SciFi and Fantasy Art: 'Wounds' Studies
I wouldn't want people to think that finished drawings just 'pop' into an artist's head, and all the artist has to do is record them on paper. Art is a lot of work. You have to practice a lot to draw anything at all. Then, if you want to draw something specific and have it look halfways decent, you have to make some study sketches. You start, and you realize that you don't really know how to draw the thing. You think, 'What do clouds actually look like? How does smoke behave? How do I draw on a black background? What is the correct posture for a dead dragon lying on its back? What should it's arms be doing? What should this guy be wearing? How do I draw dry, cracked ground? Should this dead guy be lying down, or propped up? What kind of teeth should this dragon have? Or should it just kind of have a beak? What do clothes ripped by a claw look like? How does blood trickle? Where should this woman be looking? How does lava flow, and what colors should it be? Why does this woman look like a guy with breasts? What should the woman be doing with her left hand? How should her skirt wrinkle?' The only way to answer questions like these is to try a bunch of alternatives, most of which look awful, and figure out which ones actually look sort of OK. Anyway, I scanned in a small fraction of the study sketches I made when I was working on 'Wounds.' And when I say 'small fraction,' I mean like 4 or 5 percent of them. If I had had more artistic experience, I might have already known how to draw on a dark background, or what clouds really look like, or why my women look like men with breasts, or how skirts wrinkle. I might have been able to draw something decent in only half an eternity, instead of a whole one. But only if I had already put in 100 etermities worth of prior practice.
Now you know why I have so few finished drawings in my gallery. Yes, I'm a perfectionist, and yes that gets in the way of my productivity, but I am convinvced that my perfectionism slowly improves my drawing skill (which still has a long way to go) and the quality of the drawings I actually finish.
I am convinced, however, that no matter how good of an artist you are, you still have to make about a billion study sketches in order to draw anything decent. Every drawing is different, every drawing has new combinations of elements and things you've never tried before. I put this drawing up so that people could see some of the work involved: how an artist tries out different ideas, some of which aren't very good. If at first you don't succeed, you're normal.
I upped the contrast on this and uploaded the image again to make it a little more readable. It's awfully wide for the screen, I know, but this is actually one drawing where it's not that important to see the whole thing at once. There really isn't a whole thing; it's just a collection of bits and pieces.
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