camwyn | Well, it's later.

Just got back from lunch. The rest of the office has pizza and salad, the traditional compensation for sitting still through an entire staff meeting; in this case it's compensation for sitting still through the workplace first aid course that includes the Accident With The Fry-O-Lator as part of the Burns section. I don't mind. I just got back from my daily visit to my PO box (sometimes the only thing that keeps me sane is being able to escape at lunchtime regardless of what my food options are) and I had some leftover Szechuan shredded beef. I'm happy.

I mentioned in my last posting that I had the GQ fall fashion special with me. This, like the other issues of GQ I have, is an integral part of my artistic development. See, as a kid I had an absolute passion for horses. I had more Breyer horses than most kids my age had Star Wars action figures. I built prosthetic legs for some of my horses out of cardboard, because they had an annoying tendency to break at the pastern or just below the knee if they got knocked off the table. These horses taught me how to draw, because I could set them down and stare at them until my eyes bled and I was fully familiar with every detail of musculature, posture, etc. - Breyer's good for stuff like that. I could take as long or as short a time as I wanted to draw them, too. They sat there. They didn't complain. They held whatever poses the factory shipped them in and there wasn't the slightest hint that half an hour or an hour or ninety minutes was Too Damn Long. They were *good* for artistic modeling, and I think it shows; if you look at the Pencils Gallery at http://www.megaloceros.net/pencils.htm , you can see that I've got a certain facility with large animals now.

People are not nearly so cooperative as Breyer models. They don't hold the same facial expression for any length of time, and as for poses - feh. My father complains if I ask him to hold his hand in a certain position for more than two minutes. I haven't got the money for a drawing-from-life class, and I haven't got anyone I can really use as a model, so I'm stuck with two choices:

1. The stick-figures ball-and-pipe construction espoused in every bloody Learn to Draw Comics book to come down the pike (along with its cousin, the Bendy Mannequin with a Stick Up Its Bum), or
2. Drawing from reference, i.e., photographs.

I've been doing stick-figure construction since... gah. Sixth grade? Earlier? Who knows. The point is that it hasn't worked for me. I can block out what I see, I can lay down all kinds of guidelines and stuff, but inevitably something bends wrong or stretches too far, and it winds up that the stick figure looks infinitely more alive and realistic in its posture than the end result. It's pathetic. It's the same way that drawing the ball-and-cross head and laying down five eyes in a neat little line across the front of the face is supposed to enable you to create a good-looking human face with accurate proportions, etc. All I get when I do that is something flat and lifeless.

If I had human models that didn't complain about having to hold still, I'd go for 'em. I haven't had that chance since high school, when Sister... shoot, I forget the nun's name... had plaster-of-Paris hands and feet for us to learn to draw. What I have instead is photographs. See, the Breyer models - though excellent to work from - didn't cover everything. Books with titles like The Complete Horse and The Encyclopedia of the Horse and The Huge-Ass Book of Every Frickin' Horse Breed There Is, on the other hand, had LOTS of photographs. If I wanted to see a different breed of horse and learn its proportions, no problemo. Page 342 was much much cheaper than running out to buy a model Percheron. Magazines - the glossy, stupid kind that have more advertising than copy - have been my equivalent of the horse books. The GQ fall fashion special does the trick for men, generally; the female equivalent tends to be Glamour, but I take what I can get. (Yes, I know, posebooks, but I've only recently been introduced to those.)

The neat thing is that once I've got the pose in front of me, I don't have to draw it the way the photograph shows. I mean, I tried that once, and the result was the little heap of festering pain that made it into the Pens Gallery as 'The Progress of a Work'. As long as I have the basic reference to work from, I can more or less dispense with the details in front of me. Horses taught me respect for musculature and bone structure. Physical practice for archery has taught me the specifics of human upper-body musculature. Legs I know from the sports I indulge in during the summer (rollerblading, horseback riding, etc.). I just need to see how it all comes together in order to make it work out right. It's given me a nice familiarity with fabric wrinkles and textures, too.

The new picture I was working on last night isn't linked, but it's available at http://www.megaloceros.net/Pencils/test.jpg . The original was a two-page ad for some company with a name like Jhames Redd, and the guy was wearing a sweater and baggy trousers. Also, his right arm was outstretched behind him. We'll see how this one develops as I get the chance, that empty hand (the raised one) needs some finger work.