ENERGIZE Your Artwork by....going back to basics?!
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- Опубликовано: 12 сен 2024
- We all get into that rut of thinking that "more is more", piling on techniques and gimmicks and ideas on our artwork, but it still comes out looking lackluster?
Let's dig in and see what the answer may be, and it may be an answer that forces us to look backwards, instead of forwards.
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Thanks for a really insightful discussion, Wes.
What resonated with in me in particular was that looking for the triangle/trifecta around the binary of imagination and realism. To me, it feels like you're talking about abstraction, in the fundamental sense of the term wherein the essence of visual communication lies in emotion, intuition, and -- like you said -- "energy" . This is opposed to realism that at its core can be empirically measured like with the exact dimensions of a human head or sight sizing. But abstraction as a concept has no need for such exactitudes, and even the ambiguity in its terminology speaks volumes of it as an artform unbound by convention. Understandably, this makes it a hotly debated point of discourse in most fine arts circles and ateliers.
But I think abstraction exists not in absolutes but in degrees, like a spectrum along imagination and realism. Artists like James Gurney pull reference and inspiration from real life to create fantastical settings infused with wonder, and others like Carolyn Anderson and Yuming Li evoke that through their remarkable brushwork. But there's always an element of abstraction that speaks (in romanticized terms) to the "soul" of the artist and hopefully resonates with the audience as well. But like learning another language, abstraction is different from how art is traditionally taught and requires a shift in both skillset and artistic perspective. Perhaps that would mean cultivating one's unique sense of intuition (before it was overridden with mandates of what art *should* look like) would be a form of going back to the basics?
Hopefully that makes sense
You were such a blessing from the algorithm, thanks for the fantastic content!🎉
Thank you so much my friend, I appreciate you!
I think that the third thing you spoke of is Impact, or at least that's how i call it. It's related to the message (or intention or story or personal voice, etc) that you want to convey and how you compose/present it before your audience. So it's possibly related to composition which then also relates to design, the difference is, it's not something technical and can be taught through theories, at least not ones that will apply for everybody because it's an individual thing. These things are rarely shared (through social media), because of how personal and arbitrary it can be, but with that said, I hope that you can pull it off and not stop sharing.
Anyway, this is just me thinking along with you as I am also searching and thinking a lot about my own art for the past couple of years. I like what you are doing here, sharing thoughts and questions like this and I am curious as to how you are going to answer them. Don't stop sharing man. Cheers.
I think you hit the nail on the head! It's important to share the more "intimate" parts of the creative process, as everyone has to go through that, and it's VERY easy to fall into the trap of thinking that nobody else has to deal with those. It's easy to find a ton of "technique" videos and "tips and tricks" type things, but trying to put words to the more esoteric art things can be a bit harder. In fact, it was hard to even put words to the ideas themselves LOL. Many thanks for the great comment!
I am learning some basic animation and finding myself in the same boat. I need to simplify too! Also I want the story to be strong so my message gets across. Thanks for the great video. I might need to get out my watercolor pencils now too!
It's SUPER fun, it feels like a breath of fresh air to get out the traditional stuff after such a long digital-only stint! You can do it!!
@@ArtOfWesGardner thanks!
I wished more people would get that in art forms like Manga or comics, the plot and characters, and framing, are much more important than the art itself. I have read many technically beautiful Manga in the past whose story was just meh.
But no, artists have to be perfect to the last line, I can't tell anymore how often I see people downtalking e.g. a Manga series due to it's artstyle because it is so ugly but they don't even think about how much of an effort it takes to do not only draw one picture but a whole sequenced story....
I want to produce my own Manga someday but this fear of not being good enough is holding me back so much. I am still no master at realism so I don't allow myself to draw what I really want to ("Master the fundamentals"). I was really brainwashed the feeling hat if I am not able to do an artwork for e.g. Magic the Gathering I am not allowed to do manga.
I should really just take out my sketchbook and draw with my pencils again though
I liked your pen, marker and paper piece the best. I think like me you have a little bit of a perfectionist mindset, with a need to "fix" stuff. Which is all good after you have your imaginative stuff down on the page... whatever medium you're working in. I can do it but I struggle with that initial imaginative splurge where you shouldn't literally care, or even think beyond a basic concept when getting stuff out there. That's where the magic lies in any truly creative work. You watch Kopinski with a pen and initially there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the lines he's putting down. I'm sure there is but I think for him its literally unimportant. Afterwards the ordered mind comes to the fore. In writing, "stream of consciousness" exercises have given me the best results once I've ordered the madness. From a famous perspective, The Beatles "Yesterday" started out as "Scrambled Eggs" with some snatches of unrelated melody. I guess if you were to call the third sense maybe name it a bridge conceptually. You want to bring order to the madness you've laid down but you don't want to lose the magic of your initial chaos. An example would be adding structure to a gesture drawing but keeping the concept of the initial gesture. I don't know if thats what you're talking about but I think its part of it. From a Taoist viewpoint I guess it more about balancing in a Yin Yang sense