Finger Painting

Label Artwork

Entry posted by Nathan Strum March 25, 2011

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So I'm working on a few labels for homebrews. Well, three homebrews and one reproduction. But the reproduction might as well be a homebrew, because there's no established precedent for its artwork, so we (Dave Dries and I) can just do whatever we want.

Anyway... so I've started sketching and looking through art books for inspiration, and as happens quite often with artwork, I hate pretty-much everything I'm drawing.

It happens. It's a frustration which stems from not being able to draw other peoples' styles as well as they do. Which of course is to be expected, since I'm not them. I don't have their training, talent, background or experiences. My skill set is different.

The trick is, finding a happy compromise between my style, and the style I'm trying to rip off emulate.

It does take some time though, because to mimic a particular style, even to a small degree, takes time to break down the style, and learn it well enough to get away with something that bears a passing (and not embarrassing) resemblance to the original. Something that says, "Ah... he was inspired by such-and-such, and made it his own," rather than "That talentless hack shouldn't have even made the attempt in the first place."

Inevitably, this process results in bad drawings. Lots of them. It's part of the process. Trial and error. The problem is when the bad drawings become more of a source of frustration than merely a part of that process. Then drawing tends to lose its fun, and I have to step away from it. Sometimes I step away from it for a few hours. Maybe a few days. Or weeks. Or months.

Once I stepped away from it for years. But that's another story.

This story is about the present, and more to the point - about bad drawings.

Oddly enough, some of my favorite drawings that I've done are "bad drawings". They tend to be quick sketches, usually cartoons, where something stupid happens, because at the moment I drew it, something struck me as being funny. They capture a moment better than drawings that I labor over for months. Some still make me laugh.

So when I found myself getting frustrated yesterday, I decided I needed to loosen up, and just draw something stupid. Just to remind myself, drawing is supposed to be fun, and even if I can't at the moment draw what I want to, I can still draw. Even if it's a bad drawing... just draw.

I have entire sketchbooks filled with bad drawings. Admittedly, most of them weren't intentionally bad. :roll:

I also have a bunch of half-empty sketchbooks sitting around, waiting to be filled with more bad drawings. But I've had a really hard time committing ideas to paper for some reason lately. Not sure why... something about the permanency of it. I'm very bad about throwing away bad drawings, or any drawings for that matter. And I don't particularly like revisiting really bad ones. So I guess the problem is - I'm hesitant to produce work that's going to sit there in a stack in the corner of my room, mocking me.

So I decided to try something different. Something completely non-permanent. I needed to break down the process of drawing right back to it's most fundamental experience. Even using a graphics tablet on my Mac didn't work to break me out of my funk, because the results weren't any better than what I had been doing on paper, and I still wasn't able to loosen up enough to just, well... scribble.

All of that coincided with something else that happened yesterday - I went to a Mac store. I had to pick up an iMac we had repaired for work.

While I was there, I noticed they had styluses for iPhones and iPads. I bought Autodesk's SketchBook Mobile for my iPhone awhile ago, but had never really done anything with it, since trying to draw precisely with my finger was pretty futile. So I tried the styluses out. One was small and lightweight, one was milled out of aluminum and very chunky, and neither were really any better than drawing with my finger. The problem is, for a capacity stylus to work, the end of it has to be about as large as a pencil eraser or Q-tip. And that's exactly what using the styluses were like - very imprecise, kind of squishy, and I also had to press pretty hard for them to work. So a stylus just wasn't going to work.

So when I got home that night, I decided I might as well try drawing with my finger on my iPhone. Nothing permanent about that. And certainly nothing that I could afford to get fussy over, due to the completely imprecise nature of it.

And so... I just scribbled. I made one or two attempts to get started, erasing everything, until I just started scribbling the stupidest-looking human I could. (Drawing humans has always been particularly vexing for me, and three of the labels I'm working on feature humans. Smart move there. :roll: ) Maybe I felt like an idiot, or felt that all I could draw was an idiot... so I drew an idiot.

And a funny thing happened... I started enjoying it. I started using the tools in Sketchbook Mobile to zoom in, put in cross-hatching and detail, added layers with color and shading, and actually had fun drawing this stupid-looking guy. Another bad drawing, but in a good way.

Tonight, still at loggerheads with drawing what I wanted to be drawing, I returned to my iPhone, and decided to see if I could draw something Syd Mead-esque, since I'd picked up his Sentury II book for inspiration for the labels I'm working on. I figured chrome and metal was a good place to start since those are fairly easy to do, and look good if you can pull them off. So I drew a little semi-futuristic car. It actually turned out pretty good, for not having my usual slate of drawing tools available (and I've been drawing cars longer than anything, so it was challenging to not have a larger canvas).

Speaking of larger canvases, these have been reduced to the resolution of my iPhone's screen (480 x 320), but the software itself actually makes the documents at 1024 x 682, so there's enough resolution to zoom in and add some reasonable detail.

By this time, I'd figured on posting these to my blog, so I decided I'd better do something videogame-related. And thus... Pac-Man.

So now, I'm finally starting to loosen up again. The next step will be taking this back to the world of paper, and moving on from there. But I think I'm going to keep my iPhone handy... just in case.