by Christopher Hart | Jun 18, 2013 | Blog old, Slide Show
Let’s say that you want to get better at drawing. How much should you practice?
This is an excellent question, and not just because I wrote it myself. All right, maybe a little bit because I wrote it myself, but mainly it’s because sooner or later, every aspiring artists asks this question. Let’s break this down into two parts: first, how much time should I practice; and second, how often should I practice?
The answers are counterintuitive: Take it slow; take it easy. Don’t work at it so hard that it takes the fun out of drawing. Fun is an essential element in cartoons and manga. If it stops being fun, or if you no longer get the satisfaction that you used to get from drawing, then you’ve turned it into a chore. And there’s another important aspect to this: By leaving some part of your practice session unfinished, you’ll look forward to resuming. And taking a break from a drawing, even a brief one, almost always adds perspective to the creative process.
If you find yourself especially motivated one day, and inspiration is just flowing all over the place, then don’t force yourself to quit early! Ride the horse where it’s galloping. (My, but we’re having a lot of animal metaphors today….)
Specifically, how much time should you devote to practicing? The answer is: Enough so that you feel that you’re making progress. But it doesn’t have to be fast progress – and here’s the weird part – you don’t even have to be improving to show progress.
“Dear God!” you utter, totally bewildered, “Is there no end to your cryptic vagaries??”
Well, I’m not quite sure what “cryptic” and “vagaries” mean, but since you asked, I’ll try to wing it. You see, when you’re learning a new technique, you’re breaking old habits. You’re going out of your comfort zone. And that means the drawing may, at first, look worse. This is where some people get discouraged and quit. The ones who stick with it, through the troughs, often end up with far better skills than they ever imagined.
So the takeaway for today is just this:
“Two steps forward and one step back makes for steady progress.”
by Christopher Hart | Jun 16, 2013 | Blog old, Slide Show
Cartoon characters need personality in order to hold a viewer’s attention. A cartoon can be drawn with skill and care, and yet, fall flat. It can even be funny and energetic, and still not connect with the viewer, because it lacks personality. In my opinion, a great case in point is Disney’s “Roger Rabbit.” Never heard of it? I rest my case.
Here’s the key: Your audience wants to find something that they find engaging about a character. Otherwise, the image becomes boring. And if you’ve ever noticed, boredom is never a strong positive. No one ever says, “I feel like getting bored.” So we try to avoid that.
To make a character – your character – engaging, something about it, some feature or trait, has to be compelling. This is often misinterpreted to mean that you have to make a character “likable” in order for people to like it. We can scoff at people who hold this wildly inaccurate view. Yes, my artistically inclined friends, simply hurl that thought from your brain as fast as a banshee recoils from a glass of sour milk. At least, I assume banshees recoil from sour milk. What kind of a warped, unholy banshee would actually like sour milk? Please quiet down. You’re getting me off topic.
Back on track again: The thing to remember is that there’s a big difference between making a character “likable,” or compelling to watch. That’s what we’re talking about, along with a little banshee humor tossed into the mix.
No one can like every character. Who warms up to a villain? Lawyers? Okay, that’s one. But it’s hard to come up with more examples. However, a villain can be wonderfully engaging it their wickedness. They can be syrupy sweet and cunningly disingenuous. And the audience will find it hard to take their eyes off such a character. Therefore, you’ve got to find something in each and every character that is charismatic, in its own way. Pokies rely on luck, and your previous spins won’t affect future spins in any way https://www.playpokiesonline.org/play-for-real-money.
Today’s cartooning takes away is simply this:
“Create villains that viewers love to hate.”
by Christopher Hart | May 27, 2013 | Blog old, Slide Show
When I was in art school, the instructor told us two things that I devoted to memory: First, the directions to the school cafeteria. And second, he said that the word “artist” is a gift-word, which you can’t bestow on yourself. People must refer to you that way before you can rightfully claim that title as your own, he said.
I understood his point, which was that, just because you call yourself an artist, doesn’t mean you are one. After all, most professions have some type of minimum standard or credential.
You can’t go around calling yourself a lawyer and defending people without a JD, unless you’re eager to see what the inside of a jail cell looks like. And you can’t call yourself an economist if your resume includes “change maker” at the annual carnival.
But the creative arts are a different animal. Often – and this was the case in my life – an artist acquires professional credits before he or she ever sets foot in an art school, let alone earns his or her college degree. While I believe it’s fair to say that the majority of artists who have had some training possess more skills than the artists who have been exclusively self-taught, such is not always the case. There are many artists whose only formal training has come from eating a few sliders during recess while stealing some time to practice from how-to-draw books. Charles Schultz of “Peanuts” fame toiled away at a how-to-draw correspondence course. Self-taught artists are not uncommon in the profession.
When I recommend a graphic artist, illustrator, or colorist for a particular freelance job, some formal art education is a plus. However, I have also referred, and hired, artists with zero formal training, and few professional credits. They were generally young and early in their careers. The main thing, aside from the quality of their portfolio, was whether they presented themselves as professional artists. A person, no matter how talented, who is working on an accounting degree, but has an amazing portfolio (oh yes, this stuff happens) would not make an appealing candidate, because their priorities lay elsewhere. Most publishers or clients who are doing the hiring are looking for people who are “all in.” There’s just something dedicated about them. You know that their artwork means everything to them. Why? Because they’re “artists,” even if they don’t have formal training, or the professional credits.
Today’s take away is:
“You are what you dream to be.”
See You Soon,
Chris Hart
Your Cartooning Sherpa
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
