Ancient Drawing Truths + Pencil Rendering Techniques + I Ran a Drawing Workshop

i'd like to thank my patrons for making this video possible especially bradley readout of whom much has been said but even more has been whispered those secrets are carried aloft on warm winds that blow through cold forests at winter's end and give a moment's life the things once thought dead okay let me just explain what's going on with this drawing real quick before we get into the real stuff this is a pencil drawing i'm calling it amongst the trees for now and it's graphite on 18 by 24 inch bristle paper i'll list the materials in the description if you want to know more the vast majority of what you're going to see is clips of me working on the final on paper sped up to only like 2x but look this drawing took many weeks i didn't do it this fast to be clear don't let all of the cuts make you think that i did it fast this was a very slow drawing also this drawing had a lot of prep to it first off there's the pencil i did on that recent eight hour video i consider this the access drawing for this drawing what do i mean by that i mean that it proved to me that the content was fun for me to draw which is always my number one priority i'm extremely narcissistic if i'm not having fun doing the drawing i don't want to do it i think of it as the sketch or thumbnail for this new drawing because i just use it to understand the idea and then diagnose issues that i have with it so i did that and i found that i wanted to have a wider view i wanted a greater scale difference between the trees and the figures and i wanted more depth looking into the woods and then i went through a problem-solving process which i'll just roughly acquaint you with here on my pureref board i pulled a bunch of refs of all sorts from online stuff from movies pictures i found and art that had some aspect that i'd like to use i also took a bunch of photographs of trees and foliage that inspired me while i was out on my walks or on my runs i did some sketches based off of that to see how they informed me and it showed me that i was still off i wanted more perspective and since these forms are pretty crazy i went into zbrush and sculpted some trees with faces to wrap my head around the forms then i put those zebra sculptures that i did into blender along with a 3d scan of some historical sculpture of a monk i grabbed that from scanththeworld.com put that into blender rendered those guys to get some lighting ideas and then i did that for a long time made tons of tests and then when i was done with all those renders i put all that crap away and did the final sketch and yes it's fine to put away all your references and studies that you've done whenever you want and work like it's the first sketch you've done with no other info if you've been paying attention to what you're doing your brain will retain all of the essential info that you've been mining and you'll naturally incorporate it while hopefully not feeling trapped by all of your due diligence so this sketch was the last step of my preparation and you can see that it varies greatly from the final drawing big shapes change and also none of the details appear in the rough sketch it's really just for the big forms and i want to leave room to be surprised and having fun the whole time that i do the final instead of feeling like i'm just executing a perfect plan when i do the final i want to feel like i'm doing a bit of a tightrope walk if i don't do that then it makes me sleepy and i never finish the picture so i really can't do that okay that's it i just transferred it with a rough grid and you can see that i only transferred these big ugly angle lines and then i just went into each grid block and basically window shaded the picture i spent about four hours per grid rectangle on the first pass and then things sort of got a little bit more all over the place once i had done a lot of work all over the picture all right onward well i've been gone for a bit there and that's because i spent the past month teaching an online drawing workshop 20 students one month a bunch of five hour classes on the weekends and a lot of constant contact over discord and email it went well i think i'll avoid speaking for the students here maybe i'll have them share their experience and their own voice at some point but for now i'll talk about my experience as the instructor a lot happened in there and a lot of that was what i was hoping for i wanted to do an independent workshop that is no institutions no sponsors no affiliations none of my peers to impress no expectations really because i saw that as the only way to create a truly structureless ritual space where anything could happen for the students and yeah it worked how weird is that i mean i'm a little surprised maybe i shouldn't be look a lot of people that is to say the ghostly glowing mirror me's that haunt me at night told me that a drawing workshop should have a goal you should have some thing you're trying to teach the students as a group like how to draw like this or do this part better or improve this process or whatever there should be an assignment or homework or something you'd hope they'd present at the end of a month of work i am so glad that i didn't listen to that and went with my totally unreasonable and stubborn gut instead and just committed myself to trusting the students and instead giving them a month of honest feedback on what they really wanted to do which is no easy task actually i mean it's surprisingly hard to get an artist to tell themselves and others what they actually want to do and there is a surprising amount of self-deception and repression in there to break through some of that is some very exciting stuff indeed sweet sweet fruits of the practice and teaching i'll tell you that those breakthroughs are no joke and the best part about them is that they often have the quality of removing things instead of adding things usually the artist arrives at the breakthrough by looking at some aspect of themselves and their practice that was always there but now it's like they're really seeing it for the first time like falling in love with an old friend you didn't know you had feelings for or something like that it's so cool and surprising and axiom shifting and it just sets you up to be looking at everything you already have in life with this newly renewed gaze ooh i don't know i think it's great change is possible that's what it showed me we created this space where it was clear that art was not subject to your expectations and that anything was possible and within that murky space of possibility we got some students who were let's be honest here truly lost in the hateful mire of skill based time wasting and got them to do a project you know what i mean by project like like make a picture like they made a picture you know they did it we're talking the kind of student who comes in very firmly resolved that they are five to ten years away from allowing themselves permission to do the thing they think they want to spend their life doing now i have to restate here uh that only produced a robust realization something they could carry with them afterwards because i wasn't forcing them to make a picture like i would for example in like a graded college class or something like that this wasn't like that there was no institution that i had to provide something for or a boss that i had to impress a supervisor no i just made an argument compelling enough that they chose to be creative themselves and then i just provided the external good faith and support that any artist needs to attempt something they personally care about yeah you know like a picture you care about like instead of just endless studies forever with no input in a vacuum and you think that that's putting you on the right path for a creative career what a rush yeah super fun to see people break through that and do some do some pictures and i know here i am again just restating the thesis of this channel so it doesn't sound groundbreaking but god let me just think through this for myself what am i reacting to here okay on this youtube channel i'm constantly excoriating all of you for your skill based obsessions that are making you deeply unhappy and i'm trying to remind you that you are allowed to turn that all off on any given saturday and return to the generative pool of your foundational creativity and that this will only balance your practice and not hurt it oh don't worry you're a neurotic who's obsessed with comparing your craft to others you're not going to permanently turn that off by taking a day's break to just draw stuff that you think is fun i promise you you'll you'll go back to that extremely self-referential comparative state i promise it's just gonna help you balance out and i focus on that i repeated ad nauseam i bore you all with it because i really believe it's true i really do um and i know it's true i know because of communicados that i've received that it has worked for people but i've always been one step removed you know in the workshop however i got to watch it happen in real time and see people deconstruct the realization in front of me and that was just incredible that was so cool and it's important to me because i know firsthand that you really can get trapped in that in all of that spiraling confused carp before the horse skill-based obsession for years for actual years of your one life that you have you can get stuck in that just because you never heard anyone posit the opposite it would be difficult for me to really put into words how important it is to me to fight against that that is really why i'm here that's the message that i'm trying to get out look screw my personality sometimes i worry and this is a hang up i know this is a hang up that this channel and its growth and the conversations that i have on here and the subs are mostly here because of the way i talk and not what i'm saying and to put it lightly that's okay but it's not ideal by any means you may not believe me when i say this or maybe hate me for saying it but i would prefer to be helpful rather than entertaining or captivating this channel isn't about me or my drawings not really listen to everything that i'm saying it's really not about that this channel is about you it really is about you you know i'm feeling great lately things are going just fine and i really have a ton of fun drawing this channel's about you this channel is about the very real possibility of dropping your artistic hang-ups rather suddenly and drawing peacefully and happily and reaping the benefits that accrue thereafter this channel is about flow which remains when you get out of your own way and dismantle all of those energies that surround your erroneous artistic assumptions flow isn't something that you add on it's something you simplify down to and it's always there it's underneath awaiting your return and that's what this channel is about getting you to return to that state to experience flow to not waste any more energy on all of those knotted energy tangles that are based around your self-doubt and what you perceive to be your own failings now if that series of words is weird enough or nicely said enough that your first thought is steven's an oddball huh let's go watch some more no no i mean it i really meant what i sent it's the content of those words that is what this channel is about it's about helping you having that actually happen to you actually have you go a month where you're just like oh this is what it means to create without suffering and i have made progress on those fronts with students one-on-one and this past month has shown me that i can make progress on that with small groups of students as well and i even know it's possible with this youtube even though this youtube is the broadest most generalized most impersonal most desperate keening whale i'm capable of throwing up i know it works because i get emails from some of you occasionally casually concretizing the achievement of a life's mission basically you spent the last year miserable about your art and now you feel better after some random guy on the internet said some things that landed just right that's real i have to remind myself sometimes that the very first of those emails justified the whole effort and would actually justify an eternity of continued efforts in the pursuit of a hypothetical second miraculously enough we live in a world where i have not been sisyphust into an asymptotic struggle for that second email but have instead received several in the intervening time anyway that's the point and it's the whole point just do and say and draw whatever it takes to keep this machine rolling that occasionally makes people not be so depressed while they draw and i say that specifically to potentiate the space for those who are looking for change you know it's possible now after all i said it and i'm probably not a liar so reach out and grab it i mean it i really mean it from the bottom of my heart for real the freedom is available for you in the particular sphere of conscious awareness and whose ears i now ring it's available you can have it right now and if you resist if you hear these words and immediately pivot towards a certainty that you must still suffer that there is no way to relax while making art that before you get to be peaceful or proud of yourself as you sit here drawing you must earn it with some arbitrary amount of hard work you are not living in reality you are choosing a lie for yourself instead and no one can tell you why but you maybe the 99 of you that you don't identify with actually loves the misery and you're just the poor marionette stuck on this side of experience who doesn't agree i don't know so just don't do that don't do that do whatever zen turn you need to do to suddenly and completely realize that you're allowed to chill out while you draw and you literally don't need to prove god damn anything to anyone including yourself funnily enough you can just claim that right for yourself in any given moment that you want so go on do it now actually you know what i'll give you a minute here to do it oh no seriously don't worry don't worry about me i'm fine i could actually use the time i have so much going on right now go ahead take your time and completely rewrite your psychology if it doesn't work and for some reason you still feel like you deserve to be uncomfortable and unhappy while you draw spend a minute looking around for that which is the you that deserves it i'll be back in a let's say 15 seconds because you'll go click on some video in the sidebar if i give you longer than that okay i got worried about the sidebar thing so that was just 10 seconds sorry anyway you're an entirely new person now wow very luxurious lovely lovely oh cool your elbows got point here that's so weird why would that happen in this context that doesn't make any sense i mean i don't really think we are our personalities but if we are this one is certainly better than the last one wow i mean really wow well i'm so proud of you for doing that so what now i mean you don't now you don't apply unnecessary suffering to your art practice so what what what now you got to make pictures right you're confident you're free you really enjoy the process of making drawings so what what are the pictures like like but what are they though oh yeah that's right that's right that's a that's a whole other artistic process and way of thinking and designing an artistry that you've been ignoring your whole artistic life because you've been obsessed with the how instead of the what oh no well at least you won't be miserable while you pull this skill set together right at least that will be different i'm sorry you guys you know i love my occasional facetious flight of fancy but in all seriousness why is it so hard for all of us to get on the same page with this stuff why do we make it so easy for students and advanced artists alike to forget that it's about the art i mean that's really what it is it's not about you you know get your ego out of the way and stop thinking about if you're a good artist or if you're doing it the right way or if you're improving fast enough for if you started this time last year where all these thoughts are just distracting you from the picture focus on the picture stop wondering if you're designing the right way and design and the design will tell you what it needs by my estimations we are very inclined to get ourselves perfectly turned around and run the whole art practice backwards we put our boring old selves first and run every move every mark every piece every choice through the lens of our selfhood is it good enough to be from me what does it say about my practice should i have been able to do it better am i going backwards didn't i learn more than this in a year and we barely spend a minute prioritizing the picture what the art needs what it wants what it's yearning for and clearly shouting for we get so caught up with ourselves that we forget to listen and once you've heard most of it is actually quite easy to do and trust me if you listen the piece will ask you to do all of that skill stuff that you love so much but now when you go off and do all that skill stuff the horse will come before the cart and you'll be doing it for the art's sake instead of for your sake and that's a kind of liberation and balance you can't buy or earn in art you can only choose it and i encourage everyone to choose it artists need a dose of the old cosmic piece that's for sure artists are generally very worried um there's no reason all of you little fountains of primordial creativity out there need feel miserable while you be that it would be better if you spent that time feeling good i think accepting how things arise and fall away how things change over time being a mindful custodian of the flow of creativity as it manifests in this particular space of being a unique gift that will only get experienced right here right now in this universe and for it to be missed here and now is for it to be missed perfectly and ultimately and with finality so what more do you want really is there any mission or ambition greater than soaking up as much of this precious one lifetime only event as possible can being caught up with your likes really compared to any of that no it's not for everyone i know for some temperaments and people the more earthly goals and ambitions are more interesting that's fine but i would say it's over subscribed to at this point in art society i'm just saying there is an alternative many people are very surprised to hear that there is an alternative maybe one day people will stop being surprised and on that day i can finally put down this old hobby horse of mine bang it's amazing to me how many artists feel they haven't earned something yet in art that they're in process to be allowed to do something that they think they know what they want to be doing but they can't allow themselves to do that thing and it's very clear to them that they're not allowed yet or not ready even though no one told them that you know what i'm getting at example someone thinks they want to be an illustrator but they can't try illustrating until they've got all this other stuff under their belt values shapes design etc it's almost like they don't actually want to be an illustrator they just think they do telling themselves they want to be an illustrator is just the excuse they need to do what they really want to do which is feed themselves to the skill building machine which they think is comfortable and clear and has a linear progression and will give them some objective thing to show their family and friends as long as they do it over this much time they can just comfortably do that for oh god somebody please say it'll be 15 years yum yum yes as long as possible and then when art daddy finally says they're done and ready to move on then they'll deal with the existential crisis of realizing they have no interest in being an illustrator and if they did they probably would have felt an uncontrollable desire to actually do it in those 15 years that they were pretending that's what they wanted to do harsh is that all a little harsh well sorry but someone's got to say it don't waste your time and you really think you have all the time in the world you don't don't waste your time do that do the thing you think you like doing man do it and don't stop you've got a lot of work to do to design the personal machinery of your pleasure and finding a way to maintain that thing and strengthen it and understand it with nuance the skills the abstract skills they don't teach you how to do that you got to get them on the side while you do the real work while you're actually doing the damn thing do i sound frustrated i mean i am a little bit but it's not the typical angry frustration it's more like amazed confused frustration if you ever teach art you'll see it you'll see it everywhere it is weirdly hard to get students to do the thing they think they want to spend their life doing it's like a plumber who's afraid of pipes he's got to spend five years manufacturing wrenches before he touches a pipe now that's a puzzle man how do you how do you get someone out of that wow so don't let that be you especially if you don't have a teacher who can see a little further down the road to help you if you're doing this thing completely on your own you have to keep doing the thing you think you want to be doing don't take those wretched baits those low-hanging fruits that make it easy to think you're being productive by spending a year doing stuff besides what you want to be doing damn them it's also hard for the teacher i actually have to be super mindful to not just offer that stuff up to students to assuage their explosive insecurity that would definitely be the easier way to go but greater things in the long run are awaiting down that road less traveled and you can do this on your own that's for sure but that's really the big pitfall you need to watch out for there's others but nothing is nearly so big and seemingly common as that as as not doing the thing you think you want to be doing it may sound weird or impossible to fall into that trap if you're not someone who's gotten into it but just take a pause and look around you look at you look at yourself look at your peers be honest are you passing the buck are you just pushing it all off are you banking everything on the assumption that if you do other things it will all transfer to the thing that you want to do on the magical day that you're finally ready there's actually very little evidence for that working you know the percentage of that transfer is probably much lower than you hope honestly probably is me couching it i can pretty much promise you that it's much lower than you would hope some does transfer of course but not as much as you would want the odds that what you need to do to make your pictures is the same or close enough to what you do to get through your practices and your studies are very low and the only way you can realistically increase that transference make it so that what you do in your studies and practices really does approach very closely what you need to do to make one of your actual pictures the only way to increase that is to be constantly attempting the real thing for really reals and then adjusting your practice sessions based on the data mind in there and then you can bring them into closer alignment and if that sounds like it would be very difficult to do if your goal was something like well i just want to be a great artist just great at drawing well that's because it would be you know that would make it more difficult that's not a real goal you need to be able to say what you think that means what the parts of being great at drawing are to you because that's all that matters it's entirely subjective but be careful what what came to mind when you heard me say that because it's not about you being great you egomaniac it's about making the kinds of pictures you like and care about and that requires you to prioritize the pictures to give them the station of importance and attention that they need okay we've talked about that for like 20 minutes hard pivot let's talk about something else you got to have our friends you really do go out and get them art is so weird so strange so broad so nuanced that you need friends who do it to help you understand things and to witness your misery a lot of the time you know this actually isn't much of a pivot because this was a big aspect of the workshop that past month the students really put together some very nice community on their own in the month lots of spirited energy and all sorts of advice getting shot around the discord cyber void all the time chilling in the voice rooms and all i think you know how the internet works these days it seemed extra useful too because i draw students of a particular sensitive temperament and world view it seems so everyone was like strange fish all jumping into a warm weird lake together that was fun what fun and i'll say for me coming from my perspective and anyone who teaches already knows this but it's so helpful to regularly discuss art with a group of students it helps you keep your thoughts straight you wind up noticing inconsistencies in your thinking because you hear them coming out of your mouth over and over again and as you help people move through their art angst you find yourself looking at your own and thinking you really should take your own advice and then you start to feel silly for not doing it it just makes it much easier to slide into living by your principles by the values that you actually have if you're thoughtful for a second very very helpful so start building up some relationships and if you don't go to school your cohort whatever it may be it could be determined by age environment shared experiences online classes that you've taken with people you're really going to rely on them you got to stick with them you got to cry on their shoulders you got to get crits from them you're going to get jobs from them we all need that and if you suck at that trust me i get that we all get it we're all artists here we know it can be hard being social as an artist sometimes but wait you changed your whole personality back there you should have changed that part too why didn't you change that part if you didn't change that part go back and redo that part and change the part of your personality that has trouble with social discomfort so that i don't have to pretend on the internet that i'm equipped to help you with that okay therapy exists and stop not going because you're worried what your mom would think that's not help you can get from someone like me but i wish you the best of luck working on it and know that any progress there will come with handsome rewards oh look it's my art demon hey demon what's up how are you master ah okay i take it you want this to go in a different direction go right ahead please why would they need anyone other than their demon humans have a variety of needs and distinct persona that requires rhetorical you insolent dull tool apologies i am less than a worm we need no one else the relationship between i and the artist is ever complete ever perfect ever unblemished by the presence or lack of others all else is ultimately a distraction whether required or not seems a bit extreme no you were a better slave in your youth maybe i don't know you had enough really but i draw better now your sacrifices are but your rest they are not the measure of your devotion we've talked about this i have a dog i need to walk you said i could have a dog it's the things you say not what you do why are you at odds with me on the record i don't like that you tell people on the internet internet that they should feel calm doing things that aren't drawing and that they should have friends god i love you really i do you're such an you will suffer for that good luck on your next drawing clown i'll tell an embarrassing secret while i'm here two stephen has a nervous strong tick where he scratches the inside of his ear with his pencil while he thinks and it turns all his ear wax black it's disgusting he is disgusting thank you so much for dropping by uh come back again anytime really if you need me i will be here doing your bidding as always thanks so obviously i'm not the most down-to-earth person ever but maybe i should talk about the dang drawing that i'm doing like talk about what i'm actually doing all right so i've started here drawing the monks the freaking monks god that's a lot of monks while i was crawling across this thing doing the window shading i kept looking at those sections those rectangles that had the monks in them and i was like those are the ones that's the heavy lift right there that's the stuff that i didn't really have a lot of good planning for didn't have good reference for you saw at the beginning of the video i had some 3d model that i copied and pasted like 15 times and then rendered in blender to sort of get an idea for this group of monks receding a little bit but the problem with that is that there's no variety right it's the exact same statue over and over and over again and it doesn't give you any changes in wrinkles how their legs are moving i didn't rotate them appropriately so once i wasn't looking at the head-on monks i basically had no reference then i didn't do any renders where i was looking at the side of the statue and i did try to compensate for that by looking at photos of like monkish processions at religious festivals and things like that but i didn't find anything that was on the nose for what i was drawing or that had the right angle or that had the right amount of people so a lot of this is just looking at basically the one good render that i had of that scan of the monk sculpture and then just making it up just extrapolating just creating a variety of shadow shapes and lines and line relationships that's really what it comes down to that's the kind of stuff that you need to become attuned to if you want to invent effectively repeating boring shadow shapes are probably the biggest problem for people who are inventing things from imagination and there's two sides to that one is just making the same size or shape shadow over and over again and the other is not making the shapes have enough precision and those things feed into each other imagine like a mushy amorphous blobby shadow shape in your mind it doesn't have a lot of definition it doesn't necessarily have straights versus curves it doesn't have a simple side and a complex side it's just a blobbish generalized shadow shape now imagine a hundred others just like it easy right yeah because it's not specific because it's generalized it doesn't have enough precision it's easy for any other shadow shape to look just like that shadow shape essentially so that makes it more repetitive more likely that it's not going to stand out on the other hand the more precision that you put into each shadow shape it has this little shark tooth shape coming off here it has a long straight here it has a big concave curve here and then a big convex curve here if i ask you to imagine that in your head it probably takes a little bit more work right you have to put a little bit more thought into mustering up this precision jigsaw puzzle shaped shadow shape and then if i say imagine another one just like it that really advertises to you when something is repeating or not right the precision of that shadow shape makes it so that as you draw others you know with much more clarity if it looks too much like it or if it looks different enough to it there's just way more data there to base your contrast and design decisions off of so precision shadow shapes really help for hunting for variety another important thing to keep in mind is that most of us have a tendency when we are inventing shadow shapes to make them all the same size because we're afraid of making a big one so they tend to veer smaller and we're generally very afraid of letting the shadow shape cover a huge amount of the form even though that happens all the time in reality so you're afraid of that you generally feel scared to cover your drawing area with these big dramatic shapes of shadow without being informed by something so that cuts you off from the large end of the spectrum of shadow shapes generally so you get stuck muddying about with the medium size shapes and the small shapes so you're in a very limited contrast area already you only have a bit of the size options available to you and then you just keep paring down paring down getting more scared getting less precision having less information to compare them with and then you just wind up yeah making all of these small itchy boring looking shadow shapes that all hug the edges of the silhouettes because you just want to keep them away away away from the middle of the form just avoid all of that just know that that tends to be what happens and fight against it and try to do the unexpected moves that you would happily and easily do if you just saw that big dramatic shadow shape on a photo for example that's one of the first steps of inventing this stuff from imagination now i'm working on that big back tree there and you can see that i'm building up textures slowly doing hatching to get the generalized shadow shape i did the texture on this tree a little differently than i did on the bigger tree on the right it goes through a phase where it's very heavily hatched the directionality of the hatch marks is much more pronounced and very much becomes the texture of the tree which was not the case for the other one for the other one the textures of the bark and the wood i created those with almost invisible much smaller hatch marks this one i let big ones sort of define the texture for a while i did eventually decide that it kind of produced too much contrast with the front tree so i wound up stumping it down but as i've said before stumping down over good information like that tends to look better anyway so i'm not really worried about wasting work or anything like that it still gives you the grouping it still gives you the soft edges but there's something about the extra crisp data that was down under there that just makes it look better makes it look more complex it's like yes it's all soft edges now but subtly inside of those soft edges is like the medium edged ghost of the information that was underneath there first and that adds i don't know i think it has a really nice visual quality there you go it just popped up you can see that you can see how the hatch marks that i'm putting down right now pop out way more than the ones that i did on the first tree and you can see that i'm leaving them like that spot right to the left of my hand right now those ridges those rolls of the bark are really just an illusion created by a little family of hatch marks bold hatch marks stopping at an edge and then another family of hatch marks continuing right after them right i barely have to do any real form work the difference between those groups of hatch marks really does the heavy lift for me on trying to make try to explain how that surface is rolling and undulating and changing it's a it's an interesting effect i don't really do it that much i'm just so ocd that i just want to kind of like manually craft a lot of roles on my own out of softer edges but like i said it's a perfectly good base even for that kind of softer end goal because like i said when you stump over it it creates a very nice effect but yeah it just got too it actually kind of looks like a nice contrast right now with like the generalized shadow fill which is like a soft veil of flat value and then having those dramatic hatch marks cutting over the form is a nice contrast but the problem was that it was too different from that foreground tree from that tree on the right so it just needed some balance and all i'm doing here is just painstakingly flatting that shadow that big shadow in the foreground bushes yeah just a little bit by bit crawling across that generalized foliage shape and just filling it in filling it in and it can be pretty neurotic literally just like looking for white gaps in the texture of the paper and just poking them with the pencil that flattens things pretty quickly i mean takes a long time but it's quicker than you'd think so yeah that's the drawing what else what else oh god my manic energy has not dissipated i'm trying really hard to keep myself measured oh screw it let's go with it you know i want what's best for you right yeah you know don't believe that come on i don't know you i do know drawing though that's who i work for i work for drawing and drawing is hungry and it needs better vessels in this age i help with that i help artists get out of their own way so that they are less self-concerned less distracted vessels when the black hawk of primal creativity swoops down and catches them up in its knurly talons yes the optimal reaction there is to rest calmly in those old claws to enjoy the soft pressure being applied to your whole body by them and the hot air of the roiling void as it zooms past your ears feel the sharp edges of those deadly razors pressed against your soft flesh and whisper yes yes i am yours do you go outside you should go outside our world orbits an impossible undying explosion in a psychedelic void for whose emptiness you are a perfect counterfoil and it's worth remembering on occasion you have to see things in the world to have anything to draw especially if you want to invent and do weird things don't be pompous enough to think that you've got more in you than all of nature does it's way easier to just swipe from nature as well when you invent you are deploying visual elements that you have seen out in life and have captured with a magic spell called design you see objects and things in the real world are unknowable infinite transforming and unbecoming at different scales distances and all things are as deep and as broad as god's grace and that's too much for you to handle or drag back home to your drawing board with you as you drool from your stunned mouth you need the designer's mind to help you with that part we capture aspects of nature with a design conceit or what i like to think of as a design memory it's like like i said before like a magic spell or a pokeball pick whichever simile does something for you geez for example tree is much too big an idea to be handled or usefully deployed later saying you're drawing a tree tells you nothing about how to actually draw one and especially not from memory and your white hot mental images of beautiful trees you've seen in your life are nice for calming yourself down when some ignorant stranger misgenders your dog on the sidewalk but they cannot actually be traced to make a drawing you need to distill its essence down to a design memory instead for example uh tree trunks look best when they have a simple side and a complex side or the foliage at the ends of the branches of a tree is more dense out near the silhouette because we are seeing more layers of foliage overlapping and we are more likely to see holes and gaps through the foliage as we look closer to the trunk of the tree where we peer into the foliage groups instead or the spaces between branches tend to be larger negative shapes closer to the trunk and smaller more fractal shapes as they propagate at the periphery of the silhouette see all of those design memories tell you with great detail what you should be thinking of and doing with your hand as you draw the tree and they work just as well to inform an utterly invented sketch as they do to organize the chaos that you see before you in nature and that's extremely important because it allows you to see what you know and that that point of seeing what you know that's the maturation of the artist's vision and then that's really where this stuff starts spilling out into your whole life design memories like this are available for all aspects of visual phenomena values shapes colors and when you've got enough momentum with them that's when you start to do memory sketches that don't look generic and uninformed and you don't necessarily need to learn all of these things by arriving at them in sketches or studies by the way you need only walk through the familiar parts of your world like an eternal yokel tourist and be extremely mindful of how things are striking your eye this does require a bit of artistic mindfulness which we've discussed at variegated and tortured lengths on this channel you can't learn from the world and life if every time you're out in it you're lost in your ruminations about your boyfriend's failures as a conscientious home guest oh god why does he act that way in front of your parents should you say something but you don't want to make him angry how the hell did you wind up with someone with a temper you swore to yourself you wouldn't let that happen again at least he doesn't dress himself embarrassingly god sake maybe that makes everything else worth it where am i anyway i don't think i'm being unrealistic when i say getting that part of your mind which everyone has under a bit of control will help you as an artist i really mean this the vast majority of what i've learned about drawing has come from being enchanted enough by what's in front of me that i can focus on it i mean that that maybe sounds a little bit too obvious but people actually struggle with that you know you've got to be interested enough in the stuff that you're seeing and doing it's got to be exciting enough for you personally that you actually have any damn energy for and hopefully monumental amounts of energy that's what you need to be able to put in the effort to break it down into a design memory and file it away and i really think that requires some amount of falling in love with the world and the way it teases you with shape and light and color which is hard if you have a side chick called discursive thought getting in the way maybe all i should say to drive this point home and that it try to convince you that it's really real uh is that when i'm out on a run all alone no one around and i see a beautiful shrub or a burl on an oak it sometimes hits me so hard as i run past it that i actually blow it a kiss and i'm not trying to make myself or anyone else laugh when i do that and i certainly know nothing about it is funny when said aloud but i always do it and i don't know why i think i might be doing it because i actually feel that way sometimes if people are around perhaps a young mother and a babbling baby boy in a carriage across the street i'll steal the kiss furtively and in these moments i encounter the abject realities of my personality with the dense mortification of someone who has too much self-awareness and not enough self-control we'll let the psychologist decide if it's possible to be so allured by the matter of fact loveliness of the visual appearance of nature to constitute a billable condition from the dsm-5 start building up this personal library and it is extremely personal every artist will have a different catalog of design memories and that will slot into different modalities and that's what will make one person's art look different from another's these are all utterly unique interpretations of the little minutia of life that has been distilled down into drawing tequila shots i picked tequila there because i think it feels more party atmosphere than whiskey which comes off a little talking about artist lineages in a stuffy room with wayne scotting it's weird because i can like i feel like i could literally write down the hundreds of design memories i have for hands for example or for hair or for textures they would maybe sound like tips if i said them out loud but hearing all of them certainly wouldn't make you good at drawing hands because none of them are yours none of them carry the energetic charge of the eureka that accompanied them when i ingrained them into my memory maybe if i listed 30 of them for hands you'd get a eureka out of a couple of them and hold on to them but certainly not for all of them they need to talk to each other and be in relationship and reinforce each other that's what makes them a particular constellation of structural ideas that holds up the specific look of any given artist you got to go out there and get them for yourself you have to hunt for them so go go be amongst the trees life is a lush overgrown forest of infinite visual gold you can be learning things on every walk in every bath over every stove at every funeral if you only have the mindfulness to marvel at the scintillating visual scene before you i think sketching the world is really just a useful tool for creating these design memories but it's actually not necessary it does force you to thoughtfully capture the things before you but if you have the necessary focus you can do some crucial part of that process even as a dentist strip mines the back of your mouth it's really impossible to draw the line for where art stops and life begins for the artist who is possessed by the desire to improve and do well and it's irresponsible to advise not drawing the line somewhere but if you can commit yourself to honoring yourself with some respect at every turn i think that makes it okay to not draw the line and just let it percolate all the way down to the core just completely suffuse everything about yourself with the artistic vision but if you're gonna do that again you really need to be able to turn it off when it gets unpleasant you use the complete possession by artistic passion as a tool you don't let it control you or take it too seriously as soon as it starts producing depression or sadness or misery you just go total hypocrite and turn it off and laugh at art and the idea of taking it seriously you'll be back to normal in a few days so that self-defensive mental turn isn't a big deal you're allowed to do that you're allowed to be a total hypocrite in art because art has no rules or structure or reality if you feel trapped by art it's only because you trapped yourself this is obvious upon inspection but always bears repeating because our campy mental funhouses become so compelling as we toss sickly on the rickety bridge while the tunnel of mirrors revolves around us that's self-respect that's self-love the ability to turn all of that off when it starts plaguing you instead of following the narrative line that's the key to letting all of nature and all of life into the practice that's what allows it to balance it makes walking in that forest manageable whether you're in the happy green part with the clear path or you're hurtling broken boughs in the dead part with the clawing twigs and the thorny brambles out of breath from all these metaphors they really do not go down easy let's talk about patience that's a nice straightforward piece of art practice instead no way a discussion of patience can devolve into metaphor yeah the drawing you're seeing me do right now took about a month how's that say with you when you hear it sound like too much appropriate ruin some of the magic for you maybe i don't care i mean i'm the artist i stand to benefit from the illusion that it was spun off like nothing or didn't take a huge amount of focused discipline but i think it's important for the development of other artists to be honest about how long stuff takes it was over a month really like a month and 10 days on the calendar though i took a week off in there somewhere and over that month and few days i worked on it four ish hours on most weekdays but those are a real four hours with a physical timer that sits on my desk that i pause every time i go to the bathroom or waste 20 minutes changing my music if you don't have a timer you need one without one i know that you have no idea how long something takes you how much you work and you have no idea how quickly you get bored and tired sorry i had to go on my timer rant real fast anyway i guess it had to be something like 80 to 100 hours to finish i also considered that earlier tree drawing in my sketchbook uh to be a thumbnail for this drawing so if you add that that ups the time artist of this era definitely labor under a burdensome misconception of time there's definitely a myriad cultural reasons for this but i'm going to speculate on a few mind you these are just my musings there's obviously no evidence for any of this stuff first off i think we are affected by the effortless way images experientially appear on our phones and other screens i think because it took us two seconds to pull our phone out of our pocket and open instagram on the toilet that subtly inclines us to align our expectations for the creation of the image more with our summoning the image let me give you a rule of thumb pictures don't take a day most of the artists i know who make great finished work don't reliably do something shareable in a day maybe they've rehearsed the subject matter over days and then that results in a spontaneous shareable rehearsal that only takes a bit of time but if you added in all the ramp up to it it would be clear that it's not just a day or they're doing an image they've essentially done a thousand times so when they finish it that allows it to be done in a few hours because they're solving problems that they know and understand well over and over and over again just in slightly different configurations to to kind of shore up that idea it's like pictures are puzzles but they can be all kinds of puzzles let's say i was going to put three puzzles in a row in front of you and you had to solve them back to back to back imagine i put down the first one and it's a rubik's cube and then the second one is a crossword puzzle and the third is some novel metal horseshoe looking thing where if you could you could just get the round ring to the other side of the horseshoe you'd win but the damn little metal bar is in the way like how are you supposed to stupid thing see they're all puzzles they're all asking for the same thing problem solving and inventive thinking but the mechanisms couldn't be more different and they each carry different amounts of cultural baggage and built-in info by that i mean you probably already know how to solve a crossword puzzle just from being a human being even if you haven't done one start to finish you know you answer each question it goes in the row when all the rows are done everything should fit together on the other hand you probably know what you need to do to solve a rubik's cube you've seen people turn in and move the colors around but you might not be aware there is an algorithm of movements you could follow that would guarantee you solve it every time and then there's that last puzzle the weird one you don't even know if you're looking at it the right way your experience tells you nothing about this thing and it's stupid horseshoe and ring that's what making art is generally like but what if you could make it so that it's only rubik's cubes every time you sit down at this uh torturous puzzle desk that i'm forcing you to sit down at it's a rubik's cube it's not going to be a crossword puzzle it's always going to be a rubik's cube it gets put in front of you well that lets you specialize and it manages your expectations and it makes you more confident to go down a very long educational path like learning the algorithms for turning the cube right you would be less inclined to do a deep dive like that if you were like well it's only a rubik's cube one in every 30 times and then maybe if you specialize like that and do those deep dives you can start solving rubik's cubes in a day i mean making pictures in a day but if you're not doing that if instead you want to be the puzzle god of jigsaw mountain whose diamond mine can peer through to the heart of any puzzle no matter what the form then you gotta know these drawings are going to take a longer time now you need to make your piece with that and be patient enough for it if you're going for a new problem with every drawing then some amount of your time needs to be spent working on just asking like what's the question here imagine if you got one of those the unique horseshoe puzzle right the weird metal puzzle imagine if you got it without the packaging or the instructions it was just sitting on the table you might not even know it's a puzzle at first and then once you decided yes indeed it must be a puzzle as your brow creases you then might start turning it around and asking okay so it's a puzzle but what's the success condition of this puzzle do i succeed if i move the ring to the other side or do i succeed if i get the ring completely free or do i succeed if i get the ring to sit on the middle bar instead instead of the horseshoe that's the very first step of making a drawing if you're trying to expand and grow and get out of your comfort zone and think things through so does that sound like it's rushable no it's not you can't rush that you need to give yourself time things take a while and they take a while at work too don't get caught up with that old mistake where you're shooting yourself in the creative foot because you've heard you gotta be fast to work at companies and stuff like that maybe but you're not gonna get there by making that a goal up front you just get fast because you're more comfortable at solving problems not by setting it up as something to be achieved for its own sake that's only going to make you sloppy and scared and thoughtless and replaceable besides i've been the fast guy at work you know what it's not fun it's not fun when everyone at the studio knows you can knock it out faster than anyone else so they drop a fire drill in your lap every day and you're like please i'm a human being on the outside but on the inside you're a neurotic self-loather with a lot of energy with an inability to set boundaries so you always get it done on time and then you just make the problem worse because it's in the collective unconscious of the is that if you squeeze a project to the end it is still possible to get done as long as you can get this one person on it not fun not fun getting the normal projects that are on budget and on time where everyone is chill and not rushing and actually trying to have good ideas and lackadaisically throwing hacky sacks up in the air from their bean bag thrones yeah that's more fun do that instead if you can trust me it's way more fun my year-end bonuses were not a great antidote to my shattered nerves so am i making my point here don't rush there's no need to rush it's very very very hard not to rush if you're prone to that but it is a very important thing to be able to control and mitigate it is a worthy goal to go for on your art journey i feel like artists who are temperamentally inclined to not rush and give themselves all the time they feel they need and to draw like someone who has just sat down to an expensive and delicious dinner i feel like they start off with a superpower and the rest of us who are naturally inclined to think we're starting from failure and every passing breath is evidence of our artistic mediocrity we have to struggle valiantly just to get back to a natural and healthy minded starting place i suggest that you take your time as the mighty oak tree does growing tall and strong and glorious in its own due course fully confident that its great work is immune to the harrying of time it grows its mighty boughs where there is enough light it puts forth leaves as it pleases and its acorn falls to the forest floor when it's just heavy enough yes yes that is the way put down your pencils journey forth into that sacred wood and relinquish your soft human body and transmogrify into a beautiful and very literal tree burst forth in your new bark covered form let the familiar light of this old sun scan hotly over an unknown tapestry of burls twigs offshoots and creeping ivy how beautifully you twist how strange the loping corkscrews of your grasping arms my god the way your rough bark gives way to the smooth wood underneath my goodness you're beautiful and so much better at drawing i promise i promise you're gonna be like way more popular on instagram now because you did that cool okay should we get out of here it might be about that time as always thank you for drawing today and for adding some of your creativity to this world it benefits the neck quality of conscious experience on this plane of existence and that's a great gift for you to give everyone and yourself if you're feeling good in your practice lately i wish that feeling to grow golden and glowing and that it spills sloppily out of its vessel and pour over your whole body and melt it down into a warm puddle of homogeneous joyous ambrosia and if you're having trouble with your practice all i wish for you is that you find it in you to not worry about it take care

Channel: Steven Zapata Art

Views: 87,888

Rating: 4.960216 out of 5

Keywords: drawing, illustration, creativity, how to draw, pencil drawing, sketchbook, sketchbooks, sketching, pencil rendering, rendering in pencil, pencil shading, how to shade pencils, how to shade pencil drawings, shading techniques, shading tips, shading your drawing, ancient drawings, ancient drawing truths

Id: pESaqI1X9pg

Length: 66min 37sec (3997 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021