New logo

After trashing several ideas, I finally settled on a new logo look. 

Considering that I didn't study design, I'm quite surprised it turned out ok. I liked the way the character is somewhat "sneaking" and boggarting his way into the lower right side of the stage, as well as the custom text I designed. I didn't know what I was doing 90% of the time but I just trusted my instincts to what looks nice. Now moving on to studying shape and creating several clips for my new animated intro. Totally stoked for May!

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A recommitment to professionalism

I remember it very clearly, it was a normal sunny day. I was inside my crowded apartment starting though the window. The previous days have been wasted in browsing the internet and playing games which I don't even remember. I feel terrible, I'm wasting my life and I know I have to make a decision. June 12, 2012 was the day I committed myself into becoming a professional. 

This commitment was brought upon a special audiobook I bought several weeks before - Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield - which was and is my go-to book whenever I feel like I'm out of touch with the way I should be living. It emphasizes that an individual that wants to be the person that he's destined to be must rely on order and regularity instead of a few days with a blaze of glory to make anything substantial. He must turn pro.

So I did, and it brought upon great results. I did 8-10 backgrounds for my animation short till I changed my mind and switched to making comics which I did a lot of episode outlines, character C.V's and 3 full-color pages. After that, I slid back to my old chaotic ways and forgot about the commitment.

I did try several times to recommit, they lasted around several days to a month then a fast slide back down chaosland. But I still remember the feeling I have when I was acting like a pro. It's a relaxed feeling of following a certain schedule, doing whatever you can in the time allotted and leaving everything else in the hands of the muses. I liked that idea, and frankly, it's the best routine I had that's why I'm recommitting back to it. 

Once again, I need to become a professional and this time, I'm sticking to it. I have no excuses this time, I'm living alone, my life is peaceful, and I'm healthy in every way. Combined with the effortless life learning experiment, I think this will be my best year so far.

This quick doodle shows nothing of what I learned

The only thing I needed to do for this is to keep my schedule. I'm also keeping my Effortless life experiment for learning which would help greatly in this schedule due to it's emphasis on passion instead of goals. I'm already done with two things on my Pro Level Curriculum - I'm looking forward to the next challenge. Onward!

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Caricatures 001

Some warmups to get the 2 day rust off.I got way too burned out finishing the hand tutorial in just 24 hours. The tiredness carried over the next 2 days, but now I'm feeling much better though the week is almost over and I hadn't done anything yet work-wise. The effortless life experiment has been going great as well. I'm feeling less stressed and more productive the past several days. 

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Hand drawing tutorial

Just got done posting my hour+ long drawing hands video tutorial. 

This was an insane task. I never knew making a proper tutorial that I can be proud of takes so much effort. But it's really worth it, I learned a lot and I hope that this could be of help to other aspiring artists.

EDIT: For anyone that's interested in the images that show up throughout the vid, you can find them below:

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Hand tutorial - teaser

Some samples for my upcoming hand drawing tutorial. It will be up several weeks or so. 

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The Effortless life - a 30 day experiment

"The journey is the destination"

Life is totally unpredictable.

That's one of the things I've learned ever since I started to seriously update this blog in my quest to become a better artist. Overall, I think I did become a slightly better artist in three months' time, but the funny thing is, I think I also became a better person.

It's weird, but I really do feel wiser and happier. And it all started with a realization that "Art is a mountain with no summit".

Almost everyone I know is looking for an upgrade all the time. I'm not an exception.

I have to get better at gesture drawing, expressions, animation, painting, animal drawing, character designs..I have to be great at everything! But as we all know, these are very vague goals. After all, how do we know if we already made it as a character designer? What is the yardstick for "greatness" at a certain area of artistry?

Think about it, have you ever heard a great artist say "I've reached the standard that I want when I was 30, so I stopped learning and just started churning out a ton of amazing work. This worked out until my retirement when I got to enjoy the fruits of my planning and foresight. Now I'm chillin in the bahamas, a beautiful lady in one arm and a coconut drink in another."

Obviously, that's an exaggeration but you get the point. It's crazy but many artists have this illusion of reaching that perfect position that you've learned all you can and from this moment on, people will praise every work of art you put out and you will never make another mistake.

This is a flawed belief, one that took me awhile to understand but once I did, I immediately recognized how insane it is. 

So to counteract this craziness, I want to do an experiment from the other side of the spectrum. I recently purchased a book entitled "The Effortless Life" by Leo Babauta. He's the same guy that runs the site zenhabits.com and for some years now, he gave up on basic success concepts like "goals" or "planning" and instead rely on where his passion lies for the day. This is a foreign concept to most of us but I think it warrants a try because Leo claims he's never been happier and more productive, and I just think there's a better way than stressing out on things I can't control and feeling bad whenever things didn't go out as planned(which is 90% of the time).

As a start, I made a very "loose" list of guidelines, just something to help me remember the concepts:

Guidelines for my Zen way of effortless living:

1. Have no fixed goals, plans or expectations

2. Instead of improvement and success, think about exploration and having fun. You're now free to do things not because you want to be better, but because you love it.

3. Don't create false needs, create no unnecessary actions.

4. Don't rush.

5. Prefer subtraction.

6. Don't spend time comparing yourself to other people, instead realize that you have everything that you need and try to help other people.

That's it. A month without planning, curriculums and dreams of success. This will mostly apply to my personal time of learning since I have a job, but for that period in my day, everything's an open book. I'll just go wherever your passion takes me, and take everything as it is.

I'll see you in a few weeks and let you know how it goes!

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April - Hand Month!

Google "senshi stock hands" for tons of reference

April is the month of hands! I'm currently on 100 out of 1000 hand drawings and it feels great to be finally doing something about hand drawing problems. I'll post all or maybe most of the drawings once I'm done with this and a tutorial as well. But that's thinking too far ahead. For now, all I'm thinking is to work so let's do this!

As with all things anatomy, it's not enough to learn how to draw it unless you're planning to draw realistically. You have to caricature it after learning it inside out, it's much more fun and if you're a cartoonist, you have to cartoon stuff out! Check out this mandatory JohnK post I share on every anatomy study entry:

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/03/can-life-drawing-help-your-animation.html

And you know the drill, I always have a plan:

Weeks 1 and 2: Construction and learning how the hand works

-Make 150 realistic copies of hands and 150 drawings of your own using construction, to a total of 300

*study thumb(function and appeal), study other fingers(function and appeal), learn appealing hand shapes this week

Week 3: Caricature:

-Make 300 caricatures of hands. Have fun with proportions and don't be afraid to experiment!

Week 3: Gesture and body language

- Study these book chapters and make 200 drawings of hands in the situations described in said chapters

A. p. 133 - Getting a Grip - Nonverbals of the hands and fingers - What EveryBODY is saying 

B. p. 31 - The power is in your hands - The definitive book on body language

Week 4: Cartoon hands

-Make 200 studies of John K, Preston Blair and Looney tunes hands

Weeks after: Make a hand-drawing tutorial

-show how to draw it realistically then show how to caricature it

Some great examples of where I wanna be at, drawing hands-wise:

And reposting my general method of learning anatomy in case I lose track:

General method of learning:

EMPHASIS ON CONSTRUCTION, UNDERSTANDING HOW IT WORKS, CARICATURE, BODY LANGUAGE AND APPLYING KNOWLEDGE TO CARTOON DRAWINGS

1. Learn construction and how it works

2. Draw lots of realistic copies using construction and knowledge of it's function on male

3. Make lots of caricatures of said body part! Widen study by doing same part but of woman, teens, children and old people. If not applicable, do certain body types instead - fat, skinny, muscular etc

5. Study general body language books for notes on the specific body part

6. Make lots of caricatures of said body part!

7. Once general idea is thoroughly understood, learn more by copying cartoon counterparts

 Exercises:

1. After copying from reference, draw it from memory as accurately as you can.

2. Another good exercise is to draw a body part position from imagination then compare from a reference and see the mistakes.

NOTES:

1. It's incredibly important that you visualize the level of draftsmanship that you want to be before starting to study. Post a single picture, or save a single animation sequence of where do you want to go with this.

2.  Make slow careful drawings at first to understand the lesson and once you feel like you

get it, draw a huge volume to sear it in your brain

3. When running our of reference, turn to your greatest reference- yourself!

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Learning vs. Doing

One question many artists face when learning art, or anything, is: 

"How do I know when should I stop learning and start doing?"

Even Picasso is confused

Answer is: You don't.

Many great artists I've read about almost always say they're never content with their work. Picasso was still painting when he was past 90 years old, and Henry Miller was still chasing women. That is the beauty of art, it's very elusive. One day you could be blowing people's socks off and the other day you can't even imagine how did you make through the industry with such crappy work.

The problem arises though, when an artist gets obsessed with learning and does nothing. I'm struggling with the problem myself in the quest to become a better artist. It's very confusing. Take this for example: when I'm in a period of studying, halfway through the course I oftentimes get very antsy and want to apply what I'm studying to something. I want to create, cause I believe that is one of my missions in this world. But at times when I am creating, I find myself looking at the work and my mouth would just curl up in distaste. It's not enough for my standards and I barely improved. How do we deal with this dilemma?

My proposal is this: Learning-teaching-doing-cycles.

It is what it sounds like - an alternate cycle between periods of learning, periods of teaching and periods of doing. So for example I suck at drawing hands(which is actually true atleast for now), I would spend a month doing 1000 drawings of hands from copies and my own, really learning it's construction and how it works and then spend some days creating a tutorial about it to cement the principles in my mind and finally a give a month on my personal project and applying what I learned to it.

Some people can actually learn a lot from little amount of study and apply it immediately to their work so this may seem like overkill but I find that I need to do something for a period of time in order for it to "settle" and get hard wired in my memory.

The other kicker here is the teaching part. I believe in giving back to the community, and teaching is one form of how I do it. I love the fact that I can help other people out by doing something that I normally do in the first place - studying things and organizing it into some sort of a tutorial for myself. And as they say "to teach is to learn twice", I'd take up on that offer anytime.

Finally, we get to the "doing" part. The part that will test your mettle. If you think you've already mastered drawing hands, apply it in your personal comic and watch as you get humbled by that upshot of a 3-fingered ogre hand flicking a cigarette on page 15. This is the time you will doubt yourself and the studies you've previously made. You will say to yourself: "I've wasted a whole month making a thousand studies of hands and I can't even draw a chunky ogre hand!". If your find yourself doing this, stop. Remind yourself that this is an ongoing process. Even the greats make mistakes. In the cozy scene for the animation short "Feed the Kitty", Chuck Jones drew hundreds of expressions for Marc Anthony over and over again until he got the one that's just right. He didn't pull out a piece of paper, made a few elegant strokes and presto! - the perfect expression was made. No, he made a lot of mistakes, and he was one of the best animation directors the world has seen. Give yourself permission to make mistakes, don't be sloppy and remember what you've learned, but also don't pull your hair out if you didn't draw the thing right the first time.

In my humble opinon, what follows is a better mindset - You did your best for what time you could spare to learn, helped people with your tutorial and got a little bit better in the process. And in the end, doing the best we can on something we love is all the world and our deeper selves asks of us.

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