Chapter: Blog Post

|So with me taking a week off, I decided to take that time to really nail down what I didn't like about my art, and honestly, it was not just the eyes, but a fundamental misunderstanding of symbol language. If you don't like hearing someone talk about their art process, then this will be insanely boring, so check in on Thursday next week. This was all derived from my adventure with what I really thought the problem was, and that's the eye. Look at this collage.

What do all these eyes have in common? Because they do have something in common, they're all exactly the same in fact when you see it. It's not shapes, or color, it's not the irisis or reflections or pupils, it's the language of the art. These eyes all have the same exact thing, the top lin is always darker then the bottom line, it's always thicker. Sometimes the bottom line isn't connected on the bottom, or doesn't exist, or is merely implied, but there's always a top line, and it's always thicker. That's because of the way our eyes work

When you look at an eye, you don't really see all the intricate details, but you know it's an eye, this is because of the way the tear line (the little build up of water at the bottom and top of your eye) interacts with line. It reflects a little bit and makes it lighter, when we see a line, it's not only a representation of a border, but also the representation of a shadow. Rest your hand on your desk, or in front of your monitor. There is in fact a line of shadow that is darkest the seperateds the border of your hand from your desk, or your monitor. That's what the line represents, a shadow, no more, no less. Whenever you put a line down, you're saying "This is where the shadows lie, this is the place between places."

There's more to it than that, but those are the basics. When I first got started drawing I did Drawabox, which is a short art tutorial that gets your feet wet with the basic concepts, and really pushes you to your limits to see what you do and don't like about art, while learning the basics of construction which is enormously important, one of the challenges in DrawABox is to draw 250 boxes, which you may not know this is a lot of fucking boxes to draw. I did all 250 in about 3 days, and whenever I can't get a concept down when I'm really struggling that's how I fix the problem, I draw 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 or however many it takes to really understand that. So over these last two days I've been drawing eyes. Sometimes I color, sometimes I shade'em sometimes I just bang'em out. It doesn't really matter I just do whatever as long as it's an eye.

And it's some pretty powerful stuff, it took me a minute of studying the eyes to get to this point where I really understood what I was doing, this is the moment where it started to click, and I realized how important the top and bottom lines were to what I was doing, You can see that I wasn't getting it, and you can see where the idea starts to take root. I did a bit more studying, and started really going into anatomy books, and youtube tutorials, and all that, but it wasn't until I started tracing over eyes I liked, looking at them in colleges, photoshopping them on my characters face that I finally understood.

You can actually make any shape into an eye, you can make random scribbles into an eye if you understand the basic facts.

And once you understand those basic facts it becomes easier and easier to play with the shapes, and experiment. Scribble lids at the bottom was when it really clicked that eyes and shape are extremely malleable as long as you get the symbology right. If you can hit the key points that makes your brain, which has trained all it's life to look for the gist, not the specifics, this is an eye, an eye is what it'll be. Once I started getting that down, I started experimenting with colors, and with eye reflections, and different shapes. I actually had my wife just tell me random shapes and I tried to make them into eyes.

And that's when I realized about the body, what makes it look like a body is merely proportions, and a few key features, does the mouth have a shadow where the lips curl inward? That's a mouth. Do the eyes have a shadow ontop and a thin shadow on the bottom, that's an eye. Are they about equidistant from the nose? Well then you have a face friend. And once you start composing these pieces, you can make a character. The importance is not trying to draw a perfect recreation of what you're seeing, but understanding the constructing shapes and lines that will depict what you're saying.

Drawing is just lying via paper. You are tricking the brain that an image is a thing. You do that by circumventing the parts of the brain that wrestle with logic and try to figure shit out, and go straight into tickling the parts of the brain that are trained to spark when the right patterns show up.