joyfulexperiment

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Joyful Experiment, Jan-Feb 2023: "RenFaire Minstrel," charcoal (unfinished)

“A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.” - Anne Carson

(Art journal below the cut)

Behold! A rare Joyful Experiment dashes across the wilderness! Thanks @valiantarcher and @telthor for encouraging me to keep it up when fancy struck. It took me a few months, but at least I didn't stop sketching entirely!

So this page is a bit of a mess. I worked on it very slowly through January, mainly while listening to the marvellous King of Attolia audiobook narrated by Steve West, which resulted in one of the characters, Sejanus, sharing this minstrel's face. This minstrel, by the way, is no one in particular that I know of - it's based on a random photo I found online from a Renaissance Faire.

The reason it looks so messy is because I clumsily spilled a lake of tea over it before I could properly draw his instrument. As a result, I decided to just leave it. The paper is too wrinkled to lie flat in the scanner, resulting in some blurry areas, and the tea stains look like the way I used to try to age my fantasy maps when I was elementary-age (at least the edges aren't burned in this case!) But I am posting it nonetheless, because the purpose of this blog isn't polish, but joyful experiments! And even in this condition it still looks better than my attempts at drawing Alain from my novel back in July...

Anyhow, cheers! Perhaps I'll be back around this blog sooner, perhaps later. (I think everyone who follows this blog follows at least one of my two other blogs, so no point saying farewell!)

#traditional art #practice

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I have some older art tips that I keep forgetting to post here. I'll add a few in the next few days, at least those that aren't too outdated!

This one is about giving an extra feel of weight to your characters.

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THIS CERTIFIES

that the Bearer has

PERMISSION

to make as much really terrible

BAD ART

as they need to make

and it’ll be

OKAY

(I have a Hugo Award and make a living drawing stuff, and I say it’s cool!)

Super Official Seal of Officialness

Ursula Vernon’s Certificate of Bad Artistry, for those days when it’s just not coming together.

#I have new sketch I'm finishing #and I am posting this for my own moral support in advance of it. :-)

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“clean up your drawings” no!! that’s a load-bearing scribble!!!!

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oh hey new guide thinggg~ some basics on how to practice! there’s SO much I could add to this, so it’s just the basics :O

short (kind of): there’s more to practice than doing something repeatedly, it’s also learning new things, problem solving, and honest critique. Each of those is its own skill…also be nice to yourself!

#This is good advice. #For future reference.

[joyfulexperiment]

Joyful Experiment, #11: "Bilbo Baggins," charcoal

"The greatest adventure is what lies ahead. / Today and tomorrow are yet to be said. / The chances, the changes are all yours to make, / the mould of your life is in your hands to break." - Glenn Yabrough, in the 1978 Rankin Bass adaptation "The Hobbit."

(Art diary under the cut.)

So, I fell off the art challenge wagon, but that doesn't mean I can't continue challenging myself to keep practicing, even with a less rigorous posting schedule. Thank you, @telthor, for kind encouragement to give it another whack.

I'm a little intimidated to write an entry for this one, because it feels like such an entry ought to properly express the impact Tolkien and the love of his work has had on my life, and that's a steep, steep task. Instead of waxing wordy, I'll just say the Professor was hugely formational for me, was there at some of the great turning points of my life, and you can find his handprints all over my imagination, my sense of humour, and my worldview. There's also so much room in my heart for the various adaptations, the parodies, and the way Tolkien has of bringing people together.

Bilbo, love you to pieces. RIP Sir Ian Holm.

#new artist #traditional art #lotr #lord of the rings #the hobbit #bilbo baggins #tolkien

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One time I made a couple of bowls at one of those pottery-painting places. When it came time to glaze them, one of the employees showed me the different glazes they had available, and she made very, very sure that I understood that one particular type of glaze was not guaranteed to be the same color as it was on the sample. She explained that this variety mixed two different color tones and that the color of the finished product would vary based on which color dominated, or where the project sat in the kiln, or what other colors were near it in the kiln, and so on. I nodded and told her it was fine, but she kept explaining, because she wanted to make sure that I totally understood that the color of my finished project could be wildly different from the color on display.

As she went on and on, all I could think was, "What soccer mom hurt you?" What horrifically entitled people had demanded such ultra-specific color matching from their amateur pottery efforts? Wasn't the fun of this to find out what happened? To try a new technique and new materials and see what resulted? Who cared if it matched a particular color? As I questioned along those lines, the woman explained that people sometimes wanted a specific color to match their home decor and were upset by inconsistencies, which made a certain amount of sense, but it seemed to me to go against the point of the creative process. Why set yourself up for disappointment by demanding an ultra-specific result when you could get joy out of discovering the unexpected?

And it hit me that this should really be the mindset for all creative processes. Every artist, in any medium, has an image in their head of the piece they want to create, but our work is always going to be altered by the limitations of the medium we work in. Pottery changes based on heat or environmental conditions. A musician is limited by the quirks of his instrument. A writer needs to translate a whole simultaneous symphony of ideas into a linear string of black-and-white words. Making art is putting ideas outside of ourselves, which means that there are factors that we have no control over. And why should we demand complete control over the universe? Why should we possibly expect that the world bow to us in giving us exactly the art that we envisioned? Art is creation, but it's also discovery, and the artist can get much more joy if, rather than clinging to their own vision, they gratefully accept the changes that occur in translating the artwork from the abstract to the real. The true joy of artistry requires putting aside one's pride and approaching the work with humility.

I did end up using that glaze, choosing a color that was supposed to be an orange-red color, and ending up with a deep brown bowl that appeared to be carved from wood. It was so much cooler than what I'd envisioned, and it would have been a tragedy if it had come out exactly like I'd expected. By not expecting a particular result, I got something better than I could have made if I had complete control. Not every mistake is going to come out well, but there's still a joy in the discovery. And I need to remember to apply that to other types of art as well.

#Great thoughts for all creatives in any discipline!

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Joyful Experiment, Day #10: "St. Dominic Cartoon," charcoal

"Behold, my children, the heritage I leave you: Have charity for one another; Guard humility; Make your treasure out of voluntary poverty." - The Last Will of St. Dominic (only extant words written by his own hand)

(Art diary under the cut)

I'm low on sleep and motivation, so I fell back without reference on my standard cartoony doodle style, complete with ridiculously short legs and odd arms. Still, I am pleased how much, even in cartoon form, the head looks like the bust of St. Dominic based on his seamstress's description of him.

Oh, how I love St. Dominic. He has the most awesome story. Daring and gentle at once - at once so similar in spirit and yet so utterly different from his contemporary and friend, St. Francis of Assisi. I discerned seriously with a Dominican community at one time, and he and the saints of the order are very dear to my heart.

I am a day behind in the challenge, but I don't think today is the day to catch up. I'll keep doing a drawing a day steadily, and sometime when it seems right I will squeeze in an extra drawing.

#art challenge #traditional art #st. dominic #saint dominic #order of preachers

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How to Character Design

- Draw a man

- Scream at man

- Draw man again

- Man looks worse

- Look at photos of things that your man should look like

- Ignore photos and draw man

- Man is still flawed

- Realize the non-negotiable feature is issue

- Cry

- Redraw man without feature.

- Man looks better

- Repeat cry. Rage.

- Try color schemes

- New color schemes reveal fundamental flaw in current design.

- You will cry. This isn’t part of the procedure.

- Try coloring again with altered design.

- Colors are all bad.  But one color good. Color will be friend forever.

- Change all other colors to good. Friend color now bad. Abandon it.

- Done!

- Not done. Draw man 1000 times.

- Man will look different now.

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I feel like I want to do a Tolkien sketch today. But I don't know what quite yet. Might mosey over to my dad's enormous Tolkien collection that takes up more than two shelves for some inspiration.

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Joyful Experiment, Day #9: "Middlefest," charcoal

Shallan jumped, safehand to breast, and spun.

He rested up a tree limb, wearing his black outfit. He moved as she saw him, and the spiky limbs retreated in wave of vanishing red and orange. It was the messenger who had spoken to Father earlier. - Brandon Sanderson's Words of Radiance

(Art diary, the weirdness of a drawing a book-accurate fantasy species of tree, and sharing about what happens when a book is there for you at the right time, under the cut.)

I feel excited to post this one - it's not really any more skillful than the rest, but the picture means something to me, I find.

I blame Sanderson for his description of the jella tree, which is is naturally adapted to thrive in an environment that gets weekly hurricanes. It has long, pointed, spiny leaves of pink, orange, and yellow that look like explosions of colour, or as though the tree were on fire, and which pull inside the trunk if they sense movement (to avoid being ripped off by storms.) Further, the trunks are rock hard because they are evolved to take in the detritus that naturally falls in the rain and incorporate it into the trunk and heart of the tree to make it withstand gale force winds.

I actually tried drawing this scene once last year, from a much further away and level perspective, and tried to be very literal about those spiny leaves, which came out looking like gigantic evergreen needles. The effect was ugly and sparse looking. So for this attempt, I decided to be less literal and be more inspired by the flame description, rounding them out and bringing them to a point with a tinge of what might be a contrasting colour if this weren't a pencil sketch. The result looks a bit goofy, chaotic, and Dr. Suess-ish, but I consider it an improvement on the previous picture, and it does get more the effect I was going for if you stand back and don't look closely at any particular leaf.

As for for the trunk, Sanderson doesn't tell us how this rock hard tree draws leaves inside itself, so I decided maybe it was like a fantastic crackled egg shell with gooey bits holding the crackles together, where the hatching dinosaur baby might stick its little beak or appendages out and pull them back in several times without wrecking the shape or integrity of the egg. (I know - we raised chickens and turkeys for years, and I know this isn't quite how it works - but I establish my image, don't I?) To this effect, I decided the trunk would be a bit like a spruce tree, covered with random non-corresponding shapes and nobbles with seams between them that all fit together like a mosaic. The leaves pull in and out through the seams. I don't have the skill yet to pull off what I was going for, but you get the idea.

I am happier with how the people in this picture turned out. Though they could of course use work, I think I did a better job with foreshortening then usual, and it was fun making little choices like giving Hoid a cape or short boots. Shallan's havah (dress) was tricky to figure out, as this is a flashback scene to her early teens. I didn't want to give it too much shape (I wanted her to look a little stubbier at this age than later) nor did I want to make it too fancy or embellished, because it would make her look older. But then again, she's at a festival, so it made sense she'd been wearing something a bit special. For cultural reasons of modesty, Vorin women cover their left hands with long sleeves buttoned closed, and this seemed like a promising part of the outfit to add some ornamentation.

This scene means a lot to me. Without spoilers, in this scene Shallan meets Hoid, who is much older than he looks and will become a sort of mentor figure to her, for the first time. She's living through some extremely difficult events, and feels at once helpless to change anything and like the only one who can keep her family from being destroyed. She's weeping, and then she sees a funny man in a tree who asks her questions that open up her mind, spins her a tale like a true storyteller and engages her in a Socratic discussion about it, and finally shows her something wondrous. She doesn't meet him again till adulthood, and even then they meet seldom, but every time they meet I am so, so delighted.

When I was reading the Stormlight Archive aloud to my brother last year, I wasn't in a situation anything like Shallan's, thank God, but I was going through possibly the most awful time of my life, which turned out all right but that I am still working through on some level. It was a situation where, like Shallan, I could do very little change anything except pray and try to be a source of stability through it all for the others who were suffering. About four days into it, someone told me I was just scarring myself further by allowing myself no mental escape from it. They told me, "Go on praying, go on listening, go on being there for the ones who need it - but there's no knowing how long this will go on. Please, you'll be better able to come through this if you listen to some music or read a book or something, even for a little."

So I decided it would help both me and my brother to continue our read aloud. It was a lifesaver. Those books are not perfect books, but there is much, much that is beautiful and fascinating and thoughtful, and encouraging in them. We let ourselves laugh at the funny moments, and speculate about the mysteries. We were already far enough into the story before this crisis started that we were emotionally attached to Kaladin, Shallan, Dalinar, and the rest. And there was something about their story that made it seem like it wasn't a pure escape - when we finished a reading, we felt a little bit strengthened to carry on through what we were facing with new resolve and trust, to stay soft even though it hurt, to work through the anger and the sorrow, to trust God for what would come next. It feels embarrassing in some ways that we were leaning on Brandon Sanderson novels of all things, but there was a grace in it I am thankful for. The timing was right.

#traditional art #art challenge #words of radiance #stormlight archive #hoid #shallan davar #cosmere #cfsbf

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Joyful Experiment, Day #8: "King Edmund Study," charcoal

And they stood looking upon it. Then said King Edmund, "I know not how it is, but this lamp on the post worketh upon me strangely. It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before; as it were in a dream, or in the dream of a dream." - C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

(Art diary under the cut)

This is the reference I was working off. While I would liked to have captured the liveliness of his expression (and a number of other things) much better, this one didn't turn out terrible as a beginner study. He, um, looks a bit like the old Prince Valiant comics from the forties (not a compliment,) but I think a fan of the Narnia movies would be able to recognize the pose and crown, etc. I used cheat markings for distances and a few edges. This particular screencap has been in my files for years, as I have the strangest feeling I'm supposed to steal this actor's face for an original character.

The Narnia books seem both very present and faraway in my mind. They were a tremendous part of my childhood - aside from many rereads, the Radio Theatre dramas were the joy of my heart (my first experience with really good audio drama,) I loved the BBC miniseries and the 1970's animation in spite of their flaws, and in my teens I made cosplays for the releases of the movies. My favourites were The Silver Chair and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

The Narnia stories don't follow me around or stay in my heart the way they do for some who loved them in childhood (LOTR does, though!) Nonetheless, I do have a warmth for them.

This fall I am going to teach a semester-long class for younger students on the Chronicles, with two weeks alloted for each book. It'll be my first reread in a bit (though I think it highly unlikely I have forgotten anything.) I'm a bit like the Doctor - the sheen can sometimes rub off of the things dear to me a little bit, but when I have a companion - or a class of students - to show it to, the wonder revivifies. "And when you see it, I see it." I'm looking forward to hopefully seeing new truth in those dear old children's books.

#traditional art #art challenge #edmund pevensie #king edmund #the lion the witch and the wardrobe #chronicles of narnia #narnia

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my art may never be as good as i want it to be, but i have hands and a pencil and i will make that everyone else’s problem

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This is the hard part of the experiment, where I'm challenging myself to do more than pure studies - to try to combine reference with what's in my head, to draw things with elements outside my realm of experience. It feels like regression compared to some of the nicer, safer pictures I did the first few days, but I know it's not regression. It's new ice being broken.

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Joyful Experiment, Day #7 "Alain, Post-Haircut" charcoal

Tufts of hair littered the floor like so many little hay stacks. Noemie surveyed her handiwork with her lips sucked inside her mouth and the scissors limp in her fingers. As no looking glass was available, Alain had to content himself with running his curious fingers through his hair.

“Verdict?” he asked.

She shuffled one foot round the other.  “Well, I’m hardly going to brag about my own work….” - From my WIP, The Brilliant Hour

(Art diary under the cut)

I was so dissatisfied with yesterday's efforts that I decided to try drawing Alain again. It's a little bit better than yesterday, but still not what I was aiming for. Aside from some weird proportions, he looks kind of like a hobbit here. I did have fun drawing the very uneven but very significant haircut he gets in Chapter Seven, though the shading kind of makes him look like he needs to get his roots done.

Against his will, Alain has been stuck with long hair far beyond its fashionable expiration date, and it's a source of great excitement to him to chop it off, even if it's a mess.

#traditional rt #art challenge #wipart #my ocs art

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"Embarrassment is the cost of entry. If you aren't willing to look like a foolish beginner, you'll never become a graceful master." - Ed Latimore

#art #creativity #encouragement #platitude but true

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Joyful Experiment Day 5: "Facial Proportion Studies," & Day 6: "Alain," charcoal

And you are going to get me into the Circle of Fetes.”

“Bloody likely.”

“Likely bloody. But nonetheless, we’re going.” - My WIP, The Brilliant Hour

(More sketches, art diary, lamentations, etc. below the cut.)

Shivers of horror. The last couple of days have not been my proudest of the experiment thus far. I did watch some informative videos on the mathematics of the face, and while the studies that resulted are not precisely lovely, they were helpful for cementing the principles in my head.

Today I tried to draw my secondary character from my WIP, Alain Renaud, and... did not even get close to accurately portraying him. Noemie was not very accurate either, but somehow I was more okay with that. Alain here fought me every step of the way, which makes sense for a young man who's depending on disguise for his very life.

But I will introduce his character anyway, even if these visuals don't capture him at all. Alain is a difficult character to introduce since the details of his identity form an important part of the intrigue of the first few chapters of the story. He's a twenty-one-year-old chatterbox who fancies himself a philosopher and a wit - but is actually thrives and is much more his true self the more practical and salt of the earth things get. In truth, he does his fastest thinking in an emergency. He has no natural dexterity but nonetheless must pass himself off as a professional juggler. He loves the newly popular coffee, a good laugh, whatever is most up-to-date, and this unusual chance to be insanely on his own in his decisions. He and Noemie are foils and friends, and I love playing with their dynamic.

Now to scrub those drawings out of my mind.

That one pair of eyes, though actually love kind of like his eyes - I'll count that as a win.

#art challenge #traditional art #wipart #my oc art