Hi my name is Michelle and as 2020 is coming to a close I wanted to look back at how my art has
improved over the years or more accurately, how it's changed. I'll be redrawing a piece
I made in 2014 which I drew again in 2016 and we're gonna do it one more time in 2020.
Towards the end I'll also be going over some unseen childhood art, so stay tuned.
By the way I'll be using this reference of Audrey Hepburn. Let's start.
Because I'm drawing a famous person, accuracy is important to me and I'm being more careful
than usual. I'm starting by plotting down the figure's proportions by marking the most important
anatomical landmarks. At the same time, this is a pretty expressive portrait. I want to capture
her smile and the glint in her eyes so i'm trying to keep my lines as soft and loose as possible.
The quality of your lines, whether they're heavy or light, horizontal or vertical
all matter and they contribute to expression. I find that drawing slowly will lead to a
drawing that feels more still, while drawing with energy produces a sense of movement.
Whatever the case, it helps to feel what your subject is feeling.
Anyway, here is the finished sketch. I'm now moving on to blocking in the shadow shapes.
I like to establish where my shadows are early in the drawing because they help me bring out the
three-dimensional form and I want to make sure the shapes look right before making permanent marks.
Pretty quickly, I start rendering, focusing mainly on values and how hard or soft edges are. However,
as I keep going I kid you not I begin to feel this sense of dread growing and growing. The
process I've been following is the same that I've used to produce these highly realistic drawings,
and this is something I already know I can do given enough time. I'm far more interested in
reinterpreting the portrait with my own twist. The more I start to render the more stiff she becomes,
and eventually, I decide that the amount of time I need to save her is not worth it. So, I restart.
And then I fail again so I restart another time, but this time, on Photoshop, and a
different medium begs a different approach. By the way I'm not saying it's impossible to
be expressive with pencil - it certainly is, and I do want to get better at it. It's just
no longer the medium with which I can best express myself. I want this redraw to reflect my current
abilities and interests. Now, I know that digital art comes with a lot of shortcuts. You don't have
to be perfect on the first try, so it's easier in that respect. You can always delete, resize,
crop, and add filters to your heart's content. Like with any tool, it makes some things more
convenient but also introduces its own challenges and new standards. The thing I like most about
digital art is that it allows me to spend less time on tedious tasks and more time experimenting.
On Photoshop, you can use the brush tool to paint. Something I picked up from friends last year was,
get this: you can also use the lasso tool to paint. I don't mean use it to fill up areas
with ease but you should also do that, I mean, it produces really crisp edges really fast. I
don't know how obvious that is maybe I'm just out of the loop but in case you didn't know,
you're welcome. Again, I'm starting with the dark areas. Whenever I try to simplify complex subject
matter, and mind you this is just one way, I go for the dark areas first because they do
a lot of work describing the overall form. As long as I have those, I don't need to add much else.
As I'm drawing I wanted to address some comments that came up in previous videos. A lot of people
have said that while it's inspiring to see my work, it can also be discouraging and
I know how you feel because I sometimes feel this way towards the people who challenge me.
At least with my experience when I'm comparing myself to others, art isn't fun anymore,
and I forget why I like drawing. Something I think about that helps me a little is that no
matter how much I improve, there will always be people who can draw better than me and I will
always want more and I don't want to feel like I'll never be good enough for my entire career.
So, what is most important is that I enjoy what I do. That I enjoy the process. I would also much
rather feel challenged than bored and I'm grateful to everyone who pushes my art to better places.
I wish I could give you better answers but I'm still figuring this out for myself.
If there's anything you've done that's helped you cope, feel free to share, I would love to hear.
I'm not going to bother with each individual strand of hair. I'll draw a few to give an
impression, but then I'll make a textured brush do the rest of the work. Her hair in this picture
looks a little wind blown so I'm going to go with broad, gestural strokes to convey movement.
One problem I've struggled with a lot in the past is over-rendering. At times, adding unnecessary
detail can make your piece uncomfortable to look at, so the way I avoid that now is by picking
focal points and giving those parts the most attention. Things in the periphery can be kept
more loose. When you're drawing portraits, the focal point will almost always be the eyes and in
this case, I want her eyes to be the anchor - the thing the viewer can hold onto while everything
around her moves. I really want to make sure I get the eyes right so I tried three different
takes to see my options. The first one is too washed out; it's expressive, but also difficult
to focus on. The second one is too graphical and sharp - it's not at all warm and inviting, and
the third one is plain, but it's warm and easy to look at. I'm gonna try blurring it a little more.
To finish things off, I'm playing with some filters. Above all I want to preserve expression
so I'm going to avoid ones that brighten her face. These little lines here are quite essential in
communicating emotion. When I look at these what stands out to me is not so much the improvement
in technical skill but that each of these drawings shows how my art philosophy changed over time. Let
me explain. In my first drawing, you will see that it is 0% artistic interpretation and 100%
accuracy because my goal then was to replicate the photograph exactly how I saw it. At the time,
I thought this was the most important skill for me to practice and it also happened to be the skill
that garnered the most attention from others. As I get older we see a continuation of this emphasis
on accuracy; this is a much harder piece to draw because it's not so black and white - it has these
intermediate values in grey. At this point, we also see that I'm trying to change elements of
the reference as opposed to replicating it. If you look really closely you can see that I'm getting
less shaky with the pencil and because I'm more familiar with the process, I'm getting faster too.
In my last iteration, I gotta say, the accuracy is pretty off, but to be fair, it wasn't something I
paid much attention to. If I were to redo this I would more actively note what features make
her face unique and translate that with greater accuracy. Overall, this is a pretty significant
departure from my previous two drawings. I know a lot more about design now, and think about things
like contrast, shape language, and composition. I also feel more confident and efficient with
my strokes. I'm able to describe more with less by paying attention to the quality of each line
and embracing texture. As a result, there is a stronger sense of movement, but to be fair this
photo of Audrey Hepburn is more expressive. In fact as I continue to compare my drawing to the
reference I feel like my interpretation could have been way more expressive especially in the face
area. Overall we see that my interests have shifted over the years but these three drawings
hardly show the full picture. Let's take a step back and look at a broader range of my work.
I'm not self-taught. I learned over weekends at an atelier starting when I was 12
and that was when my art both in terms of subject matter and technical skill
really started changing. Before then I mostly drew whatever I thought up in my head.
Being highly impressionable, I saw the methods they taught me as a more worthy form of art,
which isn't true. It's just another way of interpreting the world. There, I learned
the fundamentals but I also stopped doodling and began to develop more perfectionistic tendencies.
It was good in that I became more detail-oriented and strived for quality, but bad that I was more
afraid of failure. At this time, I was still very committed to going into animation and knew I
wasn't gonna get anywhere with these master copies and so I made an effort to be more expressive, to
draw from imagination, and to breathe life into my characters. We're gonna go through these fast I'm
sorry I can't look at these for too long. Later in high school, I started getting really busy,
stopped drawing frequently, and stopped improving. I felt pretty lost during this period and
a lot of my work from back then still makes me uncomfortable to look at.
By the way, what I'm showing you is the better side of things. I can't tell you how many
pages in my sketchbook look like this. When I finally started college, I was suddenly exposed
to a wide variety of art. That, in addition to my classwork pushed my work in directions I probably
would have never explored on my own. You'll notice that my shape language over time gets more
interesting as I begin to experiment with anatomy and my compositions grow more complex and nuanced.
I'm also more adept using the elements of art to convey feeling and create atmosphere.
To be honest, I nearly abandoned this video because I didn't like the outcome of my redraw.
But ultimately, I felt that sharing process even when things don't turn out stellar
is valuable in that I'm being more honest with my work and my abilities. What I see looking back is
that progress isn't linear - sometimes it takes a while. I look at all this and I see someone who's
just figuring things out, someone who's developing their voice. When I get frustrated because I'm not
satisfied with my improvement, it helps a little to remind myself that this is a journey. I'm sorry
for being cheesy I just can't think of another way to say it. After getting over the initial
cringe looking at all this, I am fascinated by how this journey has unfolded so far.
It makes me excited about the future. That's a wrap for 2020 folks. I'll see you next year.