HSB's Sketchbook

[heysawbones]

I'm gonna cheat a bit since I already know you personally, haha. I think a lot of your issue with rendering and drawing in general is indecisiveness due to a lack of planning. I know that you tend to wing it a lot and plan and edit as you go, which can be a fine and valid way to do things but I think at times it bites you in the ass.

I think you definitely know how to draw and paint, but I also think that you may have some blind spots and once you reach that upper limit of your abilities you begin to waffle and poke around until you stumble on something that works, rather than making an informed decision. I know that's how I always felt when I was first learning how to render. And sometimes it'd be something as simple as not utilizing something as silly, that I should have already known by then, like the hierarchy of shading/values on a sphere.

I wish I could be more specific, I think you know better where you begin to get hung up on than I would. I would just say don't be afraid to revisit the most basic of basic things. You're a fantastic artist, but sometimes revisiting the most mundane things bears the most fruit.

I can tell you where I get hung up: I don't know what an informed decision looks like, in my case. As in, with few exceptions, I don't actually know exactly what I'm going for. This is less of a problem with natural media work, which I suspect is because there are fewer options available. It's less of a problem with comics than with standalone illustrations, because a comic page has, if nothing else, a narrative structure that i have plans for ahead of time. I really need to work on my standalone illo storytelling skills.

Anyway, the intentionality thing you're talking about is why I go off looking for mentors every year or whatever. The planning issue's all on me and is solvable. "What is my art even supposed to look like?" is... I have no idea. I don't begin to know how to approach that. So, I just keep doing it in the hope that I'll figure it out.