My Creative Journey 25 + Watch me Draw! Ep. 05

Every journey begins with a step...and continues with countless more. There is no end to the creative path. Only progress. To get better you have to do. Your skills, your mind, your art will not get better unless you try. And trying means you will fail a lot. But, if you keep at it, eventually you will triumph, break through, and be where you want to be. Here is another step on my journey.

Wow...been a busy couple days and I didn't get a chance to post the others days blog...honestly didn't even get to writing it until today. That was supposed to be yesterday...but yesterday I decided to take a break. I figured it would be good to go home, relax after doing all the client retouching, chill with some friends, and go to bed early. Anyone wanna guess how much of that actually happened? I'll give you a hint...all of it but the break bit.

I gotta say my friends are really awesome. Creatives, like myself, who've traveled different paths and learned different lessons by different means so when you light up a tasty joint with them, you're bound to be inspired to create...which means I'll be putting out two posts today because after we burned that one down I jumped up and got to painting, hehe. No rest for the wicked and all of that :) I love to create, so, fuck it. If I get a little less sleep but progress future down my road, it's well worth the cost. Though, I do feel I'm gonna be sleep really late tomorrow because I know exactly what I'm gonna be doing tonight :).

That night I was a bit tired, almost punchy. I've mentioned a couple times I'm sure that I'm currently burning both ends of the candle in an almost frantic rush to push forward because of the time-frame I have for what I need to do, so, I decided to keep things a bit conservative. I wanted to use up the last drops of my ink practicing for the postcards I plan to do this weekend and I'm pretty much decided on a skull theme. I'm not quite sure if it's just going to be black on Kraft paper, or white with colors...that I'm still on the fence about.

This first set I was mainly going off my memory of the skull from the previous night. So, of course it has a bit more of my spin to it, and the scale is off. Those eyes on the left skull make me giggle, they're so small, especially when compared to the chin and dome. But, I was more interested in just having fun with it, getting a feel for how they work...which is a line I know I repeat a lot, but it's how I think...how I learn. It's important (for me) to internalize the structures of what I want to create. I think all great artists can draw the stuff they want to do in it's most elemental of forms, accurate to nature, and that's because they've taken the object and formed a sort of map of it in their head. A map that can be modified to however they want it to in the process of bringing their own ideas to life...

Which is why with the second page I paid a lot more attention to the real aspects of a skulls. I also switched brushes, once again trying to internalize how each of them works and can be used for affect. Over the next couple days I'm going to get really familiar with this form, hehe. But, I'm also going to move on from it. I've seen a lot of modern artists get obsessed with skulls and skeletons, and then just never grow from there. Yes, they couch their reasonings for why that's their 'thing,' but most of them just use that as a crutch for not evolving. They seems so utterly happy that they discovered them, and that they can make them look cool... But, that's art. People do what they want to do, grow as far as they want to, say what they want to say...

...as I say throwing down yet another image of a skull.

This one is a combo of brush and finger painting. I wanted to experiment...no, play with the form again. How could I blend a range of black, white, and gray together on that brown for affect? Would it be better to use brushes? Would fingers be better? A combo? There's no one path to get to any destination, right? And, the fun of art is that I'm doing what I want to do, how I want to do it...right? Otherwise, what's the point?

There's definitely a lot of miles I need to go to get something like this to really look good. One of the things I really need to study is how classical painters did their work...raising from dark to light, and light to dark...in different mediums. A huge part of becoming an artist is study. Study of the past, the present...artists, artwork, trends, schools...the deeper I get into this the more I realize why people get art degrees, hehe. What I'm stumbling through on a daily basis I'm sure there's a bunch of classes for...but, even if I found an online course, I don't think that's how I want to learn. I think my next course of action is to find a mentor...which, in this day-in-age could be a bitch because of how society has structured itself (worth dozens of posts in itself). I want to be challenged, not be told how to learn or how to do something...if that makes sense, hehe.

So I finished with a self portrait painting how I felt at the moment of painting. Tired, troubled, frustrated....worried. Not sure I if I got any of those emotions across but that's how it was for me, at, what, 1230am knowing I wouldn't get to bed until 2am and had to be up at 8am...

Thought, this is a step forward for me, even if it seems like a lame painting. I'm not letting things come from my imagination, treating each painting as an improv performance, but now slowly taking the reins and trying to get specific things out of my brush. It's going to be a long, slow process, but, every little step is a step closer... :)

I'm going to end this post with another video...yeah! :) Another episode of Watch me Draw! This episode captures a time-lapse of the first page of ink drawings, so, if you want to see the process, take a couple minute and watch .

Music: Tours