old shit

[egypturnash]

Given a thread on the VCL forum about crappy old art, and Synnabar posting some of her stuff from '88, I decided to put up some of my old stuff.

From 1994!

I didn't play with levels to get the paper white because I wanted to preserve as much of my lack of sketch technique as I could.

From a sketchbook labeled July 1993-March 1994, the oldest one I have here in California:

College project: poster design. Limited color scheme, to be executed in ink and sticky color film that was on its way to extinction at the time. This was the rough. The Matt Howarth influence in this exaggeration of an anglerfish is fairly obvious if you're at all familiar with his work. The final piece was something like 18x24, and was probably much fiddlier; this is my rough.

Tabitha Caroline I-never-settled-on-a-last-name, also known as 'Bad Bunny'. A girl with a short fuse and mysterious access to lots of weaponry. The 'stereo is for sissies' gag is stolen from a Daniel M. Pinkwater book, the 'LOUD NOISE' effect on the speaker is another Howarthism. The raccoon is Nikki, one of her friends; as I recall, Nikki was a lesbian and might have had a crush on Caroline. Caroline's sexuality was undefined; she was too busy being a force of chaos to deal with that! Note me struggling hideously with anatomy and construction.

I used to do a lot of crosshatching. This was probably inked with #00 and #0 Rapidograph pens.

From a sketchbook labeled March-December 1994:


RPG character. According to other drawings in this book, his name was Nikolai. He was from an Amber game, and was a swashbuckler sort from a distant shadow populated by furries. Not having any sort of Amberite blood in him, having a Trump made for him was quite unlikely, but this was my suggestion as to what he would look like if one was. I always ended up playing the comic relief characters in games.


A rare expedition into muscly buff feral werewolf-thing territory. Looks like I didn't know much about muscles back then. If you can't read the overwrought dialogue, he is saying "Hey Pat! I'd like to buy a VÖWEL!!". I'm really impressed at how wholly unconvincing the fur texture is on this.


More Bad Bunny stuff. I drew her in a lot of different situations. Note the attempt at Winsor McCay-ish line weight theories on the piano-playing drawing. I can't help but wonder, looking back, if Bad Bunny was an early manifestation of the same parts of me that gained more refined expression as Peggy, once I started playing her on Furrymuck - sultry, unsubmissive, distinctly female. BB was absurdly violent and rather prone to tacky stripperesque outfits; Peggy could rip your guts out or set you on fire, but would rather just give you a cold shoulder.


The thing I most notice as different in this eight-year-old stuff is the lack of confidence. I'd learnt a very hesitant, shaggy, sketchy mode of drawing (kinda lost in the low res scans, I'm afraid). Here and there I seem to be overcoming it and slashing in a line without caring if it's absolutely right - and these drawings have much more energy and appeal - but I was really burying myself in endless waffling, and attempts at including levels of detail I have never had the focus to execute properly. I also notice the utter lack of understanding of construction, but that's something I'm still working on to this day.

There's less analysis of why my drawings failed to work then there is now - only a very few instances of me proclaiming something bad by a note next to it; nowadays, not only will I do this, but I'll often put notes explaining precisely how it's bad and wrong next to the offending sketch. Also, these seem to be almost exclusively drawn with mechanical pencils - the favorite medium of college-age artists everywhere, it sometimes seems.



[Addendum: I should make it clear that this is mostly the best stuff I found. The ones that kinda worked, that didn't make me wince too much to see them now. It didn't get better than this, bit it got a lot worse. It's from after I'd had my first figure drawing class, so there was some idea of anatomy.]

Comments

[mcgroarty.livejournal.com]

All else aside, I've got to say that the piano playing one really strikes me. It seems a little silly with the action pose suggesting she's about to beat the crap out of the piano, but it makes me curious to hear what it'd sound like. I'd love to see that one finished.

Overall, there seems to be a lot of expression in the characters' faces. This is something I've noticed... as many artists progress, they actually start putting less and less character into their characters, more into "correctness" and sameness from drawing to drawing. The characters tend toward one of just a few expressions, if they emote much at all. Would you agree? If so, why do you think that is?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I think that's a case of changing emphasis. If you're concentrating on solidity and realism, you're not going to worry as much about life and expressiveness unless you make an effort. I've thought that liveliness is one of the major strengths of my work, and I try to not lose that under construction; I change my working methods around to keep myself from becoming too used to any particular way, and keep my work loose - but that's because it became less of a priority for a while, until I noticed my art suffering, and took steps to keep everything alive.

Lack of expressiveness and sameness can also come from locking into "style" too early. A lot of "style" is just accumulated cheats and fakes... and... haven't I gone on that tangent a thousand times before? I've dropped bits of style when they became a straitjacket; one thing that I noticed for the first time when looking through this book is how many drawings include someone looking askance at the viewer, with the far eye almost squinting, and the near brow raised. (Nothing I was willing to scan had this Standard Expression, but trust me, you'd see it if you flipped through the actual book.)

The piano drawing is one of the nicer ones in that book; the proportions are decent, and I lucked into a good sense of the masses. I suspect she's playing with some degree of competence...

[mandrill.livejournal.com]

Interesting stuff. Thank you for posting the artwork.

Your drawings remind of a guy whose work I've seen in some old furry fanzines from around that time period. His name was Tom Verre but I can't recall which zine he was in -- the zines I saw belonged to a friend of mine. Not sure what became of Verre.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think that's a bit of a compliment; I remember seeing a few pieces by him in some of the few issues of either Furversion or Yarf! that I had, and was struck by his graphic sense, elegance, and restraint. (If the pin-ups I remember were in Furversion, then I was definitely struck by his restraint, given the fact that the rest of that zine was mostly full of pr0n.)

I think Verre decided to Leave The Fandom some time ago, and has stayed out. Google brings up the name as an artist on lists of cards for the Xxxenophile card game, and in the credits for an educational game called 'Pajama Sam 3'... I seem to recall him being involved with 'Lesbian Foxes In Hovertanks', which was going to be a parody of the high amounts of military hardware fetish work and pinup stuff in the fandom, before it got cleaned up into 'Tank Vixens', which I never saw.

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

Ooof, brave woman. I haven't yet had the nerve to dig up the old sketchbooks for that thread--my work from 1998 that was actually on my computer makes me cringe already, and I shudder to think what may be waiting for me a few years prior to that. I'm fairly sure my grasp on anatomy wasn't nearly as advanced as yours in these sketches...well, maybe I oughta bite the bullet and dig some up.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Heh. Notice that I'm posting it here rather than on the VCL forum thread... I'd had a semester of figure drawing by this point, so I had some idea of how anatomy works. I couldn't draw legs to save my life, though. Most of my drawings at that time trailed off around the waist for a damn good reason.

[klawzie.livejournal.com]

I knew you were one of my favorite artists for a reason. Very few artists make me want to do the artistic equivilant of a panty raid (ie: breaking in and making off with their private sketchbooks. XD ), but you've made my list. ;D (Though, after hearing it termed an "artistic panty raid" that might not be quite the compliment it was intended to be. Ohwell. )

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

23 sketchbooks stretching back to 83/84 (plus the one I'm only a third done with) would be a pretty large weight to haul out of a window. Unless you enlisted a whole frat-house to help. Mostly you'd be the proud owner of lots of abandoned scribbles; I'm not one of those people who thinks that the hard covers mean every page has to have a masterpiece.

If you want the real hoard of pre-worn panties, you could always break into my mother's apartment and open the cabinet in the spare room. There's a large cardboard box at the bottom that's stuffed full of sketchbooks going from 1993 all the way back to, um, somewhere in grade school. The box is jokingly stenciled with rad- and bio-hazard signs for a reason.

[synnabar.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU SO MUCH for posting all that! I dunno, I just really love to see people's old art - not because I care that they didn't know anatomy or whatever (my own old work is HORRIBLE when it comes to that) - but because I really love to see the creative process in action! It's really interesting to me to see how artists develop and change over time; and I love to see what people were interested in drawing when they were younger... what influenced them, what styles they tried out, etc. Fascinating!

I think your "old stuff" is very impressive! It's so full of expression and motion - something which your work still has today (unlike, as was commented, those of us who get mired down in detail and end up with expressionless pieces). And the range of styles and materials (sketchy pen here, tight crosshatching there, loose pencil, colored pencil, etc.) is interesting, too. Caroline and the piano, and the dragon-head I could see as spot-illustrations. I love the layout and costuming in Nikolai's card. The anglerfish is wild! The bunnies have so much personality, and I do love the werewolf!

"Also, these seem to be almost exclusively drawn with mechanical pencils - the favorite medium of college-age artists everywhere, it sometimes seems."
*laughs* you got it! I STILL use 'em a lot because I don't always have a sharpener handy (or a place to throw out pencil-shavings), but I remember the sheer thrill of drawing with a thick-lead pencil, or good-quality charcoal, or conte crayon in college. (Actually, I won't show a lot of my college stuff BECAUSE I was trying to "make it look good", and failed ((well, I did well grade-wise, but personally I wasn't happy with it)). My old sketchbook stuff I don't mind showing because it was just for fun.)

And - aaah! - the VCL has a thread on Old Art? *starts gibbering madly* must... see....

Thanks for taking the time to share all that! :D

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It's interesting to look back through one's old stuff. Hope you don't mind that I put in a link to the friends-only post with your own old art...

Liveliness is something that's been one of my major strengths as an artist for quite a while. I'm not sure when I consciously noticed it, or when it started - there's older stuff that's pretty stiff - but ever since I started looking at my art really critically, that's never been something that's been a problem. I do it so unconsciously that it's hard for me to dissect how I do it.

I don't think any of these were direct in pen... the werewolf is definitely over a pencil rough; the little dragon head probably is, too. It's only in the past few years that I've really gained confidence (there's that word again) in working direct in ink. I keep an electric pencil sharpener in my backpack so that I don't have to worry about shavings disposal; I still use the .5mm mechanical (exact same type, even) but I'm much more likely to use something with a real tip to it so I have the option of doing broad, expressive lines from the shoulder with the side of the point.

If I was going home for this Christmas, I'd dig out some of the really old stuff - high school and even beyond. And then I'd probably put it back without scanning it, because, well, I think the statute of limitations has expired on them. I will not be held accountable for crimes against art I comitted twenty years ago!