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“Many are willing to suffer for their art. Few are willing to learn to draw.”

Study of Adam for Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo

That is a quote by Simon Munnery and really sets the tone for today’s post.  A lack of sound drawing skills is the number one reason for a piece of artwork wallowing in failure.  You can get by with a deficient in any other area but bad drawing will always give you away.  It’s not “your style” to draw badly and it’s not “just my opinion” when your perspective is wrong.  Bad drawing is also the most difficult thing to correct when you don’t get it right to start with.  We’ve all had the experience of spending the majority of time on a drawing “fixing” it.  There are hundreds of good books on how to draw and I’m not even going to try it here in a short blog post.  I, myself, still work daily on strengthening my foundational drawing.  Instead, I’ll list a handful of tips that may help you next time you sit down to draw.

A.  Use reference because you don’t know what you don’t know.

B.  Stay Loose.  Make sure you’re not holding your breath and draw with a flourish, not as if you’re building a bomb where one false move will be the end of it all.  Develop some rhythm.

C.  Draw the silhouette.  Many artists will pay too much attention to the individual parts or in the rendering and neglect to draw the whole.  Their figure end up looking stiff and wooden.

D.  See it in a different way.  Our brains automatically try to categorize what we’re looking at and “see” what the thing is.  It’s way too easy to draw what you think you see and not the reality (when drawing from reference or life).  Try holding up your picture to a mirror or turning it upside down.  Squinting is also useful to get rid of any detail in your picture and allow you to see the basic shapes and values.

E.  Be confident!  Nothing will destroy a drawing faster than not knowing what you’re doing.  Don’t guess.  If you don’t know then go do some studies or get some reference.  Even a laymen can tell the difference between a simple circle drawn by a professional artist and that of one drawn by an amateur.

A few months ago I finished a cover for a comic called Dragonstorm, put out by Unstoppable Comics.  I didn’t know if I had permission to post it or not so I would just check out their website from time to time to see if I saw it.  Alas, I’ve yet to see it but I did run across an email from them saying it was OK to post on my website, so here we are.  I really loved doing this and it’s my favorite digital piece I’ve done so far as the process was the closest I’ve gotten to my traditional painting.  It hard to explain but to me there is a difference between doing something in Photoshop and painting in Photoshop.  This piece felt like I was painting.

Another commission I finished the other week.  Ink and acrylics.

I just put the finishing touches on this last night.  It’s 100% oil paint.  I painted it to donate to the upcoming Heroes Comic book convention art auction.  The proceeds of which go to help Heroes comic book store owner Sheldon Drum put on the Heroes comic book convention every year.  It’s the best comic convention I’ve ever been too because the focus is almost exclusively on comics, the books, the writers and the artists.  It’s a great show and I’m very excited to be able to set up a table in artist alley there.  If you get a chance stop by and say hello and bid heavily on the painting at the auction Saturday night at the Westin Hotel in downtown Charlotte, NC.

I really happy with how Jean Grey, aka the Black Queen  came out but I hate to say that for better or worse the original looks so much better.  Most people don’t realize the short comings of photography and scanning.  They just don’t do the original justice.  I’m an amateur photographer but I often wonder what I might be missing that a professional photographer could do with my work.  Oh well, when my paintings  start making a lot more money I’ll pay for some lessons from a pro.  Until then you’re stuck with my Nikon D80.

I hope you like the painting and remember, I’m always open for commissions and job offers.