I became a PRO ARTIST with NO art school and NO talent

this is the sketchbook that got me rejected from art school in 2000 i was graduating high school applying to colleges and i wanted to go to sheridan college which at the time had a really renowned animation program they required a portfolio though and i couldn't really draw this was about the level of my drawing at 19 years old that's my name i think you can tell by the way i drew that i was trying to copy other art you know i didn't really understand it yet now look i i don't want to laugh at my 19 year old self this kid had hope he just didn't have skill part of sheridan's portfolio was a life drawing assignment this is probably my first ever life drawing oh yes sheridan wanted us to draw a room in perspective i had no idea how to draw perspective the other assignment was they gave us a character design and had us draw expressions this here is a tracing of the character they provided and then that's my expression sheet around it i was trying i really tried i sent them scanned copies of this portfolio and of course you know you don't get into a school when the envelope you get back is this thin so yeah i didn't get into sheridan college so that was 2000 fast forward now 17 years and disney asked me to paint the book version of their nutcracker film and they wanted me to do it in my own painting style i got to be brushy and expressive and do everything i love i had so much fun working on these illustrations the room is in perspective uh here's one of my favorite paintings from the book this page here was more refined more of a standard portrait i had to use 17 years of art experience to get these poses just right and of course make them look like they had form and light and texture obviously i learned a lot of lessons between this and this and in this video i want to account for them where i learned things when i learned things and how i apply them to my work as a professional this is some of my early cg work it got me accepted into ryerson university in toronto i did their film studies program there was no drawing though so my university was here and as luck would have it i discovered that just up the street was a life drawing studio now when i was younger i did not know that it was possible to learn how to draw i thought you had to be born with it a talent and i didn't have the talent that's why i was doing all the cg stuff in the first place i figured i can't draw maybe i could do art on the computer does anyone remember this viral animation from 1999 this piece landed victor navone his job at pixar when i went to his website i was kind of dismayed to see that p could draw but he also recommended taking life drawing classes which he was doing to help with his animation now when i went for my first life drawing session nude model posing i approached the drawings like this you know trying to get a finished contour right off the bat my drawings were failures i wish i still had some of them to show you but i mean you've seen this anyway the guy who owned the life drawing studio was nick kalistian a fantastic artist go check him out after seeing some of nick's three to five minute life drawings it became clear that my approach to drawing had to fundamentally change nick showed me how his teacher glenn vilpou would draw these things called gestures and a gesture drawing wasn't supposed to look finished or pretty it's a method of drawing designed to quickly capture the feel of a pose and that's it a gesture drawing can very quickly indicate things like weight balance and movement very important features of any style of drawing you can play with exaggerating it too in this case to really feel say the thrust of her hips the outstretched elbow the weight on her left leg there are no rules to drawing a gesture but one piece of advice i do have when you draw a gesture be gestural doing this will help you find the larger relationships within a pose for example the counterbalanced shoulders and hips here and the graceful arc that connects them also the related circular rhythm for the legs and by the way i am using the wacom cintiq pro 32 what a piece of machinery however i only got this machine last week for the past 20 years i've been doing my art with this wacom intuos 3. look how worn down it is i'll talk about these tools a little more later in the video so back to gesture the shoulders and hips are giving me a bit of drama in this pose but there's a lot of drama in that outstretched arm i'll use a straight for that another straight to show the weight on this leg straights tend to portray speed or strength so gesture captures rhythm but what is rhythm to me rhythm is an abstract through line it gracefully connects all the parts of a pose and helps ensure that together they add up to something gesture is present in so much good art it just works under the surface so i drew exclusively gestures for several months most of them have been long since thrown away but here's a few i still do have gesture was the first real tool i had in my artistic development character-wise you can explore anything with gesture from a squirrel to a wingless dragon to a sword-wielding warrior to spider-man gestures don't need style they're not finished drawings they're just information you use to proceed gesture drawing doesn't necessarily look impressive i remember telling my parents i was learning to draw and showing them my gestures and they were like okay but the next thing nick introduced me to was breaking down the figure into basic forms we would put a piece of tracing paper over a photograph of the figure and we would reconstruct it with boxes and cylinders look at how the box for the torso here captures the twist in the body i'll throw a center line down that box to further help me understand the dimension then the arms we would construct with two cylinders then we would square those off in this way you're understanding both the roundness and the planes of the arm often we would draw through the geometry see those ghost ellipses going behind the leg and this is how we come up with very three-dimensional drawings this was part of an informal class that nick was teaching it was three hours a week for six weeks it's the closest thing i ever had to art school so you take the gesture you take the form and mash them and my drawing started looking like this remember i started from here and this is about a three year timeline to get there i want to show you a recreation of my process at the time i'm mapping out the gesture shoulder lines hip lines the rhythm that connects them then extending those rhythms through the limbs then i would start working out volumes but i wouldn't do it quite as rigidly as the demo i just showed you i am drawing three-dimensional cylinders and boxes but i'm trying to respect the gesture you know keep it intact while adding these more rigid forms so this is what my life drawings looked like for about a year and a half okay that's actually not quite true they looked more like this same philosophy but poorer execution that was my very first drawing done with a tablet you see in 2003 i was convinced i could become a professional artist it was a huge moment for me so i went out and bought a tablet i chose wacom because hey it's the industry standard trust me i've tried them all it is pronounced wacom by the way not wacom or wacom wa in japanese means harmony and com computer harmony computer so anyway these drawings done about a year later do have one more element at play shapes shape is the fundamental that packages all the information and delivers it to the viewer in a digestible way i studied a lot of animators drawings in my early years in this rough pass look at how the attitude of the character is fully worked out in gesture it reads perfectly compare that to the next pass which has all the shapes designed it gains sophistication but the feeling was established before this let's do a little comparison take the arm for example in the gestured arm it's almost perfectly symmetrical here and here that's because the design hasn't really been considered yet now in the shape stage we're solving a very different problem we usually don't want repetition or symmetry but we do want to retain a cohesive flow good shapes do have a flow to them this book came out in 2001 and i was instantly obsessed with claire wendling's shapes but let's not get distracted by the cool subject matter take something more mundane perfect i'm studying the shape by breaking my strokes into segments there's a subtle s curve here followed by a hook which is then followed by a sweeping c curve another hook another c curve and then a subtle s curve at the end to mirror the beginning it's poetry so even though this is traced it's a method i would use to study shapes here's another simple exercise take a basic shape like a square then redraw it but a bit askew almost like some force has been applied to it try it again maybe adding a curve to one of the sides want that shape to look dimensional try adding cross contours going over the form this is simple but it leads to great possibilities my green monster character is just a circle and these two character designs are basically inversions of each other this is not just for cartoons either here's a piece i did for the eternals keeping the silhouette shape clear gives you the freedom to do tons of stuff inside the silhouette these are professional tools now befitting a professional setup say hello to the wacom 32-inch cintiq with the flex arm of course huh a manual i'm sure it's helpful so you remove this tab and the cables go in like this wait what oh this comes out first and then wraps got it what the heck okay cables go through this do the wrappy thing and screw it in this is a heavy duty bracket hey look i'm an auto mechanic this part's satisfying watch this i love that i don't however love this okay so stop rolling the cameras change my son's diaper and here's my final setup this is where i make my living and wacom has always helped create a comfortable creative space and after 20 years i swapped out my old intuos for an intuos pro and check this out i can use the same pen on this device and this one that is fantastic all right back to shapes you can use shapes in a thematic way take this chunky baby that's my daughter the shapes are mostly round basing your shapes on a theme can help you arrive at a good design that big guy there was designed around squares this was for a children's book project i did around 2012. they're all squares but they've all been warped in different ways different sizes too the variety helps minimize the repetition i first gained an appreciation of this from lilo and stitch in 2002 chris sanders brought his signature round shapes to the entire movie it's a stylistic choice but one that's derived from life's visual lessons this on the other hand is not a successful example of shape design one of the biggest critiques i have of this is the marshmallow effect it's caused by repetitive symmetry see nature almost never does that instead you'll see what i call offset symmetry i'll trace the curves of the calf muscle plot the apex points and shoot a line through them the symmetry happens on the diagonal in the lilo and stitch style guide there's a warning against obvious symmetry there's two solutions to it you could offset the symmetry as in this example here or you could put two totally different lines up against each other a curve versus a straight the eye just likes variety and every artist i've ever studied has the curve versus straight thing in their visual vocabulary but it's not the curve or the straight that's important it's this part something versus something how about this match up here's a beautiful piece by lois look how simple this side of the silhouette is compared to what's going on on this side that stuff doesn't just happen by accident you have to really think about how to design it this was for an animation character design job i did around 2017 and to this day i start with some form of gesture however your shapes can go a hundred different ways from there just because you have a workable gesture does not guarantee you'll have a good drawing so as i'm putting down these lines i'm exploring the something versus something idea that's why the lines are going in in segments like i did with the clairwendeling shape study i'm trying to figure out the puzzle piece by piece this is a problem-solving part of art that i really enjoy and i've learned to take my time in solving it see a beginner's work virtually always lacks that type of exploration and there's a stiffness that results the solutions i came up with here include slim at the top wide at the bottom creating little hooks to break up an otherwise continuous line i'm offsetting the symmetry in four different places i'm also trying to connect different areas of the drawing with hidden rhythms and just generally trying to avoid any sense of obvious repetition and again all of this applies to more realistic art as well check out this page i did for the nutcracker there's a gestural rhythm going through it tracking the shoulder line even tried some thematic rhythms to help unify the piece if you're feeling really cheeky you can take an overall gestural rhythm a line of action and just use it as one of the contours i'd say this line here represents the gesture in this drawing so i'll just move that line out here and start building up my study of it as far as i remember this is a discovery i made on my own i'm not saying i invented it but it only came to me after probably a few years of working with the concept of gesture you need time to see how these things can apply to your art just because you learn something one day it doesn't mean you can apply it the next day so if you're just starting learning art and you're learning all these new concepts my advice is give it some time to truly sink in and seep its way into your work to me this is where anatomy comes in anatomy is full of rhythms i just love how the serratus muscle fans into the external obliques anatomy can piggyback on basic forms and add a whole lot of sophistication to your drawing but i don't recommend putting anatomy at the forefront of your study too soon i didn't dive into anatomy for several years and i think my understanding of the more basic fundamentals benefited from that so when i finally did start breaking open the anatomy textbooks i kind of had a hierarchy in place to plug it into this is another page from the nutcracker book let me zoom in on the figure here look at this arm it's outstretched but it's not just straight it's got some action to it anatomy will teach you that the arm has a chain-link rhythm each muscle group is one link of the chain but then i also bent the chain as driven by a simple gesture so the painting of it was really derived by drawing ah painting kind of a whole new can of worms and we'll break it open in the next installment i want to thank wacom for their generous support and being there for my whole art career as well as a big thanks to my patrons thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Marco Bucci

Views: 2,218,155

Keywords: Marco Bucci tutorial, art industry job, pro art skills, digital painting tips, art hacks, art tips and tricks, drawing tutorial, gesture drawing, drawing 3D, how to draw realistic, how to pick color, digital painting brushes, best art tips, OC character design, animation lesson, figure drawing, life drawing, sketching tutorial, beginner artist tips, marvel art, fan art, how to be pro artist, concept art tutorial, art school, art talent, stylized art, procreate, sketch

Id: zmUMhMs5vFE

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2022