Loading ...
I am most certainly not the artist of this pairing. My storyboards should be proof enough of that. A few years back I dared to dream that I was getting better, but facts are facts: I can still look at a picture I drew when I was six and a picture I draw now and find them functionally indistinguishable.
Luckily, Dawn is adept enough at interpreting my scrawlings that something good can still come out of it, but occasionally some unsuspecting child still comes by at a convention and asks me for a sketch, despite my dire warnings. I do what I can. For free, naturally. At Long Beach a couple of weeks ago I changed things up and risked a stick figure prospector with a big stick moustache instead of my usual stick zombie. I think it worked well enough from a symbolic viewpoint…
But that’s the big trick, isn’t it? I’m reminded of a drawing class I took in college where we used a text called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Still in print to this day, it would seem. The premise of the book was that everyone has the potential for rendering lifelike scenes and portraits, and the major hurdle is not so much the precision of our hands as it is the formatting of our brains. That humans are naturally wired to not really, truly “see” what they’re looking at, instead using shortcuts and symbolism — great when you’re just trying to get through the day, gathering food and avoiding dangers, not so great when you pick up a brush and try to recreate the image of the saber-tooth tiger that was trying to eat you. We recognize our good friend Phil on sight, of course, but when it comes to drawing Phil most of us fall short, even with Phil sitting right in front of us.
Why? The theory, again, is shortcurts and symbols. I can picture an AK-47 perfectly in my head, and then when I try sketching it out I get something that’s kinda sorta like it. Huh. If there’s a picture of one in front of me, that’s better, but I still find it oddly difficult and frustrating to get anything better than an approximation.
The solution of the book was various exercises to try to break your brain out of its symbolic habits and get you to draw what you’re actually seeing, not the symbolic shorthand your mind is relaying to you. One lesson that I recall was to take someone’s photograph and turn it upside down or otherwise reorient it so that your mind didn’t automatically go “someone’s face” and you instead would just be reproducing the various curves and lines. A few years ago when I was still painting wargaming miniatures this trick happened in a concrete fashion for me as I wanted to put the image of a handprint on a figure’s apron. Looking up handprint images online gave plenty of examples but every time I tried to put that into practice it didn’t look right. The only way I finally made it work was to stop thinking “handprint” and instead just go “oval here, and little blob here, and here, and also here…”
Once I broke it up into those component parts, independent of any larger concept? Poof, success. But it was definitely a struggle, and you have to respect artists who have made it their life’s work to embrace that struggle. Even those that are masters of a more “cartoony” style still have to deconstruct what they’re trying to represent, mastering the symbols rather than being slave to them.
Here’s a more modern example of the phenomenon… video games with character creation and customization features. Ever tried to recreate a celebrity? A friend? Yourself? Yeah, even your own damn face can get really tricky, and while part of that can be chalked up to the limitations of a game’s engine, every year they get more and more robust and realistic and a lot of us feel more and more inadequate by comparison, especially when you get one of those engines with the free range sliders that should theoretically be able to produce any shape and size of nose you need. So why doesn’t your nose look right, dammit? Is it because you’ve never really seen it?
Okay, bad example since without reflections and photos and such we really wouldn’t ever see our noses. But you get the gist. Instead of “my face” we might be better off reproducing the collection of lines, curves and blobs that compose it.
Sometimes it’s said that good artists really just don’t think or see things like the rest of us. Well, when it comes to drawing, that may not only be true, it may be their greatest skill.