Am I Lazy??? Here's 20 drawings - Why Am I Making This? Issue #8
Hey pals,
I was on the phone with a friend the other day, talking about art and feeling tired and feeling busy. I kept saying how lazy I felt - about working on an unfinished painting, or starting a new illustration. She responded that she doesn’t think I’m a lazy person at all. I do a lot of art and have a full-time job!
That’s true, isn’t it? I actually do a lot of things. But I still think of myself as quite a lazy person. Maybe this is subconscious self-criticism, but I really don’t mean it in a self-deprecating way when I say it. I think I probably mean it in a bit of a rebellious way.
Especially in art, I see a lot of people (online, at least) that talk about how hard they had to work to get where they are. That to succeed, you need to live and breathe your passion, work at it nonstop. That learning to be a better artist isn’t easy, it’s hard work - and if you’re the kind of person who tries to cut corners in your pursuit of artistic improvement, you just don’t have what it takes to make it. I’m not exactly sure what they’re imagining when they talk about trying to “make it” (whatever they did, I guess - as a commercial illustrator, gallery artist, or someone in the film/animation/game industry), but this kind of talk rankles me.
In some industries (academia and video games are the first ones that come to mind), there’s a lot of competition for jobs combined with a lot of people who are ultra-passionate about their work. This, at least from the outside, seems to create incredibly toxic environments where it’s easy to exploit and overwork people. They’re passionate! They would do anything for this! So why shouldn’t people have to work nonstop!
There have been moments in my life where I have wanted to be that kind of passionate person (about academia, or art), but I always end up realizing I don’t want to be exploited and overworked because of what I love. I guess that’s what I mean when I say I’m lazy, and I say it as a (possibly misguided) badge of pride. But it’s probably a bit of a confusing thing to say to other people! Maybe I should let it go. Much to think about.
Anyway, that’s been my navel-gazing for this newsletter. I’m Julien, by the way. I write this newsletter once a month about the art I've been up to. I am an artist, just not a crazy hardworking one. Maybe an appropriately hardworking one. Not sure.
What I’ve been up to
I truly have, in my heart, been feeling very lazy. I have a few big projects I’ve been turning over in my head, but I haven’t worked on them much, and I’m not sure when or whether I will. I’ve been too lazy to think about it. (I do think I might use my high-and-mighty idea of laziness to self-sabotage my more ambitious ideas.)
Despite that, I guess art has become enough of a habit that I still draw all the time, just miscellaneous stuff. I have drawn a lot of miscellaneous stuff on the iPad since I last wrote - 21 things, I think? So I’m going to share them all here with brief annotations.
1-2. These two are studies of Italian landscapes from photos by Jenn Ravenna Tran. I started playing with a few brushes from Sadie Lew's Drawing Box brush set with these, with mixed effects. I also realized how few times I have tried hard at drawing a busy town scene, and that if I want to be good at them, I need to do some more careful studies!
3. An experiment trying to do a "stylized illustration", inspired by some of my punchneedle embroideries - not really happy with how it came out, but it is something I'd like to be able to do more effectively.
4. Zagreus on a hike! I settled on one of the pencil brushes from the brush set above, and was really excited about how it looked in this picture. I was also excited to rediscover some old photos I have of some friends hiking in England, and find new life in them as drawing references.
5. Lumity. You might remember some fanart of Luz and Amity from The Owl House that I did last year, and I wanted to try doing a digital version of one of the scenes from the show that I drew before. I was so excited that I was able to draw it so much better! I felt like I was really starting to get a glimpse of how I could do good digital drawings, after this one.
6. Carole and Tuesday and Angela - other characters I've mentioned before, from the show Carole and Tuesday. Another scene redraw of a moment at the end of the show that really melted my heart. I made this my phone lock screen, so I see it all the time.
7. Favorite characters of 2020. This picture made me feel powerful. These are many of the fandoms that brought me much-needed enthusiasm last year, and I was so excited that I have the burgeoning ability to draw them all together in one picture and feel proud of it. I have a bright future ahead of me drawing fanart that is tailor-made for me.
8. Golden Sun! This is a video game from my childhood that I hadn't thought much about in years. But there was a speedrun of it at the beginning of the month during Awesome Games Done Quick, and I wanted to draw these characters... for the first time ever, probably? I even took reference photos of myself pointing/gesturing upwards so I could attempt to draw their poses properly. And I played around with putting a little paper texture in this one.
9. Houndoom with halftones. There's an artist on twitter whose style I adore, and I wanted to try to learn to use halftones to shade like they do... to no great effect, here, but oh well.
10. Another copy of a twitter artist I admire. I'd love to be able to bust out this rainbowy style whenever I felt like it. Here's their original.
11. Another study from an artist on twitter - but this one is from a photo. The sense of atmosphere is okay but I don't think I controlled the edges and color changes that well. Also, as everyone says, cars are hard to draw.
12-14. Figure drawing - some miscellaneous figure studies I did from photos while watching TV. Works alright as some light practice. I used some more of the halftone and texture brushes to color some of these, and liked how they looked a bit better...
15. Crystal studies. Who doesn't love a drawing of a shiny crystal. I want to be able to put random crystals in illustrations (think Sam Bosma's backgrounds for Steven Universe, or the crystals from the third Pokemon movie...)
16-18. Raikou, Entei, and Suicune! I drew this set of three Pokemon to try to apply some of the lessons I'd learned from the previous studies (rainbow coloring, crystals, etc). I'm really happy with how they turned out!
19. Xatu with halftones. I was slightly more successful here than with Houndoom, but it's still kind of a struggle to get these halftones right. I ought to try to find a video of someone applying halftones digitally to try to learn a good process for it. Or maybe my drawing/composition is just not working.
20. Eugénie, from Dépanneur Nocturne, a gorgeous little micro-game from KO_OP games. I played it in about an hour one evening a few weeks ago and was so dazzled that I had to draw this magical salamander character. Something interesting happened here - I was really disappointed by my initial pass with colors, but as I added on more layers of color manipulation, I managed to get close to the effect I had been looking for in the beginning. I think this ability - to edit and tweak until I have something I like - is one of the things I'm least able to do well, and if I can figure out how to get better at it, I'll really be able to make more art I'm proud of.
21. A cover for a friend's fanfic, Wandersword. I would love to try designing more covers! I did a cover about three years ago for a friend's self-published novel, Long Steady Distance, and had fun with that too - I always think I should practice more covers and I never do! Maybe this is the year.
22. More practice in iridescence, this time it's a coat. Being able to draw shiny, iridescent clothing... what a dream. I'll get there!
23. A Pokemon-themed redraw of a scene from Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea. I've been watching a lot of Ghibli movies lately and I think Ponyo is among the most beautiful. But I'd love to study scenes from a lot more of those films, too...
That's it! It was fun to look back through all of those, and I feel like I did learn quite a bit over the past month. Writing these newsletters has made me much more able to make sense of my art progress, so thank you for enabling them.
What’s next?
I might continue to plunk away at one or two of my big project ideas. But those will be simmering without much of interest to show you for months yet, I think.
What you’re likely to hear about next month, then, are two online art classes I’ve just started this past week. One is in fundamentals of illustration, and the other is about drawing caricatures. I think there might be some interesting tidbits to come from them! I haven’t done an art class with homework for years. Or maybe ever? So I’m interested to see how I feel about them, and I expect that they’ll take up most of my art time for the next couple months. But then, who knows what else will have grabbed my attention!
As always, thanks for hanging out with me. If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them. Talk to you in a month!
Love, Julien