Alright, in this lesson, this is Advanced Shape Design.
We’re going to take a look at the head and see how to take it to the next level.
We’ve got our basic information.
We understand laws of light, how the landscape of the head supports those all-important details
called the features.
Now we’re going to take it to the next level.
We’re going to figure out how to not only make it more interesting, more beautiful,
but more importantly, I think more personal.
How can we start to make these things our own?
We’re going to get into that, and we’re going to have some fun.
This is my favorite part.
Now we take all the stuff, and we put it together for meaning, for purpose.
It’s going to be now my stuff, and I’m going to present it all of you.
I hope you enjoy it.
Right now, let’s get into it.

Alright, let’s get into it.
We’re going to talk about shape designs.
Let’s get some background.
Real quick recap.
It always helps to remember where we started so we can find out where we’re going.
We’re working with two ideas as artists: Our structure and our gesture.
Structure and gesture, the foundations of any good artwork and every art form, in fact.
For us, in drawing we’re using it in this form.
It’ll work with dance and all those other lovely art forms.
Structure is the parts.
And for us it’ll be the three-dimensional parts, of course, but it could be two-dimensional
parts.
This is the connection relationship between those parts, how they fit together.
The fundamental design of those parts.
With gesture, we’re really working off curves.
That’s the key idea of that.
Specifically, when we’re trying to get the gesture of something, we’re not interested
in how it rounds over.
That’s actually part of the structure.
We’re interested in how it flows out, how it goes from end to end.
It’s the long axis curve, the length.
When we get that long axis curve, then we see how beautifully fluid those organic forms
tend to be, as opposed to something that’s a straight trajectory and is not organic.
Also, it creates then this beautiful rhythm of how this curve fits into that curve.
This curve fits into that curve.
Notice it works in the biggest possible structures and in the smallest possible structures; the
hair, for example.
The long axis curve.
That gives us the fundamental design, the fundamental design line.
More important than what part, what shape, what structure we choose.
We can come up with all sorts of boxy, typical box, ball, tube concept.
We’re working with that, just those three-dimensional parts.
If we take that idea, whatever we want it to be, and we start out by drawing the long
axis, the length of that structure, let’s say it’s a tapering tube.
Now, as soon as we put an end on, whether we make that end a tubular, rounded end, or
a squared boxy end, what we’re doing is we’re talking about the corners, the front
to the top, the top to the side, and this would be the backside.
Just to be clear—do it this way—when I do these construction lines across, what we’re
really getting is an idea of a corner, how that moves in space.
How if we slice it off at that point we can see that’s it’s tilting back in, going
back into space.
That’s the corner.
Then, of course, we can make that corner or those corners, any of these corners very square
or very rounded.
Notice both line and tone support these structural concepts.
And so when we do the core shadow, the beginning of the shadow of whatever particular shadow
shape we’re putting on whatever particular form.
That shadow, then, that beginning of the shadow specifically, is a corner.
Let’s bring that down here.
Then if we want to add character to something, more specific information about it.
In other words, in this case, if we want to round that corner, then we can use our values
or tone or shading to create a gradation.
The gradation rounds off, refines that corner.
Instead of a stairstep, maybe it’s carpeted.
We get a square step, or it can be, with just a little bit of work, a rounded step, and
so that gives us the idea.
To sum up then, structure, the parts, you can think of that very simply as the corners.
The more corners you add, the more structure you have.
Structure specifically is the three-dimensional part in position in space.
We want to make sure we know its position.
As soon as we start adding those corners, we know that it’s leaning and that it’s
facing this way, and that it’s tilting back into the picture plane.
It gives us those three dimensions, the positions or the three dimensions in space.
All we’re looking for then, in terms of our two master ideas, our two great ideas,
is curves and corners.
That’s the simplest way to think about it.
We’re going to use that then to design our shapes.
If we play up or play down the corners or play up or play down the curves, that’s
going to get us very far in our shape design.
Alright, to understand shape design—and we’ve got to use some title for these things.
Shape Design is a bit of a misnomer in a way because we’re going to add all sorts of
things on top of the shape, the shape is suggestive of that structural idea.
That’s how most people think of it.
This is a familiar phrase, so that’s why we used it.
Of course, we’re adding gesture, and we’re going to add some other things on top of that.
We’re going to talk about that right now.
When we look at the movie business, they talk about visual components.
I’ve mentioned this quite often in my various lectures that we have out there.
But to recap, visual components are all the tools of the trade for we artists.
In other words, shape.
We can make them rounder shapes or squarer shapes.
We can make them more complex, more simple.
We can make the smaller, bigger.
We can make them many or few and on and on and on.
A visual component is any tool that you will use to create a pictorial difference, some
different idea on there.
Again, to go through it, it would be two-dimensional to three-dimensional.
It would be simple to complex, and so we have a continuum here, of course.
It can be very simple, very complex, or anywhere in between.
We have many, few; big, small; organic to architectural; abstract to real.
Then you can get into the actual mediums, thick paint to thin paint; opaque to transparent.
You can get into the values, light to dark.
You can get into the colors, warm to cool, rich to gray.
On and on and on.
Deep space to shallow space.
There is a million of them.
Anything that creates a difference between.
Gradation to flat graphic, that kind of stuff.
All those become really valuable tools to create a nuanced picture.
If you’re working in high realism, you’re going to use all of those on some level probably,
at least if you’re doing a full-color rendering.
They all become tools.
They all become choices for us.
We can make it bigger or smaller, more complex or more simple, more contrasting or more subtle
would be another one.
And so, the visual component came from the film industry, but the film industry just
steals from we artists.
They went back to the great paintings, the great artworks and stole from them.
Then because of the nature of film, there medium adds in a time element because you’ve
got not just one picture, you’ve got many pictures running together so you have movement.
There is the aspect of movement, sound, and editing.
How you cut.
You do a close up, and then you do an establishing shot.
Is it quick cutting?
Is it a long take?
Does the camera move around within those takes?
There is all that kind of film additions to it.
It’s all based on us.
We started it, so we get the high ground on that.
But, we can learn from film.
I use film a lot because frankly even we artists probably see more film and spend more time
looking at film than we do looking at artwork, going to museums and looking on the web at
great image banks of the great masters or having our books open or whatever it is.
Even if we’re very, very dedicated, we don’t spend probably more than a couple of minutes
looking at a masterpiece unless we have some assignment maybe our teacher gave us to study
the David or Titian’s Rape of Europa or whatever it is.
Film become useful because we know it well.
At least we know it better, so we can draw from those.
Our visual components that we’re going to use, we would use all of those in terms of
design, really, but we’re only going to pick out a few.
What we want to do is realize first in terms of medium, we’ll use the visual component,
the tool of line and tone since we’re working with advanced ideas here.
We’re going to use our full palette of rendering.
If this was a painting class and not a drawing class, we would add in full color.
Instead we’re just using tone or value.
We want them to work on both cylinders.
They’re going to always be under the rubric of structure and gesture.
Any of these visual components will be informing, working under the idea of either a structural
mark, whether it’s a line.
When I make a mark it will be something that talks about the gesture or something that
talks about the structure all the way through.
Same with value, all this kind of stuff.
So, always with that bigger idea.
Now it’s just really gamesmanship.
Once you understand there is a visual component to something, if you can isolate that, it’s
going to be a line idea, or it’s going to be a shape idea, or it’s going to be a shape
idea, or it’s going to be a value idea.
Then you can say it’s going to be a value that supports my gesture.
Do I want to move the dial up on that and make a much greater gesture?
By our definition that would probably mean much greater curvature.
Or do we want to play down and dial down that gesture and make it stiffer and straighter?
Getting a little more formal or less alive.
Maybe it’s Frankenstein is not quite alive.
That kind of stuff.
Same with shape.
Do we want to make it rounder or squarer?
Do we want to make it more complex?
Maybe it’s round at one end and square at the other.
Maybe it’s very complex.
Maybe it’s not only tubular, but at one end that tube becomes a block, boxy form.
At the other end it becomes an egg shape.
It’s really three forms in one, within one gesture.
Maybe it’s seven or eight actual little structures embedded in the big structure.
We might have a structure on a structure on a structure idea.
We get a repetition of those structures and a conglomeration of them.
We have many structures as opposed to a few structures.
Maybe down in the forearm we’re going to make one big egg shape.
That egg shape becomes a tube embedded into a cylinder.
That becomes a block with a wedge with several tubular structures and cable structures and
a blocky dome-like structures on the knuckles and on and on and on.
As we move down the arm, in other words, we’re dialing up the complexity of that.
And then we could add value to that.
We could make a very full value here, a very limited value there.
And so it’s just playing the game.
It’s just a what if?
What if I make it this as opposed to that?
What if I give more of that idea or take away and leave less of that idea?
And so, it becomes really a compositional tool in that sense too.
When we say shape design it really should be shape competit—composition.
I don’t know if that was a Freudian slip or not.
Composition.
The difference for me between designing and composition, most people use them interchangeably.
I don’t like to do that just because we can understand our art form better if we parse
these things out.
Design is just making choices.
I think it would be more beautiful or more interesting or whatever adjective I’m after
in my work.
More challenging, more subversive even.
If I made the colors less harmonious or more harmonious.
It’s just an aesthetic choice.
Composition is when you’re doing it with a concept, with a theme in mind.
I want to bring life to that figure.
I’m trying to approach it from a big idea.
Rather than just a matter of taste, I think this would be prettier or more interesting
if I did this as opposed to that.
That’s like interior design.
Maybe just one lamp over there would be more attractive than six lamps on that table.
That kind of stuff.
Maybe we shouldn’t have patterned pants and patterned shirt.
That kind of thing.
It’s just pure aesthetics.
It’s just prettier, more attractive if we do it this way.
It’s a matter of taste.
But, composition is a matter of theme.
I want to bring life to my artwork.
I want to bring tension and action to my artwork.
I want to bring a force of great emotion in some sense or maybe powerful philosophical
themes even to the work.
That becomes composition.
Composition is design plus an idea, plus a theme, a great motive than just prettifying.
We can talk a little bit about that as we go.
When we look at our favorite artists, it’s fun to play that game.
If we look at one artist over another, you know, why are they making it more complex
or more simple?
For example, Ingres, who is in the Neoclassical period, but he wasn’t really Neoclassical.
He was right before the Impressionists and during the Romantic period.
His stuff is all very watery, very fluid and very simplified.
He didn’t have big zigzagging shadows.
Let’s take someone very different and on a different level and in fantasy illustration,
Frank Frazetta.
He wanted to show these gritty, sensual, barbarian men and women.
There is a lot of sexual tension in it and a lot of titillation, and also a lot of action.
They were going to fight the cave bear or beat up the goblin or whatever the monster
was they were facing.
There was an action hero, heroic superhero kind of aspect to it.
He had these really dramatic shapes, zigzagging; big, full curves that pushed out; big zigzagging
muscles; and shadow shapes that show this kind of like a lightning strike of tension
in there.
And so, those shapes are very different than Ingres’ shapes of contour
and shadow shape.
Those two visual components were quite, quite different because the motivation was different.
They were after a different idea.
They were trying to say something different with a work.
Alright, so we probably want to take some time, and we’ll do a little bit of work
on this together, studying our masters.
Well, I like the old masters.
But, any masters, they can be modern masters, your favorite illustrator, painter, whatever
it is.
See how they did it.
It’s important when we do this kind of study, when we’re looking at artwork to figure
out a fundamental truth as opposed to a technical truth.
In other words, we have our favorites that influence.
You know, I love Frank Frazetta when I was younger.
I still like him, actually.
I learned a lot from him because I liked his style.
I was doing fantasy movie posters at the time and such.
And so, I like that style.
I learned a lot from him because he was kind of in the style I wanted to work.
And so, I stole from him in that sense.
That’s important to do.
Find—you know, if you love pastel, maybe you steal from Dega or whoever your favorite
is.
You go that route.
That’s great.
What most artists miss out on is they don’t look at the artists they don’t like.
What I mean by that is that there are a lot of masters out there that you’re going to
think are great technically.
It’s old-fashioned or it’s just plain ugly.
You don’t like it.
I’m a realist so I don’t like abstract work.
That’s fine.
I’m not telling you have to like something you don’t like.
What I am saying is that those folks are famous.
They’re old famous or new masters.
A lot of people like them because they’re doing something right.
What we want to do is look at the people we don’t like as well as the people we do like
and see what are the common threads.
What are the components that they’re working with to get the various effects?
For example, when I do my realist work, I’m thinking of abstract ideas.
How can I create this abstract sense of shape that happens to be a pectoralis muscle or
a cheekbone or something?
How can I get beautiful surface to the paint even though it’s having to represent a realistic
truth?
Look past your favorites and go to the fundamentals.
Look at Picasso and see how he keeps changing things.
Nothing has to be one particular way.
He does it in very different ways.
It’ll be ways you don’t want to do it as, but the idea that he made it rounder than
it should have been or simpler than it really was or flatter than the form would suggest,
you can use some of that.
We can flatten some of our areas in a realist painting to make other areas seem more realistic.
That’s really the trick here.
When we start understanding the fundamentals, then we can look at all these styles and learn
from them and see what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong, and we can steal
the rightness of it and leave off the wrongness of it.
The lovely thing about that is, I can start developing my own look by stealing from these
wide sources that most realists wouldn’t steal from.
They’re going to stick with the Frazettas and the Sargents and the Fechins, and the
Sarollas.
There is going to be a very close circle that everybody is taking from who is in that realistic
genre you’re in, let’s say.
Go wide afield.
Go to the comic book artists to steal for realist paintings.
Go to the abstract expressionists.
Go to the post-impressionists.
Go to the gothic work or Renaissance work.
Go far afield.
Go to primitive work.
Look at the contemporary stuff of mixing mediums and using things we didn’t consider art
or art materials before to create art.
Found object or video, all that kind of stuff.
House paint instead of oil paint.
All those things are possibilities, and it’s going to make your work stand out in some
way or manner.
You’re going to be more masterful because of that because you’re understanding then,
not just technique in some straightforward process that makes everybody look the same
at the end of it.
You’re going to understand the fundamental truths, the foundational structure for all
styles.
The same foundational truth of gesture and structure is underneath the Picasso or even
Mondriaan as well as a Rubens and a Michelangelo and all the others.
Mondriaan took out the curvature in gesture.
He removed it.
He is actually painting trees, at least in the beginning, and he just removed the curve,
the lifeline of the trees and made it this abstract kind of wedges, almost a labyrinth
of connections between these rectangular shapes and such.
It widens your scope, opens up your world, and it’s going to make your work more sophisticated
to look at them, not for technique, not because I want to make mine look like that and be
pretty like that.
There is some of that, of course.
How do I make harmonious colors and pleasing shapes.
Look deeper than that.
How, what are they doing?
In other words, look to see if they’re making things more curved or straighter.
Look to see if they’re making things more complex or simpler.
Look to see if they’re making things more three-dimensional or flatter.
Deep space, greater depth, or flattened space.
Rounder shapes or squarer shapes.
An off shoot of this is, but it’s different, is organic
and architectural.
We can go on.
Full value, limited value.
Is it going to be black to white or is it going to be slightly lighter gray to slightly
darker gray?
The other one that would kind of go along with that is, is there more contrast or less
contrast?
Is it more subtle?
Those are our big ones, give or take.
They’re all based on structure and gesture, notice.
Then we’re going to add the visual component of gradation, but not just with value.
Really, the visual idea because this is going to be in all the visual components.
Let’s be clear on that.
Gradation.
When we think of gradation we usually think of making it more sophisticated and more realistic.
We could put that down, realistic to abstract.
There are others we could add, but these are kind of the high points.
That helps to round things, as I said.
We can also use gradation, not just to make something look more real, and we can use strong
values to make things look more real so they pop out at us.
We can use gradation to focus the eye.
We can do a
gradation here.
I’m gradating the shadow of the ball and the shadow on the table from dark to light
in this direction.
I’m gradating the tabletop from light to dark in that direction.
Notice how more a more middle-range tabletop is very close in value to the middle-range
cast shadow.
But, over here, the very dark tabletop and egg contrast severely from the very light
tabletop.
Here we get far more contrast.
Here it’s much more subtle on this side.
Here and her specifically.
You’re going to look here first.
That’s going to be more interesting.
It will grab your attention first.
Then you may move on from that, or you may stay with that, depending on how much complexity
there is in that area.
This is super realistic and detailed.
It’s this side over here really simplified and maybe even flatter.
We can add all sorts of other components into that.
Then I can create interest based on that basic contrast.
The gradation within each of these then becomes a possibility.
I can not only decide to make that arm a more curved forearm, widely breaking it like a
Modigliani might do, for example, or a cartoon Squarepants character, whatever cartoon it
is out there, Spongebob.
Or, I can make it radically straighter like South Park, let’s say, and anywhere in between.
That’s my dial.
I can go here or go here, dial it down or dial it up, or anywhere in between.
But also, within that idea, I can say, well, that form is going to begin very curved and
then straightened out.
As we get here it becomes straighter.
Back over here, it’s more curved.
We can play it that way.
We can also play from side to side.
We can make maybe the top side of that forearm idea very straight or straighter.
We’re going to make it straighter.
We’ll make the bottom side very curved and dial it up, and there will be a contrast between.
Within that, it’ll be more curved here and relatively straighter down here.
But, this whole thing will be much more curved and this will be much straighter.
On and on and on.
So, you’ve got all sorts of possibilities there.
Notice now when we start playing with those visual components, and there are several major
ones and hundreds of lesser ones, I would guess.
There are a lot of them.
We can’t come up with hundreds, but there are a lot of visual components.
Each visual component we can play a range within that.
We can dial it up or dial it down in terms of how much we’re going to play up.
Notice the visual component is based on a continuum.
It’s either more or less.
More curve or less curve.
More complex or less complex.
More three-dimensional structure form or less.
Greater picture plane breakage or staying close to picture plane.
On and on and on.
Then we can do, through gradation, within any one moment of line or tone or shape or
foreground background element, any of these elements then, any component can evolve as
it’s plotted out.
I can start out very complex in the features here and get rather simple here.
Then maybe as I go from head to body get very simple down here.
Or I can do very realistic full-value rendering with lots of color.
As I go down here, that full-color range becomes more in the cool range.
Then the brighter cools become more in the grayer cools.
Then the color drops out, and it’s almost monotone or no color.
I go from full color to lesser color, from full temperature to lesser temperature to,
in effect, no temperature.
Then I can get more realistic rendering and more complex little shapes, and less and less
and less.
We can see that.
I first notice those kinds of ideas in Rembrandt.
We get this natural dropping off of light as we go down.
As we are hit by that God light, which is what it is in a Rembrandt, and that soul is
hopefully enlightened, illuminated, then as we go down towards the grounded Earth, the
corrupt Earth, there is less and less light hitting it because we’re not up in heaven.
We’re going down to Earth here.
We drop down and someplace below the picture, oftentimes, say in a portrait, we’re grounded
completely, but by the time we get to the hands which are in my lap—can’t show you
my lap—there, the light source is reduced down to almost nothing.
The detail is radically reduced.
The values and color range are reduced, and the rendered gradation become more or less
drawn lines, oftentimes, in those hands.
So, he’s reduced several components as he has gone down.
He’s gone from contrasting full-value light to limited value, ambient light or even shadow,
and from three-dimensional, two-dimension, from paint to drawing, complexity to simplicity,
the thickness of the paint diminishes.
Opaque to transparent, glazing to very little glazing, color shifts to little or no color
shift, on and on and on.
There are a bunch of visual components that are going on in that area to make us look
here, spend most of our time here and see this much later.
It also adds a theme to it.
In this case, a religious theme.
It was a proclamation of his faith.
That’s that compositional idea.
It’s the design elements, the components, all these components.
Let’s put components up here.
Done for a very specific purpose.
For us it might have a deep philosophical or religious purpose or sociological purpose,
psychological purpose.
It might just be an aesthetic truth or a feeling.
I want you to feel joy.
I want you to feel outrage or whatever it is.
So, it can just be some simple idea, relatively.
It still is going to increase the power of these.
I may want to scare you because I’m doing a horror picture.
It might be a film picture, and I want to spook you.
I want to play down the elements in one area and play up the others someplace else to get
that pop, that bang.
Notice that in film they do that all the time.
They’ll use repetition oftentimes in film.
The pretty girl that’s gone into the horror house that everybody else has died at, and
she has decided to go there anyway—she walks down the hallway, and the light that illuminates
everything in full relief goes out, or it starts flashing on and off.
We’ll see then that repetition of on and off and change.
She walks down the—I can’t walk toward you or I’ll go out of focus—but she walks
down the hallway in this change.
I can see, I can’t see.
It’s scary, it’s not scary.
She opens the door and there is a cat there.
We get a little scare.
She opens another door, and there is a fluttering window curtain.
That’s another little scare.
She opens another door, and there is nothing at all.
She closes the door and goes, oh, that’s great.
The camera switches and we see behind her.
As we see her relieved face, we see that behind her as the light flashes on the monster is
there with his knife, and he’s going to get her.
And we go, ah!
Scared.
We’ve played down, through repetition we’ve got you used to it’s scary, it’s really
not.
Scary, really not.
You say, well, those aren’t real scares, and you become immune to that little shock.
And so, your level of excitement is maintained at a modest level.
Then they actually say, actually, there is nothing to be scared of at all.
There is nothing behind the last door.
You go down, and then all of a sudden, the dead body drops from the ceiling, and the
monster gets you, and you go from moderate to zero to 10 plus.
And then you jump out of your seat.
And so that’s that.
That’s the power of gradation, of playing the dial on those visual components in a way
that breaks the monotony.
We need to do that in a horror film because how many monsters have jumped out of the closet
at people?
We get sophisticated, and that doesn’t scare us anymore.
We’ve got to up the stakes and do it in a different way.
We have to break tempo so that we shock you, and that’s the basis of a joke, too.
We start telling you a basic truth, and take you in one direction, and then suddenly veer
off in a completely different direction that surprises you but still rings true in a way
you hadn’t realized.
You go, oh, of course, and you laugh.
That’s the joke.
We have to do the same thing as realists because, of course, just like horror films we’ve
done realism to death, really.
It’s been done for thousands of years.
You could argue that the cave paintings are realist paintings.
There are subtle gradations.
There is careful shape design.
They are very characteristic of what was out there.
Oftentimes, just flat out realistic what was out there.
We’ve been seeing this for 40,000 years, it seems like.
It’s gotten repetitious.
How as realists can we make the old thing, make what was old new again?
Making the old new.
That’s what we need to do.
Being inventive.
Notice that each one of these, just if we deal with these, whatever it is, eight of
them.
Now we have a range for each one, more or less, and within that we can make that single
area that the component is working with evolve on its own.
We can make it overall lesser, more curve for the arm, but within the arm we can have
a continuum, a brand-new continuum of the more being even more and even less.
So, more curve, less curve, all that kind of stuff.
It’s really endless possibilities.
You want to take advantage of that.
Alright, so the last component I want to talk about here before we start getting into examples
is position.
This applies much more fully to the full figure, and I’m going to talk a little bit about
that just so we can get the point across and understand the concept.
Of course, everything that we draw has a position to it.
It’s going to be true with the head, and it’s going to be true with the subtle structures
within the head; the cheekbone, the nose, all this kind of stuff.
We want to understand how we can play with position and still have the overall idea ring
true.
That’s going to be always our yardstick, our barometer is what we’re doing when we
make that mark.
Is it ringing true to what’s in front of us and true to the concept
that we have about that?
For example, again, Picasso or any of the post-Impressionists, let alone the later modern
artists, the truth started to abandon, started to play real games.
Cézanne started to take the tabletop for those still lifes and flatten it out and distort
the space and all that kind of stuff.
The truth can be relative.
For us, realism is going to have to have some fidelity overall to the idea of depth, three-dimensional
ideas, the position, stability, can’t feel like it falls off the paper.
It can’t add proportion.
This can’t be out of whack.
You can’t make a little tiny head and a huge body.
You can’t make a really big head in a little tiny body.
It’s not going to look realistic.
We’re going to have certain limitations imposed on us by our choice of being realists.
If we throw away that realist idea, then it becomes really widen open.
We can make it pure abstraction.
And so, a Motherwell painting, sometimes he’s thinking of a figure, but you’d never find
a figure in there necessarily.
He’s just using that as a rift, something to rift off of and go wildly apart from it
and completely really abandon the precepts of it.
So, we want to make sure we are clear of our limitations, and they’ll be certain limitations
and materials.
If I’m working in pen and ink, it’s going to be fairly delicate.
That’ll affect scale, another visual component.
I’m going to be working all with line possibly, if it’s a fountain pen, let’s say.
That’s going to limit exactly how I can produce the gradations and the lighting effects
and the amount of depth and realism, all that kind of stuff.
There are all sorts of limitations to this.
But, having said that, we want to make sure as realists that when we play with the position
it rings true.
If that figure is a bending over figure,
when we draw it it’s suggesting that bent position on us.
So, how do we do that?
We need to understand the laws of stability.
Like everything, that’s going to be based on structure and gesture.
And so, the most stable form in nature is a triangle.
Notice that the wider we make the base and the shorter we make the apex,
the more stable it is.
In other words, it can’t tip over very easily.
It’s the most stable structure, and that’s why this is used so often in art.
Almost every single portrait you’ll ever look at is going to be a little head on wide
shoulders and a wider body, as the arms will go out like this, let’s say, or the robe,
the cape will go out like that and say our Rembrandt or a van Dyck painting, or something
like that.
Raphael portrait.
And so, we get this sense of stability.
Every Madonna and child, you know, Raphaels and da Vinci’s and all, you have mommy here,
usually with a cloak, and she’s holding her little baby here, sweet baby Jesus as
Will Ferrell calls him.
Oftentimes, a second little baby is down here torturing a lamb or something like that, and
that’s John the Baptist down here.
Maybe she’s kneeling on the ground, and maybe she is in a lotus position like that.
Notice how we’ve got this fantastic triangle, this mountain, and oftentimes there will actually
be mountains or some stable imagery in back that suggests that nature, the world is at
peace with this mother of the future, however we want to put it, it’s there.
What’s more stable, what’s more reassuring emotionally than a mother holding a child?
If mommy is holding me, I feel really safe and stable.
Stability gives us a sense of safety, generally, although we can subvert that.
Not only that, the position of the three bodies, or the three heads is also triangular.
Oftentimes, the folds, the drop folds and the zigzag folds or triangles.
We’ll have triangles throughout, and that’s one of the things to pay attention to.
When we’re working with any visual component, in this case, shape, if we want to get that
idea across we can play with scale.
We can make it a really big shape that dominates most or all of the composition, or we can
play with scale through gradation where we’ve got bigger triangles.
Notice her features are triangle, too, and then tiny little triangles back here and in
the folds of her outfit.
And so, we can show scale, big to small, and repetition.
Think about teaching.
I did a quick recap of our earlier classes talking about gesture and structure because
by repeating the idea you’re going to learn it better.
It’s going to stick with you.
You’re going to remember its importance.
You’re going to have it in front of your mind.
It’s the repetition that allows us to teach that idea.
Saying the same thing in several different ways and several different times, repeated,
and notice that horror show scenario was a repetition of light to dark and open and closing
doors; anticipation of danger and no danger, anticipation of danger, no danger; no danger,
real danger.
Then it’s that change at the end that gives us the pop and tells the real story, completes
the action.
Triangles are the most stable.
Notice if we put them upside down they’re unstable.
We want to understand whether we’re trying to create stability or instability, or if
we’re observing stability or instability.
The shape, then, can be a stable shape or an unstable shape.
Notice if I’m balancing on one foot here, I’m unstable, but I can hold that position
for quite a while.
I can do a balancing act like so.
Notice, say a ballet dancer or any kind of dancer.
Notice the balancing act here.
Notice that that is an upside down triangle like so.
If you want to create a sense of stability or instability, the shape design itself, or
the overall arrangement of shapes is going to—you know, we could think of it this way, too.
Just a T. That arrangement of shapes is going to have a big impact on them.
Do we want to show that the stability of that character, of that scenario.
I want to make it a little bit out of whack and show that there is some emotional trouble
there or whatever the scenario is.
There is stability of position.
There is instability or balancing act.
They can hold it for a moment but it’s not going to last.
A lot of potential energy has built up, and something has got to go.
She can stay here forever.
Notice, if we just lay the reclining figure down here it’s more or less that.
We’ve even taken away the apex.
We’ve got a reclining figure there.
That can last forever.
You can be dead in your coffin and stay there for centuries.
Instability, stability, and then the third one is action, mobility.
The action.
What we do if we want to show action and movement is we tilt it off axis.
Whatever the shape is, let’s just stay with the triangle.
If I do that, not it’s falling or it’s in action.
Maybe I’ve got a figure, a cartoon character chasing after the cat that stole his wallet.
That’s showing action.
If we can throw something off axis, it’s going to show action.
If I’ve got a boxer who punches a guy, and the guy is going to get knocked out; it’s a KO.
I’m going to have the guy falling back like this.
His feet will be to this side of the canvas, his head will go this way, and he’ll be
out of balance.
He’s falling away.
Like this.
Maybe his gloved hands are here.
This one is off the page or something.
He’ll be going back this way.
We know where he’s going to go.
Boom.
We know where this guy is going to go.
In another second he’ll be here.
Another second he’ll be here.
He’s going to move along.
Notice the speed lines, you know, comic book speed lines are showing that time passage.
The blast off of the rocket, that kind of stuff.
Those are telling us where it was.
Maybe it’s showing us how we went from stability to instability
as he teeters over and falls.

Alright, now was we look at this basic idea there’s several ways we can approach that
and I’m going to give you possibilities that you can run with, but there’s really
infinite ways to design and redesign and once you get into the, the mechanics of this and
understand a little bit of the theory of it, you know.
How this works it’s really endless possibilities and it’s almost like you can’t help but
make it personal and make it unique and make it your own at least on some level because
you’re looking at those components a little differently and you may do that just intuitively
too, in fact, you do, do that.
You know, it’s one of the reasons you’re attracted to this artist over that artist
is because they see things in accord with the way you see things.
So I’m just going to mark out this stuff like a standard, you know, drawing 101 design,
you know, lay-in I should say, and then we’ll kind of look at like I said a few of the many,
many possibilities here.
Okay and as I lay this in I start to kind of plan, I’m thinking of the possibilities
here right away and of course, she’s got that great hair that’s flowing this way
and that, and there’s all sorts of fun stuff.
So even as I draw it’s going to help me just practically, not in terms of being a
stylist here at all.
Just practically if I look at a curve it becomes hard to measure that to get the proportions
if I’m going down a spine, how far from shoulders to hips and that kind of stuff.
But if there’s corners in there that become, those become landmark points that I can aim
for, attach to and measure off of.
It can be really, really helpful.
So just in terms of trying to place the thing on the page, getting it this, this big enough
and that small enough and all that kind of stuff, having those corners where something
overlaps where a curve becomes a corner or two curves together meeting at a corner, all
those things become really useful and then we can start playing with that stuff.
Well, let’s take this up a little higher because that’s more accurate or that’s
more attractive or that’s more of whatever I’m trying to get out of it, more rococo
or whatever the esthetic is there.
So we’re going to look for those things so I’m going to use a lot of curves and
corners, curves and straights and then I’ll look at the curves and I can make them more
curved or less curve.
I can make it be a curve that starts out fairly slow and lazy and gets really energetic, you
know, it really has a big finish there.
It can start out simpler and become more complicated as it goes; all those kind of possibilities.
Okay, just at the lay-in stage start to wonder, start to say what if, what if I made this
simpler, what if I took this out, what if I played this up, what if I took it farther
in the direction its naturally going, the curved, more curved.
The straight more straight, and then I’m going to look for repetitions of ideas, if
there’s anything that’s happening over and over again, but we know that organic forms
are fluid, they have a watery design, and also they’re organic so they’re imperfect.
It’s not like an amplitude that’s always rises to the same height and drops to the
same depth it evolves and is constantly changing and it’s that evolution of the line where
each little section is somewhat or greatly different than the next is what makes it seem
sophisticated.
So we’re looking for those kind of things, those variations and those repetitions.
So I’m going to look at repetitions.
One thing I notice is this curves in and then comes down.
So we get a curve against a straight or we get a pinch idea.
So I’m going to play that pinch idea here and here and here and here, and as many places,
here and here and here.
Now if I repeat things enough it will create a look to it.
So think of art novae design, for example.
There is based off the curled leaf idea, like that, so all these shapes, you know, the little
bud is in here and then it opens up and flowers out into that full leave design whatever leave
is and so we have this very organic garden motive, a plant like motive going on.
That’s very different than art deco that you have a lot of straights in there and a
lot of curves, but they’re either, they’re mechanical curves.
They speed up at a certain acceleration or they start slow, more like a French curve
or its radial curve, machine curve, so it’s off a circle that kind of thing, deco.
So all of those are taking the, both of those are taking the curved idea and pushing it
towards more, more of a nature in terms of the garden or man in terms of the machine.
It’s manufactured curves rather than life, life developed, life design curves.
So anyway all those things become possibility.
So I’ll look for something that repeats that kind of bump or maybe it’s going to
be a, a curve against a straight, a curve against a straight.
The postimpressionists used this idea a lot in their, maybe it can be that.
So maybe I’ll curve a cheekbone and then make it straight down the jawline like so.
Maybe I’ll start out with the eye as a straight and then pick up the eyelashes as a curve
and then here I’ll make this straight or relatively straight and pick up the curve
here for the orbicular area.
This will be straight and a curve here, so I notice that whole eye structure with the
tonal, it could be with the tones and the line and tone working with just line here
for the most part, but all those can be based off this idea.
Also, it’s variations of that straight meeting a curve or straight becoming a curve.
Okay, so that’s going to be the idea we work with.
I can further take it, let’s now take this away from realism and make it, and we can
do this within realism too, but I’m going to make, let’s do that just a separate,
I’m going to, I’m going to alternate.
I’m going to start, if I start with a curve I’ll go to a straight, and if I finish with
a straight I’ll go to a curve and then that curve needs a straight.
Okay, and we could even reverse it here, we could make the lips straights against curves,
okay, and I can start squeezing, moving things off the axis, it should connect here.
I’ll start drifting it away and it will start to disconnect.
You can see how it becomes modern very quickly.
So we can take what was basically the realistic ideas of nature and start to push them into
these slightly off or radically different ideas, maybe if this is going to be curved
this is going to be straight and then we’re off again and it’s very much what a lot
of the post-impressionists did of, Modigliani, Vouard, Piscine, these guys, kind of guys
and can really start busting things up or it can become graphic, you’ll see in graphic
novels a lot of, like get away from their mainstream superheroes, but look at the independent
graphic novels overseas in Europe, for me overseas or in America,
all over the world really.
And you’ll see all this kind of real crazy, you know, that chin can end up being this
way, it could start to get cubused or something.
You can get into real while flights of fancy with it.
So let’s go ahead and work with another lay-in here, and now we have dramatic light,
the other one we had very little light in terms of big shadow shapes and stuff.
So here we’re going to have something quite different and so we’ll deal now with more
of the shading of it.
Okay, you might start off at, in your own art, especially as you have developed these
ideas right away taking into a wildly different direction or distinctly personal direction
whatever your, your model for success is there, and of course, these, these personal ideas,
this idea of finding your own voice is something that we develop over time and it does take
time to do that for most people.
Every once in a while there’s some amazing sabot who comes out and starts doing their
own thing and she’s fantastic and unique all at once, but typically mere mortals like
us it takes us many years to get here, so be patient with yourself, but I’m just going
to lay this in, and I’m going to look from side to side.
So how is this, this contour over here different than this.
Well, this is simpler, this is more complex, this steps in and out more.
So do I want to play up the stepping in and out on this side so that they relate, you
know, in, on both sides, their speaking of that same complexity, kind of zigzagging complexity
or do I want to play up the difference between the complex figure, features and the simpler
skull or hairstyle in the back and play down those things and there’s not a right answer
for this.
It’s whatever feels right, whatever speaks to the truth of what you see and what you
want to say about it.
Okay, so now when I look at the shadows I tend to work more in the baroque area, it’s
bigger than life, it’s fairly flamboyant.
So I’ll play things up, so I like a lot of, I like to have,
I always think of a roller coaster.
I like to have fun getting to where I’m going, starting here and ending here, and
I can do that as a herky-jerky zigzag or a fluid idea.
And then I’ll play the simpler, more prosaic against that.
I’ll play the simplest things to contrast quieting down before the big scare, that kind
of thing or the big finish in this case.
So now when I do my shadows I’m just going to use the side of my pencil, I’m going
to turn my pencil against the stroke to get that side view, of course.
That soft tone I should say.
I love these kind of shapes.
So I’m just going to design that straight against a curve, making a big deal out the
stair step back around the brow and the stair step forward around the eye, the hair of the
eyebrow.
I have another zigzag there where that little chunk of light pops out.
Let me darken it a little bit so you can see that clearly on camera.
Now I’m using the shadows as a way to create a really interesting, dramatic, dynamic, organic
complex shape and not only that design element that I’m playing up, but I’m going to
use that shadow shape as a way of tracking over the contour of the form and specifically
moving over that short axis, moving over the form is structural.
Moving between the forms is gestural.
So now I’m going to move from the eye socket down the cheek bone and off the cheek bone,
down over the cheek bone and then over the cheek bone and then from the cheek bone I’m
going to move back down the jawline,
and then I’m just going to attach a value to that that’s distinctly darker so that the shadows
are a dark idea and the light side is a light idea.
And so I start to see just by observing and being careful with the shapes or by observing
and being stylistic putting in the shapes the way I like to do it because I’ve developed
that voice wherever you are at stage wise and it’s going to be a little bit of both
generally.
I start to get this real interesting trip moving down like that.
It’s doing a lot of structure stuff, it’s doing a lot of gesture stuff, it’s moving
down the, moving over the short axis in very interesting ways, but it’s also moving down
the long axis to get us to the next thing, the next little form or the next big form
and so it’s doing a lot of structural and gestural work as well as being interesting
esthetic shapes and then it might speak to some great deep theme of life that I have
in mind.
In this case, not so much, but it’s the way I see things as these, these forms kind
of in battle, they fight a little bit and then they get along and calm down and then
they get into a tizzy again and get going, and I can even pick of that kind of simple,
fluid grace and that intense kind of combative energy with a zigzag after, after all if you
get aggressive you find that things kind of turn into zigzags so they fight each little
form fights against each other.
The brow furrows, the fist clenches that kind of idea.
So maybe I’ll use zigzags and I do use zigzags as a metaphor for the that and that’s a
fairly standard metaphor in art because it’s the way it is.
Just think when you get tensed up, you know, you start to get those wrinkles and creases
and contractions of anger and aggression and fighting life on some level.
Maybe I’ll use a lot of line as well as tone, usually you do in drawings.
So I noticed that all these things nothing new about any of these visual components,
they’ve always been there since there was art, but how you put them together can make
quite different statements.
Maybe we’ll do a little sky hole where we can see the background through the hair and
then maybe the rest of this I’ll quiet down relative to what I had before.
Here’s that neck fighting against that chin as she bends her head, let’s do that for
now and then off that maybe I’m going to then just really simplify things.
So here is now that lovely forehead.
So start looking at your favorite artist and you, as I said before your least favorite
artist or in the second tier or 10th tier pile and see how they arrange things.
Why don’t you like Henry Moore, why don’t you like Puson or Battachelli or why do you
like Delsarto?
Okay, so that’s kind of the idea
and even within a sketch you can start saying
well shoot maybe I should make that ear bigger, push it back farther after all I’m creating
this idealized figure or a specific character type.
It’s not a portrait commission for this particular person.
So maybe I can do some things that make a better piece of art that have nothing to do
with the, or very little to do or rifting off what the model has, is offering in terms
of information.
So even things like how can I take something and let’s play that up a little more and
evolve it into something else, notice how I can work down from the hair binding back
into the French braid or whatever is going on there and have it come on down into the,
get us to the shoulder idea.
So play with that and don’t worry so much about results in the beginning, just let it
be whatever it’s going to be and then you can, you can come back and play it again.
Okay, as I try and get a sense of what I’m doing here that’s just subtly different
than the last one, a couple things here, and I’m evolving it as I’m going here too.
Take an idea and then, and then push it and say well, it should be a little more of this,
or little less than that or start over and say no, no, no, now I know what I want to
do and just leave that sketching finish and take it farther.
Okay and so in this case, let’s do this, take it a little bit farther here.
Starting to consider the environment a little bit, I might even bring in shapes suggesting
a difference architecture of the room to the organics stuff, but I’m quieting these things
down, so let’s quiet them down a little bit more.
I’m taking out that zigzag idea that was so aggressive there and notice as I play up
the aggression not so flattering, it’s taking the, that, the feminine is a lot softer, younger
and softer.
The more zigzags you put in the more details, the more technique hatching there.
Let’s keep this a little smoother here.
All those things steal away maybe the beauty of the, of the person or the beauty of the
pose where I do have something simple though, I’m going to tilt the angle more in this
one so I’m laying the ear back more than I laid this one.
I’m pushing the forehead back far more than it is.
I’m making sure as always, this is just me, but you can take this away too, making
sure that that curve speeds up or has a bit of corner in it so that it’s organic and
has a feeling of that organic quality, playing down the nose a little bit, making it more
squarish but simpler.
Letting the detail below fall, fall away and losing that taking out some or all the detail
and in the shadows and giving a bigger jaw to it, fuller jaw and kind of ghosting away
the lip so you don’t really get much of the lips.
So I’m picking and choosing the detail, the detail that I am using then I’m designing
or redesigning that detail in such a way that its, it creates a somewhat different look.
It still feels kind of the like the same guy did it, but now I’ve played down and maybe
flattered a little bit here and there or I played up other things.

Okay and you can notice this is a whole different lecture, but you can notice in character types
that those shapes, the shape design also is going to be informed by that type.
I’m just looking at the shapes I have, whether it’s male or female or Asian or Caucasian,
that I don’t, I’m not going to concern my with or ourselves with.
What I am going to do is I love the verticality and the narrow verticality of this and you
can see how it’s you can make a cartoon that’s the basis of caricatures is taking
the nature of those shapes and then pushing those and any good portrait painter and especially
like the great ones like Sargent or a van Dyck, they’re going to play a little bit
of character , caricature quality in that.
They’re going to push things into a direction, they’re not going to copy.
Okay, so I’m going to have very quiet changes around that eye and then I’m going to have
a big relatively big bump for the cheek.
I’m going to have very quiet changes around the brow and the eyebrow and then a big change
at the crown of the forehead.
I’m going to really play up the verticality of things, a line, the tones and he has these
great eyebrows so I’m going to play up the size of those, and this, I might be doing
these things because it’s more flattering, it’s more manly, more character type if
I’m going for that for my comic book novel or something like that or it’s just beautiful.
So it could be for any reason so I’m not doing it because it will be more flattering
necessarily, it might be the reverse, but it might be more characteristic of who this
guy is on a deeper level or it might just be a really more, much more beautiful type
for my anonymous portrait series.
So I’m going to have things quiet for a long time and then a big change or relatively
big change, go back to that vertical again and you might have to, to stick with something
that’s not in that vertical theme that you were planning on, N.O.
Darn, but you can get us back to it maybe.
Maybe with that shadow shape wherever that is a little too soon, put that in, but just
so we can keep that thread alive.
So that got me back to the vertical down in the neck area.
This little vertical moment, it is a vertical moment, a little vertical moment there before
it takes off around there.
So since I’m playing with the vertical I’m going to take that chin that goes this way
and I’m going to push it back out to that verticality again that I’m so interested
in; every place I can I’ll find those vertical little ideas.
There we go again, maybe I’ll really take off the back of the skull a little bit.
He’s one of the character types is a short skull, he has a short skull not a lot of depth
going back.
There’s a short, medium and long and even say extra-long sometimes.
He has a short skull so maybe I’ll play up that shortness and then really give him
a big ponytail here.
I’m just going to hit at that, keep that out of there.
Okay, so now let’s take that same thing and do it again and now I’m going to really
play up the horizontal.
Okay, so this is not substantially different, I’m shortcutting it here for time sake so
we can get into some other examples and ideas, but that’s not substantially different in
style than the other, it’s subtly different, and I might play up the technique, maybe I
pull the strands of hair into horizontals or near horizontals, I guess over here.
And of course the I’m going to much around here since I don’t have the whole head,
but playing out those horizontals ideas there.
So maybe I’m going to bring this cheek more forward now, pull this brow ridge connection
of the socket back into the crown of the skull, maybe separating the brow ridge a little bit
more, it doesn’t really at all on the figure.
You’ll be able to get that horizontality if that’s a word.
It doesn’t mean I won’t have verticals but I’ll let the, since I’m in the realist
realm I’ve got to go with what I’m given, but if I abandon that or subvert that realism
than all bets are off or all bets are possible actually is a better metaphor.
So I’ll play up the, kind of the softening jowl line here to get that verticality or
that horizontality, my new favorite word, and I’ll play up those overlaps there into
the throat; that whole thing.
So play up that horizontal moment has slipped past that one, but you can see now how we
can really get that going in interesting ways.
We can also have it evolve and I’m finding smaller shapes within, you know, the renaissance
would do this where they’d, everything would be based of the egg because that was that
rebirth or born again concept that’s so important to the Christian metaphor religion
and so everything would be eggs, but we can take that complex series of eggs so everything
is based on all these contours.
They’re based on tracking over or around an egg design, and notice how the overall
realism hasn’t changed much, I mean, it still tracks pretty realistic, I’m not going
crazy into some modern art movement, although we can certainly do that, of course.
But we’re just taking it and seeing that realism through a lens, that’s what shape
design is, with a motive, a motivation to take what is kin of mundane and ho-hum or
overly complex or whatever the problem you see it is, notice each of these is an egg
design and solving it, manipulating it so that it
fits into our needs, our world vision, our concept for that particular piece of body
of work or life mission, you know, to bring a certain esthetic to the world.
Okay, so now let’s take this stuff and I’m going to take it out of the egg here let’s
say and now I’m going to start, I’m going to go from this idea to this idea, let me
be clearer.
I’m going to start adding curves with corners.
So I still have the curve but it’s going to bump quite often now, and then we had corners
before but they were products of this.
Now I’m going to start to get more and more boxy and I’ll make a quick transition, probably
too quick a transition.
Maybe it’s because his eyes say he’s friendly, but his mouth he’s this hired assassin that’s
going to take out Austin Powers or whatever, Captain America or whatever hero is the subject
of our story, and now we get quite square, probably for this drawing, overly square but
you get the point.
Then by the end of it we never have a curved line at all
and we get up here and maybe add a little bit of curve again, because we start moving
back up.
Okay and again the average fellow or young lady or whoever is not going to think any
of that, they’ll dislike or they won’t like it and then you can’t have any control
over it, but hopefully they will like it, but it will look realistic to them, just like
a Rembrandt or a Sargent looks realistic, those aren’t realistic at all.
So sort of highly stylized.
I mean, there’s very few chins in the world that are going to be that sharp.
Notice how we can do it for utilitarian purposes too, functional purposes.
It may not just be purely aesthetic but you may have put it in even though it looks good,
but for reasons that were esthetic at all they were functional, there was so much roundness
going on here that it didn’t track in our perspective world with our vanishing points
well enough, and so I needed one or two things that were square that would track right off
into my linear prospective so I can put that fellow in a futuristic environment or a domestic
room or something that is going to make sense.
So I can take a body and if I take that, say the rear end of a figure here, so it’s a
figure going this way.
If I take her rear end as it hits that ground and turn into a box not only does it help
me make sense of the shadows because the corner of the box is going to be the shadow shape.
So I can make my invention of shadows easier or the understanding of the shadows I have
to render in that complex intimidating mess of a figure in front of me more cohesive,
and so it can be for all things.
But now that, well, just like the tile floor, the wood slats in the wood floor or the mosaic
or the Oriental rug, all that now will track correctly and I can always come back and round
it off later in the finishing process.
So it could be working for several reasons in several different ways, esthetic, functional,
probably a combinational of both those things.
I put that shape down because I liked it, I chose that model to draw or paint because
I like the look of him or her, but then I take it a step farther or several steps farther
and you can see how this is a lovely exercise to just keep pushing it farther and farther
and farther in one direction and push it in a different direction.
Can we make it even simpler, can we make it more horizontals, all that kind of stuff.

Okay, its assignment time so what I want you to do now, take a drawing and I want you to
draw it once, just stick with the lay-in, just simple lay-in, get that well-structured,
take five minutes, take 10 minutes, don’t detail it out, don’t render it.
Just very basic and then I want you to take that same drawing, same, or same reference
really draw it again right next to it.
Just move across the paper, now push it in one direction, maybe it’s going to be squarer,
do it again, make it much rounder, do it again and make it more complicated.
It’s straight against curved, it’s convex against concave.
Pick a visual component or two and just play with it, so go ahead and do it, we’ll see
you on the other side.
Alright, now it’s my turn so I’m just going to do my simple structure here and I’m
just going to use a pin just for the heck of it
and I’m going to just draw it fairly realistic, at least my version of realism.
I’m not going to get too detailed in it because I want to have the bones in front
of me, the basic design choices I’ve made based on the character.
I don’t, I’m not too concerned about likeness here, if it comes out great what I’m trying
to do is to get the lesson down, the principle down and so don’t worry too much about that.
You know, I’m not results oriented when I’m trying to figure things out at all.
I really want to figure it out so I want to stay away from the pressure of it having to
be framed and given to Aunt Millie or whatever or being part of my portfolio.
If it turned out that way that’s terrific, but don’t, don’t depend on it and let
that freeze you, freeze not free, freeze you up from stopping from learning the lesson.
If I’ve got to get it right, I got the pressure of making it perfect or as I can, you’re
going to stick with your same old solutions and you’re not going to learn anything new
because you’re going to stay save all the time.
So we want, we want to give us, ourselves the permission to screw up.
Have the permission to fail and like I said before you can always blame somebody else.
The teacher screwed me up, it was that company that sold me the pen,
it was running out of ink.
You know, the chiropractor didn’t adjust my back, whatever it is.
Okay, so that’s that.
Now I’m going to do it again and I can, I can come back in and give all this shading
and take it farther, be we’re better off keeping it as this stage and what you might
want to do is after I do this, go back and give it a shot again where you do it.
So now that you’ve got a clearer understanding of what I was after.
Now you can go back in with more knowledge and clearer vision of what you’re trying
to get here.
So now I’m going to do this all with eggs or mainly with eggs so very rounded design
and notice it’s not going to be a big departure, it’s just, it could be but it doesn’t
have to be.
I can sneak these in and in this renaissance the game was to sneak those eggs in there,
but don’t let it be obvious, how can real can we make it or their version of real, it’s
different than our version of real.
How real can we make it but have it thematic to the egg as the metaphor for a story that
we’re telling, a Christian story in that case.
So notice that everything is this rounded idea
and maybe at some point you just give up and go another way or for contrast.
You give up and take it, not give up and take it in another way, never give up, never surrender,
I just want to, my favorite funny movie is Galaxy Quest, it was a funny Tim Allen movie
where he is a Star Trek type character with a TV show that has to save the universe, he
always said never give up, never surrender.
Forgot, there I got to get my curves, maybe I’m thinking of a ball out here now to get that.
Okay, so subtly different, now I’m going to do it again
and it could be, you, I only use small shapes, I bundle a bunch of small shapes together.
Let’s play a straights against curves.
I’ll put the shadow shapes in here just so we can see our motif a little clearer.
There’s a lots of ways you can do it and you can mix it for effect and you can play
with proportions too, it can grow bigger in some a lot of the TV animation as you go down
that face it gets bigger and bigger and bigger either because it was stylized to be funny
or it’s stylized to be heroic that heroic chin, maybe the jaw pulls this way rounded
to square.
Straight against curve, maybe we try something where we’re always trying to attach, find
a way to get back gesturally, to flow here, here we make that connection or think about
that connection so I never go to the next thing without playing sling-shotting off the
first thing.
So I have this fun adventure getting to wherever I’m going, straight against curved.
Okay, so just keep, keep going, keep going and you can get more and more ideas out of
it.
Anything that goes forward we thrust it farther forward so the forehead, the brow, the nose,
the tip of the nose and can we do that as far as we dare to do it and not worry about
the likeness or the eyebrows or do we do it just ever so subtly to give a little bit of
strength or force of personality, but not enough to break the illusion that it’s a
portrait, way forward and then down.
Way forward down, the barrel of the mouth way forward
and down and just playing with it, just ideas or taking that same eyebrow and really quieting
down those ideas.
Maybe that’s going to make, take 10 years off or 30 years off my model and make them
look as a younger man or woman, it may be just the flattering thing we want to do for
them, or we have to do a design or we take our aging actor who is the star of an action
series that was in the 80s and make him look like he’s 20 years younger, how do we design
that for that comic book, it still looks Bruce Willis or whoever, but now it’s a younger
version.
How do we look, take the reference of what we got from the 60-year-old fellow and make
him a 30-year-old fellow or that 70-year-old star and make her
a 40-year-old star or whatever is.
So now we quieted it and can we take that and quiet it down even more or could we get
really active with the structures like the eye socket and the forehead and the nose,
but then really quiet with the shadow take out and keep it fairly flat so all of the
energy is inside this, all the churning anger of the evil villain that’s going to secretly
try to destroy our hero.
So we have all this big time passion coming out here, but it’s under the service, it’s
quieted down like that.
So or can we push that way out, how far can we take it that’s that game we play.
So you can see how we can do 30 of these and have them quite different and the easy way
to do, you’ll notice these are all kind of my style, you know, it’s still is kind
of me.
You might be able to recognize that I did this and if you looked at it you wouldn’t
think five different artists or six different artists did it, you think one guy who was
playing around as we were, but can you clothe yourself in a Titian style, a Gustav Klimt
style, Egon Schiele style, a "Katie Covet" style, a Goya style, and just put those, put
those costumes on and speak with that voice and see what you can learn and what you’ll
probably find unless you really practice you’re not an excellent Goya, we can tell that’s
not Goya.
But it’s your version of Goya and that will tell you something to, why do I keep, why
can’t I get that shape or that technique that Goya does because that’s maybe not
the technique I should be doing.
My technique should be more of this, more broad, less refined, more upbeat, less pessimistic
or whatever.
Yet you’ll learn what you don’t want to do to by studying your other favorite artists.
So anyway that’s the idea, play with that on a very simple level about here.
If you want to add a little bit of shading great, probably too much at this point, playing
with all that kind of stuff.
Keep it as a, a design stage, a lay-in construction stage and do that for a while and then start
adding more stuff on it and slow down.
I’m going to tell you if you’re going to do this spend 20 minutes not five minutes
doing it.
Here we can spend five minutes probably be okay.
So just do that and create a sketch book just of shape design and just carry it around and
start drawing stuff and you’ll find that you might find several figures when you’ve
drawn a bunch of people, that very much look they’re all Asian men with ponytails even maybe.
So they all have that similarity of being of being of a same ethnicity, but they’re
all unique too.
Ones got a heavier jowls, ones got a deeper brow, ones got a different hairline, ear shapes
all that proportion stuff, and they’ll slightly vary and you’ll see, well I like the forehead
of this guy and the jaw of that guy and you might come up with your ideal character of
what you like to draw.
But any way give that a shot some more, practice, practice, practice.
We will see you in a second.

Alright, so let’s then look at a curve.
Here is the problem with a curve.
A curve is constantly changing directions.
Again, if we think about a figure that has to be stable, let’s say, and hold its position,
how do we give all the curves that it needs to have if it’s going to be a living, realistic
idea and not have it feel like it falls off the page?
That’s one of the big problems we have when we’re doing action poses or short poses.
How do we get all the body parts to sync together so they feel well-connected, well-related.
They’re fluid and graceful in their design.
They have the curves where they need to have curves, corners where they need to have corners;
to be realistic and truthful; yet, it doesn’t feel like it falls away.
Well, let’s look at the curves here.
Curve always changes direction.
We have a bunch of curves.
What we want to do to find the stability—let’s do a different scenario.
That’s stable, but so is this.
It’s not as stable.
Notice if we make it wider and shorter it gets more stable.
These aren’t as stable as that because we have a heavier top, relatively, compared to
that bottom.
In this case, the top is just as heavy as the bottom, presumably.
Here we have a light top, heavy bottom.
It’s more grounded.
It’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
This is still pretty stable.
And then we can start evolving that into a less and less stable scenario, of course.
Or, for that matter, a more and more stable scenario.
This is kind of what we have going on with the figure.
It’s a long column of structures, but all those structures are curved.
So, what we’re going to look for.
Notice this is stable because it’s vertical.
When things are vertical, they feel stable.
Whether it’s balanced or not, they’re not going anywhere.
That verticality brings in the stability.
If we make it horizontal, it’s stable too, and it’s super calm.
It’s restful.
This has a little bit more potential energy in it.
At some point, it’s probably going to move or erode or wear out and fall down.
Vertical, horizontal and then the third scenario, of course, is the angle.
And that’s going to be this.
That is, again, unstable.
That’s what we did with our potential energy action scenario as we tilted the axis of the
triangle so that it was at an angle rather than being a vertical balancing act or a vertical
stabilizing scenario.
All I’m going to do is I’m going to look for every curve or at least the major curves,
and I’m going to look for where it’s vertical in the curve.
Notice they’ll be a section there where it’s vertical.
Then it will barely fade off the vertical idea, stabilizing element, or it will rather
or very radically change off that verticality, that stabilizing idea.
So, with a curve then, we always want to look for the vertical moment in the curve to find
that stable moment.
If we look through every curve here, we’re going to find where it’s stable.
If we can match the verticality of the figure we’re seeing with the figure we’re drawing,
our figure will be stable.
Not only that, as long as we keep that vertical moment, that section, in this case, maybe
the belly button up to the breastbone or something, shoulder blade area or whatever it is.
If we keep that moment vertical, I can exaggerate the angles.
I can make the lower stomach back to the pubic area a greater angle than it was.
The stomach area back to the collar bone greater.
I’ll keep the vertical moment of the shoulder blades, but I’ll push back into greater
angularity the thrust back to the waist.
I keep the vertical moment at the waist, but I’ll push out angle of the buttocks.
I’ll keep the base of the buttocks vertical as we go, and then I’ll move along.
From each of these scenarios, then, I can make a more exaggerated statement, as say
a Rubens would do.
I guess over here, as a Rubens would do and an Ingres would do.
Or, I can make it less so, as a Poussin would do or a more primitive work, early sculptures
in Greece would do.
Instead of here, I’ll go here and make it less dynamic, less alive, less fluid, more
formal, whatever it is.
Or, I’ll go this way and make it more so.
At some point, you’re going to break that poor guy’s neck and tear away his rib cage
from his stomach.
But, we’re probably not going to take it that far.
Probably our problem is that we put in too little curve, not too much.
But, if you do too much, you can always back off the next drawing, but the odds are you won't.
You’ll probably do what you think is a whole lot of curve, and it may not even be enough
to be realistic, let alone to be dramatically more fluid.
If the figure is bending over or whatever form it is, it’s bending over, then we do
the same thing on the horizontal moments.
Find that horizontal area of the spine.
Here is the vertical area of the arm.
Then we can go crazy with the angles to make that spine more curved if we want.
We can do the same thing then with any of the structures of the face.
If I wanted to make that ear, which is sitting on an angle, more angular.
Maybe he’s turning into a werewolf; he’s getting werewolf ears, or whatever the reason
is, or it just is more attractive, I can push it more or push it a little bit less.
If I want that cheekbone to come back, I can make it come back a little bit farther.
If I want that eye socket to go back in, I can push it back farther.
I can push the brow out farther that way.
Notice then, I start to get a more active.
Rather than this, I’m starting to get this.
More dynamic, dramatic idea.
This is eroded down and is a subtler movement.
More like an Ingres would do.
This is more dramatic movement, maybe like a Leyendecker, an early illustrator, what
Leyendecker would do.
Or, maybe like nobody has done before, and you’re going to be first.
Again, that’s that gradation, that continuum idea.
Anyway, that’s what we’re going to do now.
We’re going to take that idea of stability, instability, and action, and push it for all
it’s worth, and play up, dial it up, or play it down.
Within any area, we can take whatever visual component we’re working with and have that
actual visual component evolve as it goes.
I can start out saying I’m going to design the tube of the arm as a more curved tube.
I dial up the curvature of the arm.
But within that arm, it’s going to be more curved at the beginning of the arm, less curved
in the middle of the arm, and more curved at the end of the arm.
And so, I’m going to play a game within that area.
Anyway, that’s the meat of it.
That’s the bones of it.
Let’s go look at the head and see how we can apply it so we can actually do drawings
that are more dynamic, more dramatic, more interesting, more whatever you want them to be.
Most importantly, more of your own rather than a bad version of some other teacher or
old master you’ve latched onto.
We’re going to make now these drawings that come alive and be our own drawings based on
this idea of shape design, taking those visual components through gesture and structure and
gradation, and we’re going to go crazy with it.
Let’s go have some fun.

Alright, so one of the things I can do as a stylist here is push the position.
She’s tilting down, so I’m going to make her tilt down a little farther, or I’m going
to make her tilt down a lot farther.
If you look at Ruben’s work, there is no way the models could be in some of those positions
he’s got them in.
He’s really pushed it quite far, or maybe they were just more flexible back then, but
I don’t think so.
You can play proportions—oftentimes, you have to go down a certain distance, or really
always, I guess, a certain distance of the forehead to be her forehead, certain distance
down to her lower eyelid to the tip of her nose, that kind of stuff, to make it look
like her.
But, you can also keep some of that.
I’m not going to worry about that too much in this.
We’re going to play with this a little bit more.
I can do things like crowd her hairstyling a little tighter.
That’s going to give the feeling that she is in a more deeper perspective than she is.
As things vanish away, they foreshorten and get tighter.
I’ll close in this a little bit, maybe.
And sometimes, this is kind of Art Harris-y in terms of all that I’ve been teaching
you folks over the many lessons, but sometimes you can just start drawing.
Maybe I’ll just do that much.
I’m just going to start with this eye and see what happens.
See what suggests itself.
Let’s do that.
Here is the eyebrow.
It’s always going to be easier if you go from the top down because then you’re going
to get the forehead off the skull and the nose off the forehead and the jaw and then
the neck and then the body, that kind of stuff.
You can just kind of see where this goes.
Are you going to tighten everything up?
Are you going to stretch everything out?
Maybe I’m going to make it extra wide.
Maybe I’m going to play up this kind of lift there, a little tent pole kind of thing
or whatever you’d call it.
I’ll play that against the straight simpler.
I’ll play that against kind of the more sagging curve.
That’s interesting isn’t it?
Each of these is based on a curve, but the eyebrow has this kind of tee-pee effect.
We have this fairly straight curve that is just barely sagging, and this is sagging.
It’s almost the evolution.
It’s fights gravity.
It gives into gravity.
It’s overwhelmed by gravity.
There is a whole storyline going on there visually with the work.
That can often be the case in stylist work as you see this grand design, or it seems
to have a storyline going on with it.
With Sargent you’re seeing royalty, whether it’s actually royalty of Europe or the capital
royalty of a capitalist system in America.
These people are royal, and they’re painted like they’re gods, like they’re Zeus and
Harem.
These grand shapes, deeper sockets, longer necks, tighter jaw lines, unblemished flesh,
all that kind of stuff.
When you do this kind of breaking of the rules—we haven’t laid out the whole thing carefully—I
usually work like this, frankly.
I’ve got in my head the bigger design, but I usually do something very vague.
I’ll get going, and I’ll invariably screw it up in some way or another.
Then I’ve got to fix that screw-up, or that screw up becomes the basis of a design, of
a new kind of stylistic solution within my own style.
I don’t completely reinvent my style.
It gives me possibilities, and when I screw it up, I’ve got to fix it.
I’ve either got to fix it by doing it even better.
I’ve got to fix it right on top.
If it’s a painting it would be the latter.
I’m going to make this cheekbone that’s out of whack, fix it.
By repainting it, it freshens it up and it breaks my process.
That allows for a little fresher.
I’m not doing the same old solution.
I’m doing something a little differently than maybe the last time I did it.
I’m not copying myself.
That’s one of the dangers.
You’ve got to, at some point, come up with your own take on things, your own style.
That’s tough enough.
It can’t be a bad copy of your own inspiration five, ten years later.
That happens to a lot of artists.
I see it a lot in Impressionist painting.
My roots are in California.
I don’t live there anymore, but I used to live in California.
All the painters are—well, not all, but a big percentage of those painters are, whether
they are landscape or figure, are California Impressionist painters.
It’s their own subset of the French Impressionists.
They all kind of look somewhat alike.
It’s gorgeous work.
What you’ll see with the Impressionists, they oftentimes, I’d say almost always,
frankly, over the course of their career, it just becomes a shortcut, simpler version
of the original loose brush strokes.
And so, it loses some of the energy and becomes a little bit more formulaic.
That can be a problem.
That can end up being not quite as exciting or rich in texture or nuanced in application
or whatever as it was five, 10, 20 years ago.
So, if I’m constantly kind of testing the boundaries, then I can come up with fresh
variations.
You look at the great artists, the Michelangelo.
He had at least three distinct styles in his career.
Dega, Titian, all those folks are coming up with different styles.
Sargent didn’t so much, but what he did do is he started to move away from the big
old portraits and he was doing portraits in charcoal to keep the collection of patrons going.
He’d get them to settle for a charcoal, if possible.
Then he’d go out and paint in watercolor and sometimes oil, too.
He’d go out and paint landscapes and figures and escapes and have a great old time there
and have a different color palette and a slightly different energy and voice to those works.
And so that kept it fresher for him.
Notice now the very square quality to all the features.
Notice how these are vanishing like that last gentleman we drew.
We’ve got kind of a good old constructionist style that puts us into that box logic that
gives us such nice structure and clear perspective lines that help to tie in the greater world
around us.
Then I plane that off with very rounded forms, very organic forms that still key back to
corners. They still get corners again.
It still gives us a sense of plotting things out.
If we connected the corners we could get that architecture back.
Then plane more flamboyant areas.
Oftentimes, a sketch like that, that will give you a key into what you want to do in
technique.
I’m going to put most of the rendering in here, keep the hair very simple, actually
do some more tonal stuff with the half tones and core shadows.
More linear stuff inside the shadows.
Of course, that’s the typical Brown school theory of working, the Rembrandts, the van
Dycks, the portrait class of Sargent, Zorn, Chase, and those folks.
Now we’ve got something that’s pretty interesting, and we can take that and we can
push it even farther.
I really like that boxy thing going on.
Notice by boxing things out, we’re doing this area in here—I’m just going to slop
this together for time’s sake so we don’t belabor it too much.
Just give you the point here.
All these things can be done with much stronger straights or exclusively straights and chisel
it out.
Then I can play these things, like give her a little bit more of a short nose because
of the foreshortening.
I might want to make her a little tougher character for the drama I’m trying to portray
in this illustration or this working class theories of hardworking folks that I want
to paint or whatever it is.
Maybe off the architecture of the features, I stay with that really flamboyant solution
for the hair.
Or no, I keep that also rectilinear.
“Rec” as in you screwed it up, linear line.
It means when you screw up your line.
No, I’m joking.
Anyway, play those things off.
Square, rounder like we did in the last one.
Just the possibilities.
Notice, again, it can be done in a very stylized way like early video games or early video
sequences in movies.
Everything would be very mechanical and chiseled out kind of stuff because it was cheaper to
do that.
As opposed to the realism, which is much more nuanced.
The transitions between things are subtler and with more complexity.
There might be quite a bit of complexity going on in any particular area that will have an
effect that would have to be edited out for cost, you know, avoided for cost reasons and
that kind of stuff.
Anything can be taken in one direction or another, and that’s that shape design.
Just plane.
You can get into an area and just go crazy and start rifting on all the subtle forms,
all the subtle details that are within a particular brow ridge where it meets the skull cap and
bides back into the cheekbone.
There can be a ton of stuff going on, and you can pick that all up.
All these rhythms are playing up.
That’s all gestural stuff in a way, how we’re getting from one thing to the next
into the hair, into the eye socket, into the skull, the brow, back in the cheekbone down
into the mouth.
Then lots of secondary forms that are laid in subtly or not that are picking up those
rhythms. I might get a ton of detail here.
Keep this or this very very simplified.
Alright, so with this…and you can see how the character of a character is going to make
suggestions to you.
So, with our fellow here, this wonderful face he’s got, we have a lot of stairsteps, a
lot of boxy ideas, a lot of corners then.
The eyebrows are very arching, even the hairstyle.
Despite all those curls, I’m going to look past this kind of dance of details.
I’m going to see if there is an alignment of general information that I can work off of.
I’m thinking like a sculptor.
If I had to take a chunk of marble what
would be the overall shape before I did all the cutouts?
Maybe even it was clay and I had to add on a little bit.
What would be the overall the structure of it, shape design of it?
We’ve got this kind of thing going on here.
The bangs area of the hair and the top of the brow, the top of the forehead and the
brow line are all tracking in this wonderful, dynamic position.
That’s all front plane stuff.
This is going that way.
That squareness then becomes a natural for us.
Let’s do that first.
Then we’ll take it away from that.
I’m going to work with the square and the round here.
Then we’ll add some other stuff too.
We’ll add some repetition.
We’re going to play with some scale stuff.
I’m working fast here for obvious reasons, so I can get down information and you don’t
have to wait around while I nitpick.
But, you want to go slow when it becomes your turn in our next section here.
Make sure you’re not going fast, faster than you can get the information down correctly.
Go only as fast as you observe, translate, and then our able to record.
It’s really important that we don’t set ourselves up for failure by knocking it out
because we have a deadline.
I’m working under a deadline of your attention span.
I want you to get as much information as I can in the limitations of this course, how
much time we can put into one course, so I’m rushing through that.
I want you to be able to get those ideas quickly and not I say something, it’ll take me five
minutes to show it, and then I say something else and it takes me another five minutes
to show it.
That’s not very helpful, so we’re rushing through.
What I’m really saying is, my drawings are always perfect if it wasn’t for you guys.
It’s your guys’ fault if I screw that up.
This whole thing was really a backup plan to make me look not as bad as I would look
if I screwed this drawing up.
Remember, it’s always, it’s probably the most important lesson I could teach you in
advanced drawing.
It’s always someone else’s fault.
If you’re advanced as you are, by definition if you’re watching this course, then it’s
never your fault.
It’s always somebody else’s fault, so find someone to blame.
Then you could also charge more if you’re a working artist for the pain and suffering.
It was their fault.
They did it to you.
Okay, so we’ll just do that for the sake of it.
Let’s go ahead and make this very squarish.
Notice how in a lot of ways, probably in most ways lots of corners.
That’s easier to construct things, isn’t it?
If we make things simple boxes we were clear in where it sits in space.
We’re much clearer in its proportions because it definitely ends and begins.
If we have any kind of stair-stepping thing going on, then every time we take a step that’s
another little incremental place to measure, and so our proportions will get much better
as I break these things down.
One of the joys are adding littler shapes is they are oftentimes beautiful.
It makes it more complicated, more complex and nuanced for our audience.
It keeps our attention longer, and it allows us to break things down into smaller and smaller
pieces that then give us a way of parsing out and getting the chin right and getting
the neck right and so on, all the way down into the finish of the composition or whatever.
Your ambitions were on that.
Okay, so that’s there.
So, very very square.
I can go through all these things.
Anything that was a curve I can chisel out into several straights and corners.
I can take this and do this to it for as precise as a parsing out as I would like.
There we go, very, very square.
Notice then I’m treating planes as sacred, really.
This is front plane.
It has got to go that way.
That’s front plane, front plane, front plane, front plane.
Even the highlight on the nose here, front plane.
Front plane, front plane, front plane, front plane.
Those all have to track exactly right or they might vanish and have a little bit of that
umbrella effect, but perfectly parallel is fine.
That tracks things beautifully.
It gives me a greater confidence level that what I’m doing is correct.
Then I can do the same thing or similar thing on the side planes, making sure the side planes
track as they should.
They won’t all track exactly together because these things tilt and tip like the front plane.
They’ll all go back in relationship.
They’ll have some kind of corner that might be greater or lesser and look to my earlier
beginning lessons on head to get a better grasp of that if I rush through that too much.
Okay, so anyway, we’ve got all that.
Now I can start building that squareness throughout, and maybe the big stuff I’m going to make
very square.
But the little stuff I’m going to make very round so the corrugator muscle group in here
I’m going to make rounder.
The brow ridge as it comes up into here I’ll make rounder, but the top of the forehead
I’ll make very square again.
The corner where it goes back, I’ll make it very square again.
Then hair is very fluid and loose so I’ll make it round or, you know, every time I draw
fluid here I’ll make it round.
Maybe I’ll make that square because most people would make that rounder.
You can go against the grain
and chisel that out and make this this kind of thing.
The eye I’m going to make rounder.
That’s a relatively small detail.
The socket and cheekbone structure that’s bigger I’m going to make squarer.
Socket rounder, nose squarer.
And then any detail, any little details that I haven’t parsed out as shapes are going
to become zigzag lightning bolts to show the masculine aggressive energy of this mighty
warrior for my great epic series or a new Conan the Barbarian movie for the 10th time
or whatever it is.
This shows the aggression of this guy who will choke the life out of you if you don’t
draw him well.
It’s just, it’s jazz.
I use jazz a lot because we have that improvisation rifting idea.
I actually don’t care for jazz that much, but it’s a great metaphor.
It’s okay, but I prefer Barry Manilow.
I’m kidding.
Although Mandy was a great ballad.
That’s an American joke so it’s probably not very helpful to say that.
And so maybe now, notice these shapes up here zigzagged up.
They’re rising up and away from us to kind of give this idea.
Now, as I get down here, I’m going to have them zigzag down.
They’re going to start to fall down this way and then eventually go this way.
The nose is kind of a transitional moment for that.
Notice even the technique, the rough hatching can give a sense of the coarse skin or the
beard or whatever that can add to that.
If I did that on all these little shapes and details on a woman, that’s probably going
to steal away some of that beauty if I’m doing the kind of stereotypical
aesthetic of pretty, you know, the Hollywood or Barbie Doll or Greek goddess motif.
Notice these are starting to sag this way, so I’m going to break up my boxy idea a
little bit by having these sag this way.
That will help take me around that corner.
What I ended up doing is these guys this way.
Let’s make this stronger in here.
That here and then this is going to go this way here.
Here, here, and here.
Notice how I ended up changing my mind a little bit from the lay-in.
Once I got that kind of concept out of the piece.
It took me awhile to get to that, and that’s oftentimes the case.
Unless you’re working with your established style.
Even within that, I am, but within that I’ve got room to explore and create and diversify
and invent within the parameters of what I consider interesting or beautiful or good
art or whatever I’m going to attach to that aesthetic.
Okay, so anyway, that gives us some choices on what to do, and it’s literally endless
because nothing is endless, really.
But there are a number of ways we can take these things.
It gets almost endless.
You’ve got a ton of parameters, ton of visual components, and you also have a ton of ways
to mix and match them and then to play with them on their own.
You can push it farther this way, back off that way.
On and on and on.
It can be technique and go from line to tone.
It can be from dot pointillism to line to tone, lot of choices.
That wraps up our lesson today.
I hope you had fun.
I hope you learned a lot.
There is always more we can add to this, but for now we’ve got some ideas where we can
start taking a basic realism and make it a more powerful statement, a more personal statement,
and really enjoy that and really reach a greater audience, I think.
So, good luck with it.
Thanks for being with me, and we’ll see you next time.