I became a PRO ARTIST with NO art school and NO talent

This is the sketchbook that got me rejected from art

school

in 2000. I was graduating high

school

applying to colleges and wanted to go to Sheridan College, which at the time had a well-known animation program, although they needed a portfolio and I really couldn't. drawing this was about the level of my drawing when I was 19 that's my name I think from the way I drew you can tell I was trying to copy other art you know I still didn't really understand it now look I don't understand I want to laugh of my 19 year old self. This kid was hoping he didn't have any skills.

Part of Sheridan's portfolio was a life drawing assignment. This is probably my first drawing ever. Oh yeah, Sheridan wanted us to draw a room in perspective. I have no idea how to draw perspective. The other task was that they gave us a character design and made us draw expressions. This is a tracing of the character they provided and then that's my expression sheet. I was trying, I really tried. I sent them scanned copies. of this portfolio and of course you know you don't get into a school when the envelope you get back is this thin so yeah I didn't get into Sheridan College so that was 2000 let's fast forward now 17 years and Disney asked me to paint. the book version of their movie The Nutcracker and they wanted me to do it in my own painting style.

I have to be brushy and expressive and do everything I love. I had a lot of fun working on these illustrations. The room is in perspective. Here is one of my favorite paintings in the book, this page here was more refined, more of a standard portrait. I had to use 17 years of

artist

ic experience to get these poses right and of course making them look like they had shape, light and texture, obviously I learned a lot. of lessons between this and this and in this video I want to explain where I learned things when I learned things and how I apply them to my work as a professional this is one of my first works in cg that allowed me to be accepted at Ryerson University In Toronto I did its film studies program, but there was no drawing, so my university was here and luckily I discovered that just down the street there was a life drawing studio.

Now when I was younger I didn't know it was possible Learn to draw I thought you had to be born with a

talent

and I didn't have the

talent

that's why I was doing all the cg stuff in the first place. I thought I couldn't draw, maybe I could make art on the computer, does anyone remember this viral animation from 1999? This piece allowed Victor Navone to get his job at Pixar. When I went to his website, I was a little dismayed to see that he could draw, but he also recommended I take life drawing classes, which he was doing to help. the animation of it now, when I went to my first life drawing session, nude model posing, I approached the drawings this way, you know, trying to get a finished outline from the beginning, my drawings were a failure.

I wish I still had some of them to show you but I mean you've seen this anyway, the owner of the life drawing studio was Nick Kalistian, a fantastic

artist

, go check him out after you see some of Nick's life drawings Within three to five minutes, it

became

clear that my approach to drawing had to fundamentally change. He told me how his teacher Glenn Vilpou drew these things called gestures and a gesture drawing wasn't supposed to look finished or pretty. It's a drawing method designed to quickly capture the feel of a pose and that's it. A gesture drawing can indicate things very quickly.

As weight balance and movement are very important features of any drawing style, you can play with exaggerating it in this case too to really feel, for example, the thrust of his hips, the extended elbow, the weight on his left leg, not There are rules for drawing a gesture, but one piece of advice I have when you draw a gesture, be gestural. Doing this will help you find the broader relationships within a pose, for example the counterbalanced shoulders and hips here and the graceful arc that connects them, also the related circular rhythm for the legs and By the way, I'm using the wacom cintiq pro 32, what a piece of machinery, however, I received this machine last week for the last 20 years.

I've been doing my art with this wacom intuos 3. Look how worn out it is. I'll talk about these tools a little later in the video, so going back to the gesture, the shoulders and hips give me a little bit of drama in this pose, but there's a lot of drama in that extended arm. I'll use a straight line for that, another straight line. to show the weight on this leg, straights tend to represent speed or strength, so the gesture captures rhythm, but what rhythm is to me, rhythm is an abstract line that gracefully connects all parts of a pose and helps ensure that together they add up to something.

It's present in so many good works of art that it simply works beneath the surface, so I drew exclusively gestures for several months, most of them long since discarded, but here are a few I still have. Gestures were the first real tool I had in my artistic development. As for characters, you can explore anything with gestures, from a squirrel to a wingless dragon, a sword-wielding warrior, and spider-man. Gestures do not need styling, they are not finished drawings, they are just information that you use to continue. Gesture drawing doesn't necessarily look impressive. I remember telling my parents that he was learning to draw and showing them my gestures and they said it was okay, but the next thing Nick introduced me to was breaking down the figure into basic shapes on which we would put a piece of tracing paper. a photograph of the figure and we would reconstruct it with boxes and cylinders.

Look at how the torso box here captures the twist in the body. I'll draw a center line across that box to help me better understand the dimension and then the arms we would build with two cylinders, then we would square them like this, you understand both the roundness and the planes of the arm, we would often draw through geometry, we would see those ghost ellipses that go behind the leg and that's how we came up with Very three-dimensional drawings This was part of an informal class that Nick was teaching, it was three hours a week for six weeks, it's the closest thing that I have had an art school, so you take the gesture, you take the form and you crush them and my drawing.

I started to see myself like that. Remember I started from here and this is roughly a three year timeline to get there. I want to show you a recreation of my process at that time. I'm tracing the gesture, the lines of the shoulders, the lines of the hips, the rhythm that connects them. By extending those rhythms through the limbs, I would then begin to work the volumes, but I wouldn't do it as rigidly as in the demonstration I just showed you. I'm drawing three-dimensional cylinders and boxes, but I'm trying to respect the gesture, you know? keep it intact while adding these more rigid shapes, this is what my life drawings looked like for about a year and a half.

Well, actually it's not entirely true, they were more like this same philosophy but with worse execution. That was my first drawing done with a tablet, you see, in 2003, I was convinced that I could become a professional artist, it was a big moment for me, so I went out and bought a tablet, I chose wacom because it is the industry standard , trust me, I've tried them all, pronounced wacom. by the way, not wacom or wacom wa in Japanese means harmony and com computer harmony computer so anyway these drawings made about a year later have one more element at play the forms the form is the fundamental thing that packages all the information and the delivery to the viewer in a digestible way, I studied many animators' drawings in my early years in this rough pass, see how the character's attitude is completely worked out in gestures, it reads perfectly, compare it with the next pass that has all the shapes designed, gain sophistication. but the feeling was established before this, let's make a little comparison, take the arm for example, in the gesturing arm, it's almost perfectly symmetrical here and here, that's because the design hasn't really been considered yet.

Now, in the form stage, we are solving a very different problem. We usually don't want repetition or symmetry but we do want to maintain a cohesive flow. Good forms have a flow. This book came out in 2001 and I instantly

became

obsessed with Claire Wendling's forms. , but let's not get distracted by the interesting topic take something more mundane perfect I'm studying the form by dividing my strokes into segments there's a subtle s-curve here followed by a hook which is then followed by a broad c-curve another hook another c-curve and then a subtle s-curve at the end to reflect the beginning is poetry, so although this is traced it is a method I would use to study forms.

Here is another simple exercise. Take a basic shape like a square and then redraw it, but a little crooked, almost as if some force has been applied. try again maybe adding a curve to one of the sides I want the shape to look dimensional try adding cross contours running around the shape this is simple but creates great possibilities my green monster character is just a circle and these two character designs are basically inversions of each other this is not just for cartoons here is a piece I made for the eternals keeping the shape of the silhouette clear gives you the freedom to do tons of things within the silhouette these are professional tools that now adapt to a setup professional say hello to wacom cintiq 32 inch with the flexible arm of course uh a manual im sure it's useful so you remove this tab and the cables go in like this wait oh this comes out first and then it wraps , I got it, what the hell, are the cables okay? through this, make the wrapper and screw it.

This is a sturdy stand. Hey, look, I'm an auto mechanic. This part is satisfactory. Look at this. I love it. However, I don't love it. Okay, so stop the cameras rolling. Change my son's diaper. here is my final setup, this is where i make my living and wacom has always helped me create a comfortable creative space and after 20 years i traded in my old intuos for an intuos pro and look at this. I can use the same pencil on this device and this one that is fantastic, let's go back to the shapes, you can use the shapes thematically, take this chunky baby that is my daughter, the shapes are mostly round, base your shapes on a theme can help you come up with a good design around which that big guy is designed. squares this was for a children's book project i did around 2012. they are all squares but they have all been warped in different ways different sizes also the variety helps minimize repetition.

I first appreciated this from Lilo and Stitch in 2002. Chris Sanders brought his characteristic round shapes to the entire film. It is a stylistic choice but one that is derived from the visual lessons of life. On the other hand, this is not a successful example of form design. One of the biggest criticisms I have about this is the marshmallow effect. caused by repetitive symmetry. Look, nature almost never does that. Instead, you'll see what I call offset symmetry. I'll trace the curves of the calf muscle, trace the top points, and draw a line through them. Symmetry occurs on the diagonal on the mat and. stitch style guide there is a warning against obvious symmetry there are two solutions you can offset the symmetry like in this example here or you can put two totally different lines against each other a curved versus a straight one the eye just likes variety and each artist I have ever studied the curve versus the straight in your visual vocabulary but it is not the curve or the straight what is important is this part something versus something how about this combination here is a beautiful piece by lois look how simple this side of the silhouette?

Compared to what happens on this side, things don't just happen by accident, you have to really think about how to design it. This was for an animation character design job I did around 2017 and to this day I start with some kind of gesture. However, your shapes can go hundreds of different ways from there, just because you have a workable gesture doesn't guarantee you'll have a good drawing, so as I write these lines, I'm exploring the idea of ​​something versus something, that's why that the lines are coming into segments like I did with the clairwendeling shape study.

I'm trying to solve the puzzle piece by piece. This is a part of the art of problem solving that I really enjoy and have learned to take my time solving. I find that a beginner's work virtually always lacks that kind of exploration and there is a rigidity that results from the solutions I came up with here include thin at the top wide at the bottom creating little hooks to break up a line that of Otherwise it would be continuous. I'm compensating for symmetry in four placesdifferent. I'm also trying to connect different areas of the drawing with hidden rhythms and generally try to avoid any obvious sense of repetition and again, this all applies to more realistic art.

You can also see this page I made for the nutcracker. There is a gestural rhythm that follows the line of the shoulders, I even tried some thematic rhythms to help unify the piece. If you're feeling really daring, you can take a general gestural rhythm as a line of action and simply use it as one of the outlines. I would say that this line here represents the gesture in this drawing, so I'm just going to move that line here and start developing my study on it, as far as I remember, this is a discovery that I made on my own, I'm not saying that I invented it.

But it only occurred to me probably after a few years of working with the concept of gesture. You need time to see how these things can be applied to your art. Just because you learn something one day doesn't mean you can apply it the next. day, so if you're just starting to learn art and you're learning all these new concepts, my advice is to give it some time to really sink in and seep into your work. For me, this is where anatomy comes in. Anatomy is full of rhythms. I love how the serratus muscle opens up to the external obliques.

Anatomy can take advantage of basic shapes and add a lot of sophistication to your drawing, but I don't recommend putting anatomy at the forefront of your study too soon. I didn't dive into anatomy for several years and I think my understanding of the more basic fundamentals benefited from that, so when I finally started opening up the anatomy textbooks, I had a sort of hierarchy to connect it. This is another page from the Nutcracker book. Let me zoom in on the figure here. Look at this arm, it's extended. but not only is it straight, it has some action.

Anatomy will teach you that the arm has a chain-link rhythm. Each muscle group is a link in the chain, but then I also bent the chain driven by a simple gesture, so the painting of Really emerged by drawing and painting a completely new kind of can of worms and we will open it in the next installment. I want to thank Wacom for their generous support and for being there throughout my artistic career, as well as a big thank you. To my sponsors, thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video.