Life marches on, and the time draws near for Quitting My Job and Doing Loads of Art. So, here is a small art update.

First, I’ve been doing lots of fancy bookmarks. I should sell these once they get a bit better. For now, I’m giving them to friends, relatives and colleagues.

Saddling your acquaintances with amateur art that they didn’t ask for: a time-honoured tradition.

I spent a day each on Cartoon Children and Leaves and Mushrooms:

All of these were immensely fun to draw.

Mushrooms were something I learned to draw a wee while ago, so these below were less Working on Mushrooms and more Working on Layers: how to give layers depth?

I think you can see that on these two ink drawings (0.4 uni pin fine line and Papermate Medium respectively), I’ve added depth by drawing little out-of-focus mushrooms in the background. I think it works.

After that, I took the advice of my friend Ettie to try drawing the foreground in a darker pencil (4B), the background in lighter (2H).

Below is, in order

  1. Drawing a whole background scene in full detail in 2H (light), then drawing a foreground scene in 4B (dark).
  2. Drawing the foreground scene in 4B (dark), then drawing an out-of-focus undetailed background scene in 2H (light).

I think the second one works better.

After I finished all of these, I sliced them up into bookmarks.

Next, some work from a recent life drawing class I went to, beneath the South Bank:

[warning: NSFW, sketched nudity]

This was the first sketch of the evening. It was a great class (the model was very easy to draw, and had interesting curves), and everyone there was having a good time sketching, myself included.

I don’t see anyone else at art classes writing to themselves, about their headspace, or their methods, or self critique. And so, I think…

A Style Emerges

I have spent quite a lot of time thinking something that (I imagine) many budding artists think:

  • What’s my style? Do I decide my style? Where do I find my style?
  • I already have a style, and it’s not good. What an awful style.
  • Oh god, my style looks so standard and basic. That’s not a style, it’s just drawing. I’ve failed at having a style and now I’m just drawing. Oh god.

A lot of advice given to new artists is: don’t worry about style. Your style will develop on its own, from you being you, from you making art however you do art. Some right-handed people draw left-handed toons, and that’s their style. Some people start off by drawing Reddit comments, badly, and that’s their style.

For me, my preferred style is becoming apparent to me. It isn’t the drawing, or the technique, or the content. It’s that I Show the Process, have an open dialogue, and self-critique as I go. I don’t get as much joy from a finished piece as I do from showing the progression of that piece from start to finish.

My notation below shows that this was a 10 (more like 8) minute drawing, that I used a 2H (light) pencil to draw the structure of the model (the fantastic Ivor), and then used a 2B (darker) pencil for outlines and highlights. My note (structure easy) is my note to self that these lines came quickly, and were not laboured.

To me, this makes total sense. I’m a Physics teacher, but I’m more interested in pedagogy (the science and art of teaching and learning) than I am in Physics (sorry, physicists). If I’m going to make art (i.e. a bloody big graphic novel), then I’m going to be including footnotes, self-critique, learning stages, and drafts.

I’m happy with the emergence of this style; it fits with my lazy superhero alter-ego: Approximate Man!

“Approximate Man: he’ll… sort of do it. Well… he’ll get it done, and it’ll be functional. It might not be what you’d call perfect, and nobody’s going to say it’s polished or artisan, but, he’ll get it done. Approximately.”

Anyway, I ramble. Thank you for reading this entry. I’m having fun.