/loomis/ - Art Gains

I might be one of two atelier students on this board (and you might be the other one) so I don't know how far this thread will go, but I do have a handful of questions.

I guess I was just wondering, assuming you have experience with this, if you've found that there's any overlap between proficiency in relatively formal traditional drawing/painting and informal digital drawing/painting.

Vine charcoal or charcoal pencils?

What exercises and assignments did you do?

What is your weekly training schedule like, and how do you balance said training with other aspects of your life?

Oh shit. forgot to check this thread, sorry.

>>3322

Yeah definitely. The tools are different but if you focus on learning the principals behind the things you do, you can directly apply it to digital art. Understanding why you should unify the things not in light is equally applicable to drawing/painting from like it is to digital painting. So as long as you focus on the principals, I think it's completely transferable :)

>>3347

I go with neither. Compressed charcoal acts a little differently and it's not really to my liking. Most charcoal pencils are either too soft feeling or don't have a good range of values for me to feel comfortable with them. Vine charcoal and willow charcoal is often too soft for me and it is too powdery. It works well for large things and when you want to get really dark accents but for general drawing, I don't use it. It's also very prone to breaking and you can't really sharpen it too well.

I personally favour the "Nitram Académie Fusains" charcoal becaouse it gives you a tool that can act really consistently. It allows you to do a wide range of values in their basic H-B packs. It is also fairly hard compared to a lot of vine charcoal but it isn't super brittle. Nitram does something weird to their charcoal to make them really solid so you can get needle sharp points on them. I think almost all academic drawings are made with them now. They both allow you to work in large masses of value but it can also be sharpened to a needle point so you can make super intricate renderings. (fun note, the cast drawing on one of the packs was made by one of my instructors when they were in school).

The paper you use with your charcoal is also very important to how it behaves. For almost all charcoal drawings I use Roma paper. It's fairly expensive but it absorbs values beautifully and is extremely durable so you can spend weeks on a single drawing. It's fairly textured so you need to work on it for a while to make it smooth but I kinda like that. It gives you room to just focus on the visual impression (kinda what you see when squinting) in the beginning and then tighten it up over time.

>>3425

So the way ateliers are structured is that you have long term projects you work on and only move on once you've completed them to the satisfaction of the instructors. The instructors give you two critiques every day, one for the morning project and one for the afternoon project. We work on two projects at the same time, one made for you to focus on absorbing new information and this includes Bargue drawings, Cast drawings and so on. The other project is there to apply that knowledge you learned (as well as absorbing some new knowledge) and this is always long-pose figure drawing/painting. I am getting into the painting program so all of the drawing projects have been completed (so a bunch of Bargues, casts, figures and so on).

It's difficult to talk about them because when you're spending like 5 weeks on a drawing and you make 100 mistakes that you over time correct and instructors are guiding you through new and different ideas the project in of itself is more just something that facilitates an exploration and the value comes from trying things, making mistakes, fixing those mistakes, trying new things, getting critiqued in different ways and so on. So I can't really be like "these are the exercises I think artists you make" because the value doesn't just come from "doing" them, but rather the experience that went into them. You can often find the exact curriculum on a bunch of atelier sites, check out The Florence Academy of Art, The Swedish Academy of Realistic Art, Angel Academy of Art, Grand Central Atelier to see a general curriculum.

>>3431

My schedule has changed over time. For the first 6 months or so, I spent about 11 hours 5 days a week in the studio and 6 hours each day on the weekend. So my life was basically wake up, go to the studio, work, go home, eat something quick and go to bed. This certainly has it's value however I changed my habits quite a lot and made things a lot more efficient. My new schedule has for the most part been 7 hours every day and to make sure that those 7 hours are extremely focused and intense. Then, after those 7 hours, I am free to do whatever I want.

I've often tried to be very self aware. I know that there is a tendency in all of us to believe that if we don't rest, we won't be effective and this is true. However, our tendency tens to allow us to use this as an excuse to not work, making up arguments for ourselves not to push us as far as we can. I've really taken this seriously and for the first 6 months, this was something I actively avoided.

There is however another side of things that I tend to call the "I'm working hard" excuse. This basically boils down to us working really hard, putting in a lot of labour and using this as an excuse to not challenge ourselves. This was my problem. I spent all that time working, just grinding away but I didn't THINK about what I was doing. As long as I was grinding for long hour on end, I believed that it was the most valuable thing I could do. Now there is truth in that putting in a lot of work helps but just like our other example, this can also become an excuse.

What's the proper balance? well I don't know. I see a lot of people online that work really really hard but I see that they're working hard in one way (by doing a lot of work) but not in another way (thinking, reflecting, challenging one self, figuring things out, working effectively, focusing on how you work and so on). There is also the opposite case of a person that works every now and then but doesn't put enough pressure on each thing they do (and they also tend to miss a lot of the mental/intellectual side of things). It is difficult to know where you should be but I believe that the answer will be found by being self aware of how you heave and to think a lot about the things you are doing.

So back to my schedule. 7 hours hard core work every day. What do I do the rest of my time? Whatever I want. I often relax but at the same time, I often think about art. My mind is exploring all kinds of ideas and trying to figure out what I need to focus on, how I can change my way of working, what principals are behind the things I do and all kinds of stuff. This aspect of learning is very often neglected in favour of physically working all the time but I think it is very vital to one's learning. For me, this balance works very well. It allows me to separate the things I do and tackle them individually (one of the core ideas behind my approach to learning). I spend a lot of time thinking about drawing so that when I am in front of the drawing I'm working on, I can 100% focus in just working as hard as I can. I wouldn't want to brag too much but I believe my focus on thinking about all these things is what has made me the top student in my group and one of the top students overall at the atelier. I've won several "academic art" awards and so on and I would give most of the credit to my thinking of art rather than me just working at it.

It's probably a bit of a different answer than what you were looking for but I think it was probably the best and most honest way I could answer it :)

>>3459

Actually, that was a perfect answer.

Thank you!

>>3593

Not really, no. Maybe he had better works and this was just a stylistic experiment? Don't care enough to look into it. Bagging on shitty abstract artists is just as vapid a procrastination measure as dogging on shitty teenagers on deviantart tbh fam. Become the change you want to see in the world.

I'm new here. Holy shit this art sub is a gazillion better than that other chan.

>>4204

It's only dead when we stop posting, lad.

>>3317

is it just me or are this dudes legs misplaced?