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On art blocks and other pencil-related disasters
12 years ago
So one more public service journal after the gloriously sassy leaving-FA joke post.
Art blocks are the moments where drawing becomes such a shitty activity that not-drawing becomes the nicer alternative. Pretty much every artist has hit one, at some point, they are a bit of a midlife crisis, usually a temporary one (unless you also got a nice tendonitis to pair it up, but that's another story) but definitely a traumatic experience.
And an interesting one, so here's my take on it.
First of all what can make drawing a chore? There is a point where a gifted person (or one like me, who couldn't draw for shit) starts learning about drawing, and the very first months are absolutely great, you improve WEEKLY, and it seems obvious that, with enough time, you will be just-as-good as that dude you saw in that artbook. On top of this improvement-high there is the biggest human lie ever, the terrifying TIME WILL MAKE EVERYTHING BETTER NO MATTER WHAT(1) that supports the delusion that, without exception, sheer work and dedication will make you just THAT good.
At some point, this world of endless hope will met the world of brain chemistry and finite fuck, and you will stop improving weekly. In fact, you will improve monthly, and then yearly, and then you'll stop. In its wise administration of his neurons your brain has roughly fixed the amount of space destined to drag a pencil over a piece of paper because otherwise it would overwrite the all-important information on how to hunt mammoth (2).
Unknown to you this phase of greatness has also set in stone some of the shittiest errors you will do for the rest of your artistic career. In my case: lack of sensibility for proportions, general deficiency drawing mechanical shit. The bundle of mistakes and characteristics of your drawing will slowly sink down into muscle memory (3).
Once your natural improvement is gone and dead, you have a certain span of artificial improvements. This means that, after you have drawn pushed by your instincts, you review your drawing with a technical eye and single out the mistakes: this hand is too small, this pose is bullshit, this car looks like cow poop. And you will fix them (or sigh and just let them go) using no longer your instinct, but your reasoning and the rules you remember at a conscious level: the golden rule, the seven heads rule, the car-has-4-wheels-rule, the anatomy rules, the perspective rules, the Rob Liefeld Rule(4).
Drawing becomes split between a phase of carefree sketching and one of analytical correction, and this is where the art block starts to loom in the horizon. Analysis is no longer pushed by your fun, like sketching is, it's pushed by hubris and the desire of mastery: the will to be a good artist and to please the people around you.
Art block happens when the analysis phase starts to conflict with the sketching phase.
The main reason i found for this is entering in contact with other better artists. Better artists have better sketching phases that you do, thus they spend less time in the analytical phase, can produce quick sketches that utterly humiliate your art, and are richer than you and more loved. Remember that thing about proportions of the pecs you have to fix after every sketch? Well, that guy doesn't do that mistake at all. In fact his sketches naturally follow the golder rule and look magnificent, yours don't. It get even more maddening when the other artist can do seemingly terrible mistakes that end up looking stylish amazing and great: learning to do great mistakes is fucking impossible.
At this point the natural reaction is to fix your sketching phase, right? Study more, be more careful with what you do, do page after page of exercise. And you suddenly notice that your style is a mule who steadily refuses to bulge unless extreme unreasonable dedication(5): you're no longer in control, your muscle memory is, your drawing skill is now officially in the back side of a backstab. You read infinite critiques, you study infinite pages and tutorials, but you don't really improve, in fact, you feel STUPID. "Man, everything must be proportioned 2/5 of this length how can i NOT do that?"
You can no longer enter the "zone" of happy sketching, because you are concerned of your sketch result, you start correcting while you draw the first outlines, and now when you draw you spend 5 minutes struggling, and the usual 25 correcting, then 30 more for even MOAR correction. Drawing is suddenly the shittiest thing you do all day: Congratulations, you have an art block!
So, how do you exit an art block? There are many ways, here are some:
The Fight Club Ending: at some point you will stop caring. The death of your dream of being the next magnificent concept artist just goes, and you settle on being a skilled worker. You suddenly realize somebody had to model and design Deus Ex's toilets, and there is a place for you waiting with open arms. You can still sketch as a hobby. This may feel like a depressing ending but it's not, because DX toilets were absolutely fantastic and a pivot point of the "realistic feeling" of that game (so much to be famous). There would be no houses without the seemingly unimportant bricks, and this is true for every game, movie, or illustrated series out there. Also: in this ending you get a paycheck.
The Pinky and the Brain ending: you stop drawing for 6 months, then resume having forgotten most of your skills, and you quickly retrain your brain to sketch in a different way. This will likely not work, none of your plans really works anyways, but who cares? There is a new one every week and even if they all fail, you're kinda cool with it because THIS WEEK, this week i have a new magnificent system to try. Which I'm sure it will work. This time.
The Indie ending: you just realize it's worth capitalizing on what good comes out of your sketching phase. Stop doing cartoon stuff if you're an academic realist, or the other way around, extremize your style and stop worrying about general correctness: with some luck it's something that catches good attention, otherwise nobody but a tiny niche will notice, but who cares? You're an indie. You end up accepting you are part of the noise in the art world not a bright star, but noise avoids things being blank and dull. Look at all the porn in your folder, notice that extreme weird sketch that's your most err... used piece? Uniqueness triumphs over quality all the time.
The Fox 'n Grapes ending: you start finding flaws in other artist works, ending up infecting them with the same destructive process that killed your art: but in common pain there is half a pleasure. Also you stop drawing for good, and you're also richer and better for it, cuz art sucks and makes you poor, now you have a job that leaves you actual free time, and a happy family, you parents who looked at you with the utmost disgust now applaud you for your beautiful clean house that you could actually purchase.
The Holy Grail ending: you daily exercises in the last 6 months worked. Holy fucking shit unbelievable. You start recording speedpaints on youtube, and sketch awesome stuff all the time in the hundred sketchbooks you have. You art career is in fact unavoidable: that dinner party where every friend of yours tried to not be fully invisible to that Disney talent scout? He's actually talked to YOU, because he watches YOUR BLOG, because HE LOVES YOUR ART. He's also big, hunky and gay: the next day you removed your porn from FA because of the contract you signed. You can give a big pat on your back because you're the 1 in 100 predicted by the laws of probability. The universe and a golden sun smiles on you... and i sincerely hope you die in many fires.
(1) Also known as: The myth of experience points.
(2) Until the moment of your death, mammoth hunting will be the area your brain is most proud of.
(3) And then you'll call that "style"
(4) "Clients pay me 300$ at commissions, like fuck I'm gonna waste time improving. Here's another commission! gimme 300$ bitches."
(5) Hidden unreasonable dedication is the first ingredient in anything that feels magical.
"That guy can make a rabbit come out of an hat"... oooh magical
"that guy spent 5000 hours practicing how to make it look like a rabbit comes out of his hat"... oh shit does he have a life?
Keep that in mind the next time you see a speedpainter that can seemingly make a painting out of 5 brush strokes.
Art blocks are the moments where drawing becomes such a shitty activity that not-drawing becomes the nicer alternative. Pretty much every artist has hit one, at some point, they are a bit of a midlife crisis, usually a temporary one (unless you also got a nice tendonitis to pair it up, but that's another story) but definitely a traumatic experience.
And an interesting one, so here's my take on it.
First of all what can make drawing a chore? There is a point where a gifted person (or one like me, who couldn't draw for shit) starts learning about drawing, and the very first months are absolutely great, you improve WEEKLY, and it seems obvious that, with enough time, you will be just-as-good as that dude you saw in that artbook. On top of this improvement-high there is the biggest human lie ever, the terrifying TIME WILL MAKE EVERYTHING BETTER NO MATTER WHAT(1) that supports the delusion that, without exception, sheer work and dedication will make you just THAT good.
At some point, this world of endless hope will met the world of brain chemistry and finite fuck, and you will stop improving weekly. In fact, you will improve monthly, and then yearly, and then you'll stop. In its wise administration of his neurons your brain has roughly fixed the amount of space destined to drag a pencil over a piece of paper because otherwise it would overwrite the all-important information on how to hunt mammoth (2).
Unknown to you this phase of greatness has also set in stone some of the shittiest errors you will do for the rest of your artistic career. In my case: lack of sensibility for proportions, general deficiency drawing mechanical shit. The bundle of mistakes and characteristics of your drawing will slowly sink down into muscle memory (3).
Once your natural improvement is gone and dead, you have a certain span of artificial improvements. This means that, after you have drawn pushed by your instincts, you review your drawing with a technical eye and single out the mistakes: this hand is too small, this pose is bullshit, this car looks like cow poop. And you will fix them (or sigh and just let them go) using no longer your instinct, but your reasoning and the rules you remember at a conscious level: the golden rule, the seven heads rule, the car-has-4-wheels-rule, the anatomy rules, the perspective rules, the Rob Liefeld Rule(4).
Drawing becomes split between a phase of carefree sketching and one of analytical correction, and this is where the art block starts to loom in the horizon. Analysis is no longer pushed by your fun, like sketching is, it's pushed by hubris and the desire of mastery: the will to be a good artist and to please the people around you.
Art block happens when the analysis phase starts to conflict with the sketching phase.
The main reason i found for this is entering in contact with other better artists. Better artists have better sketching phases that you do, thus they spend less time in the analytical phase, can produce quick sketches that utterly humiliate your art, and are richer than you and more loved. Remember that thing about proportions of the pecs you have to fix after every sketch? Well, that guy doesn't do that mistake at all. In fact his sketches naturally follow the golder rule and look magnificent, yours don't. It get even more maddening when the other artist can do seemingly terrible mistakes that end up looking stylish amazing and great: learning to do great mistakes is fucking impossible.
At this point the natural reaction is to fix your sketching phase, right? Study more, be more careful with what you do, do page after page of exercise. And you suddenly notice that your style is a mule who steadily refuses to bulge unless extreme unreasonable dedication(5): you're no longer in control, your muscle memory is, your drawing skill is now officially in the back side of a backstab. You read infinite critiques, you study infinite pages and tutorials, but you don't really improve, in fact, you feel STUPID. "Man, everything must be proportioned 2/5 of this length how can i NOT do that?"
You can no longer enter the "zone" of happy sketching, because you are concerned of your sketch result, you start correcting while you draw the first outlines, and now when you draw you spend 5 minutes struggling, and the usual 25 correcting, then 30 more for even MOAR correction. Drawing is suddenly the shittiest thing you do all day: Congratulations, you have an art block!
So, how do you exit an art block? There are many ways, here are some:
The Fight Club Ending: at some point you will stop caring. The death of your dream of being the next magnificent concept artist just goes, and you settle on being a skilled worker. You suddenly realize somebody had to model and design Deus Ex's toilets, and there is a place for you waiting with open arms. You can still sketch as a hobby. This may feel like a depressing ending but it's not, because DX toilets were absolutely fantastic and a pivot point of the "realistic feeling" of that game (so much to be famous). There would be no houses without the seemingly unimportant bricks, and this is true for every game, movie, or illustrated series out there. Also: in this ending you get a paycheck.
The Pinky and the Brain ending: you stop drawing for 6 months, then resume having forgotten most of your skills, and you quickly retrain your brain to sketch in a different way. This will likely not work, none of your plans really works anyways, but who cares? There is a new one every week and even if they all fail, you're kinda cool with it because THIS WEEK, this week i have a new magnificent system to try. Which I'm sure it will work. This time.
The Indie ending: you just realize it's worth capitalizing on what good comes out of your sketching phase. Stop doing cartoon stuff if you're an academic realist, or the other way around, extremize your style and stop worrying about general correctness: with some luck it's something that catches good attention, otherwise nobody but a tiny niche will notice, but who cares? You're an indie. You end up accepting you are part of the noise in the art world not a bright star, but noise avoids things being blank and dull. Look at all the porn in your folder, notice that extreme weird sketch that's your most err... used piece? Uniqueness triumphs over quality all the time.
The Fox 'n Grapes ending: you start finding flaws in other artist works, ending up infecting them with the same destructive process that killed your art: but in common pain there is half a pleasure. Also you stop drawing for good, and you're also richer and better for it, cuz art sucks and makes you poor, now you have a job that leaves you actual free time, and a happy family, you parents who looked at you with the utmost disgust now applaud you for your beautiful clean house that you could actually purchase.
The Holy Grail ending: you daily exercises in the last 6 months worked. Holy fucking shit unbelievable. You start recording speedpaints on youtube, and sketch awesome stuff all the time in the hundred sketchbooks you have. You art career is in fact unavoidable: that dinner party where every friend of yours tried to not be fully invisible to that Disney talent scout? He's actually talked to YOU, because he watches YOUR BLOG, because HE LOVES YOUR ART. He's also big, hunky and gay: the next day you removed your porn from FA because of the contract you signed. You can give a big pat on your back because you're the 1 in 100 predicted by the laws of probability. The universe and a golden sun smiles on you... and i sincerely hope you die in many fires.
(1) Also known as: The myth of experience points.
(2) Until the moment of your death, mammoth hunting will be the area your brain is most proud of.
(3) And then you'll call that "style"
(4) "Clients pay me 300$ at commissions, like fuck I'm gonna waste time improving. Here's another commission! gimme 300$ bitches."
(5) Hidden unreasonable dedication is the first ingredient in anything that feels magical.
"That guy can make a rabbit come out of an hat"... oooh magical
"that guy spent 5000 hours practicing how to make it look like a rabbit comes out of his hat"... oh shit does he have a life?
Keep that in mind the next time you see a speedpainter that can seemingly make a painting out of 5 brush strokes.
Looks at topic, goes pale and snorts "WHA, dem FA Admins are blocking art now?"
reads journal, turns beet red and curses the damn drama of the last few days that seem to get to his head by now.
Also, make it way shorter: but that's true for everything i write.
currently on a an artist block right now XD
im going for the Pinky and the Brain ending!!
People have always asked me how I draw so well.
I always tell them. I don't. I just do it.
To more accurate. I scribble on the paper until the lines form something I like.
And when they say I'm being a smart ass, I have to tell them, I've been drawing since I was 9 years old. >_>
I mean...jee wiz.
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3958074/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3958082/
It's like...hm, I could do that, I've I wanted to...but...hey...this... XP
And honestly. In the process to now, I think I've lost the touch to a certain "style" I had before.
Well, fuck...
But the point of this post is really: this is what leads to a unhappy drawing activity (in my opinion), so beware when you start obsessing over correctness and people shouting what to do.
I'm trying to find a balance inbetween improvement and "fun" myself ^^
I don't strive to get a house, i strive to live like a nomad.
Great journal by the way! I guess i didn't mention that in my previous post :\
I wanna keep it, thank you sir, this is just epic *-*
Trying to create comics that could get me picked up by a publisher, editor, or writer is hard enough.
I've found that my own thought patterns ended up being more than relatable to your very deconstruction and analysis of thought.
I write in fits and starts - I'll churn out an almost novel-length iceberg divided into manageable subcontinents, then type nothing of consequence for a year or two. A bad habit, that, and I desperately need to break it.
Some suggest writing snippets of shtuff daily, but there are some days where I can't be arsed to put paws to keyboard for anything more meaningful than blowing away (or hack-slashing) Helpless Minions of Simulated Evil©. And sometimes not even that; 12-hour worknights will do that to you.
Conversely, I have no intention of being a professional writer.
But that stopped making sense years ago. Now I just have my own lazy butt to blame.
The crux though, with any creative endeavor, is that the fun must be the process (writing, drawing), not the result.
So if you're an average furry porn artist, you are ranked #5000 of 10000. If you are an average furry artist, you're ranked #50000 of #100000. Thus you feel more loved when you do porn.
Getting angry at math is pretty much pointless, if drawing non-porn furry art makes you happy, go for it, no point struggling over watchers. If you feel like competing for FA attention is more fun added on top of drawing, mix porn, art nudes, and clean art.
In fact the best period of improvement I've gone through happened when I stopped sketching with pencils and started sketching with ball point pens. With pencils I used to erase sketches and make corrections over and over, with pens that was impossible and so I had to face and address my actual mistakes (which often turned out to be different from the mistakes I thought I was making).
Now if only I could find a similar trick with paint... I haven't found yet a way to make color stuff fun. Switching to oil was an improvement but they are real bitches sometimes. (Especially yellow ochre. Yellow ochre must die. On the palette it looks yellow but then you put it in the picture and it magically becomes green. But if you put it near yellow it looks like vomit, literally. It's opaque when you lay it but it becomes transparent as it dries. It's almost as evil as ultramarine blue.) I'm definitely in a Pinkie and the Brain situation with paint: I keep trying to settle on a single method so I could stop worrying about the other things I can't do, but there are so many possible methods that I end up trying a new one with every picture and I never find a satisfying one.
Maybe I should try exactly the same trick and paint with wall paint on rags for a while...
The Pinkie & Brain cycle of experimenting has the nasty downside that you try new things all the time and don't settle on good solution, making learning scattered and unreliable, but sometimes you DO get out some nice breakthrough. In this sense digital can be even worse, because you don't just switch technique by painting, but almost daily.
I think it boils down to stop focusing on the result and more on the process. Which technique gives you more pleasure when you execute it? It may not be the one that produces the best results (yet) but may be worth investing time to investigate it. For example, the technique i used on the werewolf speedpaint i just posted is the same i used on the first one i did (with Andrew, the boar character from doppleganger), i knew it was fast and i liked it, so i spent time just exploring what effects it could create and how i could solve some shortcomings without changing it too much.
But yeah, I always feel sorry for people with art block. I assume it's like a more specialised version of the life block I sometimes get :D
You suffer intense abuse throughout your life, not realizing why the abuse is there or if there is even a reason for it being there, and your art becomes what it was in your childhood: a gateway to a happier place. You care ONLY about happy endings and say screw everything that doesn't have a happy ending. You draw in secret, thinking about all the dreams you've had in your life. Your family mocks you, you can't seem to find friends. You are isolated.
Your fury becomes your drive, and it doesn't even feel like rage or fury any more. You feel as though you -must- draw, and that your enjoyment comes from pulling your nightly dreams of paradise or nightmares of hell and putting them on paper or screen in such a way that the only solution is paradise.
You are terrified of attempting to make money with the products of your mind, but you go back and watch movies you love and find that they have thousands of errors, many of which are exactly the errors you make, and some of which are worse.
You close your eyes and feel a light sensation from your heart to your hands, feet, and the crown of your head.
"Who cares? If the journey is what matters and not the ending, I'll just enjoy chasing my dreams."
You draw every single day, listening to music you love, putting aside the people who tore your sketchbook out of your hands and threw it, demanding that you help poor ol' granny who screeches insults at you as soon as she lays eyes on you, and you become at once what everyone called you as an insult. "The Dreamer."
The Dreamer is now what you love about yourself.
Dragonball Z? The Kamehameha? lightsabers? The Pokeball? How simple! Errors in form, muscle memory in drawing muscles! Midieval Swords and Sorcery made electronic! Animals embedded in capsule toys mimicking the first few chapters of the book of Genesis!
Disney sees you as a threat, so they offer you a position in their head office where you won't be able to draw or animate or have any influence on their IPs in future.
A timid looking woman comes up to you and asks if you would like a tour of Konami's studios, and asks if she may have a photo of you to be placed in the next Castlevania game, on the iPhone and Android with the ability to draw characters onscreen and pull them from the books of the future, transported to the past by an obsessed subordinate of Dracula.
Konami places you with ten other people as concept artists for a new series that Hideo Kojima has been producing in secret: a reboot of the Boktai series of games.
There. Fixed.
Find and watch the movie: "Like Stars on Earth: Every Child is Special."
Ok, take a deep breath. Have you gotten over the title? If yes, good. If no, get over it.
Watch the film, and watch it in Hindi with the english subtitles. It's better that way.
Now, during a certain part of the film (you'll know which) and after the film, DRAW.
You're welcome.
I suppose a hiatus could always work out for you. All my manga/illustration/animation teachers in Japan always told me to dip my fingers in other things besides the craft I was studying, as it gives the craft something else that's different to bring to life. Most of them had Western film, one had cars (he did designs for Toyota when he wasn't playing assistant to a manga artist). Either way, they all had something to do to unwind from their art job, or something to take their mind off the fact that it's an art job they're creating for.
Really, though, you're quite skilled, so I don't feel this crisis will haunt you too long. FAITH.
I've heard that advice a lot, in comic school. I worked as a coder while my art was stuck in the block, coding definitely helped me care about drawing a lot less and feel more indifferent: an art block is definitely a child of over-caring about quality.
That was entertaining and well written. Now you have me going over it again in my head to see how it reads when all terms related to drawing are replaced with ones specific to writing. X>
But they kind of help affirm my belief that "art is a latent talent" and not something that can be trained, since I'm struggling with the same damn things 5 years later even after trying tracing, references, photos, and practice sketch after practice sketch that I'm so ashamed of, I tear them up and toss them in the trash.
But in my case I mostly end with some period of mild anxiety and laziness till the accumulated inspiration forces me to grab the pen again.
Also, you know what' s worse than art block and tendinitis? Tendinitis and no art block aaaargh stupid hand. Kidding I love you hand, here is more love to you. That sounds better in my head. I better stop writting what I think
I'm crossing fingers it won't come back, but eh, you never know.
first thing one thinks is how i am supposed to be a pro if my arm breaks so easy? and goes downhill from there
Take care, i like your stuff
I wonder if fursuit makers (or tinkerers in general) naturally develop a block as well, or if the diversity in techniques used allows them to stay in at least one 'sketching stage'/ natural improvement at all times.
FUCK!
That being said you've given me enough inspiration to want to at least try again. Draw to be happy, do it for yourself. Not for anyone else.
Thanks.