by Christopher Hart | May 20, 2013 | Blog old
Most of us accept the fact that we have to practice in order to draw well. But it’s easy to get distracted. Many things vie to steal your attention: maybe it’s schoolwork, or friction at the office, or food poisoning. Mere excuses! So what can you do to stay motivated?
Some people advise taking a stroll along the beach, clearing your mind, and centering yourself. Yeah, sure. If that worked, the beach would be teeming with art students and writers, who remain notoriously pasty-skinned. By the time you finished applying the sun block, and picking the sand out of your chicken sandwich, you wouldn’t have a creative thought left in your head. Det du ikke vil bruke med PayPal kan du enkelt og greit overføre til kort som er forbundet med din PayPal-konto casino fordeler med paypal.
No my friend, tranquility and yoga are not the answer. The answer is to multitask: do two things at once. In other words, practice drawing while you (fill in the blank). Let me explain. At night, when you’re watching TV, sketch during the commercials. I’m serious. That may sound funny because it doesn’t even seem like real practice. Ah, but that’s the point. All practice is good, and propels you forward. But be careful, the funnier the show, the less you’re likely to draw. This gives you plenty of time to sketch, especially if you draw during the warning announcement for the commercial about arthritis pain medicine. The point is that this approach takes the sting out of practice اراب فاينانشيال.
While there are periods where focused concentration is essential to make gains, it is consistency that brings the most gains. Therefore, the take away for today’s blog is this:
“It’s better to draw more often, than to draw for greater lengths of time.”
What are some other things you can do while you draw, so that drawing fits more easily into your schedule? Try these:
- While taking public transportation
- During a coffee or lunch break
- While traveling during a holiday when there may be bumper-to-bumper traffic (but, um, not if you’re the driver)
- When you’re out of town and staying at a hotel.
- At the beach, park or zoo – great places to fill up a sketchbook
- On vacation
- When you’re bored – instead of nibbling on last night’s Chinese food, which, by the way, you could do without.
- At any appointment where you’re likely to wait (such as a doctor’s office)
- When your wife forces you to go to a symphony.
- When your wife forces you to go to a ballet.
- When your wife forces you to go to a foreign film.
The list could go on, believe me. But even if you only fill 2 or 3 pages a week using this approach, that’s over 100 pages of sketching over the course of a year, which could greatly help you to hone your skills, as well as create some useful roughs for future works.
See You Soon,
Chris Hart
Your Cartooning Sherpa
by Christopher Hart | May 15, 2013 | Blog old
When I began my career writing and illustrating art instruction books, there were already many manuals on topics such as perspective, watercolor, and landscapes. But very few books covered specific genres, such as cartooning. And no American author had yet introduced manga techniques to this country. And that’s because “style” had always been looked down upon in art schools as the illegitimate stepchild of classic techniques: it wasn’t art, according to the instructors; it was merely being “tricky,” a sort of visual artifice.
I believed that the instructors were wrong. In addition, I didn’t know why, having the type of expertise they did in the visual arts, the art instructors had such incredibly poor taste in ties. But that riddle remains a mystery, my friends. Now let’s get back to “style”:
So, what happened in the real world to those who adhered to the somewhat haughty, conventional wisdom? Unless they wanted to paint bowls of fruit for a living, they had to go back to the beginning to learn how to incorporate a variety of styles into the rigid format they had acquired. The jobs in popular media are in game development and character design, comics and graphic novels, animation and children’s picture books, humorous illustration and licensing. Each of these styles has specific visual conventions, and I’m not talking about Comicon.
Ask your average figure drawing art instructor to do a sequential page for Spider-Man, or to draw a simple retro cartoon character type, or any kind of manga girl. It will be bad. I’m talking shivers-up-your-spine bad.
Therefore, when I had my chance to publish my first book, How to Draw Cartoons for Comic Strips, I focused exclusively on style. Art students loved it. But they were also understandably reluctant to admit as much. In school, they carried my book wrapped between the covers of Albinus’ tome on anatomy (and by the way, what a fun read that is). If they were spotted reading my book, they would say it was a present for their kid brother. Or they would offer up the sheepish, “Ha, ha, this book shows you how to draw all sorts of characters and poses. What a time-waster, when we want to be drawing femurs and the Teres Major, huh?” Yes, my friend, I think we all understand your dilemma.
Fast forward to today: that modest, first book of mine went on to sell over 200,000 copies. Now, when you go to the bookstore, you’ll see dozens of art instruction books that focus on style. Thankfully, many of them are authored by me. But the important thing is that the era of looking down at style as something ancillary to art is a thing of the past. We’ve stepped out of the darkness and into the light. We’ve leaped into the future, where art is style, when the sun turns into a red giant and incinerates the earth. Okay, don’t think about the sun part – bad imagery.
So today’s take away is simply this:
“Style is art.”
See You Soon,
Chris Hart
Your Cartooning Sherpa
by Christopher Hart | May 10, 2013 | Blog old
If you’re a lawyer, you’ve got to have a degree. If you’re an electrician, you have to be certified. If you’re a therapist, you need to act like you have a degree.
But an artist needs no official piece of paper to prove his worth, only his portfolio. How many clients are going to ask what the artist’s GPA was, or whether he or she did enough community service.
So, why not blow off formal training and skip art school?
That would be a misreading of the professional landscape. Let’s explore why you may want to consider art school, point by point.
- You will be competing against other artists who have completed art school, and all of the course requirements, which means they’ll be well versed in the fundamentals. In addition, their progress will increase steadily over years, with continuous input from the accomplished pros who are their teachers. In other words, their portfolios will be tough to beat. Their work will have that polished look of someone who has gone to art school. This gives clients a feeling of confidence when hiring an artist.
- Who says you have to wait until a client asks if you’ve gone to art school? If you wait, the question may not come up. Put it out there. If your competition fails to mention their background, then you’ll have the advantage. You’re the one with the “formal training,” which is generally how clients put it. On the other hand, if your client mentions that they, too went to art school, you had better mention it as well, so as not to give them the advantage.
- One great aspect of art school is that the teachers are all artists. This isn’t true of other fields. Film schools are loaded with film professors who have never shot a film or have even been on a film set. English classes are profuse with teachers who have never published a book. But by having real pros as your art teachers, you will get career guidance that matters, rather than academic theory.
- Drawing is solitary. While you labor away, putting in the long hours at the drawing board, art school will provide you with a network of others who share the same passion. Friendships have a way of turning into lifelong contacts that are mutually profitable after graduation. Think about it: whom would you rather hire, Joe Blow, or the guy you sat next to in art class, who could fulfill the assignment perfectly?
Is art school an absolute requirement? No, it isn’t. There are ways to get everything you need from supplementary education, and from a liberal arts education. But that, my friends, is a topic for another blog.
So today’s take away is this:
“Art school can be a valuable asset.”
See You Soon,
Chris Hart
Your Cartooning Sherpa
by Christopher Hart | Apr 29, 2013 | Blog old
When others offer art criticism or fashion criticism, they usually only talk about the weak points in your art, or your taste in ties. Okay, I’ll concede on the ties, though why I can’t wear my Muhammad Ali tie to a formal affair still baffles me. Here’s my secret: Recognizing your strengths is even more important than figuring out where you need to improve.
Yes, this is heretical point of view. But so was Copernicus’ idea of the solar system. And by the way, Copernicus was a heck of a good cartoonist.
He could have made something of himself if he hadn’t wasted all his time with that “earth revolves around the sun” stuff!
When you focus on your natural strengths, you improve faster. Why? Because you have a natural facility in that area. It helps you to overcome inertia, because you see results faster. And since you see results faster, that in turns inspires you further. This lifts your skills, though somewhat unevenly. That’s when it’s time to address your weaknesses.
By lifting your level in the area of your strengths, you can then turn to your weaknesses and attack them from a higher level, which allows you, once again, to improve faster. This approach also helps you set higher goals for yourself, because you will naturally want to bring your weak points up to the higher level where you’ve brought your strong points.
Focusing exclusively on what needs to be improved is like flagellating yourself, except that it’s not the Middle Ages, and you probably aren’t walking in a weird procession. https://www.247locksmithfinder.com/residential-locksmith
The question is, how does one recognize his strengths? Everyone – every single aspiring artist – has certain things that they draw better than other things, or they simply have an easier time drawing certain subjects. Perhaps you have a tough time drawing hands, but you like drawing eyes. You’ve just discovered a strength. In the beginning, you may want to focus more on headshots than full body shots.
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. But artists who are in demand are desirable because they excel at something. They specialize. They’re known for doing something better than other people. So here’s the takeaway for today:
No one ever got famous by concentrating solely on their weak points.
See you next week!
– Christopher Hart
by Christopher Hart | Apr 25, 2013 | Blog old
There are two big-time problems cartoon drawing beginners run into. And they’re big, mainly because they don’t realize it’s a problem. All the instruction in the world won’t help if you don’t correct these two bad habits, which are, believe it or not, among the easiest to fix.
One is drawing very lightly with short, feathery strokes of the pencil. The other is to draw with very slow, deliberate and clean lines. Both of these will get you into trouble, especially with the Cartooning Police. But I’m going to show you the way to avoid getting a cartoon violation.
When someone draws in short, feathery strokes, they are trying to be very careful to avoid mistakes. Alternatively, when someone presses down on the pencil very hard, making sure to keep a clean, tight line, they are being very careful to avoid making mistakes.
What do these two people have in common? Besides, leaving coffee rings on their drawing pad, they are attempting to avoid making mistakes, which is a big mistake.
These two beginners’ line styles look hesitant and lacking in confidence. It results in stiff, lifeless drawings. But it’s also wrong from a philosophical standpoint, and this brings me to the takeway for the week:
It’s a Mistake to Avoid Making Mistakes
If you look at the rough drawings of the pros, by and large, they’re a mess. There are over-drawn lines, smudges and eraser marks. Why? Because they know that the energy and vitality of drawing comes from loose, bold and flowing lines; and that somewhere in the morass of sketchiness, lies the kernel of a “keeper.” In fact, often, I will look at a very sketchy rough I did, and see a few lines, which were drawn without much thought, that could be extracted to create an interesting character. I’ll focus on those lines and erase the rest of the car key replacement services.
By trying to avoid making mistakes and attempting to do a final drawing the first time, you denying yourself choices. Draw boldly. Draw over the lines you’ve already drawn. Erase until the paper screams Uncle! Don’t deny yourself anything. Except for cookies with partially hydrogenated palm oil in them. Those, you’re better off denying yourself.
See you Next Week
Chris Hart
Most of us accept the fact that we have to practice in order to draw well. But it’s easy to get distracted. Many things vie to steal your attention: maybe it’s schoolwork, or friction at the office, or food poisoning. Mere excuses! So what can you do to stay motivated?
