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artofjim · 10 months

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End result of the mentorship. I worked on a hypothetical trading card project under the name Warrior Primates. Pictured are the front and back of the cards.

I also took his Design Thinking course, on his site, which sparked a passion for design. A lot of Peter's professional career is in the entertainment industry, so he has a lot of anecdotes and advice to give in addition to teaching. Design is a very important part of visual art, but is seldom taught to the same degree in mainstream art classes. Most of the online platforms I am clued in to have an entertainment industry focus once you get beyond the fundamentals classes, but at your standard university art program, design skills like this will most likely not be taught.

I wanted to share the new design information I had, and continue to work on my skills in that field. I started the Monthly Design Challenge, which I ran primarily through my Discord server, as a way to mock the environment design professionals work in. It was a chance to practice, collaborate, and build portfolio pieces. I decided to get guest artists to help give feedback each month, since I felt a little amateurish to fill that role by myself. I still run it to this day, if you're interested join my Discord server!

I finished the year with Figure Drawing: Rhythm and Structure, taught by Christian Nacorda on Brainstorm, and a clay sculpting class on Schoolism taught by Andrea Blasich. The former absolutely ruled, covering much of the same information as my Analytical Figure class from earlier in the year, but in much simpler terms. The homework was a high-quantity of more simplified drawings, as opposed to the singular mega-polished anatomy textbook page that we had to do for the other class. Iteration wins again! The class format was also a weekly live meeting that included lecture and feedback, which is definitely best for me. It made me obsessed over learning anatomy.

The Schoolism class was one of the most expensive classes I have bought so far, and was also the worst. Their platform is formatted even poorer than CGMA's when it comes to teacher-student interaction, and they were in the process of moving to a new website during this class. The teacher also went on vacation and there were no updates on what was happening to the class... I fell off after three weeks in the middle of the lack of communication, and wasn't really aware of what happened afterwards. I think I still have access to the lectures that eventually started getting uploaded again, but it just left a bad taste in my mouth.

All of these classes, besides the Schoolism one, cost between $500 and $800, and were between 8 and 10 weeks long. If you think about all I learned in 2021 and how much a year at a private art school is, I think there's no contest about which is the better option. Obviously, there are elements of in-person college that you miss out on, like the comradery and opportunities from being affiliated with the school, but during this time schools were all online anyways.

Thank you for reading this all! I spent about 5 hours writing, collecting all images, hyperlinking, etc., so I appreciate you taking the time. I rarely ever get much feedback on these blog posts because I don't host them on mainstream social media (is there even a social media for blogs like this?), so if you're reading and want to leave a comment below, I'd love it. I am very passionate about sharing my experience learning art because I want there to be as few 2020 clueless Jims as possible. The resources are out there to help you succeed and thrive, you just have to know where to look! And I'm happy to help you where I can. If you want to support me financially and get tons of goodies in return, become a member here on Ko-Fi. I also have a shop and one-time donation button. I just launched some new stickers and need to sell about 20 more to pay for the cost of making all of them, soooo check that out here. I'll be posting the final part of this 5-year reflection soon! Tune into my socials to keep updated. See you soon!

5-Years of Artmaking: Part 2 of 3

ORIGINALLY POSTED ON KO-FI HERE: https://ko-fi.com/post/5-Years-of-Artmaking-Part-2-of-3-P5P0N1JMW If you haven't read part 1 yet, click here: https://ko-fi.com/post/5-Year-Anniversary-of-Making-Art-K3K6N0XT5

2020

You might have noticed in part 1 how often I pointed out a lack of methodology and my tendency to just copy direct to final lines. I think I was beginning to notice the plateaus in my skills at the beginning of 2020, so I planned out a yearlong curriculum for myself. This curriculum was not guided by any outside stimulus, only my desire to experiment, grow, and get better. I made a month-by-month outline. Each month had an overall topic, and I listed resources and potential exercises for each. I did it on Trello, which is one of my favorite outlining tools.

I think one of the reasons I dug in this year is because I met Pierre Roset, a great comics artist, printmaker, and illustrator. He was selling art outside of my local comic shop and I bought a print and we started chatting. We hung out and drew a few times (less than I would have liked!) before he moved out of town. Before he left, he gave me a stack of books, and a huge box of art supplies he didn't want to take with him. Inside was oil paints, pastels, inks, printmaking supplies, and even a small printing press. I remember him telling me about how Jeffrey Alan Love tried everything under the sun to find a style he was comfortable working in, and I think it inspired me to try as many new things as possible in 2020. Check out Pierre's work here and read his comics!

Pierre's in the glasses on the right

I definitely did not accomplish all of those monthly plaques, or even 60% of it, but the goal was to try every month. I moved these cards around as I saw fit throughout the year, trying to target my weaknesses. I knew my perspective skills were lacking, so I started working through ModernDayJames' perspective tutorials on Youtube, and tried to read Scott Robertson's book How To Draw. It's the ultimate reference document for solving perspective problems, assuming you know the language to find the answer (which I didn't). I drew a lot of cars around this time and purchased a yearly pass to LeMay Car Museum. While I was exposed to some important fundamentals at this time, I would usually only do the exercises while watching the tutorial once or twice and then go back to my old ways.

These first two cars are from life at the museum before it closed during the pandemic, and the next image is a sketch of my 1995 Mitsubishi Delica from photo reference

At the same time, I was trying to draw from life as much as possible and always have a sketchbook around. One of my rituals after working at the coffee shop was to go to a local cafe (usually Brewer's Row), get something light to eat, and sketch the other patrons and layout of the building from my point of view.

I was constantly reminded of how difficult it was to do this, especially with the people. I had heard over and over that drawing from life instead of photos was valuable, so I was patting myself on the back for that, but struggling more. Looking back now, I know the reasons were limited anatomy knowledge, grasp of forms, and sketching techniques, but back then I just thought it was a lack of experience. The answer I always heard was "it just takes time," which is true even if you study the right stuff, but I was banking on my hours put in to transform me. The less I drew, the longer it would take for me to get better. Again, that's true, for the most part, but the trick is to maximize the efficiency of the time spent practicing new things, instead of just repeating what you know for more hours. To that end, I was chasing the next drawing, the tenth drawing from then, and the hundredth drawing from that one. They will get better! Everyone says so!

And they did get better, a little bit. I was putting in a ton of time, after all. It was building my confidence (which I've always had a lot of (too much at times)) and I was practicing the skill of observation, which is paramount to representational artmaking. I was still streaming at this time, and I think the vibe of my channel was "watch this guy try new things and you might learn something as well." There was some satisfaction in sharing my work and people would tell me I inspired them with my output. I think that probably validated the notion that time put in was all I needed. With the pandemic hitting around this time, I had the perfect excuse to stay inside drawing. It did greatly limit my outings to sketch in person, however.

I entered Bjorn Hurri's Unreal Bjornament online art contest, which I likely took way too seriously. Bjorn is a AAA-game concept artist and art director, and would stream his "warmup" for only 30 minutes each day. He's got an archive on youtube, each video includes the warmup and him talking about an art related topic while painting. The Bjornament seemed like a great way to push myself, so I entered. I was way out of my league, throwing my art up next to artists who had broken through the barriers I was not even aware of yet. Here's a sampling of the final pieces. I won the first two rounds due to my opponent no-showing, and then had no chance in the third round. I think I was the only artist working traditionally, and I made a comic for the first round, a sculpture for round 2, and finally an ink wash piece for round 3, while every other artist was putting up extremely polished digital illustrations. I think this experience made me aware that I was missing out on something that all these other artists had claimed.

Printmaking month arrived, and one of the mediums I fell in love with was suminagashi marbling. I felt like I could grasp it in totality and experiment with it right away. I hadn't seen much variety online, so the "drawing" that I attempted with it felt fresh and special to me. I made a bunch of prints that month, and even sold a few! I created "The Boogie Men," abstract monsters inspired by cryptids, myth, and dark themes.

Suminagashi and art fundamentals are like apples and oranges. There's a lot of chance that goes into it, and you only have so much control. This was a nice contrast to drawing, where I was trying to find that control and never being completely satisfied with the results. I still enjoy suminagashi marbling, but it never seems to land with the audience I have. I've got a bunch of Boogie Men originals, and a Zine full of them with one page stories attached, in my shop if you're interested.

I took an entire month to study Karl Kopinski's work, which consisted of copying his work like I always do, but also attempting to rotate his characters using only my imagination. This was not a terrible exercise, as it got me thinking about form rotation even if I didn't know to call it that. I often created my own rules on how to learn things, and then stuck to them while I practiced. I'm glad I at least had that tenacity during this time or the steps forward would have been even rarer. I filled a whole sketchbook with those Karl K "studies," and I think it did help me absorb some of his approach to linework and proportions. There's a little sketchbook tour of that here, but take 2020 Jim's words with a grain of salt, please. I've learned a lot since then.

A copy of Karl K's Space Marine above, and my imagined rotation of it below

I also had an oil painting month, and this went as you could probably guess. I copied photographs with no process in mind, brush stroke by brush stroke. This meant I noodled back and forth for the majority of the painting, and struggled to lock anything in. Paintings can be worked on until infinity if you really want, where drawings usually have a logical conclusion. When you're clueless, this becomes a problem. I didn't even consider shapes or do an underdrawing most of the time. I knew nothing about color theory, so color mixing took FOREVER, and I was pretty sick of it by the end of the month. I would like to go back to oil soon, since digital painting is pretty similar in what you can do with it and I'm comfy with digital these days.

I think I spent about 14 hours on this Joaquin/Joker portrait, and overworked it to death.

The most successful painting from this time, because I divided the face into shapes with pencil underneath first, so I could basically paint-by-number afterwards. I didn't realize it then, but I was modelling planes!

I did a month of left-handed drawing, which made me more aware of skills I needed and less reliant on what my hand liked to do. All lefty, I worked through an anatomy course by Aaron Blaise, and actually put in a fair amount of mileage applying each lesson to left-handed sketches each night. Outside of my self-imposed curriculum, I was doing drawings for folks pretty frequently and trying to grow my online presence. I notice now that I was trying to adopt an ambitious approach to composition and subject matter when I was creating original work. No more copying reference and making slight changes, I wanted to start from scratch, and find reference to aid the decisions I made. I'm not sure where this spirit came from, but it's still something I try to carry. Getting out of the comfort zone regularly keeps you aware of weaknesses, and also gives your work energy that isn't there with things you've done over and over. At that point, the thing I did over and over was copy references, so being more exploratory and trying to visualize my own images was a good direction, and got me asking the right questions when analyzing the duds. It primed me for the massive shift lurking around the corner in 2021. Here's some of those drawings from this era.

I gave away drawings like this to Twitch followers pretty regularly

This Batman-Who-Laughs was a left-handed redraw of my 2018 Inktober drawing, on the right. I am actively using forms at this point, and probably conscious of it, but I had spent very little time doing any conscious practice.

2021

I started a Patreon around this time, and it was just an experiment at this point to see what could happen. I have since abandoned that platform, which is outdated and not very good to its users, but back then I was pumping a lot of effort into it. I could afford to drop a day at work so I could have more time to do art, and I thought a little extra money would be nice! I also started a shop on BigCartel, and sold some things here and there. This was the beginning of learning how to run an online art business, which has about 1 billion little things to figure out and account for. Just like art, I'll never stop improving in that field. One thing I started doing in 2021 was writing weekly blogs detailing my artistic exploits. The consistent reflection helped me analyze my strengths and weaknesses, and also clued in all the people financially supporting me on Patreon to what their money was going towards. I also wanted one of the benefits to be access to my comics as I made them, and I started a short one based on a game I recently played of Twilight Imperium (very epic board game with deep lore). Here's a page of that, the rest is available on Ko-Fi for members:

The actions in this boardgame represent decades of time, so it was very hard to make an interesting sequential story that didn't read like an illustrated history book without getting very creative, which I failed to do.

On New Year's Eve, I had some stimulus money and I saw that Peter Han had class registration open. I didn't really think very long on this, and just bought a slot in his Dynamic Sketching class for $750. It happened to be the last spot, too! I knew Peter Han's work from social media and a few videos on Youtube through Proko, and I was a fan. The class suggested perspective skills would help, so for the 3 weeks prior to the beginning of class I revisited the same resources from 2021 (that I apparently did not assimilate very well).

I can't exaggerate how incredibly impactful Peter's class was for me. This was the juicy bits of visual art education that I needed for so long, but didn't know how to find. Furthermore, there was structure, a timeline, other students, and regular weekly feedback. My skills, and enthusiasm, skyrocketed during the next two months. Peter is a great teacher, and has a wealth of experience to share in a variety of artistic fields. Sometimes class would start at 2pm and go until 7 or 8pm because Peter would be so thorough answering questions and giving feedback to his students ( I submitted over 40 pages of homework once and he looked at every single page and did drawovers on over half of them). I think the last session went until 11pm.

So what was different about the material in this class, versus all the online tutorials and advice I had previously gotten? For one, there was an emphasis on drawing fundamentals and control over them, and the homework that was assigned was directly backing that up through iteration. That's an important concept, "iteration." So many times in the past I had read some instructions or followed along with a tutorial, and then completely forgotten about it because I didn't apply it. Online tutorials usually don't include suggested mileage afterwards. With Peter's class, I was obligated (financially, socially, and mentally) to knock out all the assigned homework before the next week, when more info would be layered on top of the previous weeks' building blocks. The homework was no joke, either, and some weeks I would spend over 12 hours on the homework from Peter's class alone. Some of that time was excessive, due to either my misunderstanding or enthusiasm for the subject.

For the first time, I was learning about the importance of wrapping lines and their role in describing the form.

Form intersections are one of the hardest exercises you can do as a beginner, but are crucial to developing an awareness of how to internalize the forms we see everyday. I have a terrible visual memory, and have a hard time generating images in my mind, but after hours of doing this exercise, I was able to imagine how the various forms would intersect with one another. It was like 3d sculpting in my head, which was a major breakthrough for me.

These may seem simple, regardless of my poor execution, but the fact is I had never earnestly done any exercises like this despite drawing for years.

I don't want to go into detail for every week of every class I took from this point on, but I'll say this: form is one of the building blocks of visual art, and grasping it as fully as possible when studying will allow you to construct anything you want. Another key lesson learned early in 2021: don't just watch videos and call it good, implement the methodology through iteration, and ask for feedback from those with a greater understanding. Peter's classes taught me these principles.

I wish I had been exposed to all this two years earlier, of course, but I'm glad that the first regular instructor I had was Peter, because as far as I know, there are few drawing instructors better than he. The feedback was personalized and useful. There was a direct link between the drills and how they applied to sketching subjects, and both were assigned as homework each week. Every exercise shared was an exercise I could return to now or in 40 years to develop further, and this was something I knew was valuable from my time studying music. I had a mentor that taught me how to learn the drums, rather than just teaching me how to play the drums. This may seem like a subtle difference, but it gave me the power to keep improving on my own by focusing on the cores of the skill.

After Peter's class, I felt like an absolute beginner, and I was thrilled. Before the end of it, he mapped out potential next steps for the students and revealed that his classes were not the only place where accessible, cheap, online education was available. I was practically frothing at the mouth with a renewed drawing obsession, and ready to consume more classes like his. The pandemic sent many private art schools to online methods of teaching, through Zoom and the like. After a semester or two, I think many teachers felt pity on their students paying so much for that experience and also realized that they could run those same classes independent of their affiliated institutions, charge less per class, and take all the profit. Online programs like Brainstorm and CGMA, which existed before the pandemic, beefed up their roster of teaching artists, and offered twice as many classes which filled up quickly. There was now a robust landscape of online learning opportunities to choose from, and I felt like a kid in a candy store. This was at the beginning of the pandemic, and the opportunities only continued to expand. If you're interested in learning more about that, I have a list of all online programs I'm aware of that offer live classes with feedback, and I'm happy to talk about it with you. It is one of best ways to learn the skills needed to operate as a professional artist without breaking the bank at a university. You don't need a degree to get hired, just a good portfolio that shows you have what it takes.

Remember the cars I was drawing 8 weeks prior to this?? Enough said!!!

I felt like I had a blast of momentum, finally in the right direction, and was ready to double down and do the work. I still am riding that wave to this day. I had dropped another day at work, now only going in 3 days a week, and just could not draw enough. I was eager to share my experience and new knowledge with anyone who would listen, and since my life was pretty void of friends pursuing art like I was, I channeled a lot of that energy into my Twitch streams. I knew I had to keep compounding on the methods I learned in Peter's class, so I started Saturday Sketch Night. Every Saturday, I would host a group sketching night where we would vote on a subject to draw, and then I went through the dynamic sketching method while explaining it as best as I could. At the end, I'd offer feedback to anyone who wanted it. I really wanted to help people see the light, as I had. This regurgitation of information, both on my streams and in my weekly blog posts, helped cement it alongside my enthusiasm throughout the year. It also gathered like minds around me (albeit online), who were interested in leveling up as well. I felt more confident than ever in what I was doing, and happily aware of how much there was yet to learn.

It was off of this immense drive to keep learning and drawing that I made a huge decision. In early May of 2021, I sold my beloved antique JDM van for $11,000 and quit my job. I had some savings, plus the van money, and decided to live off of that while building up my online art business. At this point, I was maybe bringing in $250 a month with art-related income, but I figured with all the extra time and new skills I could ramp that up. I don't know how I did this so carelessly, but I suppose I figured if it didn't work out I could just get another job for awhile, and try again later. I don't really believe in black-or-white ultimatums, especially when it comes to careers. If I had to just do one thing for the rest of my life I would be miserable, and I always want to keep the door open to new opportunities. The pressure of the future depending on me making art gave me even more fuel, which is perhaps similar to what university students taking on massive debt feel. Only, I had more money in hand than ever before, and was so glad to finally be free of working service industry during the pandemic. I knew one thing for sure: if I had to get a normie job again in the future, I would be very disappointed if I didn't make the most of my time up until then.

I have to thank Kayce for the support during this time (and up to now). I was basically committing myself to an untrodden path with limited income while sharing a rented house, and I wasn't scared about it when I probably should have been. Kayce gave me a lot of encouragement during this time, tempered by the right amount of caution and care. Love ya, Kayc.

On the day I sold my van, Kayce took this photo of me, Torbjorn, and $11,000 cash

I am wary of how long this is getting, but thankfully the rest of the year was not much different than the beginning of it. I took an Analytical Figure Drawing course on CGMA (it was not very good, for the record), Peter's Dynamic Sketching Extension class, and Kirk Shinmoto's Perspective class by the end of Summer. All had the same hefty homework expectation, but I had the time now to do extra if I wanted.

Remember how valuable iteration is? Unfortunately, this class had us make 1 (one!) polished illustration like this each week, and the teacher seemed more interested in critiquing us on how neat our labelling was than the actual drawing. He was also the classic make-students-cry-whenever-possible type of teacher. It got me excited about anatomy, however.

I remember spending 16 hours on the homework for this week, mostly because I was spending way too much time rendering every single sketch. A key concept of dynamic sketching is to keep your hi-fidelity surface information to your focal point on 1 or 2 sketches of each subject.

In the Fall/Winter, I enrolled in a mentorship program with Peter Han, although this was through CGMA, not his own platform. CGMA has weird formatting that limits live interaction between student and teacher, which is whack. Peter only agreed to do the mentorship class if he could run it just like his other classes. It was basically a set time limit each week and the duration would be divided amongst the enrolled students that showed up for personal tutoring and advice on a project. By the third week, there were only 2 of us left, which meant an hour and a half of private mentoring from Peter Han each week.

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#art blog #blog #learn art #ART ED #ART EDUCATION #how i learned #drawing #painting #dynamic sketching #anatomy #digital art #sketching #fundamentals #life

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