I haven't been able to overcome the inertia of all my miniatures being packed away in a small little storeroom that is full of my parent's junk to start mini painting again, which has led to all my paints sitting in their paint pots for literally decades and me praying that Vallejo and Reaper Mini and the -ancient- GW paint pots have manufactured high quality airtight lids, as opposed to the simply -old- GW paint lid which leaked more air than a badly sealed bag of keropok chips and dried within a year.
Yet, mini-painting illuminated one thing to me. I wasn't abysmal at art. Having bought into my mum's propaganda for many years, in which she claims that she is horrible at art, and my dad isn't any better, and therefore it was perfectly ok for me to be crappy at art too (see, art isn't an important examinable subject anyway, why waste time on it?), I was under the impression that I would never be good at art. Kinda like my failed attempt at piano playing, music and keeping rhythm.
There were the years of lousy art teachers at school who assume that students interested in art are already talented at it and those who aren't, aren't worth teaching... not to mention they were probably art teachers who barely understood the subject (otherwise why weren't they off doing art-y things like being a professional illustrator, graphic designer or purist artist?) and were only middling art critics at best...
Then there was the subject matter and method of teaching, which often involved boring invocations of squished fruit hastily bought from some canteen or local hawker centre, drawing blocks with paper quality worse than some brands of toilet paper providing vast, blank white canvases of creative artist's block, shoddy student art materials bought slavishly to a stationery list provided at the beginning of the school year and brought in wholesale bulk to the school's supply store monopoly, no attempt whatsoever at elucidating the very basics through instructional chalkboard teaching, a pancake thin "art textbook" which read like a reprinted Cliff notes version of some beginner art book you can find at Popular, and then there was the lack of time to do any decent amount of homework whatsoever and still have a (child's) life, thanks to the enthusiastic worksheet deluge of teachers who imagine theirs is the only subject that exists in a student's timetable.
I also remember a fun little group project way back in Secondary school when we were tasked to create some manner of sculpture out of recycled material, and we hit upon the idea of creating a tree base of empty drink cans and some branches out of real wood branches, perhaps spray-painted white. This was immensely fun to devise, conceive, collect materials for and attempt, even if our branch-sculpting skills weren't up to snuff, yielding a miserable-looking sapling resembling a bunch of Chinese New Year pussywillows, rather than the grand oak or rain tree branches of our vision.
However, our art teacher only saw the sickly grouping of the surface and paid no mind to the eons of staying back we spent slaving away. It didn't help that some moron had toppled the structure we were keeping behind the home econs lab for safekeeping a couple days it was due to be handed in, so that we ended up submitting a wounded mutilated husk. She mocked us, brutally, shamelessly, and mercilessly, putting our crushed masterpiece on display for classroom humiliation, and derided our choice of materials.
Truly, we were artists before our time. For lo and behold, this is one of the pieces I saw on display at the Singapore Garden Festival 2010:
White-painted branches, mind you. Exactly as we used. Sucks to be you, uninformed art teacher whose name I have quite forgotten.
So no, I paid no attention to art in school whatsoever.
Enter a growing maturity, an interest in the fantastical, and the advent of the Internet.
Fantasy art was eye-opening. For once, art covered subject matter of relevant personal interest, wasn't pretentiously abstract, unabashedly catered to popular culture with its photorealistic approach, and was full of brilliant colours and rendered light and shadow.
"Obviously" I wasn't capable of creating such works, but I could stand back and admire it from afar - from pros like Michael Whelan decorating the covers of my favorite novels, budding talents like Stephanie Law Pui-Mun whose portfolio website I followed religiously in my college days, to the multitudes of deviantART. Game art - be it tabletop or computer, RPG or miniature wargame - was yet another delightful subset of this subculture that shared my interest in the fantastic, and whose numbers were expanding so much as to enroach into the mainstream.
Eventually, I took my first fateful step into dabbling in "art" from the friendly encouragement of an article in Dragon magazine. Applying paint onto an already sculpted statue certainly didn't seem like anything vaguely resembling Art. More like, paint-by-numbers for fun. I could do that.
Countless free guides led me by the hand, helped me procure specialist equipment and sneakily got me practising techniques that moved me from two-color shapeless blob to decently recognisable color-controlled basecoat.
More reading, more references and more practice later, and I had unknowingly developed an art vocabulary in terms of color theory, and light and shading. I could tell complementary colors and select a limited color palette, instead of slathering on stuff that seemed like it made sense at the time. "Belts are always brown, leather, y'know. Or black. Boots too. Flesh is beige. Blood is red. Swords are silver." Things like that.
I was, in fact, producing pieces of miniature art that were more than passable - if not actually, y'know, GOOD, and non-embarassing to photograph and post online or put on display in my house.
Somewhere amidst the 1001 minipainting tutorials and websites, I ended up reading other online tutorials about *gasp, shock, horror* 2D art. Line drawing, digital painting and stuff.
And I got to thinking, well, if I can manage creating the illusion of light and shade on a miniature three-dimensional surface, isn't a two-dimensional painting just a really -really- squished miniature? After all, when you hand paint designs on banners and shields and cloaks, it's kinda 2D...
The passing of the years had illuminated me to one revelation. All creative works take an enormous amount of time, care, effort and iteration. Case in point, writing. Draft, edit, rinse, repeat, iterate. When you paint a mini, the paint doesn't leak out of the paintbrush magically shaded. Basecoat, wash or shade, drybrush or highlight, fiddle with details, then done. And yes, you can fix mistakes. That's what the delete key, an eraser or white paint is for.
By multiplying my misapprehension of how long it takes an artist to produce an artwork by a factor of x10 or x20, I now had a more realistic expectation of how long it was going to take me, a raw beginner, to produce something that kinda sorta might look like what an artist would produce in his concept sketchbook.
Oh yes, concept drawings, sketches. Huge eye-opener to listen to the behind the scenes process of various movies over the years. Not to mention, flipping through the Collector Edition artbooks of one game or another. You mean, artists do drafts? They don't do these ginormously detailed canvases every time they touch a brush?
Understanding that such a thing as colorscripts existed was BIG for me. Because I respond strongly to art with huge patches of acrylic color and plays with the simulation of light and shadow. The emotional and dramatic content replete in color has an awesomely personal resonance. And by golly, there's barely any recognizable detail or line drawing in these colorscripts, it's just splashes of color to experiment with how a certain look works. "Y'know, I could do that," says the stifled muse in me tentatively. "You like to look at it after all. So it's still art. Maybe not Art. But unassuming, unpretentious nice-to-look-at beginner-at-a-hobby art."
So I think back to some of my stillborn childhood attempts to sketch the fantasy characters of our imagination, and you know, they aren't that bad for only spending upwards of 1-2 hours on a teensy scrap of copy paper with a mechanical pencil. And an eraser, of course.
No one said you had to scale Mount Everest in a day. Maybe I can't master line drawing, dynamic figure poses, three-dimensional shading, perspective, digital painting all at once, despite the multiple attempts at loaning out library books that cover these topics to form an enormously intimidating reading list. And regardless of what Chapter 1 and 2 says in all those art books, maybe I don't have to a) gather art supplies and b) get a hang of line drawing, before moving on to more audaciously ambitious crap like color.
There are distinct pieces of subject matter
To be continued... maybe with pictures.
1 comment:
Rofl.
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