June 2028 Sketch Update

I started a new section of my website called “Sketchbook” to have a landing place for the rougher things that never quite land but I still enjoy working on.

Lately I have been trying to push more gesture and action poses, stronger expression; I often default to “idle poses” to give myself a neutral place to explore costume design from, but often, costumes benefit from reacting to the context of the character (Ninja Gaiden scarf, anyone?). I have long been a proponent of “make the neutral design good and everything else will follow”- and I don’t think that’s inherently wrong, but it may dull some potential. (but as always, everything is contextual!)

December 2022 + January & Febuary 2023 Art Recap

DECEMBER

Time is flying, as is traditional of course. Two months feels like an awful lot of time until you have to sit down and write a blog post.

Truth be told, I didn’t actually draw that much; at least not digitally. In December we took a trip to Miami to visit family and absorb the trains and urban fabric. Despite being raised in Florida, I had never actually been to Miami before. I don’t think Miami is terribly known for it’s transit, but it is much better than you’d expect considering.

A sunny day looking at downtown Miami from a train platform, with warm clay tiles in the foreground reflecting the blue sky and sun light cast shadows across them.

I did have time on the plane to squeeze out a little Krampus drawing. One thing I’ve never been particularly good at is aimlessly engaging in drawing a subject or prompt. For example, it’s only recently that I will take a subject, like “Deer” or “Pillar” or “Baseball”, and then fill a page of sketches riffing on that theme. I did this a lot in school out of necessity, but mentally it has never been the thing my brain leaps to, but it is a habit (or rather lack of habit) I have been questioning and trying to acclimate my brain to; I think my inclination was to feel that drawing the “same thing” over and over in different ways was somehow a waste of time (unless of course, it came to something academic like life drawing or master studies).

Over the years however, I have definitely come to feel that just going to town on a single theme for a few pages is an essential exercise for plumbing depth and teaching yourself lessons. I am not sure why this concept had such a hard time sticking in my brain- in fact, it still isn’t stuck there, and I have to build habits to try to make it stick.

Sketchbook page drawing the same character over and over

Sketchbook page showing multiple chibi Francescas

The thing that really consumed my time at the end of December before the new year was finally trying to make a serious effort to pick up C# and Unity to try and move Francesca and I’s personal small RPG Maker project over to Unity. I finally got fed up with RPG Maker, not because of it’s limitations but because of the horrible workflow it forces on you that plug-ins can’t really mitigate.
I made a lot of progress in a very short amount of time! But progress since then has been… slow. This has been the cycle I’ve acclimated to; an extreme spike of interest and education for a duration- a month or so, and then a very long dry spell. But then when I return to it, months or years later, I am able to make a few rungs of progress up the ladder.

JANUARY

On the drawing front, January was also a bit dry, but for good reason; For the better part of the past year, Francesca and I have been volunteering with a coalition of amazing people called House Our Neighbors which was lobbying to create an apparatus in Seattle that could build what’s known as Social Housing- a type of public housing that is mixed income, as most public housing is focused on low incomes. Everyone pays a fixed percentage of their income on rent; about 30%. Naturally, the middler-incomes pay a large amount of money, which goes to subsidize the system. Much like with a 30-year mortgage, the real fun begins once the buildings are paid off, which supercharges how far each dollar goes. Vienna is a popular example, in which about 60% of the population lives in Social Housing.

Anyways, spoiler- we won! In February there was the big election to create the Social Housing Developer. There’s a lot more I could say here (ask me about it if you want), but suffice to say it is a sea change for the US and if done right will be one of the most effective tools in ameliorating the housing crisis now and in perpetuity.

FEBRUARY

Most of February was spent prepping and planning for our honeymoon, a trip to Japan we held off for 3 years on taking thanks to COVID-19. We arrived in Tokyo and spent the night before speeding off via shinkansen to Kyoto, Osaka, and then back to Tokyo. A straightforward itinerary maybe, but not a regret was had. It was an extremely refreshing trip, and without hardly trying I was able to nearly fill a sketchbook.

I’ve gotten back into reading manga in “preparation” for the trip, and inspired me to try free-sketching panels of no particular story. Thinking about the drawings as panels in a comic is a great way to flex expression and composition, and design to an image. I tend to liken it to stream-of-consciousness writing exercises.


Anyways, apologies if this post is short on insights or long on politics. I have a few longer non-recap posts in drafts that I’m slowly chipping away at but good luck ever seeing them :)

October + November Art Recap:

A decent amount of art got done the past few months, and a few stray thoughts were had!

FanArt

Narshe from FF6, accidentally by way of Kinkade

After the Xenoblade Chronicles fan art last time, I was still feeling pretty invigorated about using fan art as a way to immediately plumb into a more emotionally motivated place when making a piece- where decisions were less drawing on spontaneous whims and more on the love and nostalgia of some piece of art or another that has sat with me for a long time. I spent a number of hours on this piece of Narshe, trying to approach it a bit as “FF6 through the lens of FF9”- a remake I’d be happy to see (keeping the fixed camera style of the PSX era games preferably).

As usual, I started hitting an uphill climb on this piece and eventually entered into the “just finish it” mode, generally meaning I will end up unsatisfied with the result. We’ll revisit that idea in a minute.

COZY SEASON

Anime-styled Francesca demon inspired by the Witch From Mercury character designs

As summer finally began to yield to autumn, the company I work at, Spry Fox, got acquired by Netflix! Simultaneously a tectonic shift, but low enough on the richter scale that our day-to-day has not drastically changed. As the temps dropped, I started focusing on more cozy and cute subjects.

This drawing started out inspired by the character designs from THE WITCH FROM MERCURY, the new Gundam show- continuing to try and learn some of the nuances of anime-oriented designs; hyper thin lines, strong shape design while retaining a high level of physical realism. It slowly morphed from a generic drawing into a fun Spooky-sona of Francesca <3 .


 

Cafe sketching. Breakfast Taco daydreaming!

Here are some doodles while sketching at one of the best outdoor cafes in Seattle- trying to embrace a more spontaneous “stream-of-consciousness” drawing approach, vs. trying to always create an under-drawing sketch. I think of it as being very ‘reactive’, so you make decisions you wouldn’t necessarily have made if you were planning it out more carefully.

Cozy SeasON CONTINUED: CHIBI

Cozy Crow Friend

I was also experimenting with much thicker outlines, trying to get in touch with the more chibi\mascot side of my brain. I love using hyper-thick outlines as a style constraint; the way you design shapes completely changes. With thinner lines, you gain a kind of “resolution” that you become somewhat responsible for, and you have different tools and different expectations about the function your line serves; it’s more of a “boundary” that is defining dimensions, and less of an element of the art itself than with super-thick lines. With super-thick lines, your toolsets are different and the rules of shape appeal become different; you can still define volume but it’s interpreted differently.

Chibi-tactics

It’s also nice in this sense that it can be “easier” to push and pull proportions and things, because there are so few lines that changing each one even a little has a substantially large impact on the overall thing.
This drawing went through a few phases- but my main goal was thinking about a human charaacter design with modestly thick lines and chibi design. But it actually brings me a bit to another fun point.

“don’t stop iterating until you are inspired by what you make”.

Lately, this is a mantra that has been ringing in my ears. I wrote a bit about this on twitter, which I’ll paraphrase here:

I’ve been applying this thought to try and goad myself into being more patient and more intentional and less complacent about what I make. There was a time before, during, and after art school where it was “easy” to improve- but after a few years, it has gotten much more difficult, which I think is just how things go. Especially as a commercial artist, when time is such a scarce resource, a lot of “improving” is getting faster- put another way, you get really good at making something just good enough to pass muster so you can move on to the next thing. It is very hard to make time for pushing to 110% when 75% is more than acceptable, and more than that will block other people you work with.

I don’t think this is necessarily good broad artistic advice, but it’s a form of creative practice I wanted to share in case it helps other people consider their own relationship to their work. It has certainly driven me to think differently about what I’m working on- to picture it as an outside observer and to think about what particular things give me the spark of inspiration, and how I can incorporate those things into what I’m working on. It is currently a very intuitive phrasing- and is more of a sort of tool for breaking patterns of complacency rather than specific advice.

Simultaneously, I feel that I’m currently juggling a number of artistic priorities for self improvement at any given point. Currently, these are:

  • Observational drawing (figure drawing and photo studies)

    • A habit I haven’t been active with for several years, largely thanks to arm injury and the pandemic.

  • Digging in to comfort zones

    • Painting landscapes and fan art and gratuitous, unquestioned things that I try to extricate from thinking about in a capitalist lens (i.e. “for work”)

  • Branching out from comfort zones

    • Approaching aesthetics I haven’t exercised (photorealism, ‘mascot\kawaii’, anime)

  • Chasing Joy and Sincerity

    • For a very long time I have styled myself a pragmatist- largely trying to focus effort of improvement towards what was mostly likely to get me a job. Thanks to prior-mentioned acquisition, I feel like there is a moment to take a breath and try to re-indulge in a more spontaneous and somewhat exploratory joy of art making! Something that I feel is very much a privilege.

In the spirit of Self Improvement, I’ve tried to get back on the figure drawing horse (literally and figuratively). Since the unfortunate political affiliations of one popular Youtube drawing resource, I’ve found this which appears to be almost a descendant, which has excellent photography and models.

LAST THINGS

Alright, I think I’ve probably gone on too much for now.

Here is a random fun character I think of as a Highlands Postal Service mailcarrier, which started off of a spontaneous doodle. I’d like to try developing\revisiting this, as it seemed to resonate with a lot of people. Below that are just a few other bits from this past 2 months.

Thank you for reading!
-Justin

Inspirational Links: