50%, Part 1: Realizing my fears

4:52 PM, Saturday April 20th 2024

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I get an idea. I take my old sketchbook and a pencil, sit down on an empty table, and opened an empty page.

In my head, I can visualize the idea to an extent. I can imagine the feeling it gives, and I can even plan how I would draw it.

I'm not entirely sure what happens upon seeing that empty page. I'm not so in touch with my emotions that I can put into certain words what exactly I feel, but I have heard of the phenomenon. The empty page sits there, ready to receive my imagination.

But my imagination is not paper. It is intangible, formless; it is not painted on, it simply receives whatever I will. It is not compatible with this page that is in front of me.

I do not know how to translate my imagination into a physical medium. "How in the world am I supposed to even start," I ponder. Long enough do I ponder that the question changes to "What did I even want to draw?"

Grasping the quickly dissipating threads of thought, I draw my first line, and the feeling of helplessness strengthens. This feels wrong. This should not be here. I must erase it. I did not want this. I cannot do this!

The next marks start appearing quickly. An onlooker would have probably thought me confident, but I know that I was panicking.

There were so many questions: "What does an eye even look like?" "How big are pupils?" "How do I apply texture to these teeth?" "How do I make this look less flat?" Questions that would only receive silence.

So clear was the image in my mind, but the white paper easily shatters the memory. I scribbled, quickly, in hopes that something would happen, to no avail. "My imagination will not be realized," I thought, and so the drawings were finished.

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9:57 PM, Saturday April 20th 2024

I was scrolling through people's sketchbooks and I wasn't expecting to find such an artistic expression of that initial fear of starting in the description. Safe to say I too have similar thoughts when sitting down in front of a blank paper.

I actually really like the eye. The wavy lines spiraling the pupil feel very chaotic while also having some order. It reminds me of when people say the abyss stares back at you, that's kinda what i see it as. Also the face is really funny, in a good way. I wouldn't even know where to begin making a face. Keep it up, and I'm sure your imagination will be realized eventually.

4:06 PM, Sunday April 21st 2024

Woah! Wasn't expecting a comment so quickly... Or at all, really. Thanks for the comment, your words made me really happy!

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Framed Ink

Framed Ink

I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

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