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Bricktown Through the Years 02

dragoncrestprod

on June 10, 2012

Here's the second stop on our/my trip down memory lane.
At least here I was getting better at complex characters, but knowing what I do now of animation, I can't believe that I had all those art classes and STILL couldn't draw any convincing people.
Actually, what you won't be able to see is that, of all the things I improved in, it was hands that I became most proficient at drawing. For those of you not in the know, hands are considered the hardest part of the human body to draw well - so I was sort of freakish in that I wasn't really all that good at drawing people as a whole, but had basically mastered drawing the hardest part early on. It probably helped that I got ticked and spent days upon days improving my hand drawings.
This seems to be a trend in my art - for god-knows-what reason, I've always compared my work not to my peers, but to masters decades older than I am. Maybe it's a bit of hubris, but I always thought, as a child, that I should be able to draw JUST AS WELL as professional artists. This was especially true with cartoons, since, at the time, I thought it a lower form of art than realism (again, I didn't realize you need to master realism, or at least expressionism, to a certain degree before you can draw cartoons well), so I would draw cartoons religiously until I felt I'd met the level of that pro… and then immediately turn around and find someone better, get ticked again, and repeat.
I will say this much - a little bit of jealousy and pride is good medicine for an artist, as it makes you want to not be shown up by anyone, regardless of their age. Remember that I went from not being able to draw cartoons at all at age 11 to being able to superficially match lower-end newspaper comic styles by age 16, without taking any Gesture Drawing classes; maybe it's not the healthiest of mindsets, but I won't deny that it got results.
To this day, I still do this, but now in a more mature fashion - rather than be jealous of more experienced artists, I look at their works and try to reverse-engineer them in order to match and exceed them. Im not saying I'm anywhere near the best artist out there, but I at least I know I have a good method of pushing myself to do better and learn from those who've already been there.