“Pretty Art” and superficial appeal
Okay prepare yourself for a long post anon ahahahah! Sorry!
I have this term that I’ve been throwing around for a few years to refer to a very specific tendency in art- I call it “Pretty Art”.
Pretty Art in its most simplest explanation is when an artist spends SO much effort on making the subject of their art “pretty” that the quality and progress of their work actually suffers.
There’s no way to cite examples of what I mean without insulting a whooole lot of young artists that you probably know and love, but it’s not like I’m exempting myself from this tendency. I think many of us, if not ALL of us, are guilty of this tendency so long as we’ve been exposed to the false idea that superficial beauty regimens determine the value of a person and have at some point in our lives transposed this horrible idea onto our art without realizing it.
Any time you see a drawing where the face was given more time and careful rendering than the rest of the figure. Any time there is a conscious effort to “apply makeup”, add big beautiful eyelashes, add blushing cheeks, plumpen up the lips of a character in a drawing. Any time that conscious effort to “apply makeup” is so excessive that it actually makes the drawing CREEPY and uncomfortable to look at. Any time you see an original character with anime hair and a bajillion scars and piercings all the way down their body with a scarf and earmuffs with shorts and a t-shirt. Any time you see a fantastic painter that seems only capable of painting gorgeous headshots of their favorite anime characters in a “realistic style”. Any time an artist uses the same “rainbow” or “warm” palette in every one of their pictures, but it doesn’t end up actually looking good in most of them. Any time you see so much effort put into shines and fancy hair that the image ends up looking HIDEOUS. Any time you draw a character just STANDING there looking PRETTY. That is tending towards Pretty Art.
And I think people will bristle at the idea that somehow drawing something that fits into your idea of beauty is bad. Because why should it be a crime to draw what the artist perceives as beautiful? Surely that’s the aim of art, to make something beautiful. But Pretty Art isn’t beautiful or even pretty.
“Beauty is possible- and is good. This [kitsch] I’m afraid is the worst thing because it thinks it’s beautiful. It doesn’t understand where beauty really lies.”
Stephen Fry said this about kitschy commemorative plates but I think it applies here because Pretty Art is kitsch. It’s art that thinks it’s beautiful but only saturates itself with an IDEA of beauty that ultimately makes it hideous to its viewer.
Making pretty pictures is about more than how attractive you can make the subject in the image or how well you can render or paint- a picture is a sum of its parts. I think the definition of what makes art beautiful can be debated by any of us- it’s a combination of parts working towards the greater narrative and meaning of the picture.
There are all kinds of Pretty Art and people that draw it. I think many people get into drawing because they’ve seen some truly gorgeous and beautiful art and want to be able to recreate that beauty. I think anyone that cites Alphonse Mucha, J.C. Leyendecker, or John Singer Sargent in their influences should be careful of this tendency. Because these are all artists that produce truly beautiful work that can’t be easily imitated through copying their technique alone. You see em everywhere- Alphonse Mucha ripoffs that have only seen his advertising work, only copy his solid outlines, his soft colors, and you think ‘this is appealing to me because it reminds me of Alphonse Mucha, but it’s just not as good for some reason’. It’s just a cheap imitation.
Even if you’re that kid that really loved Neon Genesis Evangelion or Sailor Moon and want to be able to draw like that- by nature if you don’t analyze and break down what TRULY makes these things appealing to you, you can only ever create a cheap imitation.
The pretty OC with bishounen hair and a million piercings is a cheap imitation of beauty. It’s a hodgepodge of things the artist saw at one point in their lives on some hot guy and thought “hey, that appeals to me”. But they only saw the superficial most layer of that appeal. They didn’t see the whole picture and think, for a random example, “hey, I didn’t expect that conventionally dressed guy to have so many piercings- it was unexpected and challenged my idea of what kind of person wears piercings or how piercings affect the body- the surprise and contrast of that really appeal to me.”
I mean, I don’t know your specific reason for liking piercings if you’re into that, but I can tell you, it’s not as simple as “piercings are cool.”
The problem with Pretty Art is that it wants to skip the process of actually learning and thinking about what makes something beautiful. People often complain that high fashion models never smile while they’re modeling, and wouldn’t it be so much more appealing if they just smiled while they walked? But then there is the argument that THAT is what makes it beautiful. You see it all the time in high fashion. Something beautiful put next to something horrific. The contrast between the beauty of the clothes and the lack of expression is what makes the clothes even more beautiful, and if you had the models smiling, it would no longer be beautiful- just kitschy photos in a K-Mart catalog.
I’m not saying we should draw all our people frowning in pretty clothes, but I’m saying it’s important to try and understand what’s REALLY going on when we look at a pretty picture, because it’s never as simple as we first perceive. The things we need to learn from the artists we admire are infinite, and it should be a constructive process.
I know how it feels to draw Pretty Art. I’ve had my periods of extreme Pretty Art, and I wonder now if I’m not still a Pretty Artist with little to no real substance to my work. When I’m drawing Pretty Art, I notice the face is a little asymmetrical, I notice the expression of this character looks a little goofy when I want it to look ‘cool’, I notice the hair doesn’t look flowy enough, I tweak and fix and correct. I worry my character looks too ugly, and when I draw someone that isn’t just a pretty young teenager, I spend too much time defining what makes them NOT that, adding in wrinkles, layers of flab, etc, instead of actually taking time to research what an old person looks like and drawing them in an appealing way. I end up spending more time “fixing” the picture than actually drawing it.
Pretty Art is a trap. It’s a destructive way to draw rather than a constructive one. There are only ever things to “fix”. You start to think of your work only in terms of how many “imperfections” it has. Finishing an image is comparatively unsatisfying because you will NEVER be able to reach “perfect”. THERE IS NO PERFECT.
If you can get over this urge to make things “pretty”, then you can get started on understanding what makes something truly appealing. You can learn how to draw ugly people in an appealing way, you can have fun learning how to draw nonfigurative work, you can make your work narrative and interesting, and you can go from a technically skilled artist to a GREAT artist.
From Robert Fawcett’s On the Art of Drawing (I love this book I’m sorry)-
“Sir Joshua Reynolds in his address to the Royal Academy students in 1769, told them this, ‘The error… is that the students never draw exactly from the living models which they have before them. It is not indeed their intention; nor are they directed to do it. Their drawings resemble the model only in the attitude. They change the form according to their vague and uncertain ideas of beauty and make a drawing rather of what they think the figure ought to be than of what it appears… I very much doubt whether a habit of drawing what we see will not give a proportionable power of drawing correctly what we imagine.’”
Source: pollums
The Animator’s Survival Kit - Richard Williams
The third piece of drawing advice came many years later - I was fifty - when I was pretty accomplished, and it came from a much younger man. My talent is primarily ‘linear’, which makes cartooning easy. However, since animators have to enclose their shapes, there is a tendency to end up just drawing outlines - like colouring-book figures. In other words, animators don’t usually draw from the inside-out, like a sculptor does. Sculpture had been my weakest subject - although I’d done a lot of life drawing and had a grounding in basic anatomy.
[…]
Years later, when I had dropped out of the ‘industry’ part of animation, I re-studied my anatomy and worked on drawing from the inside-out. I advanced backwards and filled in the missing stage.
[My mother] also gave me this great advice: “Don’t try to develop a style. Ignore style. Just concentrate on the drawing and style will just occur.”
Of course there’s an opposing view to all of this “you’ve got to learn to draw” stuff.
The great Tex Avery, master of animation’s ability to do the impossible and make the unreal spring to life - and the first director of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd - said:
“I was never too great an artist. I realised there at Lantz’s that most of those fellows could draw rings around me … I thought, Brother! Why fight it? I’ll never make it! Go the other route. And I’m glad I did. My goodness, I’ve enjoyed that a lot more than I would have enjoyed just animating scenes all my life.”
Tex stopped animating and became a great, original and innovative director. The biographer Jon Canemaker said, “While Disney in the 1930s was trying to convince the audience of the ‘reality’ of his characters in his film world, by creating his ‘illusion of life’, Tex went in the opposite direction, celebrating the cartoon as cartoon, exploring the medium’s potential for surrealism.” He never let audiences forget they were watching an animated film.
Tex had a twenty-year run with his wildly funny approach to the medium, but he found it impossible to sustain. “I’m burned out,” he said. His colleague, animator Mike Lah said, “He didn’t have any more space. He used it up.”
[…]
I am convinced that if an animator’s drawing foundation is strong, he will have the versatility to go in all the different directions possible at his fingertips. He’ll be able to draw anything - from the most difficult, realistic characters, to the most wild and wacky. And it’s not likely he’ll exhaust his resources and suffer burn-out.
Because of his drawing ability, Milt Kahl was usually saddled with animating “the Prince” or Disney’s “straighter” characters - which of course are the hardest ones to do. Whenever anyone criticized his work, he’d say, “OK, you can do the Prince.” And they’d soon vanish.
Word spread among the more “cartoony” artists that, “Milt draws beautifully but he can only do the straight stuff and he can’t handle zany stuff at all.” Then, between features, Milt animated most of Tiger Trouble, a Goofy short. Everybody shut up, and stayed shut up. His work is a classic of broad and crazy animation.
“If you can draw funny that’s enough” is an animation myth that’s been around a long time, and still seems to persist. This is because a few of the early animators lacked sophisticated drawing skills - but nevertheless were very inventive and excellent at getting the essence of the drama and performance.
The myth was that all they needed was to have a good draftsman as an assistant to do the final drawings and everything would be fine. But in the mid thirties, when the new wave of young animators with better drawing skills came on the scene and learned from the old guys, the ground was soon littered with out of work animators who could only handle the cruder cartoons. The new breed of better draftsmen took their jobs away from them. If the present boom in this medium ever contracts it’s certain that the more skilled artists will be the survivors.
Bill Tytla - famous for his animation of Stromboli in Pinocchio, the Devil in “Night on Bald Mountain” from Fantasia, and Dumbo with his mother - once said: “At times you will have to animate stuff where you can’t just be cute and coy. Those are the times when you’ll have to know something about drawing. Whether it’s called form or force or vitality, you must get it into your work, for that will be what you feel, and drawing is your means of expressing it.”
Obviously all this doesn’t apply so much to computer animators since the “maquette” of the character is already planted inside the machine, ready to be manipulated. But since most of the leading computer animators draw rather well, many work out their positions in small sketches, and, of course, the planning, layout and story artists and designers draw exactly the same as their classical equivalents.
[…]
One of the problems rampant today is that, in the late 1960s, realistic drawing generally became considered unfashionable by the art world, and no one bothered to learn how to do it any more.
The Slade school in London used to be world-famous for turning out fine British draftsmen. A distinguished British painter who taught at the Slade asked me, “How did you learn how to do animation?” I answered that I was lucky enough to have done a lot of life drawing at art school, so without realizing it I got the feeling for weight which is so vital to animation.
Then I said, “What am I telling you for? You’re teaching at the Slade and it’s famous for its life drawing and excellent draftsmen.”
“If the students wanted to do that,” he said, “then they’ve got to club together and hire themselves a model and do it in their own home.” At first I thought he was joking - but no! Life drawing as a subject went out years ago. It wasn’t even on the curriculum!
[…]
Lately things have improved somewhat. So-called classical drawing seems to be coming back, but with a hyper-realistic photographic approach because skilled artists are thin on the ground. Shading isn’t drawing, and it isn’t realism.
Good drawing is not copying the surface. It has to do with understanding and expression. We don’t want to learn to draw just to end up being imprisoned in showing off our knowledge of joints and muscles. We want to get the kind of reality that a camera can’t get. We want to accentuate and suppress aspects of the model’s character to make it more vivid. And we want to develop the co-ordination to be able to get our brains down into the end of our pencil.
Many cartoonists and animators say that the very reason they do cartoons is to get away from realism and the realistic world into the free realms of the imagination. They’ll correctly point out that most cartoon animals don’t look like animals - they’re designs, mental constructs. Mickey ain’t no mouse, Sylvester ain’t no cat. They look more like circus clowns than animals. Frank Thomas always says: “If you saw Lady and the Tramp walking down the road, there’s no way that you are going to buy that they’re real dogs.”
But to make these designs work, the movements have to be believable - which leads back to realism and real actions, which leads back to studying the human or animal figure to understand its structure and movement. What we want to achieve isn’t realism, it’s believability.
While Tex Avery released the animator from the more literal approach in order to do the impossible, he was only able to do it so successfully because his animation was mostly done by Disney drop-outs who already had “the Disney knowledge” of articulation, weight, etc. So, ironically, his rebellion, his “going the other route”, had its basis in an underlying knowledge of realism.
But don’t confuse a drawing with a map! We’re animating masses, not lines. So we have to understand how mass works in reality. In order to depart from reality, our work has to be based on reality.
Source: jayespace.com
Source: bobrossgifs
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
“Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Drawing as a hobby and drawing as career (or training) are two different things. I have a friend who was traumatized out of drawing completely due to her art education and she laments about it constantly. Consider what you want to do with your art, your goals, otherwise you’ll flounder and resent what was once something you enjoyed. And if it’s any consolation I never believed in a million years (can’t emphasize this enough) that I would ever be living off of my art. Or that I’d improve to the point where I could.
Career art involves skill, yes, but more to the point it’s about determination, dedication, and holding yourself to a professional standard — especially when you don’t believe you can. If you can honestly say art is ALWAYS depressing for you then that is a Major Red Flag and you need to stop and consider what you are doing this for at all.
It’s not “I guess I’m not cut out.” It’s YOU taking the time to THINK about what YOU need. Don’t be self-deprecating. Forget about expectations of yourself and of other people. Consider what you want to see from YOURSELF and ask yourself if you are willing to climb that hill. Giving up because you feel bad RIGHT NOW isn’t considering, it’s just plain giving up.
The first rule about doing art professionally? NEVER SAY YOU’RE AWFUL. EVER. EVER EVER EVER. There’s a difference between jokingly self-deprecating and self-hating. It doesn’t MATTER if you think its awful. And it isn’t by the way, but that isn’t the point. The point is—would you buy a car if the car salesman advertises that it’s a piece of shit? It’s the same with artists and their own art.
Ask yourself what can motivate you and motherfucking follow it. And I can tell you self-pity isn’t a motivator. That’s why it’s called “Faking It TIl You Make It”. Eventually you’ll start believing it too. But the difference between being a child and an adult working professionally? Not hating your work in front of your potential clients.
I can’t even explain to you how much of a fuck up I was at art before 2010. And even then, I didn’t get my act really together until this year. After I graduated high school I spent two years as a basement dweller constantly depressed & repeatedly dropping out of school. It’s not about skill, it’s about attitude. And right now your attitude is strangling the life out of you.
I’m telling you all of this because I wish someone told me this when I was where you are at now. Stop finding excuses about how you’ll fail and instead think about what everyone’s telling you. I’m not out to make you feel better, because I can’t, because you don’t want to feel better right now. I’m here to pound the truth into your head and give you the tools to work your way out of that black pit.
So you can either mope or listen, that’s the bottom line.
Source: twitter.com
Fan fiction is the way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.
(via nellasaur)
Source: enochianwarbirds
Tumblr! Why!
All I want to do is make my theme display photosets in the same orientation that my dashboard does! Why is this so hard to make sense of!
ETA: Semi-fixed! Tumblr’s default photoset crops the height whenever the layout width is greater than 500 for reasons I can’t discern (or correct, thanks to the stupid iframe).
8 Bits of Wisdom From Neil Gaiman on Being a Creator
This is a fantastic speech by Neil Gaiman, addressing the 2012 graduating class of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Gaiman himself never graduated from college—in fact, he never even enrolled in college—yet he earned his place in literary culture as one of the most celebrated and prolific writers working today. Here, he imparts several pieces of life wisdom on young people beginning a career in the arts.
1. Say “no” to projects that take you further from rather than closer to your own creative goals, however flattering or lucrative. (Hugh MacLeod put it beautifully: “The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.”)
2. Approach your creative labor with joy, or else it becomes work. (As Ray Bradbury said, “Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun of it.”)
3. Embrace your fear of failure. Make peace with the impostor syndrome that comes with success. Don’t be afraid of being wrong.
4. When things get tough, make good art.
Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—and in life, and in love, and in business, and in friendship, and in health, and in all the other ways in which life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid, or evil, or it’s all been done before? Make good art.5. Make your art, tell your story, find your voice—even if you begin by copying others.
6. You can get work because of the story you tell about yourself, even if it means embellishing, but you keep working because you’re good.
7. Enjoy your work and your small victories; don’t get swept up into the next thing before being fully present with the joys of this one.
8. This is an era in which the creative landscape is in constant flux. The rules are being broken down, the gatekeepers are being replaced and displaced. Now is the time to make up your own rules.
Gaiman sums it all up thusly:
Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art.Read the rest. [via Brain Pickings]
(via lazysmirk)
Source: The Atlantic
It looks like it’s checked by default if you’ve never touched it, so if you have your Facebook (or your Gmail) hooked up and you don’t want your friends reverse-searching your Tumblr, this is where you want to go.
Though honestly if your accounts are connected you’ve probably already posted an entry to your timeline anyway, so I don’t see Tumblr’s point in all of this. I can’t see it doing more than ticking people off.
How to Write a Novel.
And you know, this is pretty much everything you need to know. The rest is detail, most of which is irrelevant…
(Stolen from http://www.nicalderton.com/blog/HowToWriteANovel/)
Add under pitfalls “Constantly rewriting the story”. “Constantly worrying about what others will think of the story” and “thinking up too many stories” probably both fall under 2.
Source: neil-gaiman
