The artistic self development adventure of Amit Dutta aka Monkeybread who, having chucked all caution to the wind, quit his job and only source of income for 3 months, embarks on a daring adventure full of travails, teachings and tantrums while striving towards the ultimate prize: becoming an Awesome Artist.

The Quest: To become an Awesome..er artist
The Deadline: 89 Days-ish
The Risk: Returns to job penniless and soul-destroyed with suckiness intact. Should be a laugh

Thursday 21 February 2013

Day 85-83

Well, I haven't really posted much in the last few days, not because I haven't been doing much, but because I'm coming to the realisation that posting the way I have been with a concise-ish theme to the post and honing it for readership, as well as having some nice work to show, is not going to work.

I kinda spend more time setting up posts than I think I should and is pretty much unsustainable especially if I'm to post work every day or so. 
I've also found that the schedule I have set for myself is actually pretty hard to stick to. Not so much in terms of the number of hours, but because I am a hideous procrastinator when I have self-scheduled stuff to do. I seem to need externally generated deadlines, or just work on what I want at the time. It's a bit worrying but I figure this is an experiment so I'm going to try and shift things around a bit so I'm a bit less stressed about not hitting exactly what was scheduled.

So, this is the first day of the new regime. To coincide with my more random nature, I will be posting whatever I do during the day...wips, sketches, finished pieces and the total rubbish...No holds barred...and not much blabbing either.  

Study from weekend not posted
Horned Lizard Study






















19-21/02
Morning Warm-up Sketch






















Arm Anatomy study and practice































WIP Character designs















Sketch playing for a Tomb Raider competition
I might enter


















































Sunday 17 February 2013

Day 85 : Streams

This weekend and next are probably the most social of my 3 month hermitage. I didn't actually get a whole lot done art wise for my liking, but I did achieve a few things which might make things a bit more interesting.

I finally managed to get my own Livestream channel working. Livestream is a website where anyone can setup a streaming media channel for free. Many artists use it to stream their desktops live while they work so people can come and have a look at their process, ask questions or just have a good old chat and hangout for a bit. 

Below is the 3.5hr stream condensed down to about 5 and a half minutes. Sorry for the annoying windows popping up all the time, I recorded with only the laptop; future ones will be dual monitor so only the painting will be captured. 




I finished the piece offline and the final result is below.

A stream from a stream
Besides the sketchathon I don't often view other people's streams because, well I've got too much I need to do on my own painting to hang about watching other people paint but I can see how it could be really inspiring watching amazing work come together in real time.

Speaking of sketchathons, here is a collage of some of the stuff from the most recent one last night/early this morning. I seem to be staying up for these later and later each time. 10.30pm - 5.30am and up by 9.30am again.

Skull Island













Asian inspired Palace Entrance


























Ferrari inspired Mech



Female assassin (yep female: total fail on my part)












Thursday 14 February 2013

Day 86-ish

Once again I have been stymied by life and things one has to deal with that seem to serve no purpose but to be annoying. Ok, I sound whiney. so enough of that, and just a quick post today.

This is the only thing I had time to work on today. You may remember a work in progress I posted a couple of posts back for a weekly environment challenge. This is the final version.

The ship underwent countless design iterations, and I ended up settling for something quite symmetrical and familiar despite my best attempts. Quite disappointed with it. The sun turned out pretty well i think...that study really helped!




Today wasn't a total loss because I finally managed to join up at the library as I am now able to be out during business hours!  So I got my fingers on James Gurney's Imaginative Realism book and pretty much blasted through it in an hour or so. The verdict: It's pretty good.  There is quite a bit of insight into his process which are applicable to any illustrator.  The most interesting thing for me was the in depth research and reference process he seems to go through for each painting and his liberal use of quickly built maquettes and lights to play with and determine lighting .  I'm considering actually giving this a go for the more polished pieces I end up doing for the folio. Yayy for play with clay.



Monday 11 February 2013

Day 87: Concept World + Sketchathons

Concept World Sketchathons

I have been an admin on the deviantArt group ConceptWorld for probably over a year now. If you don't know. deviantArt is probably the largest online art community there is mainly because it caters to everybody.  There are professionals posting their work alongside pre pubescent teenagers.  While this is wonderfully inclusive it also means it can be a little random and overwhelming and have a distinctly amateurish flavour in parts, which isn't a bad thing but just the nature of the site. This is where groups come in.

The ConceptWorld group focuses on promoting deviant user's concept artwork. The goal isn't to be exclusive but we do aim at promoting stuff that hits a "decent" level of finish based on some clear criteria. We think of it as a skill based goal for the less experienced newbies to aspire to get into the galleries and judge their own progress by. We showcase art of people who aspire to be professional concept artists one day as well as the work of many who are already pros. For me personally the best thing about the group is being able to provide critique on young or starting artists' work and feel like I'm really doing something concrete to help them along their own journey. Warm fuzzies.

I generally have been winding down on my admin duties to take up this crusade of mine, but one of the great things that I still love to take part in when I can are the weekly hosted Sketchathons. These are run every Sunday using a combination of livestream and google hangouts and are hosted by the group creator and one of my first good internet-only art mates, Gagan, who goes by the online alterego gdsworld. He really deserves to be mentioned because of the awesome effort he goes to, completely unpaid, to host these every week. He's often up for fifteen hours straight making sure things keep ticking.

Anyway these are my sketches from Sunday's session. Each are done between thirty minutes and an hour. Everyone gets to see and comment on each other's work no matter what the skill level and basically good times are had by all. Because of the time difference with NZ I tend to miss most of it, but I only slept three hours last night because this time was a blast! Best thing is, I always feel so productive after one of these.





ConceptWorld Sketchathons
When  : GMT 9am - 10pm or thereabouts

If you have a sketchy tendency come along and give it a go. 

Yawn..coffee number three needed before getting back to some painting...Day 86 beckons

Day 86 and a half:

The loss of power

I refuse to count today as a full day. 

I wake up at 6.30am after 3 hours of sleep to continue in the sketchathon and painted further till 12pm.  Lunch and a quick three coffees later I hop back into the hunched screen monkey pose, only to discover that the power is gone. I eke out a tense 20 minutes on the cheap replacement battery, hoping.  Surely it would come back? Likely it was just a momentary glitch as always. 

Half an hour passes, and the anxiety starts to set in; visions of an entire afternoon spent without the pixel arranger in operation.  
45 minutes, a bead of sweat dribbles down my  temple. 
1 hour, Horror. Panic is setting in; but just as I am resigned to doing something practical and non art related, I suddenly remember, I can draw!  

I scrabble around in cupboards flinging boxes aside. The dog watches me quizzically and joins in the hunt. He's not helping.

Finally I find it. I blow the dust off the bag that contain my sketchbooks, pencils, pens and other traditional stuff. Busting out ye old parchment and etching sticks I get down to some studies.

After producing the two monstrosities on the right, I started to get really really scared. Had I lost all my drawing skills by doing so much digital stuff? I called the electric company. 
"Get someone out here right away please and check things out." 
"You understand that will be a $145 charge if the fault is at your end? "  
"Fine fine, I don't care, my future as an artist is at stake here" 

With nothing to be done I sit back down whip out a history of Art book that weighs more than I did as a five year old and flick through to the Hellenistic period. I pick the Altar at  Pergamum and for two hours or so sit down and do a study of a sculptural detail.

Thank the Gods! This is slightly better. The anxiety lessens somewhat. 

The power comes back on.


I Immediately boot up the old ordinateur to do a digital study and get my pixel fix. A study from photo ref of Big Dog frolicking on the beach.  Isn't technology grand?


















One thing this has taught me is to remember that even as a predominantly digital artist, drawing the old fashioned way in a sketchbook is really important. Drawing by wielding an implement directly on the final surface is fundamental to be able to do any kind of illustrative art work, including digital. It exercises those hand eye coordination skills in a way you cannot on a graphics tablet, and the results are noticeably different. You also end up with a unique object at the end of it and not a digitised bit form that can be reproduced with the click of a button.  
It's also tons of fun.



Saturday 9 February 2013

Day 88: Texture spheres

Texture Spheres

It is of course obvious that the moment I decide to take time off and concentrate on doing nothing but painting and drawing, a whole bunch of life-admin related stuff comes chugging along one after the other. I also got more invites and options to do social things in the last two weeks than I had in the entire year of working.  I'm not complaining....well maybe a little bit.

Anyway so with that lame excuse over with for lack of demonstrable productivity, here are some material studies. 



I loved doing these little material balls. They were fairly quick to do and really helped me get a feel for the material without needing to do a whole illustration or photo study. I did look at a bunch of reference photos before I started them, but I painted them from memory to really activate the learning centre of my brain. I assume there is one in there somewhere.

I highly recommend this process to any learning artists reading this. Expect to see more of these. Oh and that is bunny fur apparently.

I'm also working on a brief was taken from the environment of the week (EoW) challenge over at Conceptart.org.  The brief is a probe or vessel entering the planetary system orbiting the Gliese red dwarf star system You'll probably guess what that first material study in the line from before is supposed to be in aid of now. 
I took some liberties with proximity of the planet to the sun, but if we can ignore the ridiculousness of time travel in movies we can ignore this.  This is the work in progress as it stands. Speaking of faster than light travel I really need to engage my super-hermit drive and get harder nosed or I'm only going to get halfway to awesome.





Wednesday 6 February 2013

Day 89: Hands

Anatomy Wednesdays: Hands

As Wednesday is anatomy day in my schedule, I decided to do studies of something I haven't explicitly studied in the past having always intuitively been able to get to a fair representation, granted with a bit of effort and the old tongue poking out. So what better time to bite the bullet and lessen that effort with some hand studies.

Hands are one of the most expressive parts of the body, second only to the face; probably first if you're Italian.  

For an illustrator dynamic expressive hands are essential to being able to give added cues to the emotional state of your characters. They also need them to wield large guns, and hang from the nostrils of dragons and cast spells bewitching hapless heroes and so forth. They are always an area of focus that can cause difficulties so they are deserving of some attention.

I don't want to turn this blog into a tutorial because for one there are much better resources out there doing just that. However for me the key trick lies in knowing the large general shapes that make up the hand and working from that down to the individual fingers. The general shape I still use to start with in my head is a mit. No not myself, an actual mit; it simplifies things down before you start thinking about individual digits. Loomis's technique of using simple planes can get you further...after that knowing the anatomy is essential to add realism.

As the cliche beret wearing master french painter mentor in my head says, "You cannot zust look at ze hand! You must hear it's pulse, you must feel ze tendons pulling and ze skin stretching over bone, ze muscles flexing and ze fat pads zey bulge...you must feel ze grip of my hand on your throat if you draw another rubbish clawed monstrosity."

ermm ok so with that scary dip into my head here are some studies working from the bones out. I used several anatomy books aimed at artists to study from by Gottfried Bammes, Loomis and Burne Hogarth. Bridgeman is of course fantastic as well, but one can only do so much. 



PS. this stuff takes longer than I expected and I haven't really hit my routine as well as planned. I am already thinking about re-jigging my daily work schedule, not in total hours but in how I split it up. 

Also I have been thinking about adding a list of the resources I always end up going to for studies, reference, inspiration etc down the side...holler in the comments if you'd find it useful.

Sunday 3 February 2013

Daily Draw Feb 3



The original mess of a 3 minute sketch. For a pretty bland static pose it had some elements of dynamism about it...well the flag anyway. 
For informal fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants type painting this rough gesture sketch is all I really need to start off what will become a finished painting..
















An interim stage. The colour palette has been mostly worked out, and a bit of design work is now coming in to the character



















And the final. Probably finished in single digit hours over the course of a day. The colour palette works but I think I went a little overboard with the contrasty lighting . I definitely prefer some of the softer elements of the material and design work on the jacket in the previous image. I thought I had lost some dynamism in the sketch somewhere along the way, but I actually think I improved the pose which was way hunch-y. It's still a bit stiff but that can be massaged away.

With things like this which aren't fully planned out there are often some small elements of the image I really like. For this one it's that little bit of red bounce light off the rug and maybe the general idea of the headpiece.  






Saturday 2 February 2013

Daily Draw February


Entry for Day 2 : Here Kitty Kitty...

Daily Draw February

The online art community and gallery website SatelliteSoda.com hosts a daily draw challenge for the month of February each year. Each day you have to post at least one drawing, sketch, illustration that you have been working on that day. I hadn't heard of it before but a friend challenged me take part and as I was planning to be drawing bucket loads every day anyway I figured I could easily jump in with no extra fuss.

A lot of people on the site view it as a challenge. As I have been drawing daily for over a year now since I became really serious about improving my skills, I do admit to a tad bit of smugness on how easy I think this will be for me. 

All artists, whatever section of the skill improvement trail they are hiking on, know well the importance of practice. If you are new to the whole idea of a practice regimen, these kind of things are great to get involved in so I urge you to check it out. The great thing about daily draw challenges like these is that they provide a social forum, some support and a bit of an ass-kicking as well to get in that practice. It's also always heartening and infectious to see the excitement of people doing what they love and some of whom maybe aren't as smug in their diligence as I am. 

I also coincidentally discovered a February Sketchbook Challenge Facebook page. Guess I'll post up in there too. 



89 days to what?

So what's this blog all about then?



Old Pencil Sketch from High School.
In a nutshell. Artistic improvement. 
When I first decided to teach myself how to illustrate 5 years ago, I didn't really know what that meant and if I had known how long the journey would be I may have thought twice!

What I did know was that I was creative. 
I knew I could draw but hadn't done it for almost 15 years since those pencil sketches for art class in secondary school (high school). 
I knew I had just turned 30 and I wasn't getting any younger waiting around for stuff to happen.

I knew I actually had to start taking action if I wanted to get anywhere.


Beginnings...


I bought my first Wacom tablet in 2007. I was right out of Uni (2nd degree) and unemployed at the time so I remember umming and ahhing about the price tag which I think was somewhere around four hundred Australian dollars. Incidentally that tablet is still the one I use. Go Intuos 3! 


Hear Kitty Roar
I had to dig around in the e-closet to find the first digital sketch I did with it of Kitty, my cat at the time. Actually it was a sketch of a photo I took of Kitty; my first real study now that I think of it. 

You may be fooled in thinking that it isn't that bad and that I must have had some skill even then. Even I must have been impressed with myself because I had the gall to sign it. 

I totally faked it. Oh I did both of them alright but they are faked because while they both are fairly accurate to the photos I was drawing from, replication isn't at all what makes up artistic skill.

I could churn out a decent cat from reference but if you asked me to draw one from my imagination that would have been a totally different game. 

Artistic ability like many creative crafts is about understanding the importance of and mastering fundamentals, in this case encompassed in line and action, gesture and anatomy, form and perspective, value and colour theory. Making these second nature is imperative and this can only be be achieved with incredible amounts of practice. Incredible amounts. 
Some may have heard of Gladwell's theory in the book Outliers about needing 10,000 hours of practice in order to become an expert at anything. That's probably conservative. 

Since the days of the cat drawing I dedicated some of my free time to art on top of the day job and whatever else was going down, but it was generally pretty aimless. I did get better, albeit slowly. In early 2011 about 24 months ago after a long-term relationship went kaput I did a major re-evaluation of where I was heading. With the whole lot of free time I now had I decided to do at least one sketch or digital doodle a day. I mostly kept to it. I began to see improvements more quickly, but I was still just painting whatever I wanted to paint with no real focus.

Focusing in, burning out.


Volume 1 - White Cloud Worlds
Volume 1 of White Cloud Worlds
16 months ago I went to a 2 day weekend concept design workshop in Wellington. It was run under the White Cloud Worlds name, a New Zealand concept art and fantasy illustration art book started by the awesome Weta senior concept artist and great teacher Paul Tobin. He doesn't update his blog that often but that's because he's too busy doing things like designing Orcrist, Thorin Oakenshield's sword for the Hobbit, amongst other things. The equally awesome illustrator Ben Wooten was also teaching there.  If you are a budding concept designer or illustrator in New Zealand, I highly recommend these workshops for intensity of learning and value for money. The next ones should be coming up in March 2013 but they haven't been announced just yet.

That was where it all kicked off in earnest for me.  Concept designing was a process I thoroughly enjoyed, could see myself doing for many many hours in a day, and may even be able pay me a decent salary to do it if I got lucky enough to convince someone I could do it! I really needed to get clocking on my 10,0000 hours.

After that I spent 3-4 hours a night dedicated to improving, all after an 8 hour work day. A quick calculation showed that at that rate and not counting my already clocked hours, it would take me....9.62 years to get to 10,000!!!  I began to paint on the weekends. I had little to no social life. I wangled some flexibility at work to go down to a 4 day work week, mostly due to the most awesome manager ever. I'm not saying that just because he may be reading this, but seriously, my manager can beat your manager, any day, easy.

I even started getting some freelance jobs here and there for Indie game companies and some graphic novel concept stuff, but nothing major. I was running on an average of 5 hours of sleep a night for 8 months. I improved even quicker still but it just wasn't sustainable. I burned out and couldn't paint anything for weeks! I needed more time...and there just wasn't enough around. 
It was around this time that an idea started fermenting away in my head. I needed a good chunk of solid exclusive time to dedicate only to levelling up my skill, maybe a few months even, But how was that going to be possible?

Barrelling in.


Greg Broadmore holding his Victorious Mongoose
The final push came from something Greg Broadmore said at a week long concept design workshop I attended in September 2012. Greg is another incredible Weta concept designer responsible for way too much cool sh*t for me to mention without me soiling myself. 

He had talked about how when he was younger he was off and on the work benefit for a while and had become disillusioned with his life. He then took all his savings from working part time at a video rental store and for 3 months did nothing but draw every day and finish his first comic. The comic eventually became his folio of sorts which nailed him the job at Weta, though I'm sure his down to earth nature and even more awesome beard had more to do with it. 
Bing! 
That did it. I had forgotten that I had savings too! I was in. 3 months was perfect, the risk was addressed in my head and I was ready. Now I just had to convince my boss. Did I mention he was awesome? 


750-ish, but who's counting?


This long ramble of which I promise there will be much less of in future postings, leads me to the here and now. I have 3 months of dedicated time. I do still have all my outgoings and I will be living on nothing but savings. Who needs years of savings anyway if not for moments just like these? 
In this time I plan on working 10 hour days, 6 days a week. That should equate to about 750 hours, less than a tenth of a good 10,000. Not that I think 10,000 is a be all or end all figure but it is a nice motivational touch-point to keep the rack tightening.  Speaking of racks, my weekly schedule for the next 89 days:





The timetable is ambitious to say the least. I will be focusing on my fundamentals and studies as well as running through the concept design process every day to simulate a studio environment and also hopefully land some new pieces into my portfolio. 

Oh and there is the "little" add-on of a finished comic, graphic story, whatever you want to call it. I want to test my skill as a story teller, apply myself to a decent length project of my own and have a finished product at the end of it to boot. From my burning out last year I realise the importance of balance and healthy eating, sleeping, socialising and exercise periods have been built in.

I am hoping this will stand not only as a journal of my journey, my process, my improvement but hopefully also as a source of my learning's in general and as inspiration to people like the 5-year-ago me, with desire in bucket loads but not a clue as to how to go about the next steps.

So I hope you will come along with me; the path upwards is narrow and unrelenting but the days are yet long and bright and the way is well marked.

Amit