And tonight I will be speaking at CalArts to the Character Animation Department about the making of "Tangled". I am looking forward to it but I have a bit of a cold so I may sound even more disoriented and confused than I usually sound!
Showing posts with label Gallery Nucleus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gallery Nucleus. Show all posts
Plugs!
Tomorrow night is the opening of the Super Big Micro Gallery Show at Gallery Nucleus!
And tonight I will be speaking at CalArts to the Character Animation Department about the making of "Tangled". I am looking forward to it but I have a bit of a cold so I may sound even more disoriented and confused than I usually sound!
And tonight I will be speaking at CalArts to the Character Animation Department about the making of "Tangled". I am looking forward to it but I have a bit of a cold so I may sound even more disoriented and confused than I usually sound!
MicroGallery Update: Persistence vs. Obsessiveness, and Perfectionism
A few posts ago, I posted a couple of watercolors that I did for the upcoming Micro Gallery Show at Gallery Nucleus.
I've since painted new versions of both of those paintings to fix problems that were bugging me....here's the new version of the first one:
Once again, these pictures are only 3 and a half inches by 5 and a half inches, so they're small. If you click on them you get a much bigger version then the real thing. Here's the previous version:
Every time I looked at the original painting, I felt like the purple on the boy was too dark for such a small figure and "grounded" him...he just felt too heavy, like the dark purple was weighing him down. So in the new version I painted less coats of purple so the color would be less saturated and dark - also, I mixed a warmer version of the purple, with more red in it, and kept all of his colors fairly warm, to contrast with the cool shadow color. Both versions are based on a yellow background to accentuate the purple of his robes, and in both I greyed down the yellow by adding purple, but in the original, the background looks more green than yellow, so I changed the mix in the new version to be more yellow.
With the leopard picture, here's the new one:
And the old one.
Again, this one has a simple scheme: it's all based on red and green. The green of the foliage is meant to contrast with the red tint of the leopard's coat, the leopard's red spots, the red/brown of the hunter's book and the red/brown on the gun's stock. In the original I added a shadow pass over the top which I felt dulled down the green trees too much and killed the nice vibration between the reds and greens. So in the new version I made the greens more bright and I covered them less with the shadow color. It feels better to me.
Also I added a little bit of white smoke coming from the hunter's pipe. This helps make it clear that the shape is a pipe. And the extra added detail helps draw your eye towards the hunter because detail always attracts the eye.
It's funny, the more paintings I did, the more monochromatic they got. You'd think I would get more complicated with color as I got more experienced, but instead I got simpler. The last two paintings I did have less complicated color schemes. The first one is based entirely on (once again) the contrast between red and green:
And my final painting is simply based on a dark blue wash, set against the color orange (which is the complement of blue, of course).
They will be exhibited at the Micro Gallery Show and they will be for sale along with the work of many, many other talented artists.
I painted many, many versions of my first painting as I experimented and learned about watercolor (and I'll be the first to admit that I still don't know anything about the subject). All told I probably painted 40 versions of the first one.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to re-doing artwork. Many people don't like to re-do the same piece over and over. Many people have the philosophy that you should just do a piece once and then move on, applying what you've learned to the next one you do. And on the other hand, there are people who believe you should re-work a piece as many times as you can until you get it as good as you can and, when you've learned all that you can from that work, move onto the next one.
I guess a lot of it comes down to your personality and how you work. I've always enjoyed the process of re-working my animation and my storyboards because I'm never happy with my results and always restless to make everything I do as good as I can. I'm a bit of a perfectionist. But being a perfectionist can be very, very dangerous and can make you very miserable, for the simple reason that "perfection" is unattainable. Perfection is an ideal but nothing in life is ever truly "perfect". And striving for something that's unattainable, and feeling like you're falling short, can make you very discouraged.
Also, when we talk about "perfection" in art, we often mean on a technical level: like a life drawing where everything is perfectly constructed and proportioned. But does that make for a great drawing? Any photograph can capture the model's proportions perfectly, but that doesn't make the photographs "art". Usually the life drawings I like have an energy to them, and a sense of caricature where proportions are tweaked to exaggerate the pose and the anatomy of the model. So being technically perfect - to me - doesn't usually make for the most exciting or interesting drawing. So what is "perfection", anyway, when it comes to art? It's different to everyone, I suppose, and therefore meaningless.
So if you find yourself making yourself miserable because you're trying to reach perfection - as I did for many years, and still do - try to catch yourself and approach your work another way. You'll do your best work when you're relaxed and actually enjoying what you're doing, and trying to be perfect will tend to make you tense and frustrated. Learn to embrace the mistakes, the imperfections that give your work character and, at the same time, use your perfectionist eye to examine your work and help you see where you can do better next time.
The only reason I did so many versions of my painting was that I enjoyed the process of doing them. I really had fun seeing how I got different results each time and learning what effects were created by changing my techniques. If I had started to find the process unbearable, or if I found myself repainting it without knowing what I was trying to fix, I would have taken a break and set it aside for a while (which I did a couple of times). That always gives you perspective on what could be better.
As an example of perfectionism, and how it can lead to less interesting results, in all of my paintings, the background color is a wash. It's not easy to get a perfectly even wash of watercolor, especially when you're leaving unpainted spaces in the middle of the wash. In my painting of the boy king, I painted the background yellow but left the figure of the King and the plotting Duke behind him unpainted. You can buy a liquid mask that you can use to block out those areas but I didn't want to mess with them, because I didn't know how they would affect the paper after I removed them. So I taught myself how to do an even wash while skipping over certain areas, which wasn't exactly hard, but took me a while to figure out how to do it consistently and "perfectly" evenly.
And then I was reading "The Twits" to my son before bed tonight, and I realized that Quentin Blake doesn't do even washes for his backgrounds. He embraces the uneven-ness of them and they give his paintings a real sense of life. Check out the uneven washes in the background of these Blake watercolors:
So while I was proud of my perfectly even washes, Blake wasn't worrying about it, he was letting the paint be uneven (which is what it want to do) and letting that feeling give his painting a livelier and more vibrant feel. It simply never occurred to me to do that. Silly, huh?
Oh well, another lesson learned!
If you can make it to the Micro Gallery show on December 11th, I will see you there!
I've since painted new versions of both of those paintings to fix problems that were bugging me....here's the new version of the first one:
Once again, these pictures are only 3 and a half inches by 5 and a half inches, so they're small. If you click on them you get a much bigger version then the real thing. Here's the previous version:
Every time I looked at the original painting, I felt like the purple on the boy was too dark for such a small figure and "grounded" him...he just felt too heavy, like the dark purple was weighing him down. So in the new version I painted less coats of purple so the color would be less saturated and dark - also, I mixed a warmer version of the purple, with more red in it, and kept all of his colors fairly warm, to contrast with the cool shadow color. Both versions are based on a yellow background to accentuate the purple of his robes, and in both I greyed down the yellow by adding purple, but in the original, the background looks more green than yellow, so I changed the mix in the new version to be more yellow.
With the leopard picture, here's the new one:
And the old one.
Again, this one has a simple scheme: it's all based on red and green. The green of the foliage is meant to contrast with the red tint of the leopard's coat, the leopard's red spots, the red/brown of the hunter's book and the red/brown on the gun's stock. In the original I added a shadow pass over the top which I felt dulled down the green trees too much and killed the nice vibration between the reds and greens. So in the new version I made the greens more bright and I covered them less with the shadow color. It feels better to me.
Also I added a little bit of white smoke coming from the hunter's pipe. This helps make it clear that the shape is a pipe. And the extra added detail helps draw your eye towards the hunter because detail always attracts the eye.
It's funny, the more paintings I did, the more monochromatic they got. You'd think I would get more complicated with color as I got more experienced, but instead I got simpler. The last two paintings I did have less complicated color schemes. The first one is based entirely on (once again) the contrast between red and green:
And my final painting is simply based on a dark blue wash, set against the color orange (which is the complement of blue, of course).
They will be exhibited at the Micro Gallery Show and they will be for sale along with the work of many, many other talented artists.
I painted many, many versions of my first painting as I experimented and learned about watercolor (and I'll be the first to admit that I still don't know anything about the subject). All told I probably painted 40 versions of the first one.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to re-doing artwork. Many people don't like to re-do the same piece over and over. Many people have the philosophy that you should just do a piece once and then move on, applying what you've learned to the next one you do. And on the other hand, there are people who believe you should re-work a piece as many times as you can until you get it as good as you can and, when you've learned all that you can from that work, move onto the next one.
I guess a lot of it comes down to your personality and how you work. I've always enjoyed the process of re-working my animation and my storyboards because I'm never happy with my results and always restless to make everything I do as good as I can. I'm a bit of a perfectionist. But being a perfectionist can be very, very dangerous and can make you very miserable, for the simple reason that "perfection" is unattainable. Perfection is an ideal but nothing in life is ever truly "perfect". And striving for something that's unattainable, and feeling like you're falling short, can make you very discouraged.
Also, when we talk about "perfection" in art, we often mean on a technical level: like a life drawing where everything is perfectly constructed and proportioned. But does that make for a great drawing? Any photograph can capture the model's proportions perfectly, but that doesn't make the photographs "art". Usually the life drawings I like have an energy to them, and a sense of caricature where proportions are tweaked to exaggerate the pose and the anatomy of the model. So being technically perfect - to me - doesn't usually make for the most exciting or interesting drawing. So what is "perfection", anyway, when it comes to art? It's different to everyone, I suppose, and therefore meaningless.
So if you find yourself making yourself miserable because you're trying to reach perfection - as I did for many years, and still do - try to catch yourself and approach your work another way. You'll do your best work when you're relaxed and actually enjoying what you're doing, and trying to be perfect will tend to make you tense and frustrated. Learn to embrace the mistakes, the imperfections that give your work character and, at the same time, use your perfectionist eye to examine your work and help you see where you can do better next time.
The only reason I did so many versions of my painting was that I enjoyed the process of doing them. I really had fun seeing how I got different results each time and learning what effects were created by changing my techniques. If I had started to find the process unbearable, or if I found myself repainting it without knowing what I was trying to fix, I would have taken a break and set it aside for a while (which I did a couple of times). That always gives you perspective on what could be better.
As an example of perfectionism, and how it can lead to less interesting results, in all of my paintings, the background color is a wash. It's not easy to get a perfectly even wash of watercolor, especially when you're leaving unpainted spaces in the middle of the wash. In my painting of the boy king, I painted the background yellow but left the figure of the King and the plotting Duke behind him unpainted. You can buy a liquid mask that you can use to block out those areas but I didn't want to mess with them, because I didn't know how they would affect the paper after I removed them. So I taught myself how to do an even wash while skipping over certain areas, which wasn't exactly hard, but took me a while to figure out how to do it consistently and "perfectly" evenly.
And then I was reading "The Twits" to my son before bed tonight, and I realized that Quentin Blake doesn't do even washes for his backgrounds. He embraces the uneven-ness of them and they give his paintings a real sense of life. Check out the uneven washes in the background of these Blake watercolors:
So while I was proud of my perfectly even washes, Blake wasn't worrying about it, he was letting the paint be uneven (which is what it want to do) and letting that feeling give his painting a livelier and more vibrant feel. It simply never occurred to me to do that. Silly, huh?
Oh well, another lesson learned!
If you can make it to the Micro Gallery show on December 11th, I will see you there!
My First Painting, The Micro Gallery Show and Blog, the Artist's Dilemma and Apologies for a Big Barf of a Post
I apologize for this big mish-mash of a post. Normally I try to keep my posts to just one topic but this one is a jumbled mess of different thoughts....hopefully some of them are interesting. Or just look at the picture.
So I "finished" my first watercolor a few weeks ago. A big part of what makes watercolor color vibrant is your eye seeing the light hit the paper behind the paint and bounce back towards you...that's why watercolors can look so luminous. Scanning a watercolor isn't exactly the best way to reproduce what it looks like in person. That said, here's a scan.
If you click on it, you actually get a version that's much bigger than the original. In person it's pretty small (3 and a half by 5 and a half inches) because it's for the upcoming show at Gallery Nucleus titled "The Super Big Micro Show". All the pieces done for the show need to be less than 6 by 6 inches. Here's a link to the page about the show and there is a blog here about the Micro Gallery and its origins as a fundraising art show amongst the story and VisDev artists at Disney.
I haven't been a very big participant in any of the past Disney shows, because I have been pretty busy working on "Tangled" with minimal free time during most of the Micro show's existence, and also because I didn't know how to use any kind of traditional colored media very well, so that limited my ability to produce any kind of colorful art piece. Most of my contributions have been pen and ink drawings with crayons for color (yep.....crayons). So I've been using this upcoming Gallery show to force myself to learn how to use watercolor.
I have to say I'm not exactly happy with my results but also not totally sure what I would change about it, so I'm going to call it finished (or "finished") and move onto another painting. I painted several different versions of it and learned a lot with each one, but I don't think continuing to repaint new versions will teach me anything else so I guess it's time to call it "done". I am sure that when I look back at it in a few months I will see all sorts of things that should have been done differently and I will be embarrassed that I ever even posted it here...which is the eternal dilemma that I always face, and I assume every artist does: even when I am happy with the end results of my work, I know that I will look at it again in the future and see mistakes that I didn't see before, because I have improved as an artist since I did the piece. It's a double-edged sword because it's always great to know that you are constantly improving. After all, if I always looked at past work and thought it was still as good as I could do, then I wouldn't really be getting better over time. But that also means that when I actually like something I've just finished, I know someday I will look back at it with a more critical eye and find it wanting.
Then again I can't say I've ever really been "satisfied" with anything I've done, period.
The good thing about working at a studio with deadlines and pressure is that it forces you to finish things. They're never as great as you want them to be but if I didn't have deadlines I would never finish anything...I would polish everything and keep re-doing it until it was completely overworked and had no energy or sincerity to it at all.
Deadlines and pressure get a bad rap. Many artists seem to resent them and think that, without them, we would all be sitting around totally relaxed and oozing out beautiful works all the time and be completely happy, fulfilled and stress-free beings...I think some people believe that in a perfect world, we would all just relax and focus on our "art" rather than being bothered and distracted by pressure and schedules.
I have to be honest and say that I know myself well enough to say that I would probably never produce much of anything without deadlines. I need goals and deadlines to get motivated most of the time. For example, I've wanted to learn how to watercolor for years, but it wasn't until this upcoming show that I actually got myself to make it a priority. Another good thing about deadlines forcing you to work at high speed is that it can give your work an energy and spontaneity that it wouldn't have otherwise.
One of the best and worst things about being a story artist is that you have to churn out a high volume of drawings constantly and they are forever being thrown out and replaced as fast as you can do them - all in the service of finding the best story, the best characters and the best ideas that you can find. It teaches you to not be married to ideas or drawings and to constantly search and reach for a better idea or drawing, and no matter how much you might like a drawing or idea today, you know there will always be a better solution to be found tomorrow, or next week, or next month.
I find also, in picking subjects to paint, that I don't really gravitate towards landscapes or environments which seem to be the traditional subject you might think of when someone says "watercolor". For some reason I like characters and I like paintings that "tell a story" - that have some sense of tension, of something that just happened or is about to happen or will happen someday. I like unresolved tension and characters that have plans that haven't come to fruition yet and the conflict you can get from those type of situations. I really like and admire the way some watercolor artists can capture a certain landscape or a certain sense of light and shadow but I just don't have any interest in painting those kinds of subjects. And with all the difficulties and frustrations we face as artists trying to learn our craft, it's always smart to at least pick a subject to draw or illustrate or write about that we actually have interest in and that we find entertaining. If it's something that we'll stay interested in then we'll have a better chance of sticking with it when that first burst of enthusiasm and excitement wears off and it gets frustrating (which it always does).
Anyway, I know it's not a very spectacular example of a painting, but the real point of even doing it was to learn something, and in that sense it was a success. I learned a lot painting my first watercolor, and sometime I will talk about that more in depth.
There are a lot of amazing artists contributing to the upcoming Gallery Nucleus Show and I can't wait to see what they all do. If you live in the LA area maybe I'll see you at the Dec. 11th opening!
So I "finished" my first watercolor a few weeks ago. A big part of what makes watercolor color vibrant is your eye seeing the light hit the paper behind the paint and bounce back towards you...that's why watercolors can look so luminous. Scanning a watercolor isn't exactly the best way to reproduce what it looks like in person. That said, here's a scan.
If you click on it, you actually get a version that's much bigger than the original. In person it's pretty small (3 and a half by 5 and a half inches) because it's for the upcoming show at Gallery Nucleus titled "The Super Big Micro Show". All the pieces done for the show need to be less than 6 by 6 inches. Here's a link to the page about the show and there is a blog here about the Micro Gallery and its origins as a fundraising art show amongst the story and VisDev artists at Disney.
I haven't been a very big participant in any of the past Disney shows, because I have been pretty busy working on "Tangled" with minimal free time during most of the Micro show's existence, and also because I didn't know how to use any kind of traditional colored media very well, so that limited my ability to produce any kind of colorful art piece. Most of my contributions have been pen and ink drawings with crayons for color (yep.....crayons). So I've been using this upcoming Gallery show to force myself to learn how to use watercolor.
I have to say I'm not exactly happy with my results but also not totally sure what I would change about it, so I'm going to call it finished (or "finished") and move onto another painting. I painted several different versions of it and learned a lot with each one, but I don't think continuing to repaint new versions will teach me anything else so I guess it's time to call it "done". I am sure that when I look back at it in a few months I will see all sorts of things that should have been done differently and I will be embarrassed that I ever even posted it here...which is the eternal dilemma that I always face, and I assume every artist does: even when I am happy with the end results of my work, I know that I will look at it again in the future and see mistakes that I didn't see before, because I have improved as an artist since I did the piece. It's a double-edged sword because it's always great to know that you are constantly improving. After all, if I always looked at past work and thought it was still as good as I could do, then I wouldn't really be getting better over time. But that also means that when I actually like something I've just finished, I know someday I will look back at it with a more critical eye and find it wanting.
Then again I can't say I've ever really been "satisfied" with anything I've done, period.
The good thing about working at a studio with deadlines and pressure is that it forces you to finish things. They're never as great as you want them to be but if I didn't have deadlines I would never finish anything...I would polish everything and keep re-doing it until it was completely overworked and had no energy or sincerity to it at all.
Deadlines and pressure get a bad rap. Many artists seem to resent them and think that, without them, we would all be sitting around totally relaxed and oozing out beautiful works all the time and be completely happy, fulfilled and stress-free beings...I think some people believe that in a perfect world, we would all just relax and focus on our "art" rather than being bothered and distracted by pressure and schedules.
I have to be honest and say that I know myself well enough to say that I would probably never produce much of anything without deadlines. I need goals and deadlines to get motivated most of the time. For example, I've wanted to learn how to watercolor for years, but it wasn't until this upcoming show that I actually got myself to make it a priority. Another good thing about deadlines forcing you to work at high speed is that it can give your work an energy and spontaneity that it wouldn't have otherwise.
One of the best and worst things about being a story artist is that you have to churn out a high volume of drawings constantly and they are forever being thrown out and replaced as fast as you can do them - all in the service of finding the best story, the best characters and the best ideas that you can find. It teaches you to not be married to ideas or drawings and to constantly search and reach for a better idea or drawing, and no matter how much you might like a drawing or idea today, you know there will always be a better solution to be found tomorrow, or next week, or next month.
I find also, in picking subjects to paint, that I don't really gravitate towards landscapes or environments which seem to be the traditional subject you might think of when someone says "watercolor". For some reason I like characters and I like paintings that "tell a story" - that have some sense of tension, of something that just happened or is about to happen or will happen someday. I like unresolved tension and characters that have plans that haven't come to fruition yet and the conflict you can get from those type of situations. I really like and admire the way some watercolor artists can capture a certain landscape or a certain sense of light and shadow but I just don't have any interest in painting those kinds of subjects. And with all the difficulties and frustrations we face as artists trying to learn our craft, it's always smart to at least pick a subject to draw or illustrate or write about that we actually have interest in and that we find entertaining. If it's something that we'll stay interested in then we'll have a better chance of sticking with it when that first burst of enthusiasm and excitement wears off and it gets frustrating (which it always does).
Anyway, I know it's not a very spectacular example of a painting, but the real point of even doing it was to learn something, and in that sense it was a success. I learned a lot painting my first watercolor, and sometime I will talk about that more in depth.
There are a lot of amazing artists contributing to the upcoming Gallery Nucleus Show and I can't wait to see what they all do. If you live in the LA area maybe I'll see you at the Dec. 11th opening!
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