Hi Everybody !
...The TinyTorials!
Which hopefully I will never run out of ideas and techniques to bring (because believe me... I got few!). And my idea is to show the process of thinking through the step by step of an artwork.
What I want to priorize is the thinking over the beauty of the artwork itself. Because if you can conceive the proper way of thinking over the piece, you will understand what step goes before each another. But most importantly: why it goes in that order and why you should go that way.
The Four Stages of the Design
And their order! Which is in fact even more important than the elements by themselves. And this is something that you may actually have heard until oblivion:
Because if you start with the rendering before even blocking up your drawing, then you are in trouble. Follow the steps:
The Rhythm
The Rhythm is simply one of the main things that stops a beginner from being a high quality artist. The rhythm is what makes your artwork to look dynamic and interesting. It makes it feel alive and is the difference between a static, boring, just informative artwork and a well-realized, appealing (assuming that the design and everything else is on point) and high quality one.
It is what will define the base of the base to get started with the work of art. It is the ground under the base of your building.
The Blocking
As we saw that the rhythm defines the direction, dynamic and most of time times even the spirit and attitude of our subject in the artwork, the Blocking is needed to start defining the subject itself. Because if I put two lines, even if the rhythm is just on point, we won't really know what the fuzz is all about. So we need to define what we are talking about, what is our subject. Which in this case, it is a dragon's head.
The blocking will ensure that our subject, character, prop, landscape or whatever you want to place on the canvas, will be well displayed and, therefore, will be adapted to the perspective, the rest of the subjects (if there is any) and the composition of the current canvas dimentions and features/specifics.
The Silhouette
The Silhouette and Shape is one step further into the rendering realm. It is a very important pillard as well due to the fact that the human eye reads shapes and silhouettes in nature. All for the sake of recognizing predators, sources of food (such as trees, bushes, you name it), or even hazards in the environment. And since we are all making art for other humans, this is something pretty important.
The silhouette should be able to speak by itself. If I put a silhouette here and ask you what do you think this is...
...Maybe you will not know exactly what it is, but the features it shows (such as, in this case, the sharp shape of the horns and/or thorns) are for sure telling you that this may not be a very friendly being.
This is how important silhouette and shapes in general are. They have the potential of trigering some very primitive and strong response on the viewer, which is a resource that you for sure will want to use on your artworks. After all, art is for making people feel deep things, right?
The Rendering
The Rendering. Oh that precious bastard chocolate that everyone wants to devour before the dinner but once you realize what you have done you have an instant regret. This is, I think, what totally defines a beginner artist from a professional, and sometimes even professional artists fall in front of it (Or maybe I haven't get rid of my beginner category yet!).
When you start rendering and making things virtually appealing since before you even blocked in, then you are in trouble. Because you will be drawing things in the air. This is comparable to serving a cup of coffee without the cup... there is simply nothing where to put the coffee!
Even if this haven't been painted, you can see what I mean with rendering. You don't even need to paint something in order to render the shit out of it :3
So next time you try to jump between steps, remember an advice from this not-so-old fellow: Fuck no! Don't do that! Been there and you will regret for ages!
(All the images are my own creation and therefore I own their rights)
This post was first made on Whaleshares.io and you can see it here
