Scribbles and lines.

Okay I've finally finished the corrections, and have gotten the go ahead. This is the evolution of the composition;

The first rough, more exactly based off my sketch. The problem with not developing the much smaller cartoon was that I hadn't fully worked out the background on the left. This made for an awkward, simplistic and unimaginative setting.

Having developed the city further, I added more figures and started playing around with the placement.

Here just the figures on the right have changed, I'm seeing if placing them partly out of the canvas helped with the tension, but realized that the woman's feet was crucial for keeping her attached to the scene.

The final composition, the patron wanted more focus on the two main figures the story is based on, and wanted them interacting with the scene more than what they were, in addition to more emotion. There also needed to be more of an emphasis on the executions happening, which meant getting rid of one figure, and moving around some others.

 My biggest enemy throughout the entire composition was/is scale and perspective. Yes, I learned perspective in college, but it's not something that comes easy to me. Also, figures in space going into perspective on a slight incline...not exactly things that get covered at an Atelier.

I've come to realize that I need to do more landscapes of cities, those objective buildings and their straight lines and unbending forms! Not fun, it made me wish I had a nude to work on. I used to use landscape as a way to get away from people, but when doing a painting about people in a landscape, all the tree paintings in the world won't help with solving the problem of scaling a figure properly in space.

What I did to understand the scale was pick a street that had the incline I needed and then I took references using the lines in the sidewalk as markers. It turns out sidewalk lines here go by five foot intervals, so every five feet I got a shot of a figure going back about 150 feet. Here are a few for example.

 Working on this street, in the overcast light like this, allowed me to stage the scene. Mapping out how wide and how deep it really would be, and what the figures look like in that space. The sidewalk gave me lines to work from while getting the figures on the canvas. It set me up to be able to compare all of the figures to the five foot intervals. Otherwise I would have had no basis for comparison because I didn't have 28 or so figures to pose all at once.

From there I drew the figures directly in charcoal because I said to myself, "I hate doing transfer drawings," stupidly not accounting for the fact that I would make mistakes and need to move things around. Moving things around meant having to re-size and transfer the figures way too many times to count. My only regret here is that I wasn't better at digital work, I could have drawn everything out digitally and moved them all around much easier. This is something I'm slowly working to rectify.

But the composing and sketch is done, time to start painting. I would like to thank some of my friends who were kind enough to lend their careful eyes and minds to critiquing these little scribbles. It really does help to have people you trust look over your shoulder once in a while.

Bust-a-move with your pencil!

I'm still in the composing stage for my Civil war painting. The patron wanted some changes made, as expected, and so now I'm finishing up those changes and will be posting the evolution of the drawings from start to finish as soon as I'm given the final approval.

For now I want to say a little something about references. For something like this project I'm on, it would be impossible to do it without taking reference shots. The aim for this painting is to capture a moment in time, the moment happens to be one of war, and that means lots of movement.

So instead of having my models pose, all of my first references are video instead of pictures. capturing someone walking by having them pose in a walking stance doesn't teach me about how a human walks. But studying a video of people walking, pretending to be in the scene I want them to be in, does.

Andrew Loomis shows a great way in blocking in
a gesture in action, when mapping a scene.

You capture movement by studying movement. What this does is give you a better idea of what is possible anatomically, in an action pose, or I should say a gesture that gives the impression of movement.

The gesture is crucial. It is the difference between a character looking bored, and a character about to act, or is feeling tense, or is about to fall asleep. Look at this screenshot from the movie Akira. Not only studying actual action, but going to the people who do it best, professional animators, to see how they solve the problems of capturing movement in gesture.

In this clip, look and ask yourself what makes each figure look as though they are doing and feeling a certain way, just in the gesture. It is far more than just a face that can tell you about the emotional status of the person you are trying to capture.

This is where it become very essential that as an artist you get into the mentality of the people you're trying to convey. Go and put yourself in the position, the action and mental state of the persons you're attempting to draw. This will teach you much more about how to capture a gesture in action than anything else I can think of.

Don't get soft flabby boy.

There's this irrational fear put into classically minded artists, I don't know if it happens directly, not always, or we just absorb it via osmosis from the rigidity of the method, but across the board one of the common fears I've noticed talking to friends, and ones I face personally, is that you will grow weak or get soft from only working with references, or going any length of time not working with the figure directly from nature.

Frazetta must have gotten all of his cro-magnon  friends
to model for him in this easy to hold action scene...

Whenever I have this fear I stop myself and think about how many artists who I admire who worked from photo's and out of there heads alongside working from nature, and who I still can't even touch in skill.

It's not whether or not you use references that will lessen your drawing skills, you can't let that fear eat you because it does nothing to help you become a better artist, aaaaand it's not true. Using photo's won't inherently lessen your skills, but what will hold you back is a lack of discipline and ability to creatively solve problems as you come across them in making pictures.

So long as you are practicing you will be gaining skill. Repeat that over and over to yourself, the act of painting and the desire to do better than you did last time at all costs whether it's from life, references, out of your head or in another dimension, it doesn't matter, just paint and you will get better. The more important thing is that you don't get stuck being able to only work one way, the longest and hardest road to be on is the one where you are the most versatile, if trying it one way doesn't work, you let it go and approach it in another way no matter what anyone has told you is the supposed "right way" to do it.

I think about making art as I would having infinite resources to go exploring in a hypothetical world where there aren't so many people everywhere, always be asking "what if," especially if you get stuck, but if the inclination strikes you to try something different, give in, you will only gain from it.