Bit of a rant here.
There's a lot of bad art wisdom out there. I grew up hearing a lot of things that simply are no not true and it probably some impact on how I developed as an artist. I dunno. But bottom line is that this shit is false.
Here are a few falsehoods on my mind lately that bug me when I hear them. To be clear, I don't hear these often. But they are out there.
1. You need to sketchbook
2. Trad art is more genuine
3. Tracing is cheating
4. It takes training
5. You draw so you can paint motorcycles and do baseball logos
1. YOU NEED TO SKETCHBOOK
No, not really. It's nice to sketchbook and I'm an advocate for doing it. But you don't have to. I haven't kept a "real" sketchbook in years. I sketch all the time on my tablet, on notebooks, scrap paper, etc. Most artists just like to doodle. But you know what? You don't have to do that shit if you don't wanna.
Draw when you want, where you want.
2. TRAD ART IS MORE GENUINE
Fuck off. This is just elitist garbage along the lines of "digital art is not real art" bullshit. I remember getting into an argument with a good friend in the early 90s when we were looking at Batman: Digital Justice. He felt like it was not real art. I strongly disagreed.
Art is not limited to any given medium. Medium is the thing through which you express art. Arting through a crow quill is no more or less art than arting through a Wacom tablet. So get over yourself already.
3. TRACING IS CHEATING
What the fuck does it mean to "cheat" in art? That's such a bizarre thing to think. I grew up hearing this a bunch. The measure of a good artist was the ability to "freehand" a photorealistic likeness onto the paper with the power and strength of your art muscles. Preferably with only a single pencil, which is a bit like a sword or a dick.
And yet I learned various techniques for cheating in art from art classes. I learned how to do those grid things where you grid out an image then blow up the grid with a projector and then draw what's in each square, but larger. There's probably a name for that.
One drawing technique I learned in 6th grade was how to transfer-trace images. I either learned it from a kid named Danny or I made it up. Or, more likely, I picked it up from using those Preso-Magix transfer sets. The technique was to graphite the backside of an image such as a comic book cover, then use a ball point pen (dry, old, didn't matter) to trace the image onto a clean sheet of paper. Bam! You got a perfect tracing of the comic art. Then you would pencil or ink or color it to perfection.
I credit this stupid simple method with at least 50% of the development of my drawing skills. I ruined SO MANY comic book covers. I am so very sorry, Peter Parker.
Anyway. Tracing is fine. Do it. Trace some shit off then draw from it. Like riffing on a good song. Of course stealing other peoples' art is not cool at all so if you're gonna trace something make it your own or just do it for practice. Don't be a dooshnozzle, geez.
4. IT TAKES TRAINING
To do what? To art? No, actually, it doesn't.
Training and practice are great, don't get me wrong. You can learn some amazing tricks and tighten up your game this way. If you want to be a highly paid professional, then training probably does matter a little. But to art? Fuck no. You just do it. The doing it part is training, anyway. Don't turn this into a kung fu movie wherein you have to seek out the Master to teach you the Reverse Dragon Nib Technique.
5. YOU CAN DRAW, SO YOU SHOULD PAINT MOTORCYCLES AND DO BASEBALL LOGOS
This is a personal pet peeve. I grew up being known as the kid who can draw. Having that reputation meant family and friends would often recruit me to do things like draw their dog, draw their car, draw their mom, paint on their wall, paint their motorcycle gas tank, design their little league logo, etc. And sometimes I'd do it and always always I would hate every minute of it.
Maybe I'm just a selfish bastard. But I like to draw what I like to draw and I don't like to draw what I don't like to draw. It's a dumb-simple concept but that's how the shit is. I am not a car painter nor am I a mural artist. I draw cartoons and pinups and RPG art and if I wanted to pain motorcycle gas tanks I'd fuckin' be doing it.
(Though, being honest, I think painting motorcycle tanks would be hella fun! I just have no idea how to even begin doing it.)
I probably traced the figure in this drawing from some magazine ad. I don't remember as it was like 25 years ago or something. It doesn't matter one fuck because this drawing is not a demonstration of my freehand muscles and assuming it should be is some dumb shit.
Now, I wanna be really clear. Being a skilled freehand artist who can draw your kid's face without tracing or anything at all is fantastic! Good on you. But doing it like that is not a requirement for arting nor does it make the arting better, as a rule. It's just another cool thing you can get good at.
1. I keep sketchbooks, but only because if I doodled on bits of random paper, I'd end up losing them, so sketchbooks keep everything in one place. But that's just me, and I agree it's not a "should" situation.
ReplyDelete3. I was also taught that "tracing" technique as a child. I think my mother or brother taught me. Probably my brother, because I remember him drawing all over my comics, the blaggard.
Sketchbooks are awesome. I tried not to be too hard on them here, I was only going after the notion that you really MUST keep a sketchbook. I fuckin' love a good sketchbook too!
DeleteOh yes, your point was clear. I'm with you; if a sketchbook works for you, go for it, if not, that's cool too. But if someone tells you you NEED a sketchbook, then they are wrong.
DeleteAmen.
ReplyDelete3: Tracing is the primary skill of technical and production artists: The people who get paid the most consistently to be artists. Sure in a digital age a lot of that is copy and pasting while playing with layers and masks but it's tracing in spirit.
4: Practice will help but "training" is dubious unless you want to learn a whole lot about very small parts of the craft. I've met plenty of art school graduates that couldn't use a ruler or draw a straight line. Practice is also fun!
5: "I'm an artist not a designer" is something a whole lot of people don't understand. I can do amazing things working with a talented designer and can grok design it just isn't where I shine. There's a wide range of artistic skills, nobody would want me painting on their van.
A lot of times I'll grab a pose or something that strikes me in a photo and I'll trace off the basic shape to create a new drawing. It's a very common tool. But my entire life I have seen people - almost always non-artists - treating tracing like cheating. It's baffling to me, honestly. But it goes back to that idea that a "real artist" can use a single pencil to perfectly recreate an object 1:1 by eyeballing it.
DeleteDon't all the top guys in comics take reference photos, and draw over that? Didn't Loomis do the same exact thing? I just assume. I dunno.
DeleteYeah it's very common. A lot of old school painters will set up photo shoots to get the poses they want. But of course many of them will draw from the pose freehand like in a life drawing class, which is awesome. I definitely credit the life drawing classes I had in college with building on my foundation as an artist. If you get a chance to do life drawing, do it!
DeleteI'll come at this from the fiction writing angle, there is a LOT of similarity here. Just the highlights, so i don't write you a novel in the comment section, lol.
ReplyDelete1. Journaling can be useful, I guess, but keeping and saving everything you write, like it's precious, is NOT necessary. Write a lot, toss it, keep it, whatever you want. I learned to write by sending out emails to my buddies about my drunken debauchery in college and law school. True facts.
2. Literary Fiction is the Trad Art of the fiction world. The snoot is well known, well documented, and widely derided as elitist prattle. A note on my bias: I write about cyborgs jump kicking aliens out of airlocks. So...consider the source. :-)
3. Tracing doesn't have a direct analog in fiction, but learning tone and sentence/paragraph structure by typing out other people's work is a prime learning tool. I've never actually done it exactly that way, but whenever I'm trying to write dialog I open up some Bujold, or lately James Corey, and copy the punctuation exactly.
4. You need to practice, sure, but if by training you mean going to school, getting a degree in creative writing, or anything like that, please don't. Lol. There are a TON of MFA's and bachelor's of English that can't write their way out of a paper bag, who end up aping the strained language of others, ham handedly trying to reverse engineer lit fic when the authors who wrote it just sat down and did it. What I mean to say, is the writing advice I've gotten from lettered individuals has almost universally been garbage, with some incredibly valuable exceptions. Very few give practical every day WRITING advice, but they can deconstruct a story like the dickens!
5. Ah yes, doing what others want you to do instead of doing with what you love. In fiction this is a HUGE problem. People will chase trends, chase money. Good writers will do it too, people who have been making a living for awhile but want to break out. It can work, you can make money writing to trend, if you are fast enough to catch the wave. You'll quit in a year though, 3 years at the most. Because there's a million easier ways to make money than in writing, if you are smart enough to write novels, you are smart enough to do a lot of things. So you have to love it to do it long term. And if you stop loving it, you WILL find other ways to spend your time. And before you know it you are a marketing guru, a book agent, an editor, or back in your old profession. I've seen this happen a hundred times. Luckily my old profession was law, and it nearly killed me, I had to retire early due to health problems. I found writing as an outlet, and never looked back.
Okay that's a lie, I still consult for friends sometimes, but only when they are in dire straights. :-)
Thanks for sharing. I was thinking that a reasonable analog to tracing in writing maybe would be to take a story structure or plot you like and then modify and build on it to make something new. Which... y'know. That seems perfectly OK to me. Whatever lights your fire.
DeleteHa, well that's so common it has a name. Genre. :-)
Delete