This was an interesting piece for me. It’s one of the first that I’ve completed where I was drawing abstract thumbnails with the intention of it being a weasel. I’m trying to figure out how to harness the compositional, intuitional interest of automatic drawing and doing so with intention.
I don’t absolutely love it, but I feel there’s something here I want to lean into. I am not really sure what was going on with all of the interesting shapes; I was attempting to make something interesting out of them and not have everything be totally random/ugly. I don’t really like that part, but I’m not sure how to improve upon it. I suspect I will get better ideas the more I do it. Overall, I think this piece was a win.
Another design based on a warm-up thumbnail. I didn’t really intend for it to become a creature, but I just started to refine the thumbnail and this is what emerged.
I’ve had a desire to incorporate more abstraction into my style. This is another attempt to achieve that. I stuck very closely to the original thumbnail.
In the wide white terrain suddenly there appeared through the cover a jolly little critter. “Weasel’s the name,” he began with a smile.
I had the idea to make this little weasel blend into the background a bit. I rather like the result. It could be fun to do an entire book of forest creatures in the winter.
I’m excited to share that I have completed Stage 2 of the Line and Color Academy. To recap what I completed in this stage, I did 26 letter illustrations for AlphaCon, 20 character portraits, and 20 full-body illustrations of anthropomorphized characters . . . and it only took me 6 months :). You can go back and see a lot of the work I shared in previous blog posts.
Stage 2 was about learning a simple, reliable process. Stage 3 is about making and tracking reliable progress; to do this effectively, it’s best to pick a very specific thing you want to improve at and then put in consistent effort and track your progress over time.
To begin Stage 3 I’ve chosen to try improving at characterization, the expressiveness of the characters, the interest of the character design, the caricaturing through anthropomorphism. I spent the last 3 weeks daily studying and drawing weasels, trying to really understand them so I can create convincing weasel characters. My previous 20 anthropomorphic characters were done with almost no prior study of the creatures I was drawing. I had drawn them a little bit over the last several years, but never in-depth study to really try to understand them. I relied mostly on memory of what they look like, my ability to construct bodies and form, and a bit of photo reference for some just-in-time learning.
In this post I share some of the sketches and studies from my time studying weasels to show you a bit of what goes into this sort of learning.
I began by observing photos and videos of weasels and stoats just trying to get an understanding of them – how they move and act, their behaviour.
The following sketches were done while I was at an event and didn’t have any photo reference with me; so I had to rely on what I could remember of what I had studied the week before. I partly incorporated some of what I was seeing in my surroundings. This gave me a good chance to start applying what I had learned about the weasels into drawing my own characters.
I requested feedback about anthropomorphism from people in the Mighty Artisan community and got some really useful advice about breaking the process down into simple steps. I tried applying the advice in the following pages.
There’s a glimpse into what it looks like to study weasels. I plan to continue my studies for another couple weeks before moving on to a different animal. I’m also going to be trying to complete more illustrations in that period.
Having completed about 20 portraits in the Line and Color Academy, I will be moving on next to full-body characters. Here Mr. Octopus waves goodbye to our collection of portraits.
Having impactful colours in your images can do so much for the interest, even if the quality is rough.
This is a rough illustration I did a while back.
It’s got some fun action, but the colours, contrast, and saturation are weak.
I decided to see how borrowing the colour palette from the following image by Tim McBurnie could improve my image. I paid attention to the saturation and values. I probably just used the colour picker.
This is the result of my application of that palette to the same composition.
I think it gave the impact a massive boost. I also tried to add motion blur and a bit more of a painterly quality. Now the image throbs with intensity! What happens next!?
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the before and after:
AlphaCon (Alphabet of Concepts) is an abstract illustrated alphabet. Each letter visualizes an abstract concept.
These illustrations are my first steps in developing a new line and colour style of art with Tim McBurnie’s Line and Color Academy. I started with abstract letters because I really enjoy this sort of design, but it also meant I didn’t have to worry about realism yet or things like anatomy and perspective.
Click on the following image to go to the art collection.
These are some of the most valuable resources I have encountered on my artistic journey: they’ve offered much needed guidance and have helped set my course. To give more context a few of the links will go to articles on my blog.
Image credit: Frederic Pillot
Live Demos, Sage Advice
Mastery in Real-time – beyond seeing great finished artwork, there’s nothing to light a fire under you like watching masterful artists create in real-time, and share their thought processes. Here is a selection of my own influences:
Kim Jung Gi on Composition and Storytelling – to see him draw is a wonderful thing to behold; you can find many such videos online, but I really enjoyed his advice here about how to practice inventing scenes from imagination.
Glenn Vilpuu’s Live Demos, Figure Drawing (CAUTION: nudes) – listening to him vocalize his thought process as he creates is so invaluable to me. Don’t just watch, draw along. Amazing!
Finished, Not Perfect, Jake Parker – Just Do It! Embrace your current skill level; be a master of whatever level you’re at. Create stuff, build momentum, study as you go and learn from others; keep at it and you will improve.
The Secret of Simple Forms, Marshall Vandruff – Here I think Marshall wonderfully lays out the basics of form drawing in relation to perspective. This information will especially benefit beginners trying to wrap their minds around the concept of drawing from memory and imagination, why it is so difficult to do, and how to train it; but even if you’ve drawn for years, but have never tackled this subject, Marshall will offer valuable insights.
You Need a Product, Not a Project, Jake Parker – experimenting and exploring are valuable activities for artists, but when trying to make deliberate progress, specificity is key.
SELF TAUGHT ARTIST SECRETS AND STRATEGIES, Trent Kaniuga – I think this is a nice introduction to Trent; he’s a super generous concept artist; he teaches so much value on his YouTube channel.
Tim Mcburnie’s Strategy For Learning To Draw – creating and studying are two oars of the same row boat; with only one you just go in circles. Rather than doing loads of isolated exercises, integrate what you learn into your process and finished work ASAP.
The Draftsmen Podcast – I think this is a classic that should definitely be preserved in the archive for generations to come. Listening to Stan and Marshall banter about art is both insightful and delightful.
Schoolism interviews – Bobby Chiu has interviewed a ton of artists over the years; they used be openly available on his YouTube channel, but are now only accessible with a Schoolism account. A couple of my favourite interviews were with Heri Irawan and Devin Elle Kurtz; there are many more great ones. It is really enjoyable to hear artists share their journey; great to listen to while doing low-concentration work or just chilling.
3-Point Perspective Podcast, School of Visual Storytellers – Jake, Lee, and Will have some really great insights into being a professional artist.
Nathan Fowkes’ Pictorial Composition – I learned a great deal of foundational knowledge from this course. Fowkes teaches some very helpful universal principles for composing images with a hands-on approach.
Marshall Vandruff’s Perspective Course – I have not taken this course, but I did take Marshall’s old course for $12. This one is considerably more costly, but Marshall has invested countless hours into fine-tuning his approach to teaching perspective in the 3 decades since his first course. I can’t help but anticipate that this will be fantastic!
Line and Color Academy – Tim McBurnie helps you build a solid process to reliably get your ideas onto the page/screen; create a positive relationship with the creative process and just keep levelling up.
Human Anatomy Fundamentals – when I’m ready to dive back into learning to draw people, this is the resource I plan to follow. Joumana Medlej lays a solid foundation beginning with seeing and drawing the energy of your subject as the foundation for the structural, anatomically correct body to stand on.
Art Books
There are many great recommendations from industry pros. I’ll list the ones I’ve actually read and found helpful (I’ve not read many):
Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud – as a disclaimer, before reading this book I don’t think I’d read a single comic book in my life; I had no appetite for them, but so many pros recommended this book that I decided to get it. A comic itself, this book opened my eyes to the power and great potential of telling stories with pictures and words. Great stuff!
Picturepedia, DK – this is a great reference book for . . . everything! 360 hard-bound pages of high-res photos. I love to use it to get specific direction and inspiration for my work. You only wanted reference for a butterfly? Well, which of the 47 species best suits the design you’re creating!? This book is picture-heavy with tons of examples! Love it!
Writing Advice
HOW TO WRITE A SCENE | elements of narrative + tips (with example doc), ShaelinWrites – I started learning to write fiction with BREX and was super frustrated that all my writing was only summaries of the story; Shaelin taught me how to write a scene which totally opened up my capacity to write engaging stories by expanding time and allowing the reader to experience the action through different kinds of story beats.
3 Line NPC Method, Johnn Four – Johnn introduced me to character-driven stories and his 3-line method gave me a fantastic framework for concisely writing characters with depth and interest. I created a random generator to assist me in employing this method; it is my go-to approach whenever I need a new character for my story; I have a lot of fun with it and create characters in advance for my character library so that when I need a character I have an interesting selection to choose from. (also see my 3-line NPC Generator article)
Business Advice
How to start freelancing THIS WEEK, Jamie Brindle – a masterclass of a business resource. You can literally get started in ONE week. I’ve never heard anyone break it down like Jamie. Bookmark this one.
The ladders of wealth creation: a step-by-step roadmap to building wealth, Nathan Barry – this article explains different businesses like being ladders that can take you to different heights. Climbing each ladder requires you to learn certain skills that will serve you as you switch to bigger ladders. Skipping ladders is possible, but means you’ll be compressing how much you have to learn at once.
Honourable Mentions
Peter Draws – if you want to melt into the most chill narrated doodling experience ever, drop by Peter’s studio. This guy has completely embraced his own identity.
Scott Gustafson’s Methods – it is so cool to see the steps of Scott’s process; I appreciate his transparency, but it also intimidates me. Scott’s work makes me drool
Gurney Journey – James Gurney, the creator of Dinotopia, has a very interesting and informative blog, still updated regularly. His paintings are wonderful. He was heavily inspired by artists of the past like Norman Rockwell who recorded their artistic process for us to learn from now; he tries to do the same.
Drawabox – I spent a chunk of time doing this seriously; I learned valuable stuff, but ultimately decided to focus more of my time on creating finished work and much less on grinding skills. Irshad does have the 50% Rule about spending at least half your time drawing for fun, but in the end I was ready to drop the formal exercises and just make art. One of my favourite memories was the seasonal Promptathons; I really enjoyed the 24-hour challenges and tried to weave little stories for each.
I recently purchased Tim McBurnie’s Line and Color Academy through which I will be developing a new line and colour illustration style. One assignment has been to draw my Like List (all the stuff I enjoy drawing). I think I managed to capture about 95% of my written list on this page. I’m very satisfied with the result; ’twas a fun challenge.
I found a really neat website that finds and sells facsimiles of old books, rolls, documents, etc. facsimilefinder.com. While the price tags are way over my head, they have some great photos and visuals. It is a lot of fun to look at the artwork and design in these relics. I’ll highlight a few I was impressed by. Keep in mind that these are replicas that you could actually buy if you had a few gold coins to spare. The artwork is just incredible . . . truly a window into the past. The following headers/titles link to the corresponding web pages.
In learning to write fiction for BREX, I discovered the concept of character-driven stories from Johnn Four’s article The 3 Line NPC Method: How to Create Story-Full NPCs Fast. Johnn writes the advice from his perspective as a Game Master for TTRPGs, but I have found his ideas to be superb for writing characters for fiction. A GM needs to be able to role-play his NPCs; a writer must also role-play his characters in abundant situations. I highly recommend reading and studying the entire article for all the goods if you think this idea may help your writing (it is lengthy), but the following link will take you to the specific section that lays out how to use the 3-Line NPC Method.
To sum it up, a 3-line NPC is a non-player character described in the following 3 lines: appearance, portrayal, and hook. Appearance is what you would first see upon encountering the character. Portrayal defines a few key role and personality traits and informs how to role-play the character. The hook is something meaningful, intriguing, exciting, etc. that can expand the plot of the story. Those 3 lines create a powerful package of details that makes writing for the character a joy because you know quite a bit about them from the start including motives and tendencies.
I like to create a bunch of characters before I need them to build up a reserve or library to draw from as the need arises for new characters. As a GM Johnn encourages introducing a new character each session to keep the story moving forward. I have adopted this mentality in my writing. I try to introduce at least one new character in each episode and so far (5 episodes in) I’m having a blast. I have had to create a couple characters to fit specific roles I had written about in my script and it felt less fun and free than writing random interesting characters and then dropping them into the story. I try to let character creation drive the story as much as possible rather than having to create a specific character to fit the story, but it does happen sometimes.
3-line NPC Generator
I was sold on the concept, but I’m very inefficient at coming up with interesting information to write characters; so I created a random generator to spark ideas which I can interpret into interesting elements. I now use this to create all the characters for my story. I still have to do a lot of the work for interpretting the details and writing the story hook, but this tool makes it so much more enjoyable. You can find and use my generator here: nathanparkinson.com/npc. You can even modify the source code and customize your own version however you’d like. I’d love to hear if you find this useful.
Example 3-line NPCs
To give a proof of concept, I will provide a few 3-line NPCs I have generated using this method. You can find explanations for each section at the bottom of the generator page.
Grithim: dwarf librarian
Appearance: (middle-aged, male, dwarf, Merdite, peasant); simple stylish hat, short beard, fiery red pants; impatiently sorting through ring full of keys to unlock something; yelling at students kissing in the library.
Portrayal: (low-skill) Librarian – administers or assists in a library. Amateur bonsai arborist; impatient; blunt; short-tempered, emotionally fragile (lawful neutral)
Hook: A former circus tamer. Due to an impatient mistake he made his son was killed in the ring by a beast. To distance himself from the memories he left the circus and took a position as a librarian. He is learning bonsai to try to improve his patience; he succeeds sometimes. He is often lost in a cloud of emotion, presented as impatience or distance, as he processes his grief; he misses his son.
Kythar: evil guild master
Appearance: (elderly, male, giant, Ursmite, wealthy); epic hair, metal-plated pants, elaborate silver flute on waist; negotiating in the market about castle business.
Portrayal: (high-skill) Guild Master – leads an economically independent producer (a “guild,” an association of craftsmen or merchants that often holds considerable bureaucratic power). Sweet odor; swift; duplicitous (neutral evil)
Hook: In jealousy he betrayed his ‘best-friend’ to death and deceived the family that he did all he could to save him. In gratitude they gave him a special family heirloom, a silver flute. It is said that the darkness of his heart corrupted the life stones in the flute, cursing it never again to play a joyful melody.
Atikel: crazy bird lady
Appearance: (middle-aged, female, human, Merdite, destitute); tattered feather dress, bird’s claw clutching strange stone hangs from neck, small birds flit around her; fighting to keep a large bird in a cage.
Portrayal: Fowler – catches or ensnares birds. She loyally served one of your relatives in a naval capacity; always smells nice/wild (chaotic good)
Hook: She needs your help to save her naive daughter from the scumbag pursuing her. She has convinced him that buying her daughter a certain bird will win her heart, but she knows it will drive them apart. She wants to use Brex as bait for the bird.
If you’ve spent much time in the art world, you’ve probably heard of “the fundamentals” and how important they are. Over the years I have studied how making art actually works and how to accurately define the many components. “Why is this useful?” By breaking a skill into its individual parts, you can practice each one more intentionally. Trying to learn everything at once or with a vague focus can make it harder to recognize your progress. For someone trying to master their craft, having a solid comprehension of the tools available is important.
The result of my efforts is the Fundamentals of Art document that I am now offering for free download.
This post is generally unrelated to art, but it features an extremely useful and versatile tool for remembering anything – the Major System peg words (see my full PDF list below). The Major System is a mnemonic technique which encodes numbers as consonant sounds (or in this case, groups of similar sounds); the consonants are mixed with vowels to form words; the resulting words serve as mental pegs upon which to hang (i.e. associate) things you want to remember. The following list is an example:
0 – zoo (s,z)
1 – tie (t,d)
2 – Noah (n)
3 – ma (m)
4 – rye (r)
5 – law (l)
6 – shoe (sh,ch,j)
7 – cow (c)
8 – ivy (v,f)
9 – bee (b,p)
10 – toes
Using Peg Words
To use peg words for memorization, first learn the numbers with their sounds; then use the sounds to memorize a word list. Next create a mental association between each item from the list you want to memorize with the corresponding peg word. In your mind see the two items interacting in a bizarre, memorable way – in doing so you are hanging the item on the peg for later retrieval. Mentally-visually associating two things is the most effective way to remember something easily because it takes advantage of how the mind optimally works. This system enables you to memorize lists and recall the exact numbered position of every item in the list.
This system is very useful for memorizing passages of Scripture (even entire chapters and books) as you can create and recall an association for the beginning of each verse and link it to the peg word for that verse number. This association acts as a prompt for starting the verse.
Why the Major System?
I first learned of peg words from The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas (this book is a fantastic resource for all things memory-related). You may be asking, “Why go through all the trouble of learning a whole memory system when I can use something more simple like one-bun, two-shoe, three-tree, etc. to accomplish the same thing?” The answer is extensibility. If you only want to memorize a short list of ten items, then more simple systems are great; but what if you want to memorize 50 or 100 or an undetermined number of things? Rhyming, alphabet, and other small-scale systems are limited in their scope. Using the Major System makes expanding your word list relatively easy by providing a predictable, consistent system which allows you to move between number and sound with ease (once you’ve memorized it and practiced, of course).
Peg Word List
I’ve created a compact printout for the first 100 peg words. I started with a word list from this source (which also has a great explanation of using the Major System), and then changed some words to fit my taste. The following PDF printout contains the peg word list in a compact format four times; so you can cut the page into four sections to create bookmarks or share with others. I hope the PDF is useful.
Though it is disputed who first made this exact statement, I think it was marvelously said:
“Everyone is a genius; but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Though, I believe an important distinction should be made: if you judge the fish unwisely, then you (not necessarily the fish) will believe the lie; only if the fish judges himself by erroneous standards will he believe himself to be incompetent. When we judge ourselves according to truth, we can have great confidence (with humility) despite the dismissive nature of others.
This also reminds me of a quote by Mark Twain, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” I believe God has made each person uniquely special; there’s not another person exactly like you; so try lots of things till you find what you were made for and as Jim Elliot said, “Wherever you are, be all there! Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.”
[Toland enters Welles’ office . . .] Toland: I want to work in your picture; my name is Toland. Welles: Why do you, Mr. Toland? Toland: Because you’ve never made a picture, and you don’t know what cannot be done.
Leading up to his description of that brief conversation, Welles makes the following statement: “. . . Ignorance – there’s no authority in the world like it.” Welles’ and Toland’s statements really caught my attention. I’ve seen a similar saying by Shunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few”; that brings a couple more to mind: “It always seems impossible until it’s done” (Nelson Mandela), and, “They did not know it was impossible so they did it” (Mark Twain).
Inexperience is both a blessing and curse. Being blind to what is and is not possible, you may be willing to take risks more-experienced people would not; you’ll bring a fresh perspective and perhaps even attempt to do what others know “cannot be done”; that means you’ll probably fail quite a bit, but in challenging assumptions you will discover which ones are true and which are false. Young blood can really shake up an industry.
I greatly appreciate the wisdom of Solomon to “Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go: keep her; for she is thy life” (Proverbs 4:13); listening to the counsel of wiser people is vital to our growth; but I also see value in respectfully, humbly challenging the presuppositions of those who came before us and proving the truth for ourselves. As another wise man once said, “Just because something seems impossible, doesn’t mean it isn’t easy” (Parkinson’s Law #21, T. S. Parkinson).
Citizen Kane went on to be enormously successful; though, I’ve not seen the film in a while, so I don’t necessarily recommend it, but rather the philosophy described by Welles and the others I’ve mentioned. Though experience is certainly desirable, your being a novice doesn’t have to be a negative.
