Get Your Words Out

[auronlu]

I'm afraid I tagged on the heels of vieralynn and discovered Get Your Words Out at the last possible second.

I normally shun NaNo because I don't have self-discipline (or ideas for longer fics) and do have chronic health issues. I avoid gift-work exchanges, because I'm always afraid that I'll fail and let someone down.

However, this year, I have two long-form fics I want to work on, and I have definite plans for them. So perhaps this will help me with motivation, although LHAD has foundered for so many years I don't know if I can ever revive it. But I wish I could.

Dreamwidth or OpenID: Auronlu (although my first project is on my Who fandom blog.) I'm still a little uneasy about linking up my different fandom handles, so I'm not sure how I'm going to handle that project. I'll worry bout that when I have something to post.
Livejournal: auronlu but largely moribund
Tumblr: Auronlu
Pledge: 75K Light
Statement of writing goals: 1. Write High Hierophant from start to finish, post. (Right now it's in the planning stages with about 3200 words of draft.) 2. Write and post 100 reviews on VHSWhovian. (This is one fandom project that's going along tickety-boo.) 3. Work on LHAD, using the plot structuring/organization tools I'm learning via Story Engineering.

Comments

[flynn_the_cat]

Based on all the art I've been seeing from you, you've got a very good headstart on that!

[auronlu]

I still tend to grab the training wheels when I'm in a hurry (tracing, or using that "scan and overlay sketch on photo to find mistakes" trick).

I'm working on a breakthrough now that may help. It's just hard.

Namely: we've learned to do a rough quick loose sketch to indicate roughly where all the main shapes are, what their relationships are to one another. When I do that, the overall outline of length to width — the proportions of, say, the tallest bottle compared to the width of all the objects in the still life — is correct, but the placement of objects within that frame tend to be off.

I've learned measuring and adjustment tricks to help me bring them into alignment. But right now I'm having a devil of a time just doing it. At a certain point, with practice, it should get to the point where the objects in our rough sketch are already in the right proportions and relations to one another.

That's bleeping hard.

[flynn_the_cat]

Ha! Not necessarily! The 'rough sketch first' is definitely one of my main tricks - get the idea out, then refine it in edit, basically. The draft is *always* completely off compared to the final version.

[auronlu]

Astoundingly, this art school is trying to teach ways so that the rough sketch is already pretty close in overall placement of stuff if not details.

Although I need to review this section. I'm perhaps putting a little too much expectation into step one.

There's a bunch of techniques for measuring, from finding the largest to smallest shapes, to imagining a thread wrapping around the entire arrangement and following the shape of it, to picking out key points or a steady point and observing the relationships of edges to that point, to looking for sets of three points that can be represented by triangles and then studying the angles and trying to match those, to using a plumbline, to grouping things into different shapes and drawing those shapes,to something called flows which I have trouble putting into words but there again ways of seeing how one piece flows into the next piece without regard to what it really is just the relationships between shapes, to dividing up proportions, the exercise that I'm currently trying to master (finding the centerpoint of an overall setup and identifying a spot on some object as close as possible to that centerpoint, getting that spot placed correctly relative to the edges of the overall setup, then placing edges relative to those points -- is this above or below the midpoint? A third of the way from the cup to the apple? and then gradually dividing everything down using smaller and smaller transects and figuring out where key points are along those transects. )

All these lessons are learning to treat whatever I'm seeing as an abstract grouping of shapes lines points and edges and how they relate to one another, in order to make the picture more unified and everything in proportion to everything else, rather than focusing on the details or getting hung up with anatomy or other techniques that only work for specific things. It's very, very different from the way I originally learn to draw, self taught from old books on how to draw horses and animals and faces and figures! but I never managed to memorize or master any of those either except maybe the horse book.

[flynn_the_cat]

OOoh, that all sounds very useful. I recognise all those things, but they're stuff I learnt over lots of time (either by drawing stuff and going 'this works better' or by picking up one tip from a tutorial and blanking the rest because I couldn't absorb that many tips).

It's much more analytical, you have to sit down and work it out, but it does help you get to 'and then it looked nice and was fun to draw' quicker, and identify where the problems might be.

It's mostly stuff I do now, but it's so much easier once it's second nature :D

[auronlu]

Yes. I hope I don't get too bogged down — the danger is I lose flow and spontaneity and liveliness, which your art does beautifully even when I know it's less effortless than you make it appear — but by the end of this I may finally be able to get what's in my head out where people can SEE it the way I want them to see it, so... it's worth it.

[flynn_the_cat]

The trick is to abandon 67% of your drawings halfway :D

And yes! It's a wonderful feeling. And you're doing *really* well!

[flynn_the_cat]

Though yeah, there are definitely a bunch of measurement tricks you can learn over time - especially when it comes to anatomy (e.g. a hand should roughly cover a face, heightwise, that the corners of mouths end halfway across each eye, that sort of thing).