The procedure I’m undergoing involves teensy incisions rather than enormous ones, so I won’t have to worry about completely immobilizing my chest. But I’ll be really sore, so I probably won’t be able to use my arms as much as I’m used to. I’m hoping to use the several days of relative incapacitation to read up on painting technique (and watch two whole seasons of Deadwood), since I’ve been using the same brushstrokes for a few years now. I call my method the Lazy-Ass Loaded-Brush Alla-Prima Technique. It impresses the hell out of my teachers until they realize that I’m a one-trick painter.
As a first step in shaking up my skills, I’ve checked two books out of the library. They’re a study in contrasts. The first one is a whole book on brushstrokes and nothing but brushstrokes. It’s ridiculously detailed, full of passages like this:
Load a precise bead of paint on the chiseled tip. Holding the handle perpendicular to the canvas and barely touching the paint to the surface, pull the brush in line with the chiseled tip.
He details something like a dozen different ways of loading paint onto a brush. There are special ways of cleaning your brush–e.g. the one that creates a “chiseled tip”–so as to shape it to create yet more variations on brushstrokes.
The other book, which is all about doing cool shit to make your paintings look all artsy and shit (I think the basic technique is sketchy brushstrokes with ragged bristle brushes, plus painting bright-colored objects against “chiaroscuro” backgrounds), employs the opposite didactic strategy. You might be familiar with it from your childhood, when you might have tried to draw from books with titles like Learn to Draw Farm Animals! or Learn to Draw Marvel Comics Superheroes! Remember? Those books where there are five simple steps followed by a fall off a sheer rock face? You’re supposed to transition seamlessly from “Composition of Small Egg Shape with Larger Egg Shape” to “Wolverine Battling Juggernaut” or “Chestnut Mare with Foal,” or whatever.
This book is full of passages like this:
PRACTICE EXERCISE: PAINTING THE PORTRAIT
Step One: Tone Your Canvas. I like to use a translucent mixture of Raw Umber and Terre Verte, with dashes of Burnt Ochre.
Step Two: Block Out Your Subject. Using Raw Umber heavily diluted with medium, sketch out the general shapes of head, neck, and shoulders. “Do not think of drawing in linear terms. There should be no finesses now.”*
Step Three: Fill in Your Canvas. Hack the background color in there using broad, loose brushstrokes. Draw in the shadow-planes of the face. Don’t forget the shadow above the chin!
Step Four: Paint Everything Else. Using a variety of brushstrokes and paint textures and colors, finish your painting.
Et voila! Girl with a Pearl Earring!
The advice is in the form of obvious information that’s self-explanatory from the illustrations (“It’s important to do a careful drawing of your subject before starting on the painting”) and random tips that aren’t useful without more detailed structural advice on how he got the paint to do that (“A shadow on the underside of the stomach should follow the curve of the stomach”). These are interspersed with pretentious-old-fart platitudes that are pretty much useless to people who aren’t already possessed of technical skill: “Light is the melody. It moves, rises, and falls in intensity.”*
*Verbatim.
Between the two of them, I’m hoping they’ll be helpful.
Man, those excerpts remind me of engineering text books that I wrestled with in college. The first excerpt reminds me of books where dense strings of technical jargon are linked together in such a fashion that it takes five minutes just to digest a small paragraph.
Come to think of it, this reminds me of my brief and somewhat unpleasant encounter with the book Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. I never finished that book. In fact, I put it down somewhere in the middle of chapter one. Bitch Lab does a great job translating many of the passages, though.
The second excerpt reminds me of those text books which start out with a few basic equations, mumble a few sentences vaguely describing the manipulation of those equations, and ends with an equation that bears no obvious resemblance or relationship to the first series of equations. You just sit there thinking to yourself, “Oh yeah, if I had a doctorate in mathematics, I too would find that derivation to be oooooh so simple. Unfortunately, I’m an undergraduate you stupid twit!”
I loved the “Draw Marvel Comics” book. I didn’t know anyone else had it… :)
My favorites were the Ed Emberley Fingerprint Books.
Those were so awesome.
Hey, I was gonna mention Ed Emberly too!
I was more interested in his “Big (color) Drawing Books”, myself.
I also read that “Draw Comics the Marvel Way” book, (Which has been a staple for about thirty years), and I still draw like that.
Another good one was Mark Kistler’s (Of the Draw Squad) book.
No time for crummy drawing books during my childhood!