Working towards consistency

[Navaali]

@Darktiste Thank you for the link!

@Jephyr Hi there! Thank you! Yeah, it feels really good for me to go back to traditional media! While using softwares, I have a lot of bad habits and it’s harder to keep focused and determine the steps to follow to finish my art. I just enjoy drawing and painting on paper and seeing a concrete object taking shape and not something on a screen. And it’s easier to correct my flaws with gesture and apprehension of space on paper. It’s just a weird canvas to work on when you can zoom and dezoom, because it’s less constrictive, I feel like it gives you less the feeling of a finished limited space. 

@Tribulator Noted. I’ll try to do some exercice with this later on. Thank you.

So far I have a productive and very nice week regarding art, thanks to the holidays and the help of my friends who are taking care of me. 

     I was able to witness some shibari practitioners, so I started my sketchbook and took this opportunity to do life drawing. The poses are really short and the models move unexpectedly, so it was really fast sketchs. Very interesting, I wish I could attend life drawing sessions. 

No nudity but I put a spoiler for shibari, if this is against the rules let me know and I’ll suppress the pictures.

Spoiler

     As I want to improve the structure of my drawings, I came back to the lesson 1 of Drawabox. As I said elsewhere, I have never finished this first lesson although I did it several time in the past - I usually get stuck around the rotated box exercice. A few month ago, I realized I hadn’t grasped the theory part of the ellipse lesson. I am familiar with the practical exercices but I don’t understand how the ellipse move in space depending on the viewpoint. So I rewatched/took notes on the lesson, paying attention to the minor axis and the normal vector. I was also interested in the fact that ellipses get thinner both when they slide away from the viewpoint, and when they rotate relatively to that same viewpoint.

This I find really difficult to grasp for my brain (I don’t have good visual imagination). Because I’ve practiced object drawing in art school, I had learn how to draw ellipses and had to construct objects in 3D. We did a lot of observational drawing and later had illustration exercices where you must recreate the same objects, which means you must understand their structure. But honestly it was a long time ago, and I was not super good with it to begin with. 

Now, I am aware that I can’t mentally picture simpler things. I struggled with understanding for example how an object can rotate around 3 axis, even while manipulating the object. So today I tried to get a better understanding of space and 3D playing with this. 

     Finally, an event that was amazing and very motivating. Yesterday, I got the opportunity to meet with a BD author. He is someone great, who knew the big names of French and Belgium comics, and saw the evolution of the field since all those years. Truly a storyteller, with the aura and looks of a sorcerer. 

Encountering artists like him means a lot. A single meeting like this can inspire me more than schools and social media or internet threads. We need masters and elders and the feeling to join with a legacy…

Anyway, apart from those personal feelings, I showed him the very few pages of comics I did since last year when I tried to seriously get back into it. And he encouraged me to continue those projects and submit them to get an editor to see if they could be published. He truly seemed seduced by some sensitivity in my work. 

I don’t feel ready and know my work is so flawed, but I know I put my heart in it, so it’s really my own. I couldn’t, for years and years, do this and try to tell a story of my choice using the medium of comics. 

So when I show my work to an editor, it might not work out, but I at least want to get there. And then, I will refine it, look for other opportunities, or propose other projects.