Anatomy of Style: Fall 2021

This fall I took Anatomy of Style with Patrick Jones, an artist known for his fantasy oil paintings. At the start of the course he greeted us with an orientation video about our drawing materials: how to sharpen a charcoal pencil, how to prepare a charcoal stick for drawing, the best grip for these tools, etc. At the time I wondered, “Everyone seems to be working digitally these days. Is there a good reason for getting my hands dirty?” As it turns out, there’s a lot to be said for making a mess and forgoing the convenience of layers and Ctrl+Z.

In contrast to the analytical approaches covered in previous semesters, Patrick’s approach to the human form prioritizes feeling and storytelling, finding rhythm and gesture, and using creative interpretation to develop your personal artistic voice.

Throughout his lectures, he emphasized that one of the biggest challenges for representational artists is to balance gesture and structure when depicting the human body. Too much focus on structure results in lifeless drawings (“structure hell”). Too much focus on gesture and you lose form and solidity (“gesture hell”). Rendering offers its own pitfalls: the artist that descends into “render hell” produces work that manages to look both laboured and lost.

One of the things I’ve noticed in my online art studies is the high attrition rate. Every class seems to have one or more lurkers that never submit work for feedback. I find this rather baffling because personalized feedback is the biggest benefit of enrolling in CGMA courses. The submission rate for final assignments seems to average around 50% (the most engaging teachers manage to get this up to 75%).

I’m sure the messiness of life plays its part: studies will take a back seat when work or family responsibilities arise. But I also wonder if there’s another reason. The Renaissance gave us great art heroes like Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Artemisia. But those same heroes gave rise to the myth of artistic genius: the idea that you’ve either got it or you don’t. It’s a harmful idea that leads many aspiring artists to make unhealthy comparisons and to struggle with self-doubt. I see a lot of empathetic teachers playing coach and therapist to assuage their students’ doubts.

Getting back to dirty hands. One of the virtues of charcoal drawing is that a viewer can look at the restatements (pentimento) and feel the journey that the artist undertook. One of Patrick’s sayings that resonated for me is, “Every line is a thought.” It’s a simple but powerful idea that reminds me to be decisive when I put a mark down, but also to have the courage to accept my mistakes. To err is human, after all. Contrary to the myth of the artistic genius, art isn’t about perfection, a thing that springs from a genius’s mind fully formed. It’s fundamentally about connecting and relating to another human mind.

Analytical Figure Drawing, Production Anatomy: Summer 2021

I took two anatomy courses over the summer: Analytical Figure Drawing with Ron Lemen and Production Anatomy with Michael Falzon. It was a lot of work, but I think I benefitted from studying anatomy in 2D and 3D.

Analytical Figure Drawing was intense. Over 8 weeks, Ron laid out a structural shorthand approach to the human form. Each week we submitted 25 armature drawings and 5 detailed anatomical analyses. Despite the heavy workload, we barely scraped the surface of artistic anatomy and Ron made it clear that if we wanted to achieve competence it would take years of study.

Beyond the anatomy, Ron’s honest and supportive feedback pointed out gaps in my understanding of perspective. Although I know the rules of linear perspective, I had difficulty orienting limbs in space. To address this I’ll need to make a commitment to practicing the fundamentals.

Production Anatomy was less intense. Most of the class was devoted to one sculpt, starting from a simple block out and adding a new body part each week. Christian Bull’s lectures were packed with content, teaching anatomy by making reference to diagrams, live models, master artworks, and sculpting demos.

A theme emerged in Michael’s weekly review of my homework: my sculpts often lacked volume and contrast of forms (a common beginner mistake). I think the way for me to tackle this is: 1) tons of mileage, 2) consciously striving to exaggerate the forms, 3) to reconceptualize the human form in terms of primitive volumes, and 4) to create real world sculpts. 1, 2 and 3 are strategies that should also help with drawing, and I plan to do some clay sculpting in the near future.

In the last week of the course, we were challenged to do a speed sculpt from memory. It was a great exercise that revealed the limits of my knowledge. I think this was my biggest takeaway from the course: find ways to shine a light on your ignorance. Run towards your difficulties. Fail fast, fail better.

ZBrush for Concept and Iteration: Spring 2021

The other course I took this spring was ZBrush for Concept and Iteration, taught by Michael Pavlovich. Over 6 weeks, I received a crash course on ZBrush. But beyond learning about Zbrush, seeing Michael’s approach to problem solving and his quick-and-dirty solutions to concept sculpting proved just as invaluable.

During the course, we had complete freedom to model whatever we wanted. One of my peers was an archaeologist who modeled various historical sites, which was pretty cool to see.

Each week we learned new skills that allowed us to take our concept sculpts further.

At the start of the course, to get the ball rolling, I decided to do a mash-up of Robinhood with aquatic creatures. Taking inspiration from Little John, Friar Tuck and the Sheriff of Nottingham I ended up with three different character types.

Little John meets whale shark.

The Sheriff as a gulper eel.

Friar Tuck meets mudskipper.

In Week 2, I decided to take the Friar Tuck character further and I did some iterations, playing around with the head shape and arms.

Various heads inspired by mudskippers, catfish, piranhas and goldfish.

The goldfish headed version felt the most quirky and fun, so I selected him for refinement. In week 3, I developed the backstory that he was an angry sea creature out to get revenge against land dwellers for ruining his home with plastic waste.

Landsuit apparatus and a double-ended toothbrush. Mr. Goldfish has a very particular set of skills.

Mr. Goldfish stores fresh water in discarded milk jugs and water bottles.

In subsequent weeks, I took inspiration from the Roman gladiator type known as the Retiarius (net and trident) and I equipped him with a spaghetti spoon and a loincloth. Along the way, my wife dubbed him Bubbles.

There’s still plenty more work to be done on Bubbles. I plan to add scales, put him in a dynamic pose, apply some materials in Substance Painter, and do a proper render. This should keep me busy until the next semester begins in July.

For the summer, I’ve doubled up on anatomy courses tackling it from both 2D and 3D perspectives. With 2D I think I’ll get lots of mileage and the opportunity to practice things like gesture. With 3D, I think I’ll get more of an opportunity to do a deep dive and understand anatomy in the round.

Intro to Perspective: Spring 2021

This spring I enrolled in two foundational CGMA courses: Intro to Perspective and ZBrush for Concept and Iteration. The workload was heavy but I learned a lot. Perspective proved to be quite challenging, although in hindsight many of the challenges were self-created. My perfectionism (i.e. fear of making mistakes) emerged again; this time in the slavish application of perspective rules, which made the process painfully slow and resulted in stilted, lifeless drawings.

Reykjavik in winter. Sterile and lifeless.

Dr. Haber’s office from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven. Clinical.

The Sic Mundus Time Machine from Dark. An endless loop of shift-clicking…

Midway through the course, I realized I wasn’t having much fun. To keep up my motivation I decided that I needed to come up with interesting ideas, and that I should be telling some kind of story with my images.

For week 4, the assignment brief was to incorporate inclined planes and stairs in a two point perspective drawing. I spent some time brainstorming and came up with the idea of stair trucks for first class passengers versus everybody else.

First class and “Use at your own risk” class. Step right up!

One of the challenges of staging the stair truck scene was dealing with the foreshortening of the 747 wing. Not sure of how to solve the problem on paper, I found a Sketchfab model of a 747 and rotated it to the desired angle. Somehow this felt like cheating, but my instructor, Scott Caple, assured me that no art crime had been committed and that artists have been using technological aids for centuries (e.g. Vermeer and the camera obscura. See Tim’s Vermeer for a fascinating documentary on this subject).

In Week 5, the assignment brief was to compose a scene in 3 point perspective. After brainstorming, I came up with the idea of pollinators with flower dance partners engaged in a ballroom dance-a-thon (Check out the sordid and weird history of dance marathons from the 1920s and 1930s if you want an interesting read).

1-800-DANCE-TILL-THEY-DROP! Which couple will be the last ones left hovering?

This idea proved to be too ambitious. In hindsight, I should have recognized the warning signs when I couldn’t visualize the scene at the thumbnail stage. Having been given permission to use 3D models as an aid in the previous week, I decided that I would try to model my way out of the problem (i.e. build a ballroom and then “find” the scene by moving a camera around within the 3D model).

Colony 54. It’s got lots and lots of tables and chairs.

A lifeless ballroom. In hindsight, the colony’s collapse was inevitable.

And so I built a 3D model, moved the camera around, and then attempted to reconstruct the shot within a 3 point perspective system. In the end, I ran out of time and failed to complete the assignment. Looking back, I feel like I should have pushed through to get something I liked at the thumbnail stage. That said, if you have a complex scene a 3D model can definitely help solve complex perspective problems.

For week 6 the brief was to incorporate complex, organic forms into a drawing. Finding inspiration in Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, I decided to stage a scene with a lantern headed robot tending a Japanese garden. Unfortunately, following the thumbnail stage, I again fell into the trap of trying to be “correct” via the rigorous application of perspective. Another week, another stiff, unfinished drawing.

Week 6. Initial thumbnail and an unfinished super stiff drawing of a robot computing the precise number of Newtons required to crush a puny songbird.

In week 7, the assignment was to add value and lighting to one of our previous drawings. Here I departed from the curriculum and decided to soldier on with my concept from week 6. I reworked the scene by adding lanterns and incorporating a small Shinto shrine. I tried to give the robot a bit more life by adjusting its pose.

Week 7. Puny bird! I have you now! You will rue this day!

I wasn’t very happy with the drawing, so I decided to take a break from it and follow Scott’s suggestion of doing some studies of Hokusai’s woodblock prints.

Studies from Hokusai.

To emulate Hokusai, I had to vary my line width, and so I turned on tablet pressure sensitivity in Photoshop (which I had never used before). What a revelation! Drawing on the Cintiq suddenly felt like actual drawing! Returning to the scene, I drew in the foreground tree and found that I liked the sketchy line. I didn’t have enough time to complete the drawing for that week’s deadline, but I felt that things were moving in a good direction.

For Week 8, I did a reappraisal of my drawing and decided that although I liked the general idea, the robot wasn’t appealing and the composition felt too stilted. So I redesigned the robot and reworked the composition in a detailed rough drawing. In contrast to previous weeks, I decided to trust my own judgment instead of getting bogged down with “correctness” (although I did use perspective gridlines as an aid).

Rough reworking of the scene.

Released from the strictures of correctness, I felt freer to explore. The rough came together in an organic and enjoyable process, and after I felt like I had settled most of the compositional problems, I moved on to making a clean line drawing.

During this last stage, I fleshed out the finer details and applied what I had learned in Week 7 from doing the Hokusai studies. Fleshing out the details was pretty time-consuming, but by applying the lessons learned in previous weeks and from Dynamic Sketching, I was able to produce a final drawing that I felt happy with.

The semester is done, but I plan to continue the work by making small tweaks and doing a lighting pass on the drawing. Should be fun!