Third day

The day will be spent sketching and envisioning a few things so I don’t waste time modeling the wrong items.

I used to love drawing and art when I was a kid, but like with a lot of things I had to teach myself how to do a lot of the techniques because I was rushing ahead of what was instructed to kids at that time and in my particular school.

I used to learn a lot about drawing characters and shapes from copying sketches from comic books and drawing mountains and environments in the country side. This was before I was 10 years old, but I still to this day to have a deep appreciation for arts and its techniques.

To become a good artist, and to be able to draw whatever your imagination pushes through your pencils or brushes, you have to be able to draw what you see. From life or from reference. Understanding perspective and how the shape and size distorts over distance is also another key item you really can’t ignore.

Relying on references, you still need to go through the human anatomy and some basic animal anatomy to be able to represent believable characters on a piece of paper. Making them come alive and be dynamic is another chapter where you rely on such things as the line of beauty and foreshortening on living things in motion.

When you have mastered those principles, you should be able to draw just about anything using only line drawing and silhouettes.

But line drawings are not much if they are missing shade and lighting. Understanding lighting and how it affects the surroundings is another visual item that give you the depth in images. Soft shadows, hard shadows, dynamic occlusion, bounce light and also how various surfaces react to light and either reflect, refract or emit light.

When it comes to applying color to sketches or paintings, it is about hue, saturation and contrast basically. Understanding how to use compliments of colors, harmonies, warm and cool colors to represent the lighting in the scene properly. A lot of artwork is not about representing real life as accurately as possible, but to represent it with a particular palette and still make it interesting. Saturation and value to represent the depth and dynamics of the scene.

At this point you should be working on composition and laying out items in whatever you want to portray. The previous accumulation of skills and practices should then be put to use to fill it in and make the details, shapes, lighting and colors an interesting thing to look at.

The tools artist use has a huge voice in how things will finally look. Being a traditional artist setup with paints and pencils, to a digital artist with Photoshop and a Wacom tablet.

Like all creative processes, layering and high level rough concepts are essential to guide from concept to final form.

Such mentality does also apply to programming and making music. It is a lot of engineering with particular skills and heuristics that are needed to produce good quality.

Imagination produces visions, passion creates skill and discipline give you results.

Understand work and how techniques and education are their to maximize work produced over time. The more time you spend working and finding ways to optimize your work, you will find that absorbing creative techniques is a fun time that produces enriching skills and humbling appreciation for hard work.

Talent is an odd word, since it implies that certain individuals have an instinctual understanding for certain processes that short cuts the time needed to master a particular subject. I for one think it has a lot to do with instinctual | conditioned fear of experimenting. Your brain chemistry can of course push/pull in certain directions but for the most part, we work in the same ballpark. Where being comfortable with being childish and hitting all the damn buttons without being too caught up in conditioning reactions of fellow humans, will produce wonderful inquisitive human beings that pay attention to random details and give you new alternatives.

And today, I am going to experiment with my sketches and see if I can produce good visions on paper that accurately represent what I see in my head. I will have to reacquaint myself with some techniques to help with this, so about half the day is going to be spend practicing and working through instructions and tutorials to get rid of some rust and learn a few things.

On with it then!