Started playing a bit of FFIX the other day. Vivi is too sweet.

Construction studies while working through Draw A Box. I remember these looking pretty intimidating with all of the different additional lines to measure out the form. Not as bad once you get into the groove. Nice to have some pattern matching, feels similar to programming, even! 🤘

From Walt Stanchfield's Gesture Drawing for Animation, a favorite around here:

It all starts with preparation, which is the “open sesame” of all genius. Even the geniuses admit it’s 99% hard work and 1% genius.

In context, this is talking about capturing "The Essence" of an image. For the layman to a craft, it's what they would imagine is most of the work going into the piece. The emotion, the story, the idea.

Starting to learn drawing a few years ago, I thought ideas would be the hard part. Turned out that I had ideas pouring out of my ears! Enough so that I couldn't keep up with them all.

And so the idea is the easy part. Most of the time is spent in the trenches, working with craft.

A gesture is accomplished through a complex array of skills working in tandem: composition, perspective, anatomy, construction, expression, draftsmanship, inking, shading, and value. And each of those are sophistications unto itself.

This is, mostly, relieving. Craft can be improved, and craft is much more sustainable to work at over a long stretch of time. I find craft to be grounding; it's the thing that aligns you with the beauty of it all, and it's the way we become the image, the piece, and so on.

I write this as I'm slowing the pace of output on this ol' dot com so I can spend more time learning and honing craft. I'm trading finished works for etude books and study material. It's a quiet learning sabbatical, with occasional transmissions from the underground where the roots are being laid. With time, some nice fruit should bloom from it. But until then, on with craft.

Giving my +1 for Marco Bucci's Understanding & Painting The Head! Thorough without being bogged down in the weeds, classic Bucci teaching. Learned a lot from it!

Western music is founded on a phenomena in nature. Certain relationships between frequencies create a harmony, a certain sweetness, where there is little dissonance. Art seems to have a similar counterpart in composition through the Golden Ratio.

I've been having fun crawling through the One Perfect Shot Twitter account to find film screens of this composition principle in action. A few of my favorites below:

A farewell to Boulder 👋

There's this park near our new place that has these miniature mountains for the dogs to climb. Lucy loves them!

A series of studies done as part of Jeremy Vickery's Painting Light course.

One fellow student left a note saying that the course felt a little like the draw the owl meme. There's some truth to that — for the most part, Jeremy is providing a set of photos, telling you what sort of aspects of light to look for, and then having you take a jab at it on your own.

I was having this conversation recently where I shared that, looking back, great teachers do a lot for their students. But I think the benefit many people are really looking for is permission to do a project, and holding a container for doing the work. On the surface, that's a low bar. In practice, though, it's highly valuable and not so simple to do.

The drop into the deep end of observation is part of the strength here. By starting in observation, it's possible to paint anything you see. From there, then technique, construction, lighting principles, etc. can help streamline that process and lend to further creation from imagination.

The biggest "Aha" for me was in the images above and below. Both highly reflective material, I assumed they were advanced subjects. At the end of the day, though, once you sit down and really observe what you're seeing, there's not much more you need to know or do. You simply draw whatever truth is in front of you.

More to do next year in the course! Excited to keep going. I've also added this to my handy-dandy page of learning resources.

Enjoying the breeze.

Been a while! I've missed the digital workflow.

*psyyy~*

It's been a while since I've shared something from the sketchbook!

The night-time desk.

Wahoo!

There's a piece I've been meaning to write about how Super Mario 64 was my medium for curiosity growing up. That running around in these worlds expanded my own, that taking to the sky in game made me curious as to what would happen if you flew into the skyboxes. What other discoveries could be made out there?

But, then again, maybe the painting says it all.

A scene from my walks with Lucy around our new neighborhood!

The bird out of the box!