Inksplot Studios: Chainmail, Illustrations and Writing by Elizabeth Arnold

I’ve already done two color studies of this character, but while Sylvannas in her Undead Queen persona turned out really well, the younger Ranger General Sylvannas was, um, bad. (For one thing, I misread my reference picture and made her hair blue. In my defense I was playing a blue-haired elf at the time, so it didn’t seem weird at all.) So when I needed a subject for my adventures in painting faster and with less useless detail, I thought I might give her another chance.

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Zeetha!

I’ve mentioned Girl Genius before, so I’ll just point in that direction and say read it. Zeetha is an awesome character but while I like her, I’m not totally invested in her, which is probably why I felt comfortable taking her quite tight character design and flubbing it as part of my learning process.

This is the ‘go faster and be looser’ part of that process. Again. The process is a cyclical sort of thing. On the bright side, there has been some clear progress. This one took about three hours total, and there were no outlines at any point in the coloring process.

Now, I implied there was news.  I’ve been spreading my branchy little dendrites over the internet.

Ever wanted to buy any of my drawings? I am now a member of a little artist’s association called Paper Ribbons, where you can buy both already made pieces and commission things based on a style choice and a short statement. Paper Ribbons is aiming to make art buying make a little more accessible. Pricing is based on size, so it takes some of the uncertainty out of trying to assess artistic value. (They make it my job, rather than yours.) My Paper Ribbons page.

If you’re more into my jewelry, I also now have a facebook page. Mostly because two people in one week gasped in horror when they wanted to ‘friend’ me and found out that I didn’t have one of those buttons. (They don’t actually issue them at birth. Surprisingly.)

And there’s always my etsy, which has been updating lately. Which reminds me, I’ve got some new pieces I need to take pictures of. Boo pictures. Hooray updates!

I realize there’s been a bit of gap since my last communique, but that’s because this is my 200th post.  Noticing that resulted in a nasty case of the Specials: I was struck with the sudden need to do something memorable… something special.  Which completely got in the way of making the damn post.

But hey, 200th post! And I have something very pretty to show for it.

I wanted to do something similar to an old piece I was very proud of at the time, both to try to do something awesome again, and to see how far I’ve come. You guys remember the first post-apocalyptic lady? This is like that, but more awesome. In part because this time the set up is better. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with your basic near-futuristic world weary lady warrior, but I think the idea of a private school punk who learned to survive after the bombs fell to be a lot better of a story. I mean, the husk of a dead city? The gattling gun/shillelagh dual wield? The ratty plaid skirt? This is a moment in a narrative, not just a moody girl in armor. (Not to insult the long and occasionally glorious tradition in illustration of brooding females with accouterments of implied violence.)

It’s also just flat better stylistically. Last time, I couldn’t build anything non-organic from scratch, I didn’t have a great grasp of texture, and an extremely simple angle for the lighting. This time? The only time I really needed to have reference in front of me constantly while I was making it was for the gattling gun. I made the scree field by hand, and I’m much better with texture. Still not totally happy with my texture technique though- Mr Donkey looks a little sandblasted rather than furry, but I was getting testy by that point and it was time to be done.

I am a lucky person. In addition to occasionally donating his computer skills when I need them, my webmonkey also brews beer.

Beer.  Which I get to drink for the low low price of occasionally helping him put proto-beer in bottles.

I felt like I needed to even the scales a bit, and my recent illustrator kick gave me a lovely excuse to do so. I knew I’d need some sort of iconic figure to be the visual focus, so I borrowed the goat I’d made for him previously.  Then I determined what words needed to be on the label, and built from there.

The label is perfectly passable as-is, but I am most pleased about how I made it: the right way. It will be very easy for me to go back and change the colors and the text in the banner to make new labels for each different kind of beer he makes, without having to re-invent anything.

Postscript: We are rapidly approaching my 200th post. I’d like to spend it answering questions about process, photoshoppery, chainmail, or anything else that’s on your mind! Leave me a quick comment, and I’ll respond in my anniversary post next week.

The premise of this week’s exercise is going to seem a bit like some kind of artist hazing ritual, but I promise there will be no incriminating photographs.

This is a copying exercise, which is a long standing and honorable learning technique that makes everyone a little nervous in the day and age of twitchily litigious copyright law. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain gives the classic ‘copy this great work in order to learn how it was done’ assignment a little… twist.

Yes. You are supposed to look at the image upside down, and copy it as-is. No turning it over before you’re done.

That tiny screaming sound in your head? That’s your left brain going ‘Nooooooooo!’ Which is the point. You want your left brain to get so frustrated with the task that it fucks off to go get coffee and lets your right brain do the job.

Edwards suggests that you make a conscious effort not to recognize any parts of the drawing as you are copying them. (No ‘okay, finished the collar, time for the head’. Just adjacent lines.) She also recommends that you begin at one edge and work your way across, rather than outlining and filling in.

Here’s my attempt.

Though I tried, I did not entirely succeed in telling my left brain to sit down and shut up. Occasionally I could not help but know the parts as I was drawing them. (Part of the skill I have developed as an artist is to recognize familiar shapes regardless of their orientation, so a noob would probably find this exercise easier than I did.)

Interestingly, when I did flip both pictures over, the best parts were the ones that I copied ‘on faith’, with no idea of what I was describing. Which I suppose proves Edward’s point.

Just for comparison, here’s the original and mine in a more easily analyzed orientation.

The art is A Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, by Pablo Picasso. But really any reasonably complex line drawing will work if you’d like to try the exercise with something different.

When I first decided to do a blog, I promised myself that I would write it for me: If people read it, great, but that wouldn’t be the point.

For the most part I’ve managed to keep that promise. Which means that when my blog brings me something awesome, it is awesomeness + the delightful surprise that someone actually reads this thing.

I received an email not too long ago. Lauren and Mark Goodman are opening a village pub in Hertford Heath (in England guys. That means they’re classy.) on December first, called The Goat. Lauren had been poking around the internet looking for logo ideas, had found my goat post, and was wondering if I would be willing to develop one of them into a logo for her.

Um, YES. (Lauren’s offer of an ale on the house should I ever get out to England wasn’t the primary factor in my decision to take the job, but… English ale. And home cooked pub grub. These are not things one dismisses lightly.)

It’d been a while since I’d done a proper logo design, so I had to dust off my Illustrator skills. Although it was more like a long neglected outdoor grill than a misplaced tchotchkie… steel wool and a respirator, not a feather duster.

I hadn’t used Illustrator since I got my tablet, and that makes for a very different user interface. Mostly a much less frustrating one. Since this turned out so well, (and with a minimum of pulling my own hair out) I am suddenly I am getting ideas for projects that should be done in Illustrator.

I feel an artistic tangent coming on.

This week’s exercise didn’t take much time to do and didn’t produce a very interesting picture, but it has so many concepts bound up in it that I thought it deserved a post all to itself.

You’ve probably seen the Vase/Face illusion before. It’s also a reliable reference for non-artists on how to switch between perceiving negative space and positive space. If you see a vase, you are paying attention to positive space. If you see two faces, you’re seeing negative space.

Exercise two was to draw your own Vase/Face, with some very specific instructions:

-If you are right-handed, draw the face on the left side of the paper first. If you are left-handed, draw the face on the right side first.

-Draw the straight lines across, and copy the face you just drew in mirror image.

-While drawing, think strongly about naming the parts: This is the forehead, then the nose, etc.

This exercise is meant to teach an awareness of R-mode, by making the baton-passing from one hemisphere to the other more difficult and therefore more noticeable. Edwards reports that most people in her classes experience a moment of hesitation or even paralysis when copying the second face, because their right brain (looking at line, tracing form, balancing space) is trying to work on the same task at the same time as their left brain. (That’s the nose. Draw a nose. What are the characteristics of a nose?)

Because I am so used to shifting into R-mode¹ I didn’t experience any paralysis, but the feeling of difficulty was there. Usually my response to difficulty is frustration followed by chucking the whole thing out a window, but to my surprise I was mainly amused. It was the type of amusement you get from a three legged race, a ‘well this is a really sort of silly way to run a race isn’t it?’ kind of thing.

I’m really, really interested in that emotional response, because it was so different from how I usually experience a difficult task. I typically feel blocked, vexed, and inadequate. The absence of frustration in this case was conspicuous.

One conclusion of neurology is that humans do not have one brain, we have two. Consequently, we do not have one personality. Like most people in a literate society, I spend most of my day in L-mode. This silly little exercise has left me with the interesting conclusion that frustration when faced with a difficulty may not be something intrinsic to me, so much as something intrinsic to my left hemisphere.

¹(Okay, I’m just going to come out and say I hate that term. But it is the term Edwards uses. It is brief, comprehensible, and has no obvious substitute. Any suggestions?)

I had heard of this book on drawing, called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I still can’t remember where I heard about it, or when. But I noticed the library has it, and thought I’d check it out.

Guys. Guys. OMG guys.

If you have ever wondered why some people are good at drawing and others aren’t, or why almost all adults say they hate or aren’t good at drawing, or how it is that artists see the world, or what it would take to learn to draw, this is the book.

Now you wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I actually have an aversion to learning. It’s pretty specific, and very annoying. Basically, if I think I *should* know something by now, I am very averse to taking the necessary steps to actually learn it. (Which would entail admitting that I don’t understand it.)

I’m going to take a big step towards combating that tendency by doing the exercises in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Oh that’s right- in addition to answering some very big questions about art, it’s also a workbook with exercises taken from a 4-day course teaching adult beginners how to draw. The before and after drawings by the students (included early on in the book for encouragement) have to be seen to be believed.

The first exercise is pre-instruction, and Betty Edwards (the author) is mainly just establishing a starting point. It’s broken into three parts: draw your non-dominant hand from life, draw a person from memory, and draw a self-portrait using a mirror.

(My apologies for the fullpage gradients, which are a result of my scanner. I didn’t want to fix this in photoshop however, because I wanted a true representation of the relative greys in my sketches.)

My hand. It went okay.

This is supposed to be a drawing of my father-in-law, done from memory. As you can see, it sucks. (And also looks nothing like him.) I am conveniently illustrating one of the first points in Edward’s book, which is that when we are in doubt we fall back on a symbolic visual language we all developed as children. The drawings of adults often look ‘childlike’, because they are still using a representational rather than realistic visual vocabulary. I don’t recall my father-in-law as exactly as I would if he were sitting in front of me, so instead of drawing ‘the curve at the bottom of his face’ I draw what I know people will understand to be a chin. Which doesn’t necessarily look like a chin at all, and certainly doesn’t look like his chin.

My self-portrait is actually pretty good, although my husband insists that I am wearing ‘serious face.’ I view it as a compliment and a good sign that it is not only recognizably me, it is recognizably one of my faces.

Here I was using a mirror, and so did not need to fall back on my representational vocabulary. I was in what Edwards calls ‘R-mode’: I am drawing the line because it is the line, not because it is my chin. (Incidentally, right brain thinking is emphatically present-tense. The characteristics of right-brain thinking are covered fairly early on in Drawing, and you can find independent confirmation of them from brain researchers such as Jill Bolte Taylor.) I was still suffering from a few perceptual errors however, including the ‘cut off skull’ error, which Edwards tackles later in the book when talking about proportion. I could also stand to spend a little more time evening out the intensity of my lines, but sometimes when your tea has gone cold you just have to take the hint and stop drawing.

I finally feel like I’m learning to sketch on my Wacom tablet. It’s a different skill from paper sketching, maybe because the physical motion of the pen doesn’t have a static relationship to the movement of the cursor, (a tiny movement can have very different consequences depending on how zoomed in you are) and maybe because the picture is appearing on an entirely different surface from the one it’s being drawn on. Regardless it’s taken me about four years of practice to get reliably tolerable results.

So I had a passing fancy to draw my three main comic characters in their underwear. I justified this on two counts: One, I should really know what the character’s body looks like, not just their clothes. Two, I think one’s choice in underpants can visually say something about a character.

Here’s Adiyenko. She’s all about practicality and is even a little modest, but she’s also entirely aware that boyshorts flatter her butt. (Digitigrade legs predispose towards some serious butt.)

And now for something completely different.

It occurred to me that some of you might be interested in a guide to making stars like I did for the Diskworld post. It’s actually not too complicated. And besides, if you want apple pie you’ve got to learn to make a universe.

This tutorial has lots of pictures, so I’m putting it behind a cut so as not to clog up anyone’s RSS. It’s SFW, I promise!

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