Drawing On Your Creativity, Part 3

I like to draw. I just can't help it. The process of sketching and drawing has always interested me. As with music, if I stop for a while and then start again, it all comes pouring out!

As the original author of Painter, of course, I had to study drawing from many angles. Now, when I draw, I feel a certain freedom in simply returning to the art without the burden of analysis. And I can begin to realize just why I started drawing in the first place.

Doing the Clean Line-Art Style

I keep thick pieces of standard-size paper around to sketch on, my favorite creative weapon being an ultra-fine Sharpie (retractable!). Drawing, for me, is a way to exercise my creativity.

My process for making art has been documented in this blog post series before: scan into Preview using a networked scanner, tonally adjust and crop, export to JPEG, import into Painter, clean up, resize to blog-compatible sizes using Preview again. Sometimes I will use a gel layer in Painter to colorize, particularly when I'm doing a technical illustration.

One of my styles is thus a clean, line art style with the hand-wrought look that is usually lost with Adobe Illustrator. A little like a woodcut. All of the pieces shown here were done in this manner, in the last few days. I have been practicing my implied edges: a cool form of negative space.

I like to use my desktop for most of my posts because it simplifies my process and allows me some very nice editing opportunities. I like to edit using the Wacom tablet in Painter.

Rotating the Image for Sketching

One of the reasons I like this is because I can rotate the image, making all my hand work more natural and ergonomic. In Painter, you can hold down the space bar and the option (alt) key and rotate your image by direct click-and-drag in the image. With the same keys held down, a single click restores the normal orientation. But, as I draw and clean up lines, I generally keep the drawing rotated at whatever angle most makes sense.

I learned this workflow with sketching by watching Disney artists in studio. Their old-school sketch workstations had a turnable easel. I would bet that they have something much more like Painter these days. Because I thought to migrate that workflow to the computer.

Ideation

So, I'll get an idea and ponder over how to express it in this style. When I get an idea, I like it to be one that's out of the box, not in the box.

Sometimes I will go back to the old sketches from the Painter days and I'll get an idea that I might have pursued once, but is lost to me now. And to re-examine it and explore it afresh is exhilarating. So much has been packed away. There is so much to rediscover.

Other times I will think of an idea, like Up and Down and have an internal vision for how I would like it to appear. When it intersects another of my favorite pastimes, like impossible figures, then it is settled. I begin to draw. So it's all in the perspective: how you look at it.

With Up and Down, I actually drew it a few times before I got the right shape for it.

I chose the impossible picture, with entrances going into space that simply can't exist, to make the sketch more of a personal expression, more my style.

When I was a kid, I used to have my room in the upper floor, and then later in the basement. So I know the feeling of going up and down stairs quite well, and the feelings when it changes from up to down.

I chose to let the color connote shading in this one. And the blue for sky and red for, well, the fiery depths. More allegory. Just a tiny bit of symbolism. But in my house as a kid, the upper floors had more sunlight or overcast light, which had a bluer color temperature. The lower floors had a redder light, because we used incandescents there.

In my post about iconic things, I draw several figures that derive from the concept of One. When I was drawing them, I imagined a mould that you could pour lead into that could make a three-dimensional one.

Some Technique

This is what I could envision. I just now drew it but I used a creative technique for the cross-hatching. This time, when I sketched it, I did the cross-hatching by hand. Then when I brought it into Painter, I brought each of the different directions of hatching into a separate layer so I could sculpt their shapes separately.

I tend to use a tiger-stripe technique for simulating woodcut looks. This comes from the V-shaped tool that is used to carve out linoleum and wood blocks and the shapes that they make in the blocks.

In scratchboard, a similar look is achieved. This ease of width-control was the reason I created the original scratchboard tool in Painter.

So this sketch actually comes from a six-layer image.

Iconic Patterns

I demonstrated in the iconic things post that there were speckles that didn't just use dots when you render them. The old Good'n'Plenty design. Here we have a design where there is a complete 360-degree freedom to each placed item, which is the ultimate speckle. Even the hatchings that I demonstrated before only had a 180-degree freedom to their placement.

I can imagine controlling the direction of each item by a random process, like the one I used to create the hatchings, or by using the directions from a vector field. You could create random flockings of bird-symbols in this way.

Often, in architectural renderings, random tree placement, with different sizes, is used to stylistically symbolize a grouping of trees. Sometimes this kind of pattern was used in the formica tables of the 1960s. It's worth looking up. Thinking about patterns and the way they fit together is one of those little creative things you can do.

Liquids and Different Perspectives

In a continuation of the earlier pieces here, I thought I would do more liquid stuff, because I have been doing that kind of rendering since I was young. It was always an excuse for shading, and as you may know by now, I do like to shade things.

Drops of water or oil are fascinating to me. When I was a kid, I would sometimes look at the world through the drops or rainwater on the outside of the car window. I could see the world as a microcosm of distorted figures, and back then it was a good exercise for my brain to see things from a different perspective. I love the pattern of raindrops on a windshield: the way they avoid each other, the way they coalesce, the natural pattern of their look.

Real raindrops don't actually look like these. They are really globules of liquid, and they move and wobble as they fall. Kind of like metaballs, they have a shape defined by surface tension and equilibrium. Water drops are free from many forces, when they are in flight.

I used to look at liquid mercury, and marvel at the shines. I think that reflection and refraction have always been of interest to artists' perceptions. I'm thinking Vermeer, of course.

But these liquid renderings are more about stark shading than reflections and refractions.

Rendering the quality of reflection and refraction in line art is rather complex but a laudable goal. When you hold a drop of water on your finger, I often have watched the fingerprints beneath become magnified to a huge extent, and the skin also took on an interesting glow inside the drop, due to the caustics (concentration of light by the bending of rays by refraction) created by the shape of the bead of water.

Along with a bright shine on the drop, it creates a marvelous miniature scene, allowing us to watch yet another perspective: one magnified instead of the one viewed through the car window that seems to shrink the entire world into a single drop of rainwater.

As a small kid, I was nearsighted, and so things like this would constantly be of interest to me.

Other perspectives interested me as well, as a kid.

Like the doorway. Both entrance and exit, it was the thing that kept the kids captive in the schoolroom, or kept them out. Being the guardian of in and out, a door seemed more profound to me than just a block of wood on hinges.

And, while I was at it, what made the inside in and the outside out? Why couldn't things switch? Another perspective change, quite relevant in the 1960s.

After all, I watched Star Trek, so I knew that doorways could be more than just a way in and out. A door could be a portal to another planet or even to another dimension.

So, when I tried my hand at Up and Down, initially I thought of something we were looking into directly, even with glass doors.

This is the original sketch for Up and Down. Actually, unlike the final product, it didn't really have any magic. That's when I thought about the impossible version.

It is the change of perspective that makes this kind of piece work. When you get to drawing, liquify your workflow to make your sketching smoother. And pour on the creativity!

Drawing On Your Creativity, Part 2

More than anything, creativity comes from our artwork. It is our mark-making capabilities that make us inimitably human (though, isn't it cool that some elephants can paint?).

Of late, I have taken up drawing again, partly for use in this blog, and I have been exploring some old and some new avenues of illustration. Painter, since I wrote it, has been one of my main conduits of expression when drawing. Before that, I used pencil and paper, felt pen, ball-point pen, and whatever I had at hand. I even used scratchboard (a medium acquired when building Painter, at the suggestion of John Derry).

Nowadays I use an Ultra-Fine Sharpie. Usually black, on very thick paper (28#) so it won't leak through. This was the medium I used for the blocks image at the top of this blog. And also for the pyramid image.

Here I draw some blocks on top of each other. I made this image as an anti-minecraft homage, since the blocks do not really line up with each other from level to level. Here you see the original Sharpie drawing, scanned directly.

My usual method for illustration in this blog is to scan the image and read it into Painter. At that point, I clean up all the mistakes and funny ends, and lines that should meet but don't, and also the lines that overshoot. But I usually don't move the lines much. This retains the sketchiness of the original.

I also like to color the illustrations, using a gel layer in Painter.

You can see the effect of this kind of editing here, on a new version of this pyramid image. You can see exactly what I was drawing, for one thing. But it still retains the informal sketchy look that my illustrations need.

I employ hand-drawn and edited illustrations and I am quite sure that none of these will infringe on copyrights. After all, I drew them. I also retain all the original drawings for future reference. If necessary, I could scan them again at higher resolution and use that result for a new illustration. If I wanted a new color scheme, or some substantial edit, for instance.

My work with fabric has led me to do quite a bit of hand-drawn art lately. I even continued this with a considerably-more-challenging follow-up post. In this, I have sought to create a more realistic sketch look. For fabric, I start with a picture, clone it, and then add sketchy shading and highlights. It is an involved process, but it has been tuning up my sketching chops.

When doing work directly in Painter, using a Wacom tablet and pressure-sensitive stylus, sketchwork becomes very interesting because you can capture the essence of human expression, and yet it remains editable and adjustable.

Here I show some work I did this evening using Painter and nothing else. I took a picture of my hand with an iPhone (it was quite blurry) and cloned it, but really I didn't use the clone colors. Instead, I cleared out the clone and used the tracing paper for reference to sketch the outlines. Then I looked at the original to get a better feeling for the shading and put it all in by hand.

So this is a hand-drawn hand, having drawn the pyramid.

When drawing something, it is important to think creatively, and have an intuitive feeling of what you want the drawing to look like.

Fabric, Part 2

Fabric sure does take a long time to sketch! I can't let a single feature of it go unmodified or un-enhanced.

So I took a picture of my son with a loose striped shirt and worked on it. I wanted to highlight the folds of the fabric, the way the light catches the folds, the highlights on the ridges, and even the way the shadows mute the highlights. I wanted it to be a cool sketch. And I was willing to take the time.

I first took the picture with the iPhone and did a little contrast enhancement using Preview on a Mac. Then, in Painter, I cloned it with a Digital Airbrush set to 2.5 pixels in size and set it to use Clone Color. I specifically didn't want to use straight cloning, which just makes a photographic copy of the image. I paid attention to where the features were. When I had a fold, I brushed against the direction of the fold, so the edge took on a bit more complexity. If you go with the direction of the fold, often you will get the position of the fold wrong because of where the colors are sampled from. But sometimes, on a high-contrast fold, you have to do what you can to get it to look right.

Then I used the tiniest brush (size 1.0) with a very desaturated purple. This brush was set to Buildup:Soft Buildup in Painter. And I used a very light opacity, at 18%. Then I simply sketched into the stripes with lines at different angles. When I wanted the sketchy result to be smaller, I pressed harder. And I often went over the same area with strokes at different angles. This is one way I shade, particularly with a Sharpie.

So I went over each of the purple stripes to add clarity and a little sketchy look to it. You can see The results of this in all the examples.

I changed the color to a desaturated blue-green and went over the other stripes. By the time I was done accentuating the depth of the folds, the sketchy look was coming together quite nicely.

Then I switched the brush method to Eraser:Paint Remover at the same width and opacity to do my highlight work on top. When I created a highlight, I woke as lightly with my hand as possible so the highlights wouldn't be too brazen and abrupt.

When I add highlights, I am careful to take light and shadow into account. As the folds go from right to left across the kid's torso, the highlights become catchlights and then become much more muted in the shadow.

I was going for the feeling of a kind of not-too-shiny, yet still-a-bit-matte fabric. I think you can see the look I was going for. The original picture does not have this kind of detail. Especially after I cloned it away. But the detail was taken from the original, at least from what the original suggested. That's the way I like to do it.

This image took hours and hours of time, mostly at night, and it taught me a few more things about rendering fabric. Probably, the next time I will choose a more shiny fabric like leather (not actually woven fabric, but you know what I mean!).

The final piece really brings out the look of the fabric. And it gets my hand ready for more sketching.

Once again, Painter is up to the task.

Fabric

It has always been an interest of mine to draw fabric. In a piece I once did, called The Miracle of the Paint Can, I took a low-resolution frame grab of fabric and used it as a guide to create long flowing robes. Actually, I quite enjoyed the long hours of work that went into this piece. But since it was intended to be a mosaic, I didn't really work too hard at creating fine detail of the fabric.

The other day I began to wonder how and why the look of fabric has drawn artists in. Vermeer, Dürer, Rembrandt, Da Vinci, and many others all clearly enjoyed depicting the lush fold and sinuous shadings of fabric.

So I drew this small piece. I used my iPad to get a frame grab of a part of my shirt. One with lots of twists and turns.

The first thing I did was to move it to the new iPhoto application on iPad. Then I used the lighten and darken there to enhance the natural shading. This increased the contrast of the frame grab and also allowed me to artistically pick areas I wanted to feature or drop back. It felt like fingerprinting meets the darkroom enlarger. Really I was just dodging and burning.

Then I moved it into Painter on my Mac Pro. Using a Wacom stylus, I chose the standard digital airbrush, changed its size to a few pixels, and cloned the image. Then, with the color set to clone, I sketched the image directly using clone color.

Now, this method is really the "cheating" way of creating an image, and so, once it was cloned, I switched back to standard color, chose some blue, and masked out the background, which was irrelevant to my intended creation.

Then, I changed the size of the brush to 1.0 pixels, changed the brush method to Buildup:Soft Buildup, and lowered the opacity to about 18%. Now I was ready to really sketch. I chose a ruddy orange to give it a bit of color and sketched in the darker sections with millions of brush strokes, like I was scribbling but really I was just enhancing the actual shading of the fabric itself.

Then I changed the brush method to Eraser:Paint Remover, which actually removes density rather than just being a white brush, and, with a size of 1.0 pixels again, I sketched in the highlights. This is very much the same method used in the 15th century by artists that preferred the silverpoint method of highlighting their subjects in a sketch.

Finally I chose a darker, redder, less saturated brown and went back to the Soft Buildup method to sketch in the darker lines and also the darker shadings of the fabric. This gives the fabric a multi-tone scale that approximates the renaissance sketches I have seen.

It is a nice test of my technique and also of my vision of a fabric sketch. Although the subject is unremarkable, of course!

It also shows how I like to take a standard brush, and change the internals of it to suit my style. Really I am only using one brush and, mutatis mutandis, the brush becomes a buildup sketch pencil, a fill-in brush, a cloner, and a silverpoint brush. Knowing the internals of the Painter brushes probably helps me to keep my art honest.

I think I'll try to draw some more fabric! Now, where is that velour bedspread? Maybe a still-life?