Fall Term - 1/3 Months - October 2017

It’s late before the due date of a Sunday blog post. I decided I would post every Sunday, to be consistent with that. So here I am, writing about consistency with practice and sticking to something to cultivate learning with the work. My work is to write and draw, mainly. It is also to live and be healthy and wise. As I had to postpone drawing practice due to injury, I realized a spaciousness and a more relaxed frame of mind with it. In this way, the break I had from drawing was for drawing. It’s added to my practice and is not viewed as a lack of practice, in my experience. Though, here I am, writing tomorrow’s post on the evening before it is due, because I want to.

I want to write this because the accountability is my own doing. I want to write this because the doing of it is helping me to write and be accountable. The accomplishment of this simple blog post is a continuing to develop and be consistent. Yet, I have not always done these Sunday posts. It is a relatively new idea that I’ve suggested to myself. Write something every 5 days is what I decided when I published my last Youtube video. Now I’m doing it once a week. Things change due to what feels right and how we can establish a consistency in our practices. I stopped drawing because I had to, but the understanding of the process and the ‘result’ I’m aiming for has deepened and solidified into a clearer, more self affirming source. I see what I could not see as clearly before, likely due to breaking from the practice and now from starting again with fresh eyes and with a different disposition, necessarily so, because the physical instrument is tuned in a way that can only do so much repetitive motion.

In the same way, the repetitive action of writing a blog post could be detrimental if done too much. That word seems strong for ‘writing a blog post,’ but the truth is that anything without balance inspires a surge of imbalance within a duration of time. How long? That’s on us. It depends on how we are in tune with ourselves, to notice whether or not we are tuning effectively or ineffectively to the circumstances and the processes of life. Our bodies and minds are functioning in processes. How much do we notice these and have the awareness and clarity to align with them instead of acting with an ignorance or disharmony to ourselves? When I intentionally repeat myself, it is something to see. When I write this post to have it done on a Sunday, I am doing something to cultivate a solidified contextual tool of some kind to develop with. As I have started to draw again, I have returned to what current context I would like to clarify in regards to practicing representational art. I have looked at what things I could continue regularly to establish a better understanding of this craft.

As I was doing before, I have divided the year into 3 month terms. The term I’m on is the Fall Term and it will end at the end of December. Conveniently, I am signed up for the Watts Live Stream Critiquing course (Figure Lay-ins with Jeff Watts) that ends on December 30th. The other course I will be doing soon (Jonathan Hardesty’s Essentials of Realism critiquing - Schoolism) will end around the same time. As I had done before, I have chosen ‘classes’ that I will do until January. Two of them are actual courses, as just mentioned. The others are things I will continue to work on along side these courses. This may change as things are always changing, but for now the framework seems like something I would like to stay within in a consistent way. I realized that my previous terms had been a bit ‘full.’ It is hard to select a few courses out of the many different concepts and curriculum I will need to learn over a life time of studying how to draw and paint.

I had 9-11 courses on average in these terms. I am simplifying my Fall Term to much less. This term is as follows. The main things I am studying will stay in these ‘classes.’ I would like to digest the information in these few classes as much as I can before the next term. It was useful in my previous terms to have studied with so much diversity. However, I feel that since I've tasted many angles of learning to draw and paint, it is time to give more attention to a given few 'techniques' and fully internalize them instead of 'biting off more than I can chew.' A good analogy may be that I would rather enjoy a smaller selection of foods and digest them fully than to have a small amount of many foods that would still leave me hungry, or something.

Schoolism: Essentials of Realism. (*Critiques starting mid November til end of term) Watts Atelier: Figure Lay-ins (*Critiques weekly with Jeff Watts til end of term)

(*Above are my weekly necessities) - like a Sunday blog post.

Then I have decided to put Feature Studies - mostly related to Watts Atelier or Realistic Portraits (Schoolism) content - as a daily necessity. Every day I must spend at least 20 minutes doing a study
of a facial feature from photos, life or other art reference.

(A digital study of Johnny Depp's eye.)

Along with that is to do one sketch of something weird, wacky and wonderful from my imagination on a daily basis. The other ideas I have that I am not 100% locked into yet, because it may be too much for me right now, are to include a weekly class of Portrait Lay-ins, as well as doing master studies and then improving on sketches for our illustrated story. As well, doing a weekly or monthly fun image that contains all of the characters from my story. It could be their heads, figures, or just some kind of montage that I can create over a time to have hung up on my wall. Some image I can do again and again and learn to draw the characters in my story, concept design, decorate my studio and see my improvement as I get better and better at creating vignettes and good design for these ‘posters.’

As always, there are some uncertainties with my planning. Things will work out as they should. Included in all this is a monthly Youtube video, which continues to evolve and move into different kinds of videos. We don’t know where all this is taking us and that’s why it’s fun. We just have to enjoy the process and do the work in whatever ‘consistent’ way.

Thanks for stopping by. Joy to you all.

- Anthony

Anniversary Reflection - One Year of Art Training

Just over a year ago. Two days over in fact, I signed up for the online art program by Watts Atelier. www.wattsatelier.com. It was April 1st, 2016 when I began my traditional training as a representational artist. I dove into the program and watched many videos, with little practicing. Of course I was also doing that with Schoolism courses, and it took me a while to realize that the practicing of art is essential to developing skills, not just listening to lectures about it.

A month or two later, I signed up for a workshop in San Diego to go meet Jeffrey R. Watts and the other instructors at the brick and mortar school. This made me want to practice more, to have some skills when I got to the workshop and get the most out of the instruction. This attitude of getting really good to supposedly impress the instructors in some sense was unrealistic. Not that I really was going for impressing them, but I was expecting growth that just doesn't happen in a summer of beginning this approach to drawing.

As I continued, I realized the effort needed to develop these skills that I had never tried to develop. My inspiration continued from the content I gathered from Watts Atelier, both for free on Youtube and from the month of taking the online program. The respect I had for these teachers and the work they must have put in to get as good as they are also expanded as I tried to do this myself. The balance of life's other activities and the practice and learning of art had to be understood and reflected on over and over. I've done a lot of pointless practicing and useless time spent browsing artwork or skimming over lessons without doing the necessary practice to actually learn these. This was done before this last year of practicing, but also during this last year when I was learning how to train in art properly.

Some of these things became clearer after the workshop with the advice from the instructors, like how to navigate the variety of things that can be drawn for practice, and to spend time on the right things to be a well rounded artist with a long-term progression in mind. In other ways, this wasn't entirely clear after the workshop, because it needs practice to be put into practice. The understanding of how to comes with the doing, and there's no real answer to how to navigate this learning, even now. It's a constant metamorphosis of learning how to learn this content, but I have some much better ideas after trial and error. Even with the guidance of the Watts team and other artist talks I've listened to, one has to figure out how to do it, especially without daily contact and guidance with one of these teachers who has already gone through these trials. Even then, it's up to one's own discretion.

I feel that I've experienced many of the symptoms of beginning a serious art discipline that Jeff Watts lists as commonalities for students in their early year development, spoken of in his inspiring Youtube video: How to Train to Become a Working Professional Artist. It's been good to have that talk to reference, to understand that I'm not different than other beginners when it comes to learning how to spend your time and energy wisely, schedule your training and follow through with the practice. I think the approach the Watts school takes with 3 hour training sessions/classes, with 20 minutes of drawing/painting and then a 10 minute break, repeated, is beneficial for focusing, memorizing and committing to the work. After jumping around with ways of creating practice time, like an hour and a half session, or 1 hour sessions, or no sessions and just working whenever I can, I've returned to the 3 hour Watts way and found it is best.

One thing I've realized too is how to be balanced and do a lot of work. This is also a changing understanding, but something that I am developing is a detached intensity. It is not healthy to get frustrated over lack of practicing, but it is not going to help your skills if you don't practice at all. It also doesn't help to be frustrated and go into your practice with that mind set, thinking about how you need to do more and losing your attention on the task at hand, which is your practice. A wise man needs to be calm among the chaos. The chaos is learning art. The wisdom is doing so with a deep sense of balance and a view of timeless practice, all the while scheduling the sessions of time to develop this. It is this long term, or eternal (timeless) view of practice that is necessary, but the understanding and urgency to do it today that makes for healthy work. Something that helped with this was spending some of the time doing sketches for fun, inventing imaginative work and working on personal projects. The more playful, 'do whatever you feel like' work is just as important for balancing the academic work. It has helped me have more fun so I can keep learning and see where my skills are lacking. It inspires you to do the academic work and makes you understand why you're doing it, which is usually to express yourself in an authentic way, tell stories and create worlds.

In January I started to make Youtube videos, so that there will be a consistent video log of my development. The videos are not tutorials by any means, though at some point they could go there. I'm learning from Schoolism, Watts Atelier, Proko and Aaron Blaise, so I'm going to reference those to people wanting to learn, rather than teaching in videos on the web. It will be interesting to see the many videos I make (2 per month) as years go by. It may be an inspiration for someone in the future who is beginning to go through all this practice like I am. I'm at a point now where I feel I can see my mistakes as I make them, and therefore am beginning to learn quicker. It is good to have this understanding and you'll see it in the videos as I continue.

As last April started my real training, this April is considered to be an anniversary for my art. It is now that I begin with more vigor and have the goal to do 40 hours a week of training. Half of it will be learning academically and the other half will be creating worlds of my own for my personal story. Yesterday I came across an old blog by Stan Prokopenko, who now teaches on Proko.com and was trained at the Watts Atelier. The blog post went through every year he was at the school, and what classes he took. It described in a short paragraph what he had learned and what was a good or bad choice in how he directed his training at this time. It made me hopeful in the sense that his first year of training was slower than the other years. He practiced more as he continued, and I feel the same desire to do so, knowing that it's the only way to get as good as I need/want to be to express the stories I write in an authentic, beautiful way.

At the same time, balance is needed. It's a greater skill to learn how to work 40 hours a week on art while being aware and content, rather than losing your mind and your sense of well being through frustration in training, or guilt with "not good enough, need to practice more." I don't have the bad job I need to get out of, or the living conditions that are determining factors for some people on why they want to do something else with their time. They do it to escape current conditions and this can often lead to unbalanced attachment to the thing they use as escape. My conditions are perfect when I'm peaceful with them. I understand this more and more in my experience, with wisdom. To consistently do something to improve, but remain peaceful and unconditional with it is a skill to appreciate. I'm basically understanding what a path of mastery is and how to walk it, using art as my main context. I also have a passion project of a story to write and it needs nice pictures to give it more life.

I continue my training with a 3 month plan in mind. Every 3 months I will switch 'courses,' as if I am taking a slightly longer term at Watts Atelier. (They do 2 and a half month terms there.) I will incorporate each class into a 3 hour session once a week. Just to be clear, I am not taking classes other than studying online and from books. In this way, I'm getting lessons, but have to self-direct my training and motivate myself without guidance or a determined 'class' to attend each week. In this way, while I work two part time jobs and other things happen, my self-taught 3 hour classes won't necessarily fall on the same day every week, and they may have to be divided into more than one session (two 1.5 hour sessions for example) if needed. Each course title is based off Watts Atelier courses that they teach at their school, as well as set up to work with what programs I am currently in online and the resources I have available to teach myself. The classes are divided based on the skill level I feel I currently have, what I need to practice and how to be well rounded in portrait, landscape, still life and figure. They are based off this previous year's understanding of how to learn and practice on a day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year (one year so far) basis.

The courses are as follows, listed with the details of what I'm using to train in these areas.

1. Gouache Portrait Painting
(Once a week, paint a gouache portrait in monochrome and/or watch demos on it)
- Schoolism class: Realistic Portraits by Jason Seiler
- Painting videos on Watts Atelier Youtube in Gouache
- (perhaps Gouache online course on Watts Atelier school)

2. Head Drawing and 20 minute head layins
(Once a week, do head layins (20 minutes each) or a longer (3 hour) head drawing from photo reference or a model (friend/local life drawing class))
- Schoolism class: Realistic Portraits by Jason Seiler

3. Figure Drawing - Design and Invention
(Once a week, study figure drawing from books and online courses)
- Figure Drawing (book) by Michael Hampton
- Force (book) by Michael D. Mattesi
- Gesture Drawing (book) by Alex Woo (received at Schoolism Live workshop)
- How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way (Stan Lee)
- Watts Atelier online school
- Other (Youtube etc.)

4. Intro to Tonal Drawing and Animation
(Once a week, work on fundamental geometrical shapes/2 value construction)
- Watts Atelier Fundamentals Phase I and II content - online school
- Aaron Blaise lessons and begin animating with simple shapes

5. Head Fundamentals
(Once a week, work on head fundamentals)
- Watts Atelier Head Phases I and II online school
- Other (Andrew Loomis books)

6. Inking Essentials
(Once a week, study inking from other artists)
-Mark Schultz
-Robert Watts
-Watts Atelier inking class (when it comes out)

7. Anatomy of Arms and Legs
(Once a week, study anatomy of arms and legs)
- Watts Atelier
- Aaron Blaise
- Proko
- Other

8. Basics of Perspective
(Once a week, study the basics of perspective)
- Ernest Norling books
- Scott Roberston Youtube
- Watts Atelier and other

9. Still Life monochrome painting in gouache
(Once a week, paint a still life in gouache - photo or observed from life)
- Watts Atelier

10. Figure Drawing and 20 minute figure layins
(Once a week, draw figures from photo reference or life)

(The following classes are associated more with inventing and creating the worlds of my story)

11. Plein air/Urban sketching and invention
(Once a week, observe nature and use local environments to develop and create your own)

12. Level/Puzzle/Game Design
(Once a week, study game level design and perspectives and develop your own.)

13. Storyboarding/Comics
(Once a week, study existing comics, storyboards and develop your story's layout)

14. Creature and Character  Design
(Once a week, develop your story's creatures and characters and study other artists' work)

As Stan Prokopenko's blog post (and many other things) guided me to start this structure of classes, and document it as I learn, so may these blog posts guide another learning artist to practice and develop the skills to live a healthy, balanced life on the path of mastery.

Wish me luck!

- Anthony