October 30th, 2002 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Your October 30th, 2002 every other week YouCanDraw.com Communiqué |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Howdy all, Today I'm going to let you in on mine and YouCanDraw.com member Mary Dorman's email conversation (but of what city and state Mary? :-) . She asks some excellent questions - they're similar to emails I get quite frequently - and Mary asks them in such an honest way. The Frustration she's feeling represents a frustration felt by so many beginning, intermediate and even advanced artists - but especially beginners. The antidote to her frustration is literally right there in her hands, but it's often so easily side-stepped. ------------------------------------------------------ 1) First email: Hi Jeff: As much as I admire your caricatures, I can never hope to emulate them. My goal is to be a clone of Don Bevan. :>) I'm able to get a likeness from a caricature, and then color it in simply on the net -- which is fine for my purposes. ( Decorating and gifts ). However, I still haven't been able to do as well from a photo. Will this just take a lot more work, or should I not hold out any expectations? Wondering. Mary ------------------------ 2) my response: Nice job on Geraldo Mary! (Mary included a scanned caricature of Geraldo Rivera) At 02:11 PM 10/22/02 -0400, you wrote: Hi Jeff: As much as I admire your caricatures, (why thank you!) I can never hope to emulate them. Oh sure you can. You have a very nice "minimalist" approach right now Mary. I will challenge you however to go back to the beginning and try drawing some non-face kinds of things. Go right back to Lesson One and start with the basics. Work your way right through them. Don't rush. Do the assignments a little at a time. A lot of folks who do a minimalist approach do wonderfully at it - but often times they miss out on really digging into detail and letting go of preconceived "impulse" drawings - which means getting an idea about how a picture ought to look and then drawing the idea more so than the thing they're drawing. Which is an awesome talent! BUT, it's at the expense of sidestepping a lot of "grunt work". By grunt work I mean doing lots of other kinds of drawing - realistic, in depth studies of light and shadowing, different ways to make lines with pencil or charcoal, learning about proportion and negative space, primitive forms, basic features and anatomy, gesture drawings, etc.. The basics really can be picked up rapidly. Building on those is where the work comes. Now my job over the next year will be to basically redo the "foundation lessons" in Flash - and link them all together so you get my version of what I was taught by the Dr. Edwards group, (Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, et al, - I'll be getting to that as soon as I get this marketing push over with...which is a ton of work) Your job will be to start back at the beginning :-) You have the skills to do anything I'm drawing Mary. You just need to strengthen those basic skills - and be patient. Look at some of the "before and after" pictures at Betty Edward's site: http://www.drawright.com/gallery.htm I've seen the transformation take place in literally 5 days - and not just isolated cases, I've seen it with regularity and consistency. As for not holding out any expectations, forget that idea: absolutely hold on to expectations. But don't beat yourself up if it doesn't happen on your expected time scale. Date your drawings and look at the progress over time. It's in you if you're willing to put in the work. :-). That's the bottom line. BTW, the folks who're doing the 5-day "boot camp" are doing 6-8 hours a day of drawing for those 5 days. And they're learning nothing but those foundation skills. Every thing spring boards off them. Hang in there Mary :-) Warmly, Jeff ---------------------- 3 ) Next related email from Mary: "Hi Jeff: Would it be too much trouble to include in one of your E- Mails, the answer a minimalist would really like to know -- How do you quickly look at a photo, and not think in terms of copying it realistically -- but are there some rules that let you know right away, how to abstract the features... what caricature symbols to use for a long nose, or beady eyes, that will capture a likeness, but still be in symbols? Do you know what I'm saying?? ( I'm not sure I do. :>) ) I just know what I want to achieve -- but I don't know if practice is the only answer -- or if that would be reinventing the wheel -- because others already know how to do this. Hmmm, Mary " ---------------------------- 4) My response (things I've added since the original email are in black) Hi Mary, Mary, you sound a little frustrated there. The best minimalists go through the whole shebang of learning everything there is about drawing and anatomy etc, and then whittle back from there until what they're left with is a great, fun exaggeration with just the fewest number of lines possible. The Al Hirschfields of the world. ( Some Al Hirschfield Links: http://www.culturevulture.net/Movies/LineKing.htm http://members.iconn.net/~ab234/Plays/Les_Liaisons_Dangereuses/Hirschfeld.html http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1557833567/o/qid%3D928900216 /sr%3D2-1/002-8959481-9964848 http://www.alhirschfeld.com/news/articles.html#theater http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/hirschfeld_a.html this last link has a short video interview with Mr. Hirschfield.) BUT, of course it's possible to just dive in drawing minimalist drawings from the start. I remember when I was in Spain about 15 years ago - this woman was just running around doing caricatures of people, without the people she was drawing even knowing she was drawing them, and then just handing them a 2 minute "minimalist" drawing. If the person liked the drawing, they shelled over whatever they thought it was worth. (She asked as a bottom price about 3 bucks American). Most people gave her about 4 or 5 - if they bought it. (she had a great attitude and an even better smile - a good salesperson - and so most people bought) And she did just the minimal: if some one had curly hair, she whipped up curly cue hair in a shape somewhat similar to the "owners". If they had a big nose, she gave a big nose...her "symbol" system was so general her pictures didn't really look like the person, but they caught enough of the stereotypes that you could tell her drawings apart from other people that might be part of the group. Her drawing skills were minimal too - but she was working at it hard. To answer your question, finding an abstraction "system of symbols" is more the territory of cartooning - I mean, cartoon books have a wealth of symbols for all sorts of common nose types, and eyes and mouths, and hair and hats, etc. ( See Lenn Redmann's book - great line approach to caricatures: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0809256851/qid=1035994103 /sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3/002-8959481-9964848 and How to Draw Cartoons for Comic Strips by Christopher Hart: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0823023532/ref=pd_sim_ books_4/002-8959481-9964848?v=glance ) And you can probably substitute those kinds of symbols - since it still requires you to make some kind of observation and judgment about what you're drawing. (Otherwise everybody you draw would just look the same) - and your true drawing skills will still progress. The only way to abstract features Mary is to draw lots of them! Pull out a magazine and page through it drawing every face on every page you can go through in a 30, 45, 60 minute session - give each picture 4,5, 10 minutes time. And just do it! I can guarantee it that when you do that, the cartoon drawing books all the way to the most realistic and in-depth drawing books will be so much more interesting. ( see this archived email about "working up to your first gig": http://ycdinsiders.digitalchainsaw.com/InsidersArtistLoft/15june.htm ) There are no magic bullets that can replace learning the basics and developing the observational power you're looking for. I may be way off here, but what I'm sensing is that you're circling the actual drawing part of drawing - from spending all that time printing out the book (Mary told me it filled 3 or 4 of those BIG three-ring folders !) to looking for other short cuts. It's a very common thing people do when they're avoiding "diving". Because "diving in" is blocked by those ugly fears about looking bad, about not doing the "art" very well, about other people laughing at your stuff - that kind of thing was a block for me for a long, long time. If I'm way, way off, disregard what I'm saying Mary. If there's a little truth in it, let me recommend a book: Julie Cameron's "The Artist's Way". There's a lot of great "first aid" in it. ( Link to her book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585421464/qid=1035995014 /sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/002-8959481-9964848 ) One last suggestion is to collect and keep a file of cartoonists, caricaturists and realistic artist's pictures and just copy their drawings - copy them BIG, get some 17 x 24 paper and take all sorts of time to work on them. Seeing how one artist abstracts the features will give you ideas about how develop your own. But copy theirs rote and often enough that you can produce then from memory. Spend an hour a day for two weeks Mary - spend one day drawing just noses, one day drawing eyes, one day ears, heads, necks. Once you get through all of that start over again. Then try to draw them (the features) from memory - but not before you learn each feature first. you wrote: ''I just know what I want to achieve -- but I don't know if practice is the only answer -- or if that would be reinventing the wheel -- because others already know how to do this."" Again, I'll reiterate learning the basics of drawing AND re-inventing the wheel - your way - is the only way through this. It WILL meet you half way if you just start doing the work :-) Now go and buy a big pad of paper - get newsprint because it's cheap - and some drawing pencils and make no big deal out of it - just go get the materials . Then buy yourself one of those cooking timers if you don't have one and put aside 30 minutes - more if possible. And START DRAWING. No more avoiding Mary. Period. Lot's of folks tell me "I just don't have enough time left in my life to do all that work it takes to get there". My answer is once you start, the "time anxiety" melts away, your confidence grows in very real ways, certainty about where you're going solidifies, and the worry disappears. I think our email discussion is going to be the next e-zine Mary - I'll leave your name out if you wish) - I'm serious! :-) Now go. Warmly, Jeff ----------------------------------------- 5) Mary's response: Good morning, Jeff: And it is a good one -- thank you so much for helping me, and believe me you are right on target. Someone on T.V. also made me aware of what I was doing, when they mentioned " I am a good cook because I cook good, not because I read cook books. " Well, at least I'm not in denial about what I'm doing. I believe what's blocking me is the fact that the Betty Edwards students can show remarkable improvement in FIVE DAYS -- I expect to be your perennial student for the next five years . . . and then I'm not certain of the results. :>) But I shall try. If you believe our exchange can be as helpful to others as it is to me in building awareness -- by all means use my name or not -- whichever is most helpful to you. Cheers, Mary -------------------------------------------------------- Thanks Mary for your openness, honesty, courage and generosity! Keep on Drawing all! Warmly - Jeff Executive Director Kasbohm & Company Strategic Multimedia home of http://www.YouCanDraw.com (952) 544-0657 1351 Hampshire Ave. So., #127 St. Louis Park, MN 55426 "Once and for all getting you drawing faces and caricatures" mailto:comments@youcandraw.com |