Figure Drawing, pt.10

5.5x6.5" pencil

I'd intended to attend the Society of Illustrator's 2-on-2 sketch night twice a month. Given the things I do, that seemed a reasonable schedule, though they do it twice a week, so opportunities abound. The 1.5 hour round-trip commute doesn't help I guess. In any case, here is some fresh stuff from just last night. Sorry I haven't been able to show you other things lately. Hopefully soon!

Though there are always two models on the platform, I usually just draw one. Mainly, that's due to the time constraints, with the longest poses being only 20 minutes. Slightly aggravating, especially because the above pose was great with both ladies. I knew I couldn't get far, but a lot of us recognized it and started in on both anyway. Another 20 minute session would've been great, but I sought to frame the image and work with the incomplete parts so that it made a nice shape anyway.

I started the night out frustrated. The short-pose sketches didn't go very well this time. Maybe I was just tired, but it took awhile to get in the groove this time. Every once in awhile, you sit to draw and it's almost like you forgot how. During breaks I mentioned this to a couple guys who asked how it was going--I was relieved the hear them both say that yeah that happens all the time to them, too. I mean, I think I knew that, but it's nice to hear anyway.

I think I also learned that me and conte sticks need to part ways. At least for the kind of work I'm doing here. They just aren't friendly for holding. When I use conte in its pencil-form, I find I'm much more able to control it. So that's what I stuck with for the longer poses--if I worked larger, on longer poses, sticks would be great. But I work smallish, and trying to accurately draw more detailed areas can be problematic with these chunky, edged things. Even the conte pencils are a little problematic, since they don't fit easily in sharpeners. So you whittle points out of them using Xacto blades and, well, it's just not as predictable as pencil. This can be crucial when trying to draw facial features, for instance. But conte is great and fast for shading, where pencil is slow, or for mass drawing (drawing only shadow shapes, avoiding linework).

In any case, it is my intention to pick up the life drawing more often, hopefully twice a month starting next year (but it's not a resolution!).The music is a nice accompaniment to the evening, and there are lots of good artists working there, so it's a good environment overall to be in.

L: 3x9" conte pencil
R: 4.25x6.25" conte pencil

20 Years, 4,750 Pages

Stephen King's Dark Tower septology, or whatever, holds a singular place in my reading history. As a series, it has spanned 20 years of my life, from the time I read the first book in about 1988. So, it was with equal parts relief as well as sadness that ~4,750 pages later I finally finished it.

Book 3, the Wastelands, I read while at art school. #4 I read upon returning home from my honeymoon 10 years ago. At the rate the books were appearing, I stopped until he was finished lest I completely lose the plot, being so spaced out. Once he'd finally done so, I decided to re-read the first 4 books. Sitting at the San Jose Airport in 2005, weeks before leaving my hometown for all the other places we've been, I began reading The Gunslinger again. I talked a little about this years back, when I was still at the start of my re-reading.

I re-read #4 while in Spain. The thick trade paperback went with me on the bus the day we moved back to the states. Due to our space requirements, I tore off the first 300 pages or so I'd completed and left them in the bus, taking the rest with me. Luggage space was at a premium! Books 6 & 7 I read almost entirely while taking public transportation since May.

I have mixed feelings about the series. It was entertaining, at times fantastic. But starting in book 3 or so I really got the feeling that the book was coming out of King in a sort of stream-of-consciousness, benefiting from his years of honing his craft but not so much from structuring. Does he normally write this way? I don't think so, though I've only read two of his other books. I know that back in college, when I wrote more, I wrote that way. Stuff just sorta came out, and I rarely went back to organize it. At times, the language was sophomoric, the intended weight and seriousness of the dialects and High Speech shoehorned in such a way as to make them trite devices--King did not even take a running leap at being a fraction the linguist that Tolkien was. Yet, the story, perhaps because of its right-brained flow, was always throwing you curves, and the characters were genuinely interesting.

I read most of the books in their trade paperback editions to benefit from the illustrations. In truth, I liked the Whelan and Hale illustrations (books 1,2 and 7), and disliked the rest to varying degrees.

One surprise for me was that I reached the end and found it had not been spoiled, despite knowing others who'd read it. That was nice. I'll agree with King's estimation--it ended the way it really had to, though I hoped for something different until I got to it. By the way, though I'm not reading the Harry Potter books (nor do I intend to), I must say that I still don't know who if anyone dies in the last book as people wondered before its release. So, good job you Potter fans.

Now what? I'd like to take a break from fiction for awhile, although it would be nice to read a good old-fashioned standalone novel. In fantasy / science-fiction, it is almost impossible to find a standalone novel these days--series bloat is endemic. And if you do, it's like 3,000 pages long, the length of a series. I think I might have more luck with sci-fi in this regard. Honestly, series-bloat has kept me from reading quite a lot over the years. I wonder how much this has factored into the shrinking book publishing market, at least on the F/SF side.

If anyone knows of something good that fits the bill, do let me know.

10,000 Hours to Mastery

"If People knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all." --Michelangelo

I've always believed two things regarding most of what we would call skills: 1.) that there is such a thing as innate talent (and Michelangelo had loads of it), and 2.) that hard work will ultimately trump natural ability, which Mike also says was necessary for the full expression of his genius.

I once had a painter tell me, back when I was in school, that good brush-handling in painting is simply a matter of getting all the bad lines out first. As if your brushes are full of "bad" paint that makes horrible strokes, and the more you use them, you clear the junk out and the strokes improve. A simple enough piece of advice.

Then, in language studies, I've been reading a lot about quantity vs. quality with regards to gaining fluency--how floods of input and usage imperfectly learned ultimately causes more to stick in the long run than smaller chunks of information learned to perfection, perhaps explaining why exposure and immersion beats class-work every time.

So the following article was of particular interest to me. The idea the writer went about studying was what quantifiable traits could be found in common among people who have mastery over various subjects. I'll quote a key excerpt from the larger story, well worth reading if you are the type who aspires to gain any skills or abilities:

This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery."

I'm not sure what a master criminal does for 3 hours a day for 10 years to hone his criminality, but I found this to be a rather stunning bit of information, even if generalized. As well, the back half of the article discusses other aspects regarding window-of-opportunity for achieving greatness (which applies to Michelangelo, too).

What gave me the strongest hunch that this was so was seeing the work of some young artists, fresh out of art school. Their work was very good. It occurred to me that 10 years prior, these artists were all of 13 years old. 13 year old artists, even when they are good, aren't very good in the ultimate measure of quality--we grade on a curve for them and say they are fantastic (for being 13). So, in the course of those 10 years, those artists with some skill turned into fantastic ones. Prior to 13, it'd be interesting to measure their hours put in. I know for myself, from maybe 3rd grade-8th grade I probably spent ~8 hours a week or so drawing. I'm sure it felt like more. In those years, it was mostly uninstructed--me reinventing the wheel, as most young artists do without the benefit of good instruction. I'm sure my drawing habit before third grade was less time than that, and largely undisciplined.

In High School, that probably went up a bit. Let's say 10 hours. You see where this is going. By the end of High School I was probably at the the mid-point of so-called "mastery" of one medium: pencils. I imagine that painting would have its own curve, although a part of painting is drawing, so there has to be some overlap: like learning Italian after knowing Spanish.

Through Art School the hours jumped tremendously, and I'm guessing within a year or so of leaving I was around that goal for at least my primary medium. Which of course brings up the question of defining mastery, as I was hardly Ingres at that point when working in pencil.

I didn't became truly comfortable with painting until about the year 2000 or so. So perhaps a useful definition of mastery is the ability to utilize a skill in broad applications, with confidence and recognizable skill. You can hit that point in the English language without ever being anything near Shakespeare.

Though the article talks about those who are the tops of their fields, I imagine that mastery is somewhere below being a Bobby Fisher in chess. I would guess that every single NFL football player, even second-stringers, has mastered his position. It's just that beyond mastery, there are still levels and levels and, as Ingres shows us, levels beyond that.

When people say to me, as they often do, "I can't even draw a stick figure," there's this sort of woeful acceptance on their part that their inability is chronic. Probably they haven't devoted much disciplined time trying to do otherwise. I am not a very good dancer. I can count up the hours I've ever spent doing it and they'd be fewer than 50, I'm sure of it. For my wife, that would be a much higher number. I've never had much interest in improving my ability to dance, but neither do I feel incapable of getting good at it. I think I know it's just a matter of doing it a lot more, and I'd become good at it.

So, if you have a skill you've thought it would be great to be good at: another language, a musical instrument, painting or drawing, singing, skateboarding, or whatever, you have your marching orders: 10,000 hours. Get to work and you'll do it! I mean, some of you have already put in that amount of time on World of Warcraft, so now you can achieve something that won't disappear when the servers inevitably get unplugged someday.

Globalization

What I remembered last week: each night that you eat Thanksgiving leftovers has the same odds of putting you to sleep as the first night. Which brings me to this week.

In the years when I dreamed of being an illustrator, I was somewhat aware of the competition that would be faced to enter and remain in the field. In those years, and probably up until the mid 90's, that competition was largely other American illustrators, with a few Brits thrown in, and the occasional European. For most intents and purposes, Canada doesn't exist for most Americans, so I didn't consider Canada very much (sorry), despite there being excellent illustrators there, too.

That's a lot of people as it is. But in the mid-90's, as the world shrunk to be small enough to fit in Cat-5 cabling, suddenly people from, well, just about everywhere started to appear. Really good artists: from Japan (where I expected them), Korea (which hadn't been on my radar until I worked for Nexon for a little while), Singapore, China, and less-noticed European countries like Hungary and so on.

Great--as if I didn't have enough competition to worry about! I think I was in denial about it for awhile, but I've learned that what it really means is that I'll have to work twice as hard now, at least, to stay afloat. So, if it forces me to be a better artist while introducing me to fantastic illustration, then good.

So a few months back I was asked to supply some text and images for the Chinese-produced "Fantasy Art Magazine," which I'd heard of, but had never seen in person. When I visited China in 2005, I couldn't even imagine how or where to look for it, or how to ask for it. I did so, and Vol. 33 features a nice 6-page spread on yours truly. The other artists featured are from Canada (see?), S. Korea, Japan, and UK. So I'm representin' the stars and stripes this time (I don't know if Alex Schomburg can do so properly, since he's dead).

Click images to see big versions, if you want to practice reading in Mandarin

Faithful readers of Exit Within will not find anything particularly new in the text, so I'm not going to bother searching for the English version unless someone really bugs me for it. It's sorta the basic biography, a little about my working methods, and then a step-by-step of the sort that I do commonly here, but much shorter. Really it's the perfect sort of introduction that someone unfamiliar would need, whereas you're all much more l33t. The only really new thing is in the step-by-step for Mosquito Guard, there are 2 thumbnails that I guess I haven't shown here before. That's certainly exciting.

So, practice reading your hanzi and we'll see you next week!