Your Report Card: Reviews from Peers

If you’ve been following along with my suggestions on creating a DIY Art School experience, there’s one thing noticeably absent- Grades. You know, that little report card that tells you how you are doing? I hope you didn’t think you’d be getting off easy, and that there would be no grades to worry about. Haha, no such luck.

In fact, these grades are the only ones that matter, and they are in fact, scarier than “real” grades. You see, in art school, you can tunnel vision a bit  and trick yourself into believing that grades are the goal. They aren’t of course. Progress and reaching a professional level is the goal, and THAT’S the only meaningful measure, and it’s the one we’ll be using.

Ok, so we’re not talking about actual letter grades, or actual report cards here, but we are talking about intent behind report cards. Getting that feedback on where you have been successful, where you need more work, and some insight into the places you didn’t even know you had a problem. In art circles this is called a critique, or a portfolio review.

Reviews from Peers
Your peers are others at a similar level as you. In art school these would be your classmates. Home study doesn’t leave you much in the way of classmates, so we’ll have to get a little creative.

Locally, you can find peers “out in the field” in a few ways. We’ve already talked about one of them in the article Field Trips, going to life drawing sessions. A regular life drawing class (either with instruction or without) throws you in with other artists. Some may be much more advanced than you, and others may be complete novices giving art a try for the first time. Either way, these may be great people to get to know. When the model takes a break, many artists take the opportunity to stretch their own legs, and see how others are doing with their efforts. This is a natural time to see how others are doing and strike up conversations. Over time, once you’ve gotten to know a few people, you can start asking for a little feedback. Seek out help from those more experienced if they seem open to it. Most artists I know are very happy to help others and pass on what they’ve learned. Try not to take up too much of their time, they are there to draw just like you are, but a little quick feedback can go a long way.

Another possible avenue to find peers is to join a local artist group. If you have a local arts paper you’ll often see listings for all sorts of activities that might be of interest. Your local art store, or possibly a coffee shop, may have a bulletin board where people post things of this nature as well.

The next best thing to finding local people that you can talk to directly, is peer support from online communities. One of my favorites has been Conceptart.org. There, you can post up work you’ve been doing, or even your entire portfolio, and ask for feedback. It may take time, and you may need to spend some time building relationships and “getting your name out there” to start getting more people interested in giving feedback, but the more regularly you post work, and the more you make progress, the more interested others will be in checking in on your progress and commenting and offering advice. Be a good peer yourself, and offer help and advice where you can, or even simple encouragement. Tomorrow I continue this article with advice on getting reviews from professionals!

Carrying a Camera

I’ve talked about taking regular “field trips” out of the studio to help keep things fresh and interesting. While writing that previous article, I wanted to touch on using photography to supplement your drawing and sketching, but I felt like the topic deserved an article all it’s own. More than just a way to quickly record what you saw, photography can also help you think about composition, light, color, and a whole host of other things. I find that as I strive to improve my photography, my observation, painting, and drawing improves as well.

It’s not always easy to find the time, or the space to draw directly from nature. Some things happen to quickly, or in areas where you can’t reasonably draw or paint. Stopping and really observing closely, and taking some photos to remind you back in the studio is the next best thing. Even if you don’t like to work directly from photos, and there are good arguments that support that view, having them as a way to refer back to certain details is still extremely valuable.

What kind of camera should I be using?
For simple recording of what you see, a lot of times the smallest and most convenient camera is the best one. Let’s face it, an expensive and fancy camera is useless if you don’t have it with you. On the other hand, a small pocket camera that is simple and easy to keep with you is the one you’ll have when that amazing image opportunity comes up unexpectedly. Driving home and see some amazing clouds? That phone camera is suddenly much more useful to you than anything you left at home.

Which isn’t to say that that a phone camera is all that good, only that it’s better than not getting a shot at all. A better option is a dedicated pocket sized point and click digital camera. The specs on these are getting better and better each year, and the prices on them are pretty darn reasonable these days. For right around the $100 mark (a little more or less depending on the brand and model), a small camera is an excellent investment. There are downsides of course, mainly in that options to control the final result are limited compared to higher end cameras. Still, as mentioned above, the convenience factor is an important one.

What if I want something even better?
With some practice and knowledge, a better camera does potentially take better pictures. Beyond simple camera specs, the biggest thing better cameras offer is more control. Moving up to a Digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex) means you have  variety of controls to play with how light enters the camera, and thus the final image. They also give you many options by means of using different lenses, which gives you yet more options. An entry level DSLR kit right now goes for around $500. It’s an investment, and in my opinion a good one, IF you will take advantage of it and really learn how to use it.

That $500 entry may be just the beginning though. It’s easy to start “needing” more. A good tripod would be a big help. Another lens or two (most kits start you with one general purpose lens). Maybe a few lens filters, some additional memory cards, maybe a flash you can move off camera... like art itself it’s a hobby that can quickly start adding up.

So, what will this camera do for me in the grand scheme of things?
Admittedly, suggesting photography to improve your art seems a little like suggesting that you learn french in order to cook french food. It’s learning a whole other skill to improve your main goal. Still, it’s not as silly as it may seem.

The DSLR is the camera that really helped me start thinking more closely about control of light for the sake of taking better photos. It didn’t take long for the lessons I learned in photography to start influencing decisions in my painting as well. It made me start considering the role of light more carefully. It helped to show me that it was ok to lose detail in areas that were not the focus -literally. Looking through the view finder of the camera, and then walking around the scene to find the most interesting angles made me realize that I wasn’t doing that enough in my illustrations. I played more with both high and low vantage points, or playing with foreground/background elements. These are all things you can learn on your own in art of course, and some will probably come naturally to you. Others however, might be learned more easily by experimentation in photography, and you still gain the very nice additional benefit of really good photos to work or learn from.


And now, a few words of caution
Photographs are not to be trusted. Oooh, sounds dire and ominous doesn’t it? Well, it actually is true. Photographs are made with lenses, and a lens does distort the image. It may not be readily apparent, but that is because there is a bit of psychology involved. We believe photographs in ways we wouldn’t believe a piece of artwork that was drawn the exact same way. Shoot too close to a model, for example, and the lens will distort the proportions. Shoot a cityscape and try tracing the perspective lines. Don’t be surprised when you find they don’t line up well, and lines you assumed were straight are actually curved due to the lens.

Camera’s also shoot a narrow range of the visible light. Depending on your camera settings details may get “blown out” due to a light source, or you may lose all detail in shadows. The human eye is much more adaptable on the fly, and thus sees a far better range than a camera can capture. When you paint from a photo, you will find many of the decisions about relative light and color are made for you, and it’s tempting to use what the camera gave you. When you paint from life, you need to do that work on your own, and you will probably make better choices.

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.

Field Trips

Today, I want to talk a bit about planning “Field Trips” into your DIY Art School study. Field trips, when you are learning largely at home, are even more important than they are during a regular schooling environment. Why? Well during a regular art school experience you’d be heading out each day for classes and seeing a variety of people, and you'd have classes on topics that don't translate well into subjects studied at home alone. Studies from home can get very lonesome, or at the very least can quickly drive you into a mental rut because you just aren’t getting enough variety in stimuli. You need to engage your brain in a multitude of ways, not just to make good art, but to keep emotionally healthy.

Fortunately there are a variety of useful activities you can plan outside the home to alleviate the problem. Where field trips would likely be a very once-in-a-while activity in art school, for the diy art student it should be a once or twice a week activity to make up for the parts of a traditional art education that you are otherwise missing. It’s a great idea to plan a specific day(s) where you will force yourself out into one of the activities below. At times an outting can also take the place of a normal day of at home study and practice, to help recharge your artist batteries. A spur of the moment field trip is a very useful cure for artist block or stagnation!

Field Trip ideas

Museums
Museums are a time honored and important art outing. Just walking around and enjoying the artwork can be inspirational, but there is more you can take away from a museum experience. Take a pad of paper and a pencil with you on your museum trips, and record your thoughts as you go. Take note of artists whose work you enjoy so you can find out more about them later on the internet. Take notes about techniques they use that you find interesting, or ones you would like to learn how to produce for your own work. If you can do so without getting in the way of other museum goers, stop and make some sketches. You don’t have to do a full master copy to learn a lot. Sometimes making a quick sketch of powerful compositions, or capturing a particularly effective area of a painting can be very informative. Supplement your sketches with notes about what you can observe. The important thing is do not be a passive viewer of the art, you want to actually use your artist observation skills to really look deeply.


Other types of museums can also be excellent. I love a good natural history museum, with bones, dioramas, stuffed specimens, etc. There are museums dedicated to all sorts of topics, and they can all be a great visit.


Galleries
A gallery outing will be much like a museum outing, but with more living and working artists most likely. Going in on a quiet afternoon you can treat the experience very much like a museum outing. If you can make out to an art opening, you have some other powerful opportunities such as the ability to meet the artists, and ask them questions about their work. Now when you use those art observation skills, you won’t have to guess about an artist’s technique or intentions, you can actually ask! Additionally don’t neglect talking to others there enjoying the show. Learning how to talk intelligently about art with other people is an important artist skill.



Life drawing sessions
Most people do not have a variety of able and willing artist models at home. A weekly life drawing night is a perfect scheduled art outing. This will take some research on your part to find one available near you. Check local art schools. Many will have an evening life drawing class that is available to the public even if you are not enrolled at the school. If you don’t see one available, ask. Maybe there is one you can sit in on, and if not it at least lets them know there is an interest for possible future classes. These classes or open drawing nights will often have a fee at an art school, but it one that is very worthwhile.

You can also look for local artist groups that may organize a model for themselves. Check the bulletin board of local art stores and coffee shops. Some may require membership, and others may be welcoming to all serious artists. There will often be a fee collected each night to pay to the model, and an additional tip for the model will help insure that good models are likely to return.

You can also look for a local chapter of Dr Sketchy (warning: full and partial nudity within the link). Dr Sketchy was started by New York artist Molly Crabapple as a fun alternative to regular life drawing classes. While it started in NY, there are independent branches all over, and more cropping up regularly. There is a handy search option on the website to find one closest to you. Dr Sketchy events are one part life drawing, one part burlesque show, and one part party. They often take place at a bar and you can easily have a drink or two while drawing (although you don’t have to). Despite the party atmosphere you’d be mistaken if you thought there was little real art going on. On the contrary, Dr Sketchy offers very solid life drawing, and the atmosphere can attract very talented artists. This is not only a great drawing opportunity, but a great networking and socializing opportunity.

One last option for life drawing is going “in the wild.” Find a spot with decent foot traffic, and draw the people around you. Some people like the slow pace of a coffee shop. One of my favorite places used to be the food court at my local mall, because it pulled a wider selection of interesting people, and they were often so distracted by their shopping and finding lunch that an artist quietly sketching drew little attention. No matter where you go, you’ll need to draw quickly and you’ll rarely get someone still long enough to get a super refined drawing. Focus on drawing body language, or capturing whatever unique qualities make them stand out most.



Landscapes
Find a scenic spot and draw or paint what you see. Combining this kind of outing with a little hiking will let you find some spots not everyone sees, and gets you some valuable exercise (something many of us who spend so much time at desks needs dearly). Make sure to plan appropriately for being outside for a length of time. Dress for the weather, and don’t neglect hats and sunscreen. A good hat with a brim will help cover your eyes so you can see well without being blinded by the sun. Morning and evening gives great light, but it changes rapidly and won’t last long. The noon day sun can be too bright to see well, unless you find some shade/cover.



Zoos/Farms
The goal here is obviously to draw animals. Like in a museum or gallery, be sure not to obstruct other visitors. Like in landscape painting, plan for the weather and lighting. Like in life drawing “in the wild” the moving targets will usually mean quick drawing focusing on body language, but you will sometimes get lucky and find animals relatively still sleeping or resting.



Travel
These field trips are a little more involved, and offer opportunities you won’t get close to home. Plan ahead for hitting museums that have works that you can’t see locally, and galleries that have local artists that you have not been exposed to. You may not have as much time as you’d like for these things, but at least stopping in quickly can be very nice. If you have the time to take in the local landscape, supplement your drawing and observation with plenty of good photos. Talk to locals and ask about any “must see” spots. You may get suggestions that don’t interest you, as their idea of “must see” and yours may differ, but you also may get some really amazing suggestions you wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

These can all be incorporated into any trip you take if you plan ahead, but if you can plan a trip (even a day trip just a few hours away from home) with the intention to focus on art you can really have an amazing experience. Seeing and experiencing new things will refresh the artist batteries like no other way.

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.