So... What Do I Study?

So, I’ve talked a lot thus far about how to organize your time, and how to approach home study in a way that I think leads to the most learning and success. There has been though one glaring omission... what to study.

Part of the reason why I’ve waited to discuss this is that the honest answer is “it depends”. Advancement in art is continual, a lifetime journey. To a degree which things you tackle first depends a lot on your interests and goals. Anatomy isn’t a high priority for someone looking to get into environment concept art. Advanced perspective isn’t as important to someone who focuses on portraits or character design. If you want to pencil or ink comics, color won’t matter much to you. I could go on.

Still even with that in mind, there are some fundamental areas that are very useful to start with, and no matter what your eventual goals, your over all artistic ability is greatly enhanced by learning as much about making images as possible. You ideally SHOULD eventually learn a bit about almost every aspect of art, as it's all ammunition in your artistic arsenal. Knowledge is power. It removes limitations, and the fewer limitations you have, the more free you are to explore the ideas in your imagination rather than stifling it because of a weakness in your knowledge

To get you started I’m going to make some suggestions for ways to at least get some good foundation skills under your belt.

Foundation
In traditional art schools, the first year is often called Foundation Year. This is the time when they make sure that everyone is on the same page with at least the basics that they will need to branch out into other areas. This is the foundation that everything else is built on, and if it’s weak, then everything that comes after it will be weak as well.

• Basic Drawing. In my opinion, this is the absolute first step. Practice drawing basic shapes. Rectangles, circles, triangles, etc. This may sound like boring stuff. Kid stuff even, but these are shapes you probably haven’t thought serious about since you were really little, and without a little practice, odds are you actually draw them pretty sloppy. Make an effort to draw really clean smooth shapes by hand (no ruler or compass). Also, work on creating toned areas (shading). Practice laying down an even patch of grey pencil tone. Not patchy or scratchy, and with little to no smudging if possible. Learn how to control your pencil to get everything from very light tones, to deep dark tones, and everything in between.

• Drawing basic forms. This is drawing 3 dimensional shapes. The cube, cylinder, cone, and sphere are the basic building blocks of being able to draw much more complex forms and objects. Being able to visualize and draw these basic shapes in a variety of angles, and knowing how light and shadow apply to these shapes, will give you the ability to eventually work out far more complex shapes. When I talked in a prior article about drawing from the general to the specific, these basic shapes will often be the “general” shapes that get refined. Find an example of each shape, carefully cover them in white paper (or paint them white with a flat paint), and draw and paint them over and over again. Change the lighting, turn them on their sides, draw them from different angles, hang them from string, etc. Every possible way you can think of to draw and paint them differently, do so.  Do it until you can draw and paint them from memory. When you start seeing every day items all around you made up of those basic shapes, and you know you can draw any of them well with that knowledge you’ve ingrained, then the lesson has started to fully sink in.

• Basic color skills. One great lesson is to go to the paint isle of a hardware store, and pick up a dozen or so different paint color cards. You know the ones that help you pick out the exact color you want. Get a large variety of colors. Take them home, cut out the color swatches, and glue them down to a board. Now take a piece of canvas board (or card board, or whatever works for you) and draw equally sized squares, enough for each color you have on your color chip board. Now with acrylic or oil paint (I personally think oil paint is better for this), mix your colors and try your best to duplicate each colored chip as closely as you can. It likely won’t be possible to match every color exactly. This partly depends on the colors you have available to you, and partly is just the limitations of paint, but you should be able to get close, and many you should be able to get an almost exact match. This project is very much about observation and getting to know how your paint mixes to make other colors.

• Basic painting. Here is where you need to start seeing color for what it actually IS, rather than what you EXPECT it to be. Certain things are ingrained and are hard to rewire at first. Take those white blocks from your drawing lessons and start painting them. You know they are “white” right? You’ll be tempted to paint them white. Look closely, are they REALLY white? Or are they grey compared to the much brighter highlights? If you add a red piece of paper nearby, are the white blocks still white, or are they colored by that red paper reflecting on them? You want to learn to see how the color of almost everything is in reality influenced by almost everything around it. You don’t need to stick to the basic shapes, feel free to set up still life studies with almost anything sitting around once you are ready for a bigger challenge. Creating a shadow box will give you more control over the lighting for the objects, and help simplify the scene.

Well, those are the basics. With a solid foundation of those skills you should be able to start branching out into the areas that most interest you. Plan your areas of study to suit your specific needs, and don’t be afraid to continually come back and refine those foundation skills any time you need to. While these are “basics”, none of it is kids stuff, and I can say with absolute honesty that each of these are skills I draw on every day I work. You will too.

BONUS: "Text book" recommendations

If you are looking for a little instruction to go with your foundation drawing, I can't recommend Andrew Loomis enough. A good place to start is his book Successful Drawing to get a lot of great instruction on basic drawing. For painting, James Gurney's book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter is also excellent.

Both books give you a lot to think about, so don't feel bad if you can't absorb it all right away. Think of them as text books you'll return to often, each time taking away something new that you weren't quite ready for before. Both cover some great basics, but then move on to more advanced ideas. I'd consider both to be must have books.

Classes Part 4

Today I’m going to talk about the importance of breaking down difficult lessons into bite sized chunks, and using variety in planning your daily practice and study.

Breaking things down
If you were attending a traditional art school you would be taking a variety of different classes, each one focusing on an area of study. You might have classes on figure drawing, or still life painting, color theory, or perspective.

Why? What if instead you had only one class all day, every day, called “Art”, and the only goal was to just create paintings of a variety of topics? By necessity you’d eventually encounter all of the same topics that are often studied in classes: drawing, painting, color, anatomy, perspective, design, etc, but how over whelming would it be? So many possible areas of difficulty, all thrown at you at once. Yet, this is exactly what many people try to do when developing their artistic skill. No wonder so many new artists get intimidated! They dive in and try to figure it all out at once, or more commonly, they limit themselves and content themselves to a narrow range of skills with which they already have some ability.

Like art schools though, we can break down those difficult concepts into manageable bites. The time to learn anatomy isn’t in the middle of a complex painting with a thousand other difficult problems swirling around it. Instead, you want to study these concepts on their own, eliminating distractions so you can focus on them until they make sense and become second nature.

Variety
We have all of these topics of study, and we know we want to isolate them and tackle them on their own, however, there is a danger of TOO much focus on one thing. Let’s face it, the brain has a certain saturation point where too much is too much, and you won’t learn much more about a topic until the brain has time to digest, or at least rest. It won’t do much good to study a single area to the point of boredom and monotony. So we need to introduce some variety back into the mix, to keep learning at a good rate.

My suggestion is to adapt the same thing art schools do, and plan for variety in the form of assigned “classes”. Set a time period that is good for you, and when your time is up, swap to the next topic of study. This will allow you to study one area at a time with focus, yet still mix things up and get crucial variety to keep things from getting stale.

There are all sorts of other ways to mix things up. Move from drawing to painting. Move from precise and careful areas of study like anatomy and perspective, to looser and more conceptual ones like color theory, composition, and design. The important thing is keeping your study interesting.

So break down your study into bite sized areas, but remember to mix it up!

Classes Part 3

In “Classes” Part 2 I talked about practicing “Fast and Cheap”. Friend and fellow artist Anna Christenson asked

I have noticed that with some atelier methods, they will spend days on cast studies. This means meticulously mapping out the cast, and then usually spending days to weeks shading. From people I have talked to about this, they say it really forces them to internalize how light hits form. I'd be curious to see how you feel this fits into speed v. doing a really slow study.

Great question! Let me clarify the idea of working fast and cheap, and get into where I believe those more careful studies fit in.

For me, the idea of working fast and cheap is an important part of some serious study, but it is still only one part. When you are tackling a new subject, or an area that you have difficulty with, I think you can gain a lot of experience at a faster rate by doing more studies rather than fewer more elaborate ones. This is all about nailing down some of those basics and fundamentals, focusing on the lesson you need to learn at that moment. I think it is most helpful to focus on a single problem, or a host of simpler problems.

So what about the plaster cast study, or a master copy, or any other more careful examination? Well, to me those are more advanced studies where you are learning a different skill set. Those are about honing observation, looking for the subtle nuance, and developing finer control in your rendering abilities. They are valuable lessons, and they will teach you things the fast and cheap lessons maybe won’t teach you as easily. There will likely come a time in most artists development that these sorts of more intensive studies start taking over the fast and cheap studies, but by that point the artist is focusing on a new set of lessons that are more about that level of refinement.

This is maybe a good time to bring up another concept which I think is very fundamental to art at all stages of development. Working from the general to the specific.

Working from the general to the specific.

This is a core concept that I will touch on repeatedly in these articles. What this means is that it is best to work out larger problems without getting bogged down with too many details, and refine  and polish the work at later stages. In the context of the above discussion, working fast and cheap is working the general concepts. In an over all art education it is important to get these early lessons in to provide the basis more detailed and specific study later on, like the plaster cast study.

The concept of the general to the specific comes up over and over again. Many of you who have already started your art lessons have likely already heard about starting a drawing by working with basic shapes. These general forms provide the basic structure to eventually develop and refine into your final image. If you are talking about a whole composition, thumbnails sketches solve the placement of entire components of an image quickly and easily without wasting a lot of time on details that don’t help solve the more immediate problems. I find that 90% of the time, if I get stuck or am having problems, it’s because I didn’t solve a problem well enough at a more general stage.

I'll get back to this concept more in other articles, but in the meantime, if you have any questions, drop them in the comments below!

Classes Part 2

“Classes”, for the sake of this over view, represents the activities that will take up most of your average day while you improve your skills. I’ve heard some say that to master any skill requires 10,000 hours devoted to learning it. I’m pretty sure the number just means “a lot of time”, but there is no doubt that there are going to be a lot of hours put into the process.

Musicians do not record every note they play, and they play a lot of crappy music while they are learning. The same is true of artists. A lot of bad art is going to be made by you before you start making a lot of really amazing art. This is not just inevitable, it’s also mandatory. You need to make a lot of mistakes, to see what doesn’t work, before you narrow in on what does work for you.

Work fast and cheap when practicing.

Working fast
If every piece you do is a multi-day effort where you attempt to polish it to perfection, you may be putting in the hours, but you aren’t putting them where they need to be spent. It is better to do 20 images than 1 when tackling new concepts. That doesn’t mean to work sloppy, or with excessive speed. You still want to strive for precision, it just means get the work to a certain level, just where it needs to be for what you are trying to work out, then move on to another. You will learn more doing 20 sketches of hands, than doing 1 sketch that you erase and refine, and shade to perfection.

Working cheap
This is equal parts practicality and psychology. The practical is, there is no need to use expensive paper or top quality paints to work out problem solving. You’ll be doing lots and lots of studies, making mistakes, and generally not making stunning art, so why spend a lot of money to do so? For drawing, simple newsprint or copy paper is just fine. When working in color, you can use inexpensive paint and material as cheap as cardboard to do quick throw away practice work. Also, assuming you have a computer, there are a variety of both free and paid for software packages that are great, and once you have them and are set up, you can do endless studies and never have to worry about running out of paint or material to paint on!

The psychological reason to work cheap? To overcome the mental expectation that the clean beautiful paper needs to contain something “good.” Have you ever done a piece of artwork on the back of a sketchbook, or an envelope or scrap of cardboard that you really liked, but froze up with a nice large sheet of brand new paper? It’s because that scrap drawing had no expectations. It was just pure freedom. If you “messed it up” no big deal, you were going to throw it away anyways. This is the same concept when working with cheaper materials for practicing. You want that freedom to make mistakes without any guilt.


So, when DO you want to spend a little more time and money? Every so often it's going to be great to really sink in some time and see where all that practice is taking you. This is the pay off for all that hard work, and a great time to see where lessons are really becoming second nature, or see areas where you still need to progress. By all means, do some awesome work and spend as much time as it takes to see what you are capable of. Do some pieces that you can very proudly show off, but remember to spend more time over all nailing those basic concepts and lessons, and don't worry that you may not have a ton of portfolio pieces right away.

Classes Part 1

“Classes”, for the sake of this over view, represents the activities that will take up most of your average day while you improve your skills. The first two things you need to consider when planning a DIY Art School education is making the proper space to work, and making the proper time to work. Both of these take some planning for best results.

Making the proper space
Making the proper space means finding a place that you can comfortably work each day. Ideally you want a place devoted to your making and studying of art. Working at a kitchen table where you’ll have to contend with distractions, and the constant moving of your art materials (so the table can be used for other activities) is going to be difficult in the long run. You really need some kind of desk devoted to your study.

Absolutely ideal is an entire room, as eventually you may want to include easels, books, places to store paint and other supplies, etc. Workable is a distraction free corner of a room, that gives you enough space to not feel cramped. You need to be able to relax and concentrate.

Your choice of desk is personal, but many artists like the option to tilt the table top to better see the work (such as this inexpensive model but I suggest looking around and buying the best you can reasonably afford, because your desk is where you'll spend 90% of your time ). You also need to have plenty of quality light. Incandescent lighting, regular light bulbs, add warmth to colors you see. This means when you paint, your color choices may actually be too cool under more neutral day light, because they now lack the warmth you saw under that warm lighting. By contrast, you get the opposite effect if you work under fluorescent lighting, and you add too much warmth to counter the cooler color of light. The solution is a combination lamp, a lamp that uses both an incandescent light bulb and a fluorescent bulb at the same time to give you balanced color (like this one here). This also has the advantage of having a high quality and well balanced swing arm making it easy to get the light exactly where you need it.


A proper table, lighting, and a comfortable chair are the absolute basics, but there are a few other things to consider. Some shelving comes in handy for reference and art books. Some place to store your supplies will help keep your work space less cluttered. Some kind of cabinet is good, but an artist's taboret is even more flexible. A taboret is a small cabinet on wheels, which makes it mobile, and it is a great height to use the top of it to keep paint and other supplies close at hand while you work, whether at a table or easel. If you've never seen one, these examples will help you visualize what I'm talking about: an inexpensive option and a nicer wooden one.


Lastly, a solid easel helps make your work space complete. If you've only ever worked from a table top, you may not think you need an easel, and for small work you may be right. For larger work, there's no contest. Even though a good drawing table has a tilted surface to allow you to see your work more properly, an easel holds it right in front of you at the proper viewing angle, and the larger the piece, the more important that is. A skewed viewing angle will create all sorts of perspective problems in your artwork. Additionally, when working with wet paint, a piece laying flat is going to collect a lot more dust and debris than one standing upright. Stay away from light weight tripod easels like this one, as these are not stable enough for making art, and are instead more suited to simply displaying art on a short term basis. A more appropriate beginner easel is more like this aluminum student quality easel. Many art schools buy this type in bulk, because they are not too expensive, yet are fairly durable and sturdy. They won't handle very very large sized pieces of art, I'd estimate 2'x3' as being the largest I'd try to manage on one, but most students aren't likely to venture into that size range anyways.



Making the proper time
I mean it when I say you need to MAKE time. I assure you, you will rarely just “find time” if you don’t make an effort to prioritize working and studying. As hard as it may be, this will sometimes mean turning down social engagements, or planning other activities accordingly. Remember, if you were attending an art school, your time would be spoken for with schedules that you need to keep. It is all too easy to fall into the line of thinking of “I don’t have time” unless you MAKE it.

There is of course more flexibility than you’d get at an art school though. You can choose the days and hours that best work for you. Try to be consistent. Don’t cheat yourself out of time by starting late too often, or stopping too early. If you can put in 5 or 6 hours most days you should see fast progress, but if you can only do 2-4 that is still a great block of time. A solid longer block is far far better than many shorter blocks. If at all possible plan at least one long day a week (say 10-12 hours). Those are great days for bigger projects that take more time to prepare and set up, or just allows you a good solid day of progress.