Hey.. what happened to Part 1? Well.. that happened on my last home vacation and mostly on twitter.
This year I started again with doing art stuff and got right into it..
Doesn’t make much sense in both directions, but that’s names, I guess..
Agitprop
Somehow got into the idea of recreating agitprop like abstract thingies with SVG and modern, more hipsterish people instead of soviet working populace. Just something about the style, I guess..
First results are mixed, I’d say.. Result is so so, but I think I learned a lot doing it.
Drawing-Stuff on Youtube
I keep watching a lot of drawing and painting related tutorials on youtube and one of them is Alphonso Dunn’s channel on drawing things. I was trying to get into a more inky workflow and maaybe considering getting into actual coal drawings, but then I got stuck on my inability to draw and I watched a lot of stuff on Alphonso’s channel about cross-hatching but also other stuff. Like basic kind of lines, purpose of these lines etc. The cross-hatching went so so, I still have to learn a lot there I think, both on a physical level of actually doing it on my graphics tablet as well as reaching the consistency etc required for real good results. Slow progress..
Among all the concrete drawing stuff Alphonso talked about the communicative value of lines (and other elements) and somehow I never really had thought about it that way and at first I just found it interesting, but then later when I did the SVG work, which is not really that related at all, it kind of really clicked for me.
What is the purpose of the SVG shape I’m drawing here, what is it supposed to be, what does it communicate to the viewer?
Then I did another SVG piece, that really felt like a quantum leap for me in terms of what I feel I can accomplish with the medium of SVG vector art and more.
Except for that annoying piece of parseley, the whole thing us based on very simple, even imperfect shapes, but each element is something. The light part of this and that, the reflection of that and that, the anti-shadow there, the rim of that.
Each element was there in the initial reference material I looked at for the reflections etc, but it was there as a chaotic mishmash of oddly colored pixel noise. It takes me, the artist to reformulate them into shapes, into common areas that have a united purpose within the image.
And even though it is imperfect and wonky in places, and even if it looks very different from the references in the end, the brain will recognize the things communicated, will take the hints of color and value and recreate that ideal of the soup bowl in our heads.
I don’t know why I never thought of it that way before, and now that I do it seems so very obvious.
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