bonus post to make up for missing several. I was doodling in photoshop. These are moon bears. They live on the moon and sing little songs all day that sound something like "loo loo loooo". Sometimes they wear fishbowls on their heads because they saw silly people walking around on the moon wearing them, so they thought it was the thing to do.
1 comment:
I absolutely love your color pallette on this image. It is so subtle and awesome!
One more thought on sketching. I haven't really emphasized enough how important it is to sketch from life, from photo reference and sketch other artists work.
When I drew comic books for a living i would have to pull whole scenes out of my head. Background. Foreground. Characters. Lighting. Composition. Camera angles. When I would get really busy for a couple of weeks I would loose my discipline and not sketch as much from life. The result was that it became impossible for me to make up scenes in my head. I found that my imagination literally needed to be fed on a regular basis by drawing from life or photoreference. I had to fill up my mental library of images, before i could generate and produce imaginary images of my own. So over the course of a couple of years i learned that the discipline of drawing from life every single day really improved my ability to draw from my imagination.
In art school I was taught that two things were wrong.
1. To draw from photo reference.
2. To draw from other artists work.
This actually held back my development as an artist for years. In contemporary art education - at least in 4 year colleges as opposed to 2 year trade schools like The Art Institute schools – the reason these two things were discouraged goes back over 100 years to the age of the impressionists. Impressionism was a reaction against the new technology of photography and the classical representational painting of the art academies. Impressionists were famously 'sunday painters.' Unschooled painters who had day jobs and painted on Sundays. This revolution against technology and academic realism lives on in colleges today.
I pontificate. Excuse me. But a little history is important here.
If you look at the artists coming out places like Ringling School, CalArts and a handful of other places you can see the history and rigor of the academy lives on in spite of the revolution and rejection of representitive art. But the greatest demand for the age old skills of draughstmanship, storytelling and composition is in technological industries like film making, animation, computer games and computer graphics.
What I see from skilled and successful artists in these fields is that they don't hesitate to borrow, study, steal from their predecessors and contemporaries. In fact their art is fecund with this rich environment of cross polinization. They seem to take more pride in their craft than in themselves.
So, long story short. You see an artists who's style you like/love want to emulate. Do so. Shame free. Copy them. Steal from them. Consume them. Eventually you will make what you learned from them all yours and someone will start stealing from you. And the cycle continues.
I should be charging you for this education shouldn't I.
;-)
Keep it up! Discipline is the seccret. Consistency and discipline.
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