wanderlust

just some thoughts bouncing around...

my subjects are very stiff. gesture drawings don’t come easily to me. all in all, my style is decidedly undynamic, but i make up for it with my expressiveness, but i really wish i were better at it. i think of it as bit like charisma in people. artistic charisma. some of the artists i admire the most create works just brimming with life. unsurprisingly a lot of them are animators. 

this dynamism is especially powerful when its combined with a sensitive touch...like, some people will make you feel things with a scribble. their marksmaking is so expressive, but it’s more than that. not all expressive artists are necessarily.. emotional, and vice-a-versa. but there does seem to be an overlap.

anyways, you look at an emotional work...you feel the depth, whether it be tumultuous or delicate, yelling or brooding, brimming or convalescing... you feel it somehow. i think i’ve really only felt this through works done in physical mediums. and these artists almost always work with physical mediums, like graphite, watercolors, oils.. i don’t know if it’ll ever become possible to to digitally replicate the depth of emotionality that real, physical media hold. 

i also suck at colors. i make up for this area with my technical skills but too often my paintings suffer because of my color shortcomings. it’s unfornate because i love a good palette and i find color theory fascinating. but actually being good at color... color is so contradictory. it can so precisely be defined and theorized yet. practicing it is such an amorphous art. people who are attune to color—i imagine it’s bit of a sixth sense, an intuition. a lot of them seem to work in the design field. a lot of illustrators as well.

composition. it’s something that i don’t pay a lot of attention to because it just doesn’t interest me too much, but it can really make or break a piece and you won’t even realize why. i think it’s the first thing you notice and the last thing you really notice. i think it’s a little more easier to approach in that it’s not so formless like some of the skills i listed above, you can plan for it more and you can take a technical approach to it and try out a lot of different combinations that can play out more predictability. but again... “good” and “great” is so close yet so far apart.

logic, and techniques, kinda. being good at capturing form, creating believable space and accurately rendering substance. this one i’m less interested in as well, just because it’s really obvious... like, you can easily teach a class on it. (I mean... drawing 101, basically) ofc some definitely grasp it more quickly than others, like intuitively understanding the form behind the 2d representation, “seeing” the skull/bone structures beneath skin, learning how a medium acts and knowing how to manipulate them to get this and that effect, etc. 

all good artists will have a grasp of these fundamentals, and if one doesn’t, the work won’t be very good. at the same time it also doesn’t add much to a work if it’s the only thing you’re good at. while i find it pretty boring when some artists seem to have made technical skills their “thing,” i have to admit there is something super satisfying about watching those work come to life... 

these are some of the aspects i’ve been noticing in artists i admire...there’s more, like conceptual vs technical or symbolic vs storytelling but it’s not as fleshed out and in my head. plus, i think of them more like genres that combine with these aspects i listed above, which are more like to...elements of design/art?