The Problem With Studying Drawing

One of the problems with studying art and learning to draw is there are no internally consistent rules and terms that all artists have agreed to use.  Contrast this with mathematics, physics, astronomy, and computer programming, the rules just don't randomly change. 

 

According to one artist, music and dance have consistent rules and terms/phrases.  This makes sense, as music is very mathematical. 

 

Artists can't even agree on whether or not art has to say something, or whether it has meaning or not. 

They can't agree on who art is or isn't for. 

 

Artists can't agree on what tools to use, or how to use those tools. 

 

One artist talks about the various ways gesture is explained.  None of them show gesture the same way. 

GESTURE DRAWING EXPLAINED! Is this part of the gesture or style?  

 

The problem of no consistent rules is very obvious when studying the Fundamentals of Art – Elements of Art, Principles of Art, and Compositional Types.  Every list of these properties that I have seen has its own set of items that it includes or leaves out.  No two lists include the same items. 

 

So I've decided to collect these lists together and include items from my reading to make my own list. 

 

Another place where the problem of no consistency is studying the Reilly Rhythms.  Frank Reilly left behind no official notes, no books describing his way of drawing the Rhythms he used.  Everything we have comes from his students' notes, particularly one Fred Fixler, who ran his own art school. 

 

Fixler's students included: 

 

Glen Orbik 

Fred sold his school to Glen. 

There are a few video clips of Glen showing the Reilly Rhythms from a program that are available on YouTube. 

Chris Petrocci from YouTube (Draw Juice) 

 

Jeff Watts 

Jeff was also a student of Gleb Orbik 

Runs Watts Atelier – YouTube Channel 

Stan Prokopenko  – YouTube Channel 

Bradwynn Jones – YouTube Channel 

 

Ted Gula 

Has been on Proko YouTube videos 

 

Mark Westermoe 

Teaches at NMA 

 

 

Every Reilly Rhythm picture I find has a different set of rhythms.  So I have taken these various sources, plus the Loomis Head, my own observations, including studies of the muscles of the face, and generated my own version. 

 

Another inconsistency is the proportions used to draw the face.  Burne Hogarth describes the face as being 3 units high by 2 units wide.  I've seen Loomis head videos in which they describe the head as being about 3 ½ units high x 2 ½ units wide.  The difference being that the Loomis head uses a circle that contains the mouth, whereas the Hogarth method uses a circle that includes only down to the nose. 

 

Hogarth's method adds another half-circle to account for the space between nose to chin.  And the ears fit on the outside of the original circle. 
 
Loomis' method has a circle that needs a slice cut off of either side, and the ear fits inside that original circle, where the circle was sliced off. 

 

The final problem with studying art and learning to draw is that it distracts me from my writing, that's why I'm trying to blog, to force myself to do some writing, including about how art forces its practitioners into using their creativity and eliminates step-by-step processes of math. 

 

In conclusion, there is Absolute Truth, and true art reflects the beauty of the truth of things that are so, just like mathematics, physics, astronomy, and computer programming, 

Art should reflect its own internal truths. 

 

"There is a certain sense in which art is its own justification. If art is good art, if it is true art, if it is beautiful art, then it is bearing witness to the Author of the good, the true, and the beautiful."  Our "impetus for producing … art is a desire for excellence. That desire stems from the … supreme example of excellence in all that is good and true and beautiful." - R.C. Sproul's teaching series about Recovering the Beauty of The Arts, and blog posts on The Christian and Art (Part One, Part Two, and Part Three). 

 

My Writing Quest or The Hero's Journey

 I started my writing adventure in 1972, (discussed somewhat in  “Reflections”  and again in "Hello Twenty-Ten," and most recently, and in more detail, "13 Years") when my 7th grade science teacher gave us an assignment to write a 2-page science fiction story. 

 

But wait, my journey actually started 5 years earlier in 2nd grade when the school placed me in a remedial reading class.  I became such a voracious reader that 7 years after being placed in that slow reader program, I was tested, and as a Freshman in high school my counselor told me I had a reading vocabulary 3 grades higher than my grade level.  Later, I was placed in our school's new QUEST program.   

 

Later in life I realized I wasn’t a slow reader, I was reluctant to read in front of the class.  This reluctance to get in front of a class would impact me a good portion of my life. 

 

It is certain that all my reading affected what I wrote for that short-story writing  assignment, 50 years ago.  My "2-page" story ended up being eleven pages long, and a day late.  Something that still seems to haunt my footsteps.   

When I got it back I saw my instructor had commented that it was a great story, and that he hated having to give me the "B" I got, but he had to mark it down since I was late. 

 

This assignment sparked the first embers of creative writing that started glowing inside me at age 12, and the many more assignments that followed throughout high school, in such ¼ and ½ credit electives as "Science Fiction," "Creative Writing," etc., added fuel to my smoldering writing desires, and I soon began writing stories on my own simply for the love of writing. 

 

But at that point I never wanted to be a writer, because I didn't want to be a starving artist.  At this point, however, I'm thinking the starving artist thing is looking better and better since I've been homeless a total of about 20 months over 4 separate times of living in my car, and even living in my car while employed. 

 

In those high school electives we had the assignment to journal for 15 minutes a day, and so it was that I began to journal, if you could call what I did at that time "journaling."  At that age I had nothing to say that I wanted to put in a journal - being diagnosed recently as having depression, and being told I probably had depression going back to at least high school, if not earlier, may explain why.  

 

So anyway, I would do these journal entries, and Mr. Capra would randomly collect our journals to see how we were doing.  And most of what I had written was stuff like: “I don’t know what to write about.  There’s nothing going on.  I have to write in this journal for 15 mins, cause Mr. Capra is going to grade them.  I have nothing else to say, but I have to write in this journal for 15 mins.”  Well, you get the idea. 

 

Only later, while in college in Alaska, did I actually start a journal in which I saved writing ideas.  And then it became a life journal, etc.  That journal evolved from a 3-ring binder, to Word, to OneNote, and is continuing to evolve as I left OneNote journalling for a time to journal in my sketchbooks, but I am now journalling in OneNote once again, which is what has gotten me to blogging again, in addition to my journal entries in my sketchbooks, sketchbooks that I had started using about 1 month prior to originally starting this blog article, but didn't start using to journal for another 2 months. 

 

My U.S. History and Government teacher required us to give reports to the class.  Refusing to get up in front to do the requisite speeches basically ensures a failing grade when you already have poor grades on your homework and tests.   

 

So I ended up having to take an extra year of high school to fulfil those credit requirements.  It was during that extra year that I got interested in computer programming. 

 

During that extra year the school tested all the students, and I scored high enough that they put me into the new "Quest" advanced placement program they were starting.  My counselor had a meeting with my mom and me to discuss the results of the test.  He told us "DeWayne is very intelligent, but he is a late-bloomer, and unmotivated."  Depression at even that age may have had a tiny bit to do with being unmotivated. 

 

They asked each student enrolled in the program what they wanted to do that they weren't doing enough of in their classes.   

 

Each student enrolled in the program was placed with mentors based on the area in which they were interested. 

 

I naively said I wanted to write.   

 

I got paired with Doug Capra, one of my creative writing instructors from the elective classes I had taken. 

 

Why, oh why didn't I take the blue pill and say I wanted to do more programming?  I was already in 2 programming classes.  I wasn't taking any new creative writing classes at that point.  Quest was supposed to be designed to allow students to stretch in their interests and capabilities. 

 

I didn’t have anything specific I wanted to write about, I just had decided I liked writing 6 years earlier and had been doing some writing on my own, besides the elective class assignments from earlier years  

 

Getting no encouragement at home for my "strange" interest, and instead being told I should do what "normal" kids do, I had no external motivation, and so I never did write much of anything while in the Quest program. 

 

I still don't get much external motivation with encouragement from non-writing "friends," instead they still suggest I do more normal stuff - whatever that is, I never quite figured out that one.  I do, however, get encouragement from my writing friends at NCWA and across the internet, via Facebook, by just being around them and seeing their successes.  Particularly, the 2016 conference and meeting new Spec Fic writing friends was a big encouragement to me.