Making something look good…Part 2 (Links & Resources)

Alright, thanks for com­ing back, this is the sec­ond part of the a two part blog post, the first can be found here: Mak­ing Some­thing Look Good…Part 1

As promised, here is a list of var­i­ous skills and asso­ci­ated resources that have helped me to improve my art­work over the span of 4–5 years and will prob­a­bly do the same for you.

If you have any queries, addi­tions or just want to say hi, you’re encour­aged to hit up the com­ments sec­tion of this post. I also wrote this a while ago, so if there are errors, gram­mat­i­cal or oth­er­wise let me know and I’ll edit. Remember…caring, is sharing =)

From: Dar­ren Yeow
To: ‘Paul Turbett’
Sub­ject: Art Advice

I had a bit of a think about your email and yes, art is def­i­nitely one of those fields where it is quite sub­jec­tive. If you don’t know how to break down art-making into it’s var­i­ous under­ly­ing com­po­nents that are brought together to cre­ate a com­plex object, it can be dif­fi­cult to gauge how to improve it. I’d say that the areas cited below are the main tech­ni­cal aspects of rep­re­sen­ta­tional artwork:

1. Obser­va­tional / Repli­ca­tion skill

This is basi­cally train­ing your eyes to see what is actu­ally in front of you and to faith­fully repro­duce what you see. When look­ing at an object, a lot of newer artists look once or twice and then try to recon­struct it with their mind’s eye. Although there is a time and place for that, being able to observe a ref­er­ence and accu­rate repli­cate it on your cho­sen can­vas is an impor­tant foun­da­tional art skill. That’s why a lot of artists attend life draw­ing classes.  Per­son­ally don’t do life draw­ing, I instead just use photo ref­er­ences or other phys­i­cal objects on my table sim­ply because of time constraints.

Train­ing this is as easy as spend­ing 5–10 min­utes a day sketch­ing var­i­ous objects, take the time to look at some­thing for a while, look t how it is con­sti­tuted of form, shadow, light. It’s not so much what you draw, its more the devel­op­ment of the con­nec­tions in the brain that is important.

Visit PoseManiac’s 30-Second Draw­ing to practice.

2. Idea Generation

Also called ideation, it is the cre­ative process before attempt­ing the final art. It is under­taken to facil­i­tate the feel, ges­ture, or gen­eral shape of the final design — not so much about final details.

The start­ing point of this process is just look­ing at lots and lots of cool art, pho­tog­ra­phy, gath­er­ing good solid ref­er­ence that fits the brief, doing lots of doo­dles and sketches at a small size (thumb­nail­ing), not wor­ry­ing about details and actively mak­ing sure that you’re not bla­tantly copy­ing some­one else’s work. From there, you’ll start to develop your own ideas.

Feng Zhu, Syd Mead and Scott Robert­son, all well known and highly expe­ri­enced con­cept artists all have great DVDs out that demon­strate the con­cept of idea gen­er­a­tion. If noth­ing these DVDs will get you pumped to draw:

Con­cept Design 1: Vehi­cle Sketching

Tech­niques of Feng Zhu 1: Design Process — Fight­ing Robots

Tech­niques of Syd Mead 1: Thumb­nail Sketch­ing and Line Drawing

The Tech­niques Of Scott Robert­son 5 Cre­at­ing Unique Environments

3. Linework and line weight

This is an abstract skill mainly used for design pur­poses, line and line weight do not exist in the phys­i­cal world, every­thing is rep­re­sented to us in value / tone and hue. It is nev­er­the­less an invalu­able tool for idea cre­ation and get­ting ideas down on paper quickly. It can also be a way to simul­ta­ne­ously prac­tice your mechan­i­cal dex­ter­ity, to achieve clean work. Check out Feng’s DVD on design, tack­les the prob­lem of line work very efficiently:

Con­cept Design 1: Vehi­cle Sketching

4. Tone / Value / Light / Shadow

This is how objects are rep­re­sented to us visu­ally in the every day world, objects are rep­re­sented by their form shadow derived from light­ing, repli­cate the shad­ows and light­ing cor­rectly and your art will start to sing. Check out Henry Yan’s work, it is a good exam­ple of excel­lent tonal con­trol, he has a book on Ama­zon if you’re inter­ested. Scott Robert­son also has a fan­tas­tic series of DVD’s out detail­ing with tonal ren­der­ing also:

Henry Yan’s Fig­ure Draw­ing (Tech­niques and Tips)

How to Ren­der Matte Sur­faces 1: Shad­ing Pla­nar Surfaces

How to Ren­der Matte Sur­faces 2: Shad­ing Round Geo­met­ric Surfaces

How to Ren­der Matte Sur­faces 3: Shad­ing Com­plex Curved Surfaces

5. Per­spec­tive

Per­spec­tive is a the­o­ret­i­cal frame­work to rep­re­sent objects in a sim­u­lated 3d envi­ron­ment on a 2d sur­face. I’d say this is another area that a lot of peo­ple fall down in, basic per­spec­tive is quite sim­ple, but to really get a good grasp of it, it takes quite a lot of hard work, I have a nat­ural incli­na­tion towards art, and I knew 90% of per­spec­tive when I was a kid nat­u­rally, but the last 10% I worked hard for months to fully under­stand. A great resource I used to fill in gaps in my knowl­edge is Per­spec­tive! For Comic Book Artists Link – its rep­re­sented in a very easy to under­stand comic strip for­mat, doesn’t mean its easy to put into prac­tice, but it is easy to under­stand at least:

Per­spec­tive! For Comic Book Artists: How to Achieve a Pro­fes­sional Look in Your Artwork

6. Pro­por­tion

Pro­por­tion is the size, loca­tion, and ori­en­ta­tion of one pic­ture ele­ment in rela­tion to another pic­ture ele­ment – sim­ple but impor­tant and dif­fi­cult to grasp.

For instance, ref­er­enc­ing the human being, the pro­por­tion of the human height is mea­sured in heads, for an ide­alised man, that is 8 heads high. The pelvis area is roughly 4 heads down from the top of the body. The chest / nip­ple line is 1 head down and so on. Learn­ing pro­por­tion is as sim­ple, as sit­ting down and study­ing pho­tographs, and think­ing in terms of the image ele­ments – arms, legs, eyes, head, etc as abstract shapes, they lie on the image plane in var­i­ous loca­tions, a cer­tain dis­tance from each other. Think­ing about images in such a way, will train your artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ties so that you can incor­po­rate it into your own work.

The best books in my opin­ion that dealt with this topic was Loomis’ series of books, now out of print. I’ll work on get­ting some PDF’s uploaded so that you can down­load and ref­er­ence them. You can get some sec­ond hand copies online at Ama­zon, but they are bloody expen­sive as they went out of print in the 50’s I believe.

7. Colour Theory

Colour is an advanced topic, only learn about it once you’re com­fort­able with all the prior steps. Jeremy Vick­ery of Pixar has a fan­tas­tic DVD out, imo one of the best resources on colour the­ory around — prac­ti­cal and low on jar­gon. The DVD will cost a bit when you fac­tor in ship­ping, but it is well worth it:

The­ory and Appli­ca­tion with Jeremy Vick­ery. Prac­ti­cal Light and Color.

8. Tex­ture

Refers to the obser­va­tion and repli­ca­tion of hue and tonal gra­da­tions in order to depict var­i­ous sur­faces. I’ve only ever used one book:

Dig­i­tal Tex­tur­ing and Painting

9. Dex­ter­ity

This is really the breadth of your artist touch or feel, it’s the abil­ity to be gen­tle with your strokes, or force­ful, its what give art a feel­ing of being alive. Some new artists, because they haven’t devel­oped this gen­tle touch, tend to cre­ate all their art­work with a heavy handed touch — slap this here, slap this there, and it’s done. Just as there are dif­fer­ent golf clubs for each sit­u­a­tion on a fair­way, there are dif­fer­ent strokes in art, know­ing where to apply them comes with expe­ri­ence and pen­cil mileage, being able to do so is man­ual dex­ter­ity, how you clasp and how deftly you con­trol the pen­cil or scribe.

10. Design Principles

This refers to estab­lished prin­ci­ples, that gov­ern effec­tive design, one of the more abstract areas of illus­tra­tion. I found a good resource was the Uni­ver­sal Prin­ci­ples of Design:

Uni­ver­sal Prin­ci­ples of Design, Revised and Updated

Prob­lem solv­ing and cor­rect­ing an image essen­tially entails going through each of these attrib­utes of an image and sys­tem­at­i­cally fix what is wrong or lack­ing in each cat­e­gory. This is a fan­tas­tic method of mak­ing sure your art­work can always be “saved”.

Hope this helps you out some Paul! =)

Daz