Extinction portraits

Earlier this year, the Northern White Rhino was declared functionally exinct after the death of Sudan, the last male of the species. Unless another male is found – perhaps misclassified as another species – the remaining two females will be the last of their kind.

And that’s tragic beyond words. As a kid, I assumed that species that went extinct in the past did so because we didn’t know better, or didn’t care about animals and the environment. I figured that, now we do know better and now we do care, we’d do better at preserving species. As a kid, I never thought about funding, or that governments might be unable, or unwilling, to do something to help. I never thought that people would hunt endangered species because they were endangered. I never thought that conservation is as much luck and hope as science and that, despite all your best efforts, you might still fail.

In my naivety, I honestly never thought I’d see an extinction in my lifetime, but the Northern White Rhino isn’t the first and, unless a miracle occurs, it won’t be that last. I wanted to do something to mark the passing of a species –  the loss of a branch of our extended family – and to do something to help me grok that we will never see these animals again.

So I’m doing extinction portraits. A wreath, a halo, the sun setting on another unique species we’ve lost forever. I’m researching conservation charities and I’m going to be selling prints and giving the profits to organisations that are working to save species on the brink.

Maybe, that way, some good can come out of this.

The Artist’s Way – week seven

Overview

Another 21-day week, but I got most of the tasks done this time, so its not all bad.

I made cupcakes that i hoped would smell delicious, but my partner just complained they smelled of burned chocolate. They weren’t burned, thankyouverymuch, just a bit odd – but I suppose that’s what you get from mystery dry cake mix and no instructions. They might have been supposed to be brownies for all I know!

The collage was fun – like being at primary school again – and I found a suprising number of things related to my intetests in some otherwise normal magazines. Not everything, though, and a lot got dumped for space constraints.

Collage featuring representations of my interests

I’ve been falling back into some sort of spiritual practice and I attribute it to the Artist’s Way. I’m more mindful of my actions, express gratitude more frequently, and am trying to make a habit of saying small blessings or prayers before meals. I feel better for it – more emotionally connected to myself and my surroundings – and intend to follow the inclination and see where it leads.

Morning pages

The morning pages are still provong tricky. They’re rarely done in the morning and often under the influence of a profound desire to get to sleep, so they’re pretty rambling most of the time. I see myself making excuses and I’m catching myself doing it, the trick is now to turn that awareness into action.

Artist’s date

My artist’s date this week was indulging in a long-neglected hobby of mine – making sigils and reading about various magic(k)al theories and practices –  and exploring how I could integrate them into my paintings.

Jealousy matrix

I struggled with this one! I just don’t find myself feeling jealous so much these days, and I don’t know that I want to force feelings of jealousy, having put so much effort into self-care and overcoming those unhealthy thought processes. I don’t think it’s within the intention of the program.

Verdict

Despite the length of time I’m taking to complete these weeks, I’m making steady progress. I’m building on last week’s lesson and taking chances and exploring things I’d like to do if I didn’t have to be perfect, and found that – once I let go of the anxiety surrounding them – I generally enjoy myself.

I’m still a bit uptight – decades of reinforcement can’t be undone overnight – but I’m happier to openly suck at things.

The Artist’s Way – week six

Overview

Cameron wants us to press flowers and collect rocks this week.

I’ve never pressed flowers, and I don’t intend to start now. Plus it’s mid-September, so flowers are a but thin on the ground, but I found a few, plus some interesting leaves, and took photos instead.

In the same vein, I’m not keen of taking rocks out of the environment. They have a job to do and I’m not going to deprive some poor bug of its home because I think it’s shiny.

Happily, I can take all the photos I like:

Morning pages

I’m still not doing the morning pages regularly. Because time is tight in the mornings, they often get left to the end of the day, which means they often don’t get done.

I spent some time writing about the nature of god, why I can’t believe in Cameron’s Creator, and what I do believe in, then I reread the instructions and discovered she wanted me to write about ‘creative luxury’. This isn’t the the first time the instructions have been inconsistent and I doubt it will be the last.

I will confess to resenting the time spent writing the morning pages, because my brain insists I could be using the tine to do something, as if writing isn’t a) something, and b) really flipping useful.

Artist’s date

My creative luxury is time.

I’m in a very fortunate position where I can afford to buy myself almost whatever creative toys I like (my desires are usually limited to a particular colour of paint or a new book), but actually finding time to use them is another matter.

I indulged myself on Friday, splashing around with Brusho and Inktense pastels and generally having fun. I’m not expecting anything good to come out of these sessions, but I’m allowing myself to fail, and that’s a luxury I haven’t allowed myself before this course.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain – part 10

After the skill of perceiving edges, spaces and relationships comes the skill of seeing shadows, of making things appear three-dimensional.

Edwards calls this “light logic”, which isn’t a term I’ve heard anywhere else, but it makes sense – light and shadow obey very simple rules and can be reasoned out logically if you have the knack.

Exercise 30
Drawing an Egg Lighted from Above

“The perception of edges (line) leads to the perception of shapes (negative spaces and positive shapes), drawn in correct proportion and perspective (sighting). These skills lead to the perception of values (light logic), which leads to the perception of colours as values, which leads to painting.

Edwards has us repeat the trick of turning the picture upside down to help break down areas of light and dark into abstract shapes to be duplicated.

Exercise 31
Charlie Chaplin in Light and Shadow

The high contrast portrait of Charlie Chaplin shows us the was that the brain is able to extrapolate from incomplete data. I was thinking about pareidolia at this point – the psychological phenomenon in which a person can see a familiar pattern (eg: faces) in random patterns – but I don’t know if this would apply to seeing a face in a heavily distorted image of a face.

No matter how your style evolves, however, you will always be using edges, spaces, relationships, and (usually) lights and shadows, and you will depict the thing itself (the Gestalt) in your own way.

Edwards touches, briefly, accidentally, on what I would consider to be the most fundamental skill in drawing – that of knowing when to stop. They joke about artists needing someone to stand behind them with a sledgehammer and, on reflection, I can see the merit in that.

The mark of a trained artist is not the ability to stop in time, apparently, but the ability to crosshatch. Most of us start out with scribbling, but once you push through that, your Hatching technique is as much a signature as, well, your signature. Edwards suggests practicing crosshatching various geometric shapes, which is definitely something I could add to my warmups.

Edwards mentions that children begin drawing faces in three-quarter view around the age of ten, when they try to capture not just the likeness of the subject, but also the character. This creates a conflict with the symbol system they’re used to using, as the rotation of the face forces them to deal with asymmetry and the foreshortening of features on the far side of the face. At this point the only thing to do is to draw what you see, not what you want think you see.

Edwards points out that the space between the inner corner of the near eye and the bridge of the nose is a particularly important – and difficult – proportion, and that getting it wrong can throw off the whole drawing. Likewise, the placement of the ear has changed since the profile drawing, forward towards the face – now, the distance between the eye level and chin is equivalent to the distance between the inside corner of the eye and the back of the ear.

Another common pitfall is to widen the far side of the face and then, realising the face is too wide, to narrow the near side, resulting in a portrait closer to a frontal drawing than a three-quarter view.


Exercise 34
Drawing a Self-Portrait in Light and Shadow

The Artist’s Way – overview

I’ve owned a copy of The Artist’s Way for maybe ten years, but never actually started it (I did two days of morning pages when I first bought the book but immediately fell out of the habit and never picked it back up). Such is the life of a lot of my textbooks and workbooks. But I’ve decided that 2018 is the year I scale the foothills of my to-read pile; TAW is on the list, so here we go.

I’m starting by reading through the book before beginning the program, and I can already feel this is going to be a slog.

I understand that The Artist’s Way is based on a 12-step program and that surrendering to a higher power is part of that, but I’m not as religious as I once was and the frequent references to God/a creator are off-putting. In the early chapters, the tone is overly reassuring – bordering on coddling – and I feel spoken down to. Maybe it’s something other people will get more out of, but it’s not my thing and reading it was more a case of pushing through than actually enjoying it.
The early chapters didn’t throw anything up that I felt strongly about; I’ve been seeing a therapist for a while now, so maybe I’ve already worked through some of the baggage these chapters are designed to help with. Certainly, week one’s “write a letter to the editor in your defence” sounds like behaviour I would have indulged in a long time ago, but now it just seems silly. I’ll still do it – I’m either going to go through the program properly or not at all – but I don’t know how much I’ll get out of it.

Weeks three and four sound much more difficult. The idea of being ashamed of creating, of seeking impossible acceptance, already raises some feelings, and I’m so immediately opposed to the idea of reading deprivation that I know it’s going to throw up something profound.
The weeks get harder as they progress (obviously), digging deeper into things I thought I’d dealt with already but just reading the chapter immediately flags these up as something I’m going to have to work at.

Week seven is about perfectionism and jealousy, two things I thought I’d grown out of, but – even just skim-reading the book for an overview – I’m remembering feeling jealous of people for this or that as recently as a few weeks ago. Maybe it’s not something you ever grow out of , but we’ll see what’s under the surface.

Week eight is going to be looking at anxiety and procrastination. The notion of being too old is something I particularly struggled with in my 20s , and I still have Feelings about this topic, apparently.

Weeks nine and ten are about confronting fear disguised as self-recrimination, and self-sabotage respectively. I have an inkling this will be another emotional fortnight; I can feel the shape of the things I’ll be dealing with in these areas, even if not the fine detail.

The later exercises had less focus on letting go and letting the creator work or, at least the focus was less obvious. The last two chapters are about support systems and self-care and there’s an refrain that reminds me of a number of other books on creativity and the process of making art – that great artists share and they support each other. That the process of making art is an end unto itself, and that any fame and fortune that might or might not come with that is incidental.

My therapist said that all the self-help books in the world are just reiterating the same thing over and over but contextualising it differently. The trick is, he reckons, to find one that resonates with you.
A quick read-through suggests to me that TAW is more self-help than creativity manual, but it’s got a reputation and I’m reading it as part of my artistic development, so it goes on the blog.

All in all, I think I’ll definitely gain something from working through the book (even if it’s just shelf space after I pass it on), but only if I’m open to the ideas within and willing to put in the work. Each week concludes with a check-in, which I’ll be blogging about.

On with week one.

How not to launch a Patreon

Launching a successful Patreon is quite an endeavour. From building an audience and gathering a mailing list to setting pledge levels and arranging rewards, there’s so much to do and it all has to be done right and in the right order. Happily, flubbing a Patreon launch is so much easier!
This simple, six-step process will have you with a desolate Patreon and a looming, yet vague, feeling of obligation to hypothetical future patrons in no time!

  1. Make a Patreon account – Obviously, you’ll want to reserve a good URL. Only jerks URL squat, but you’ve got a brand to protect, so it’s okay.
  2. Set up your page, using to best pictures you have to hand, despite a less-than stellar portfolio – You can work on the content later, when people are giving you money based on your promises and obvious potential!
  3. Create some posts – It’s okay if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can figure it out as you go but, for now, just create some content. Patrons can read through old content while they wait for you to upload new stuff.
  4. Launch the page! – You don’t need a big launch, just moxy, grit and a can-do attitude.
  5. Make something, anything – Things you could post include advance access to blog posts. Maybe it’ll give you the impetus to write more often!
  6. Give it a few months, then tell people you have a Patreon using a click-bait blog post.

For more articles on learning to be a professional artist, support me on Patreon.

Seriously, though. I’d been umming and ahhing over making a Patreon page for a long time and decided to have a look at what it is and how it works. I accidentally launched the page while editing it and couldn’t find a way to un-launch it.
I’d been listening to the Fizzle show podcast and got concerned that, without a large social media following and a sizeable mailing list, I’d blown my chance of a successful launch and damned myself to abject failure. Fortunately, a few months later, I was accepted into the Tiny Dragons artbook and was able to piggyback off that success to tell people I had the blasted thing:

I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing with Patreon, but I’m getting there.

That link again: https://www.patreon.com/cheerfulomelette

Because I’m not super awkward about self-promotion or anything.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain – Chapter 9

Chapter summary

Portraiture is a challenging field, both because everyone knows what a face looks like and will be able to tell when something about it is off, but also because our symbolic language is geared towards faces, even to the point of seeing faces in random patterns (a phenomenon known as pareidolia).

Because of the challenges in observing the proportions of a face and reproducing them to such a degree that the face is recognisable, and the struggle to overcome the intrinsic symbol language, combined with the immediate feedback in recognising when a face isn’t correct, realistic portraits are ideal subjects for practice.

Because of these challenges, students often feel that drawing portraits, particularly recognisable ones, is beyond their reach, but drawing a head requires no more skill than drawing anything else.
The problem with portraiture is the same problem with any drawing requiring “painstaking accuracy” – that we naturally enlarge things we feel are important and reduce things we feel aren’t. This occurs in the brain as part of its basic data processing, long before we try to put pencil to paper, and helps to winnow the useless from the vitally important. This isn’t great for drawing but, happily, it can be overcome with practice.

We tend to overcompensate particularly when faced with optical illusions. Edwards offers an exercise wherein the artist stands in front of a mirror at arm’s length, and observes their reflection. Although it appears to be live size, if they then make a mark on the mirror showing the positions of the top of the head and the chin and step aside, the marks will only be a few inches apart.

This reduction of less important detail leads to two major issues: placing the eye line too high on the face, and misplacing the ear in profile.
The eye issue occurs when the student shows themselves to disregard the height of the forehead and visible scalp.

Exercise 27
Madame X (after John Singer Sargent)

From person to person, the position of the ear doesn’t vary by much, which makes it a key landmark when determining the width of the head in profile. The distance from the chin to the corner of the eye is the same as the distance from the back of the eye to the edge of the ear.
Visualising an equilateral triangle can help cement this relationship in the minds of the student.

When drawing portraits, remember the following points:

  • Focus on complex edges and negative spaces until you feel the shift to the visual processing mindset
  • Estimate the angles in relation to the vertical and horizontal
  • Draw what you see, without labeling or identifying elements
  • Draw what you see without resorting to symbolism and assumptions
  • Estimate the relationships between sizes
  • Observe and record proportions as they are, recognising the brain’s habit of changing things to suit it.

Questions to ask when drawing portraits:

  • Where is the point the hairline meets the forehead?
  • Where is the outermost curve of the tip of the nose?
  • What is the angle of the forehead?
  • What is the negative space between the hairline and the top of the nose?
  • If you draw a line between the top of the nose and the chin, what is
    the angle of that line relative to the vertical or horizontal?
  • What is the negative shape created by that line?
  • Where is the curve of the front of the neck, relative to the crosshairs?
  • What is the relative space between the chin and the neck?
  • Where is the edge of the ear in relation to the corner of the eye?
  • Where does the head join the neck?
  • What is the angle of the back of the neck?

Using negative spaces and relative measurements, anything – including a face – fits together like a jigsaw.

Exercise 28
Drawing a Profile Portrait

I couldn’t get a family member to sit still long enough to draw, so used a stock photo: Source

My copy of the workbook ends this section with a drawing of an American flag, or other striped object. The intent of this exercise is to highlight the importance of drawing what you can see, not what you expect to see, but I felt the point was somewhat lost on a non-American audience (owning a national flag is largely considered ‘a bit weird’ in the UK).

I substituted in a striped t-shirt, but I don’t feel like I had any preconceived notions of what it looked like and drawing it didn’t feel like it required much in the way of mental gymnastics. Short of buying a union flag specifically for this purpose, I’m not sure how I would fix the exercise.

Exercise 29
Still Life with Striped Shirt

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain – Chapter 8

Chapter summary

Edwards’ third basic drawing skill is seeing relationships between objects, enabling the artist to accurately depict perspective and proportion. So fundamental is this skill, Edwards likens it to grammar, and I can see why – without a grasp of these relationships, a picture cannot hang together, regardless of the artist’s skill in rendering.
Edwards opts to skip teaching the reader about vanishing points and the mechanics of perspective in favour of sighting.
Sighting is a multi-part skill, comprising firstly of sighting angles relative to vertical and horizontal markers, and secondly of sighting relative proportions. Each measurement is made relative to a constant so that the brain is comparing ‘thing’ to ‘thing’, instead of naming objects or measuring absolute distances. The use of ratios enables the student to overcome their known reality to accurately recreate the illusion of reality on the paper.

Exercise 20
Sighting an Open Doorway

Linear perspective is a relatively recent invention, originating from Renaissance Europe. Other cultures developed their own approach to spacial relationships, notably the stepped perspective of Egyptian and East Asian art, where depth is represented vertically and objects higher up the page are understood to be further in distance from the viewer. Distant objects are often rendered the same size and with the same level of detail as near objects.

Exercise 21
Sighting a room corner

Albrecht Dürer’s perspective machine (illustrated by Dürer’s own Artist Drawing a Nude with Perspective Device and Man Drawing a Lute) was a simple frame, strung with a grid of thread or wire, and held at a fixed position. A marker on the frame ensured that the artist was always viewing the sitter or scene from the same point (something I have struggled with while doing the exercises in this book). By recreating what is visible through the grid in the manner that it is visible the artist is able to create accurate drawings, using foreshortening to create the illusion of objects receding into space.

Exercis e22
The Knee/Foot Drawing

Something that I struggled with throughout this chapter is sighting angles. I’m far more comfortable sighting the ends of a diagonal, or points of a diagonal, and joining them up, and need to practice sighting angles, at least so I  can compare the two methods.

Notes on sighting angles

  • angles are sighted against vertical and horizons constants
  • angles are sighted on the picture plane. Care must be taken to maintain the integrity of the plane
  • creating the illusion of reality will always involve close observation of perceived forms  and the rejection of known forms (symbol language).
  • use the triangular negative shape created between the constant and the diagonal to accurately describe the angle.
  • do not determine an angle to be at 45°, 30°, etc. I do this currently, but Edwards explicitly counsels against it.
  • when deciding between a vertical or horizontal constant, Edwards recommends whichever will make the smaller angle.
Exercise 23
A Still Life of Books on a Table

Advice for perspective drawing

  • work from part to adjacent part
  • keep checking relationships
  • use negative spaces – focusing only on positive shapes weakens a drawing
  • areas of light and shadow are signed in exactly the same way as the shapes

“If in your drawing you habitually disregard proportions, you become accustomed to the sight of distortion and lose critical ability. A person living in squalor eventually gets used to it.”

(Robert Henri, The Art Spirit
Exercise 24
A Still Life with Ellipses

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain – Chapter 7

Chapter summary

Negative spaces are the spaces between and around the subject, and the observation of those spaces makes up the second of Edwards’ five basic skills of drawing.

Edwards provides an example of work by one of their students students, showing their struggle to draw an object they know and their inability to break away from calling on symbol language, and compares it to the same subject drawn by the same student using only negative spaces, and the difference is night and day.

Exercise 16
Drawing a Household Object

Since edges are shared boundaries, the edge of any object is also the edge of the negative space. By drawing the negative shape, we free ourself from what we think we know and are able to draw what we see. A particularly useful trick when drawing foreshortening.

Exercise 17
Negative-space Drawing of a Sports Photograph

Composition is the way components or the drawing are arranged. Key components include positive space, negative space and format (canvas size), and are arranged with the goal of unity in mind.
When starting from life, inexperienced artists often fail to grasp the boundaries of their picture and by addressing this, the most egregious flaws in composition rectify themselves.

A child has a full awareness of the canvas when they draw, says Edwards, but this trait drops off in adolescents as young artists concentrate on individual objects at the expense of the whole. The subject becomes the most important thing and the background becomes an afterthought.

“You can never have the use of the inside of a cup without the outside. The inside and the outside go together. They’re one.”

Alan Watts
Exercise 18
Negative-space Drawing of an Actual Chair

On sighting, Edwards says: “All proportions are found by comparing everything to the basic unit”.
The basic unit is a distance based on something within the scene – a head-height, the width of a door, or the length of a gap, for example (note the inclusion of negative space) – that everything else is measured from. If a head is one unit, a body might be seven and a half units tall.

Dr Ph Martin’s Hydrus Fine Art Watercolor

After picking up a cheap bottle of Dr. Ph. Martin’s Hydrus liquid watercolour from my local art shop a few months ago, I spent a while looking for a place to use it. I found my excuse in a painting of a friend’s dog – a beautiful black and orange pup who’s portrait was crying out a strong base colour.

Just look at this Good Boy

I’m not normally a watercolourist, but the colour of this paint is just ridiculous (I thought the Brilliant Cad Red I bought was a neon orange when I first saw it) and I’m such a sucker for vibrant colours it was inevitable that I bought more.

Set two of Dr. Ph. Martin’s Hydrus Fine Art Watercolour contains:

  • Hansa Deep Yellow
  • Yellow Ochre
  • Permanent Red
  • Cobalt Blue
  • Indian Red
  • Viridian Green
  • Burnt Sienna
  • Alizarin Crimson
  • Sepia
  • Payne’s Gray
  • Sap Green
  • Burnt Umber

Add to that the bottle I already had, and the result is a very generous
spread of colour. I’ll probably add a colour here and there as I go on
(I’m already eyeing up a more brilliant yellow and a second blue) but
I’ve got plenty to be getting on with.

The paint is amazing; I think I’m in love.

Being pre-mixed, it skips the frustrating “not quite enough pigment, not quite enough water” balancing act I struggle with when I use pan paints, and it blends beautifully – perhaps because the increased liquid content stops it drying too quickly and forming hard edges.

When it is dry, it layers nicely and the previous washes seem to resist being picked up by subsequent layers. We’re going to make some beautiful paintings together,  I can tell already.