Creative Entry #7: Give A Man A Fish ...

A few weeks ago when my FA100 class held their pot luck in our lecture hall, we were prompted to show off our talent in front of all the other tutorials as some sort of entertainment while people ate. Naturally, there was song and dance, and someone even read out a story in front of the entire assembly. As a visual artist it's a little more difficult to translate my field of "expertise", if I may call it that, into something easily demonstrated on a stage, and as much as some people find it fascinating to watch me draw I'm sure there would have been someone in the audience who'd have gotten tired of the whole affair and would have left.

But where there's a will there's a way, and by means of the photo projector on the stage I was able to draw a picture from square one (baseline sketch to penned lineart) in my sketchbook. This proccess was projected onto the wall behind the performers on stage, so while others' sang and read their stories people in the audience were able to watch a drawing unfold, albeit one that had nothing to do with the contents of the songs.

I will admit it was the audience's response to watching the process of my art that spurred me to create what I did over the weekend: four tutorials for my watchers on DeviantArt documenting how I create one of my pictures from start to finish. As I've mentioned before (or believe I have) in past blog posts, DeviantArt greatly helped me to improve my drawing capabilities since I joined it almost four years ago, until I arrived at the style I have now. The journey doesn't end there, of course, and I'm always learning and trying to encorporate new styles and techniques into my art if they appeal to me. I've also got an eye for detail if I'm encountering something I have difficulty drawing; if I have difficult drawing someone's face at a certain angle I'll peer at them funny from across the cafeteria, likewise if I'm struggling with something like a bicycle or car I'll trace their contours with my eye and try to preserve the smaller details to my memory. I'm always looking at life through a glass in ways that will benefit the one thing that is most important to me: the ability to draw.

In the past few months, especially through my irregularly-updated webcomic 'OOC': http://canadian-rainwater.deviantart.com/gallery/#OOC-A-Gaming-Webcomic, I've been getting quite a bit of attention about my art, and with it come the inquiries about how I draw. My DeviantWatchers had no means to come to FA100's pot luck so of course they missed seeing me draw in person, but it's flattering when people ask, as it makes me realize just how far I've come since I first had aspirations of becoming a well-known artist as a child. Now there is by no means one way to draw, and each person has their own approach, so I made this apparent in my tutorials. My tutorials weren't "how to draw" so much as "this is how I draw, and if you can learn something from it, then more power to you".

As a result of their massive file sizes, I'll have to ask you to follow these links to view my tutorials:

How I draw Part 1.1: http://canadian-rainwater.deviantart.com/art/How-I-Draw-Part-1-1-155349516

How I draw Part 1.2: http://canadian-rainwater.deviantart.com/art/How-I-Draw-Part-1-2-155349597

How I draw Part 2.1: http://canadian-rainwater.deviantart.com/art/How-I-Draw-Part-2-1-155540317

How I draw Part 2.2: http://canadian-rainwater.deviantart.com/art/How-I-Draw-Part-2-2-155540574

Creating these four tutorials was some of the most arduous work on Photoshop I have ever done. Usually when I draw or color a picture I slip into "the zone" (as per Ken Robinson's 'The Element'--the book I read for my book response) and usually work on it nonstop until I get bored of it, fall asleep, or it gets done. During this time usually the only distractions I'll warrant is some music or a movie playing in the background, but to create this tutorial I had to break my norms and pause my work every few minutes or when I hit an important milestone in my drawing process so that I could document it for my watchers. I wound up with almost 100 different pictures or segments of my picture in various stages of completion I then had to go through, crop down to size, sort of which ones were important to preserve and which I could discard, etc. etc. I then had to arrange them in a document and annotate each step in a way that my Watchers could understand. In the end the file sizes were so big I had to save them as psb.s instead of psd.s and they took up to three-to-five minutes to save.

It. Was. Tiring.

However, making them also made me more aware that, despite my Western outlook on art and my preference to the appeal of the final piece of artwork as opposed to the process it took to create them, I myself have a particular way of working. From the moment I lay down the gestural shapes, to fleshing out the sketch, drawing from left-to-right with the pencil and then right-to-left with the pen, to the way I lay down the base colors and then work over them, I'm always following a subconscious pattern and manner of working that I've been using for a while now. Creating these tuturials became a means into exploring my own creative process and being able to share it with others as well, which I love doing with my art. Their positive responses when I uploaded these to my account made the toil worth it, although ... I can't be saying I'll be doing it again any time soon.

--Sak