Jon Foster

At the Beginning of April, my school brought Jon Foster to campus to judge the illustration portion of the annual student show- Best of Ringling. While he was there, he also did a lecture/slideshow and a couple demos. I ended up taking a bunch of shorthand notes as he was talking, and later transcribed them, planning to go through and organize them a bit. As that was over two months ago now, I might as well just post them in raw form. =)

Jon Foster - RSAD 4/5/07
-Geometry, shapes in composition
-draw as much as you can from imagination, that's where your style comes out
-Reference for lighting and volumes
-Imagination is unique, but limited
-'intangible quirkiness from reality when you work from reality'
-not getting reference is lazy
-opaque projector
-make it sit back and come forward where you want it to!
-draw a half an hour every day, but DRAW EVERY DAY.
-Dark on light
-look at Rick Barry; Don't do a figure, do something you can experiment with more and have fun.
-You like to make art, remind yourself you like it. 'is it going to suck today?' It's sensual.
-Process and being involved. It's visceral
-looking at Phil Hale
-edges and values
-Your reference is directing you, but you are not its slave.
-Print out and paint over? feels hollow, like painting by numbers
-Nothing like experience to figure it out, master copies
-Pay attention to silhouettes!
-Raw umber and pthalo blue
-Body language natural, yet unnatural.
-Tension, storytelling
-nc wyeth
-Don't quit too early (in reference to the digital 'look')
-"Versus" with equal standing. 'swirling cloud with feet coming out' XD
-Scanning in sections. Make sure the scan settings are the same, not adjusted per section.
-young adult work
-be inventive with your fixes. Inventive with reference.
-red noses
-Photoshop for my masks and color adjustments
-"I did this. cool!"
-Detail. Sometimes things get too slick. Go in and muck it up. Give it more life.
-Eyedropper tool is amazing.
-arthur rackham
-design- james jean
-dissect your influences and go back to the sources.
-Asian print making, dean cornwell, harvey dunn.
-Let some edges go
-Sit down and play. Caricature, volumes and shapes, mood, warm/cool play, texture, subtlety. Pattern.
-Mixing vocabularies, still communicating
-abstraction of reality
-It's good to have favorite things
-Palette knives, large shapes and rhythms.
-where do we crop?
-moocha?
-in a tree looking down
-looking up, color, design!
-barbed wire
-stacks of houses
-rarely do specific scenes from a book
-not everyone has to be a badass
-National Geographic, lot of give and take with experts
-posable GI Joes
-where is the gutter?
-Do you have a personal project? Are you going to get it done?
-Pattern and texture, design. Love it. Line and Flatter color.
-inspirational email list, daily photo/image from the 40's-60's
-Big ears
-complexity of composition and motion
-crows= an amazing bird
-9 tailed fox- so much perspective
-realistic waves like the chinese paintings
-graphic trees
-"mood pieces" loose studies
-atmosphere, lighting, characters, postures, who they are. Moments, personality.
-sketchbook, do it for fun. Not just utilitarian. George [Pratt] does it all the time. Bastard.
-Use your pencil in different ways.
-geometries and rhythms
-have fun, experiment. This stuff is the most important, finding your voice, talk to the paper, it talks back to you.
-Sculpture for characters you plan on repeating.
-shock waves
-wallpaper patterns
-authentic looking fake guns. Or pink styrofoam. 'sallgood.
-color, selective color, cools and warms.
-can't go wrong with a cool moustache
-never time myself, I'd probably find out I'm making like $2 an hour.
-Start early, so you can get away from it, come back. The more distance you can get, the more perception you'll have, the more you'll get out of it.
-Sometimes you're ON you're there. Sometimes the procrastinating takes over. Then, "Why did I avoid this? this is fun."
-Studio-inspiration, What are your friends doing? People around you.
-in a sense, this isn't me
-Studio wanted him, that's cool, but what do you want me to do?
The reality was that the programmers couldn't or wouldn't do what they wanted, the subtleties. 'can only go so far' geometries of the models.
-Decided they didn't want what they thought they wanted, they wanted the straight-on orthographics. <-D&D Online.
-Traditional pieces, unfinished paintings in the closet.
-Most of the time is process, thumbnail, composition, everything you do before you sit down and paint. What's the feel? Energy? it goes a lot smoother if you plan it out.
-Critiques- group of friends, email list. Trust them.
-Wish I went to the Graphic Courses. It's another vocabulary. More tools for your box.
-If you get too abstract as an illustrator, you've got a hard time of it, communicating to a smaller group. Not bad for art, but not a great thing for illustration.
-Irene Gallow at TOR
-Pyle, Liyndecker, Schoonover, Wyeth, Symbolists, Pre-raphaelites, russian socialists
-never be afraid to grow up, even if you're in your 50's.
-Kurt Williams, John Booth. Comic books for storytelling.
-Comics, unique. Not a movie, not writing, something completely else, reader participates at different levels.
-Process. Doggedly getting it right. Repetition, markmaking. Getting more involved with your work.
-pthalo blue, raw umber, manganese blue, zinc white, yellow ocher, venetian red (potent earth tones), Burnt Sienna[W/N], Cad yellow deep(or medium), Cad red deep, alizarin crimson (cool red)
-Big chunk of graphite (or whatever) in your sketchbook, just see what happens, shape. negatives and positives. Simplify. See what you can find.
-freeform
-what do I like
-you see shapes
-"look! a Giraffe!"
-geometry

Check his stuff out at http://jonfoster.com

Mark Kennedy

Temple of the Seven Golden Camels

Another animator with a blogful of brilliant advice. Rather than simply expecting you to go read this blog, however, I offer a starting point this time.

Carrying a Sketchbook
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

COPICmarkerS

COPICmarkerS.com (With an "S" for Savings)

Yeah, yeah, so their marketing slogan isn't great, and if you actually GO to copicmarkers.com, it gives you an option- would you rather buy copic markers... or cellular skins? At the top of the page, it proclaims the site is called 'periodstyle.com'... but in the address bar? marketworks.com. Maybe we got a little overzealous buying domain names.

It's all good though. Because navigate past the web identity complex and you really can find the best possible deal for getting Copic Markers.

I won't go into all the benefits of Copics, here. Suffice it to say that Trias just went through a complete redesign and overhaul to try to compete with Copics; and Copics are still better.

The problem, formerly, with Copics, was that unless you bought the factory packaged sets of markers, you were stuck buying colors individually, and at retail of about $6 each, a Copic addiction like mine takes a pretty huge chunk out of the budget. Then even the packaged sets-- ORIGINAL available in three sets of 72 colors each; SKETCH available in four-- didn't allow you to pick which colors you wanted in the set, or avoid getting doubles if you'd gotten a few on the side, or get a smaller set of markers that still had colors that you wanted.

Problem Solved. The site might have an identity complex, but it is the only place I have ever seen that allows the customer to custom-select box sets of 12, 36, or 72 markers, in either Original or Sketch varieties. For significantly less than retail. In fact, for the same price as the factory sets from the same site.

Want even better mileage from your markers? VariousInk refills are also available there in custom sets of 24 colors, at just over $5 each. Which, of course, is less than retail for a single marker, and one bottle of VariousInk can refill that marker 5+ times.

Shipping? Unbelievably fast. I ordered a custom set of 12 on a friday afternoon but for some reason only listed 11 colors, an oversight that was remedied saturday morning. I wasn't expecting those markers until at least wednesday, but got them monday. Sure beats the month and a half I once waited for a marker order from another online store.

I'm not affiliated with this site in any way, nor do I get any specific benefit from promoting it. I just really like Copics, and this is the best way I've found to get them. Enjoy. =)

Gesture Drawing

Here's one I know almost nothing about. I was just cleaning up my firefox tabs and found it, probably someone I know linked to it and I didn't have time to look at it just then. It looks pretty good, though, so I thought I'd put it in here rather than the blackhole of my bookmarks folder.

http://punchandbrodie.com/leo/stanchfield/
"Gesture Drawing for Animation by Walt Stanchfield"

Andrew Loomis

PDF versions of all six Andrew Loomis Books can be found on Ryan Scott's blog.
http://placidchaos.com/AM/index.php/2006/02/21/andrew_loomis
Don't forget to comment and thank him for hosting these books.

Quote from Wikipedia-
Andrew Loomis (1892-1959) was an illustrator from the United States who is best remembered now for a series of art instruction books that continues to influence realist artists, though they are in 2004 all out of print, except for some excerpts available from the art publisher Walter Foster. The Loomis family, who still holds the copyrights to all the books published by Andrew Loomis, has not expressed any intention of re-printing any of his work in recent days despite popular demand.

Revelation

There is absolutely no reason why artwork targeted for children cannot also appeal to adults.

All Kinds of Stuff

John Kricfalusi's Blog

John K is the creator of "Ren and Stimpy" and "The Ripping Friends".

This was the inspiration for me to start this blog. He posts literally 'all kinds of stuff' about his artistic interests. I felt like I could benefit from doing a similar exercise myself, I hope eventually to have a repository of "everything" that inspires me, that I have learned from, that I enjoy artistically. It's my hope that other artists may find this useful, but if not, then at least I know I'll get something out of it.

There used to be a great list of links to individual John K blog posts sorted by topic on wikipedia, which I was going to share here, but it seems to have been removed. Painfully unfortunate. In that case, I recommend you scroll down to the list of archives and start at the beginning and work your way through. A vast minefield of information and goodies, truly.

Word of the Day- INERTIA

From Creative Sparks by Jim Krause

How Design Books

A recent obsession. Here are a few we've been looking at recently.

Idea #1

Get a piece of newspaper, crumple it a bit, set it on the floor or table in an interesting "pose" and sketch it, paying attention to angles, perspective, and how individual creases and folds affect the shape. Try another angle from the same 'pose' or move the paper a bit for something different. Good practice because cloth folds in similar ways, but the stiffness of the paper makes the folds more visible.