Uncategorized – Growth Spurt Creative

What You Need to Know Before Drawing Human Anatomy

Figure Sketch on Paper: Stephen Dallas (model reference from Proko on YouTube)

Before You Start Drawing Human Anatomy

This article will also help you know what to expect from drawing human anatomy. It’s ok if this is uncharted territory for you. Everyone starts somewhere.

As soon as you tell anyone you’re an artist the first thing they often ask is “Can you draw hands?”. In this article you’ll learn a plethora of practical tips, free resources, great habits for drawing the best figures ever! No matter what style or media you use, this guide should bring new life to your art.

The Importance of Foundations

If you’re self taught then maybe you’ve never heard this term; foundations. The foundations are the bedrock, basics of art. While art is a glorified intellectual talent in this century, 500 years ago artists were trade-skilled craftsmen just like welders or carpenters today. Because of this, our forefathers in art created methodical teaching methods that could train any person up to an adequate understanding of principles they needed to execute work for their employers.

So over the last half a millennium artists have fine-tuned and crafted this educational system into simple sets of rules to be understood. If you work hard at understanding the foundations, you’ll have a system that can execute anything that comes to your imagination! So now that you understand why you have to learn the foundations so that you can get to the good stuff!

Naked People

You’ve got to get over any preconceived ideas about nudity and humans undressing. You’ve got to get close to the skin if you’re going to learn how fabric drapes over the form or how the human body’s musculature changes while in action. So mentally prep yourself to get over any lingering bashfulness so you get straight to the content.

Supplies

Paper:

Learning anatomy requires a lot of drawing. So get ready to go through reams and reams of paper on this journey. The cheapest pad of copy paper is fine for drawing in earlier stages, but get a few nice large sketchbooks and 18″x24″ pads of paper for drawing more refined drawings.

If you are already fluent in Adobe Photoshop and using a Wacom then go ahead and use that for practice. But you should still invest in the larger pads of real paper for larger pieces. Also, avoid using the command z to undo strokes you make in Photoshop. Limit your tools so you are forced to live with your mistakes just like on real paper. Stick to a basic brush around 60% opacity/flow and an eraser around 60% opacity/flow. This is a great way to emulate the laying effects of charcoal.

As you become a more advanced user of digital tools feel free to break these rules. This is strictly for foundations. Introducing the infinite complexities of Photoshop would do more harm than good at this stage. The iPad Pro offers some great sketch tools even simply in the notes app!

Drawing Tools

This list will be short and sweet. Pencils, erasers, and charcoal. You many want some wetnaps if you like making a mess with charcoal.

Even a $20,000 drawing could be made with a $15 starter kit. Don’t fall for the shiny kickstarter project that has the “swiss army drawing kit” everyone needs. The more complex your tool set, the more intimidated drawing will seem at first. Having to grab your tool box and sort through dozens of utensils before starting a drawing is a chore anyway.

Added value: You might be sitting on the bus thinking “I wish I could draw that right now. If only I had my tools.” If you are used to using simple tools you’ll be able to draw anywhere!

Camera

Document your work with your phone or a digital camera and back it up online before tossing your used sketchbooks.

It is valuable to see how much you’ve grown as an artist when you need that bit of encouragement after a self deprecating drawing session gone wrong. It is kind of cool at first to see a pile of 25 sketchbooks filled to the brim with studies. But eventually you’ll need space on your shelf for something more useful than a pile of used paper.

Recycle your old sketchbooks or give them to your proud mother/grandmother when its time to make room. Learning how to let go of what is old and celebrating the journey is a great way to live in the moment is a great mindset to claim as an artist who is alway growing.

A Typical Figure Drawing Classroom Session

Gestures and Speed Drawing

There are great sites like https://line-of-action.com/ that offer tons of FREE resources for you to practice figure drawing. This particular site has a selection tool and timer so you can emulate real classroom setting. You can select male/female, nude/clothed, and how many seconds/minutes you want to spend on a pose.

Most figure drawing sessions start with a series of 60 second speed drawings. These quick studies are usually referred to as gestures. A gesture simply captures the idea of an action or emotion in a few lines and smudges.

Drawing quickly forces you to make bold decisions and to not dwell on your marks too long. If you want to learn how to eliminate artists block this is a great way to teach your mind to just do it. If you spend too much time dwelling on lines to make, you’ll never be able to rack up the number of practice pieces you need in order to actually grow.

Beyond the Gesture

After the 60 second drawings you will usually have several 2, 5, 10, and 15 minute drawings. The 10 and 15 minute drawings are where you usually have enough time to get some real anatomy laid out on your study. During this portion of your figure drawing session you are effectively practicing how to start a drawing.

Think of these drawings as the blueprints for potential finished pieces. How many finished art pieces do you have to create before you can start seeing a change in the quality of work you produce? How about 300? A typical finished piece might take anywhere from 6 to 12 hours. The math for that looks like 300 pieces times 9(average number of hours) equals a whopping 2700 hours. Of course many professional artists spend 100s of hours on their masterpieces, but you have to get a lot of experience under your belt before you get to that point.

So by effectively practicing these 10-15 minute drawings you’ll learn how to be more selective about what drawings deserve to be fully executed in the next phase. But I’d also argue that most of the time you’ll find a 15 minute drawing means more to you than a 10 hour drawing.

Take a Drawing to Warp-Speed

Even if you aren’t a professional figure artist, it is important to practice taking your drawings to their fullest potential. Much like physical exercise, you have to break previous limitations to find yourself in the best shape of your life. This means spending 3+ hours on a piece even if its just practice.

As you get better and more confident you’ll find yourself looking at a 20 minute drawing and thinking, “wow that’s great. I’ll settle for this.” Having a mental checklist of what it takes to make a good piece is great for 80% of your work, but the other 20% should be spent on the bleeding edge of your limits.

By living on that bleeding edge you’ll find that your process gets more advanced and easier to produce. Soon you’ll see that a drawing that might have taken 2 hours is now accomplished in 20 minutes thanks to constant refinement.

The Pain Means its Working

Be warned that the bleeding edge is painful. It is natural for you to feel overwhelmed when you’re in uncharted territory.

Ok, there’s not a lot of actual pain in this step, but think back to the example in physical exercise. You’ll find yourself thinking that it is done already and its an A+ but that is only the halfway point. This is where your second wind as an artist should kick in.

Get messy. Wipe the flat edge of your charcoal through the entire sheet. Scribble some crazy stuff in the middle of the page. Erase half of the drawing. What this does is creates visual problems for you to solve from outside your usual checklist of how to make a good piece. This should keep you from getting into a rut. Apply these techniques if you ever find yourself in the midst of artists’ block. It’ the equivalent of cold showers for artists.

Putting in the Time

A typical figure drawing session is 2-3 hours in a classroom. The online resource mentioned previously lets you emulate that experience free of cost so there’s no excuse not to start now!

If you can have these sessions 2 or 3 times a week, you’ll have a great future ahead of you. Many pros only do this once or twice a month just to keep their skills sharp, but in your formative years of learning good habits and techniques a more strict routine is recommended for a few years at least. Soon these techniques will be second nature and you’ll know it was all worth it.

Your Study Guide Outline

Here is an example of an itinerary you can live by while you’re improving your figures.

Tip for the pros: Maybe you have a lot of experience and don’t think you need to spend a whole year diving back into anatomy. But every artist could benefit from 1 month of visiting foundations at least once a year. I’d challenge your to do that.

Keep in mind that these are planned to be executed on weekdays only. You should rest on the weekends if you can manage it!

DAY 1-10:
Warm up with 50, thirty second gestures.
Draw 5, two minute drawings.
Draw 1, ten minute drawing.
Look at your drawings and identify a single weakness(even if you see many) and draw 30 of those parts. (i.e. draw 30 hands)
Total time elapsed: 1 hr 15 minutes.

DAY 11-20:
Warm up with 50, thirty second gestures.
Draw 5, two minute drawings.
Draw 1, ten minute drawing. Keep this figure reference for the next step.
Get a large piece of paper. At least 18″x24″. Restart the ten minute drawing on large paper and spend at least one hour diving in.

Why ALL Artists Need Photoshop

While many artists strive to master digital art as a medium, there are many who find a lot of pride in making work the old fashioned way. But even if oils are your medium of choice, there are several reasons you need to have some fluency in Photoshop or a similar software.

Digital Color Sketch: Stephen Dallas Copyright 2018

You NEED Reproductions of Your Work

The primary reason you’ll need some skills in Photoshop is to create high quality reproductions of your work. What if your studio catches fire? Even if you loose the original paintings, you’ll be able to stretch out the money earned by your paintings on the web. Even if they’re destroyed or sold.

You’ll Make More Money

NOBODY should settle for only selling their paintings once.

Thanks to the internet, artists have more flexibility than ever when it comes to selling copies of their work. Many artists dream of having their work in a gallery and selling to an audience of oooing and aweing spectators, but this is only a small portion of your art’s earning potential. Creating digital prints and reproductions may not sell for as much as the original, but they have the potential to have an infinite volume produced.

Rather than simple taking of photograph for your instagram of the framed final piece, you need to scan your work and create a high quality digital replica. Utilizing Photoshop to archive your work digitally allows you to make a plethora of products with your art on it.

Legends like James Jean create limited edition runs to build hype and keep that sense of scarcity. Let us say an original painting sells for $1000, but your 200 piece, limited edition prints sell for $50 each. That means your limited edition prints sold for 10 times the amount of your original print! And if the demand is there, you can always make a 2nd edition run.

You Can Publish a Fine Art Book

In the same vein as making reproductions, creating a curated art book is a great way to spread out the value of your work over time. Many people who can’t find the will power to pay $50 for a single art print might be able to pay $50 to have 100 pieces of your work in the form of a book.

There are many viable vendors who can print custom orders of books or even books on demand for artists who know how to work on the world wide web.

The Tools You’ll Need to Master Inside of Photoshop

Photomerge

This is how you take a 10’x10′ painting and scan it with one scanner! If you have a camera, you’ll notice the maximum size you can usually print is around 18″x24″, but what if you want to reproduce your large scaled art at its original size?

Photomerge uses an algorithm in the background to manipulate multiple scans or photos into one large document. Navigate to the photomerge tool, then select all the scans or photos your are compositing. Click ok and watch the beach ball spin. Its a little taxing on your computer’s graphics processor, but totally worth the wait to have that large, crisp scanned image as a backup!

File>Automate>Photomerge

Color Balance and Levels

Sometimes your scanner or printer just doesn’t handle the colors in a way that reflects the original piece. Don’t get frustrated. There are several ways to work around this.

Before you ever touch the original colors, consider your hardware. Apple computers tend to have nearly perfect color perception. But if you have a cheaper monitor, that may be the source of your color problems. You can calibrate a cheap monitor with some semi-affordable tools. You could also buy a true color monitor, but those are pretty pricey. If you can’t afford either of these options, you can always put the file of a thumb drive and do a high quality test print for less than $10. There are also online art printing services you can use for testing at a similar price.

Image>Adjustments>Color Balance

The levels tool is similar to the color balance in the way that it shouldn’t be touched until a test print has been reviewed. Adjusting levels lets you get control over contrast in an image and can help give your painting a bit more depth if there were details washed out in a scan or photograph.

Image>Adjustments>Levels

Crop Tool

This tool is essential for framing your photomerge composition into its original frame and aspect ratio. Never size your artwork upwards. This distorts the quality and will pixelate your original paint-strokes. Always Bring the edges inwards, never stretch the picture outwards.

There is special software like Gigapixel AI that claims it can upscale work tremendously. Some of the work output with this software is really amazing, but it still tends to have a unique sort of digital artifacting that are undesirable when making high quality prints.

Clone Stamp, Smudge, and Healing Brush Tool

The Clone Stamp allows you to sample another section of the painting and very specifically copy it. Its almost always best to turn down the hardness of the brush so your samples look more realistic.

The Smudge Tool allows you soften an area of a painting. Its also good for blurring sections you want to feel out of focus. If you feel your image is too flat this can create a sense of more depth. It’s sort of like a camera focusing on one object and not the rest of the photograph.

The Healing Brush is made to remove spots and blemishes from human faces, but you can also use it for removing accidental artifacts like stray brush hairs that stuck to your painting. So it’s a lot like the clone stamp except that you don’t need a sample to copy. Photoshop does all the work.

These three tools go hand in hand. They are for removing stray hairs and artifacts that shouldn’t have made their way into the photograph. Don’t over correct so much that you destroy any likeness to the original painting. You want to keep those original brush strokes in tact!

Keep it Simple

If you’ve never used Photoshop, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the infinite palette of features and tools to choose from. Try not to deviate from these few tools mentioned for now. These fundamentals are the bedrock of your Photoshop expertise. Get them right!

Try Adobe Photoshop here.

Here is a free Photoshop alternative called Gimp. It is almost the same, but all the names are changed for the features I described above. So it will take a little more exploring to master.

5 Productivity Hacks for Artists of Any Skill Level

In this article you’ll learn 5 positive ways to increase the quality and volume of your art work regardless of your experience or skill level as an artist. You will learn how to get your head in the game and keep moving forward.

1. Get Pumped

Making a piece of art is like doing a workout. You’ve got to warm up first. Half the battle is just getting your pen on the paper.

A typical routine might have you starting a familiar playlist on Spotify, putting on a pot of coffee, making some eggs, doing the dishes, feeding your cat, and making your bed – all before setting foot in your creative space. Overtime your mind will associate these tasks with creative juices to follow.

Athletes warm up and stretch their muscles before performing. Think of your brain as a muscle. Your brain actually consumes 60% of the energy your body needs to survive! Even Michael Phelps’ lats don’t us as much energy as his brain. So even more-so than muscles, you should warm up your brain for creative tasks.

When you end your routine you should have a de-stressing ritual to cool you off. This might be the perfect time to blow off some steam at the gym or to read a story to your kids. These sorts of cool down activities signal to your brain that it is allowed to rest and recover for the next day ahead.

2. Disconnect From Tech

The evidence is overwhelming that technology, while helpful, is deadly to your ability to stay on task. It may not seem like a big deal to intermittently check buzzes and dings that come from your phone and the desktop of your computer, but it adds up. Not to mention the rabbit holes that platforms like YouTube get you trapped in. These platforms are designed by the worlds’ top behavioral scientists to keep us enticed for as long as possible.

So put your phone in your bag or in the next room. If you’re working on a computer, just turn the WiFi off so you can mitigate that risk.

*Bonus Tip: Classical music or lofi hip hop might be the most distraction free music you can have playing while you make art. Its easy to get distracted by lyrics or grooves when your favorite jam comes on the radio.

3. Disconnect from your Head

Disconnecting from tech is pretty self explanatory. But why would you want to distance yourself from… yourself?

Think about all the things you have to do before next Wednesday; think about all the things you have to do before your roommate gets home. Watch out for these emotional distractions. Don’t let yourself think about that dinner date or about how mad you are that your roommate ate those leftovers. How annoying is it to have these thoughts spinning around your head? These distractions are just as bad as the buzzing of your smart phone.

A common thing many people passively worry about are household chores. Even though this isn’t purely an emotional stress, its a physical factor that correlates to stress later on. Taking the time to clear the clutter is another small way to cut down emotional distractions. So even if you work a full-time job while arting in the evenings, don’t go straight into it.

Working on art takes a lot of time and energy that should be rewarded with a worry-free “plop” into bed. There’s nothing more satisfying than laying down at the end of a hard day and knowing that (almost) everything is in order.

4. Have a Plan Before You Start

Planning as you go will ultimately slow you down. Especially if you have limited time to begin with. The life coach and best selling author Steve Chandler said one hour of planning saves three hours of execution.

This step actually starts the night before. Sometime before you go to bed, write down a few goals for your next creative session and how you’ll do it. Decide what references you need to collect, what supplies should be set out, and how much technology will be involved with every project before you even begin. This is all about visualizing yourself completing what you set out to accomplish.

How often do you set out to accomplish something and fall short of the final goal? Setting up small plans and completing what you set out to do will build your capacity for confidence. More confidence will turn into you reaching higher than you previously thought you were capable of.

5. Plan on Things Not Going According to Plan

You never know what discoveries will reveal themselves while you’re working. Artists aren’t robots pumping out piece after piece, they innovate and push themselves to the next big thing. So if you find yourself in the midst of a great discovery, just go with it!

But sometimes the hiccup you encounter isn’t actually a great discovery. It hinders your process and this can be very emotionally draining. Here’s a short exercise that can help keep you on track when the unexpected happens…

Keep a pad of paper nearby where you imagine all the things that could go wrong while you’re working. Maybe you struggle with drawing hands. In your note book write down “get bogged down in details of the hand” as your potential road block. Then take a moment, scratch your chin, say “ah-ha”, and write your solution – print reference hands and draw desired pose 8 times on scratch paper beforehand (no pun intended).

These micro plans are a great way to keep those negative-stress hormones at bay whenever you run into trouble. As you get used to tackling problems in this manner, you’ll see yourself as an artist who overcomes things rather than relying on whatever skills are already under your belt.

Think about it like this… Do you see yourself as a visual dictionary with a pencil attached to it? Or do you see yourself as a visual explorer who is ready for whatever is around the corner? If you master adaptability, you’re setting yourself up to master anything.

In Conclusion

The 5 suggestions to improve to productivity as an artist are as follows:
Get Pumped, Disconnect from Tech, Disconnect from your head, Plan Ahead, and to Plan on Things not Going According to Plan.

No pain. No gain. Like many before you, you’ve had romantic thoughts of what it would be like to be a successful artist in the modern world. But you shouldn’t be discouraged when you put your pen to the paper and things aren’t going as smoothly as you hoped. Like any technical skill, there is a steep learning curve with art and sometimes its painful.

But the pain means it is working!

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