whole shebang.
Work: I want to write more code. That's the long and the short of it. I'm weak at detail-oriented stuff, and I'm good at algorithms and problem-solving: I should be writing more code. I asked my boss about this today, and he supports the idea; we'll see where that goes. (To be honest, my experiences with such requests are usually taken quite seriously.)
Quality: I went to a local conference regarding the Bladridge criteria yesterday. I rather enjoyed it, though I would argue that I didn't learn anything, really. Rather, it was great idea-fodder, and allowed me some "blocked time" to contemplate how to make use of the criteria at work. ...I also considered working on a "personal criteria" for self-improvement.
Ruby: As I've mentioned, I've been pushing for it at work. There has been surprising support for it, and the lead programmer just asked me to try writing a web-page for a new project using ruby. ...My reflex was to say "no", because I wanted more time to learn it and discover best practices, but I think working on it would be an excellent way to explore the language. The first thing I went looking for was a DBASE-format library... and the first page I stumbled upon was an argument of why the writer had switched from ruby to python. ...And it's a recent article; a well-informed one. His reason, of course, was the robustness of the Py libraries out there.
Of course, this is something that will change with time. ...Or will it? ...I wonder if ruby will really be the last popular language. (Errr... last to rise to power, anyway.) I'm not terribly willing to write new libraries that are missing... I wonder if those who are willing are a dying breed. With the vast libraries available for Java and C++ on the low-end, and Perl and Python on the high-end... It will take a massive force of will to build ruby up to that level. I shudder to think how insurmountable an obstacle that will be for the languages of tomorrow.
Of course, MS has the weight to throw .NET out there, and the world will eat it. (Thank you, MaSter, may I have another?) But that's an exception.
Perhaps that's why DSL's are so popular these days... it's only in the small world of Doman-Specific problem sets that new languages have the ability to emerge.
Of course, the idea of "Very High Level Languages" may be the next big thing. Frameworks on steroids: programming languages built on today's languages. Imagine Rails, but without DHH's "convention over configuration" as a limitation: a meta-language smart enough to look at your database and figure out the schema.
Perhaps I've been drinking the MS water too much lately, since that sounds like "Visual Rails" to me.
Miniatures: Yes. Since playing miniatures with my son a few weeks ago, I've been contemplating building up my own collection. A lot. ...Obessing, really. I've decided to beef up my collection of Star Wars driod miniatures, and for D&D, I'm considering a "Devils and Blues" pool of minis... "blues" being Blue dragons. (The teams in D&D, called "Warbands", are alignment-specific, and blue dragons are LE, like Devils.) ...I'm also big on druids and constructs... but I can't quite come up with a Warband concept that seems solid enough to warrant investing in.
Strangely, my wife doesn't seem disturbed by this, and suggested I just build a collection over time, $20 a month or so. [shrug] I guess I will.
...I tried to stay the urge by installing Neverwinter Nights... but found it didn't scratch the itch.
Drawing: Okay, not much to say here. I've just thought about it a lot, lately. ...I haven't actually drawn much, however. ..A little. Enough to claim "I haven't stopped". But still, it's one of those frustrating situations where you know you should stop thinking and start doing... but something stops you. A Human curse.
For those of you who aren't watching my Flickr stream, please note that I've recently uploaded a bunch of sketches. I'm moderately proud of them.
I plan to put more up, as I do them.
