*I didn’t realize one of the gifs was too big @ 7.8mb I got it down to 2.3 and that was small enough to post.*

So whatever it is you are drawing…yes I think drawing a lot will help you devlop your own voice. I don’t expect people to draw as much as I do. But if you are pursuing improvement it could be worth it to try. I prefer to have a multifaceted view when I dive into a keyword. In this case of hands. So I have to this point I have tried drawing a lot of different looks.

Beyond that I want to think about individual motivation. EXPRESSION, Maybe it was a memory of a relative smoking a cigarette and how big their hand looked to me. Maybe it’s the anti fascist salute like the picture above.

I was affected by seeing footage of people searching through garbage in the Phillipines for fried chicken to refry and sell as Pug Pug. The feeling of the hands when you make your fingers seize up and just bend your figure tips/distal phalanges. A peace sign or a gun we make with our fingers etc. I will place those clips below as gifs. See what you can pull out from it

Or what associations do you make?

So hands or whatever you are making picture of…yes studying is important…but also considering what you are feeling while you make art…what you are trying to communicate are also worth considering. And also accepting no matter how much you think your work means one thing to you, once it goes before an audience, they could see something very different. We have both individual and collective experiences. This was much longer than I thought it was going to be. KEEP MAKING ART KIDS!!!

(I teach k-12 art and sometimes college level drawing/animation/illustration)

When I was younger I was ver self conscious about drawing hands. I still had some of this self consciousness even when I got to art school. When I was in high school I tried to copy and study from anatomy books. I can study something over and over again but I won’t always be able to recall what I studied. I need visual ques to remind me.

At the beginning of the school year I started with variations on contours drawing. This year I used cave painting as an entry for this. Quickly we got into doing studies of our own hands or other peoples hands. I went back over the working parts of the hands. E.g. carpals, metacarpals and phalanges. The muscles, fat pads and tendons.

During that time going over various forms that are in play like cylinders or rectangular cube, which I likened to a thick piece of bread.

After we put that together or now what variations can you try out? Do you want to make hands look “realistic” and take the time to render everything out or would you just throw down sausage fingers to get an idea across like a cartoonist?

Or even from there do you abstract and exaggerate?

by the time I had gotten to September from August I had a handful of animation tests and wanted to put them together in a short animation. I guess this is the limit of how many pictures I can put up on a blog post. I will continue this is a part 2. The big picture here is to get over fears or deficits by studying. Studying drawing can be just drawing a lot…I know this drives some people crazy being told to just draw more…but if part of what we are trying to over come is a fear of starting…making mistakes and still feeling like you are getting somewhere. Getting some pencil mileage can be valuable.

I used to draw swords in class. I remember doing this as far back as 3rd grade. I also remember playing Ninjas and Superspies back then. Here are some studies/research I did looking for swords for pirates. Keep making art kids!

I went through a lot of iteration trying to figure out the cafe. At first it was a tree house. But something was off…I think I tried two or three designs like that before I got set on an island as a location. Through sketching…and I often draw airships and onion domes…but that making it a port gave me possibilities for so many characters. I will do another blog on character ideation, But for now…

The intererior came first. I had seen those eagle headed espresso machines on a trip to San Francisco years ago.

When I did this I drew the floor plan in a bird’s eye view then deformed that and kind of “popped up” the elements from that sketch when painting.

Earlier versions of the inside were trying to establish mood and color. But in a more expressionistic way, not really understanding the structure/architecture.

This was one of the first exterior sketches. The title of Octopus Cafe had come to me in a dream. And I was stuck on Octopus…so the walk ways to the cafe we like the tentacles. But I knew it wasn’t working.

So This was the next iteration. I liked it a lot more. But the cafe even though it looked more like an octopus, didn’t feel right. So I kept pushing. I was teaching a digital illustration class at the time, and had given an assignment for thumnailing so I did 20-30 thumnails in 5-10 mins.

I had been looking at houses in Normandy France where they had turned old boats upside down. So I think I turned a tug boat upside down for the roof. The overlay sketch is an attempt at how the ventilation system could work. I also knew I was going to have a giant in there so I needed a really high interior ceiling. It’s been a while since I finished this project, and I think I would approach rendering very differently. But I stopped using photoshop. When I was using photoshop I would take pictures of lots of different textures, or scrap that I had laying around and make brushes with that. Lots of watercolor, but also things like circuit boards and textiles. Now that I’ve divorced myself from adobe and tried to limit my interactions with AI….90%of what I’m doing is in procreate. I’ve been using procreate for 7 years or so and I’m just starting to play with making brushes. Keep making art kids!

So I ran my online class out of my classroom again. Intermittent power outages so I had to be where the internet was available. I was drawing with my students again. I had already done some sketches like this one a month or two before.

Now I was working on paper and I haven’t been doing that because I want to stay portable with my tablet. That being said if you haven’t had the chance to work on paper or physical media…it’s expensive, but it’s worth it to help with decision making. The computer doesn’t have limitations…so you have to define the sandbox you’re going to play in.

I enjoyed this sketch but I didn’t think it was doling what I wanted…and I want to push it farther. So I went into procreate and redrew using the paint sketch as an under drawing…

I knew the position was wrong. So I kept resizing and adding and tweaking things until I had a whole figure.

Maybe I thought it was getting too close to one piece, but with normal human proportions. Just not enough, so then I threw the kitchen sink at it. And what I got from that felt like things I was doing 9 or 10 years ago.

I had changed the body position to be more forward leaning more aggressive. And I kept trying to incorporate the canon fuses Teach was known to wear into battle to scare the piss out of the people he was robbing. That’s the thing about Blackbeard, he didn’t kill a ton of people.

After that I tried to pull back and simplify. Maybe getting close to things I tend to do with printmaking. Maybe it was out of frustration, but I wanted to add the theatricality back. I knew I didn’t want a tricorn hat, it’s not really a thing to wear on a boat with heavy winds. Anyways I loosened up and started doodling.

This is where I landed before I added the skulls. I remembered Blackbeard’s flag with the devil and the heart on it. So I think that’s where the Wagnerian opera horned helmet came in. And I’m not sure if the hands are me just cartooning or if I would thing he would wear to again scare the ship he was boarding into thinking they were being attacked by a demon or devil. The pants are linen…the sharp teeth are probably wooden. Again scare tactics. I like this much better than where I started. Peace, Nic

PS Reading books about Pirate history also helped. Pirate Enlightenment or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber is a great read or listen if you do Audible like me. Doing research is good. Keep drawing kids.

Talking about old ways of ink and paint the other day in class. This was done on acetate with acrylics. Back in the day it would have been done with vinyl paint, but cartoon color went out of business years ago. I think there is still at least one company in england that still makes vinyl paint.

Another factoid was that most of the ink and paint in the animation industry in the states was done by women. Walt Disney gave a strange explanation, saying that women we better suited to detail work.

I started with a rough sketch, laid the acetate over that and made my line art. You can see on the right where I flipped over the piece to show the paint process. I just went with flat color, no light and shadow. It's a lot of fun but super time consuming to work this way for animation. But with animation you are always running out of time.

Man I’ve been wanting to post random stuff for a while…lol I have a huge back log of caricatures and political cartoons, other random stuff. Here’s Jack Black.

If you don’t know me… I am an art teacher. I teach k-12 art in Alaska and I teach an illustration class for Calarts. I tend to draw with my students. The power was out in the village I live so I was working out of my k-12 class room. Usually I’m on my tablet, but I decided to used paper, crayon and tempera paint. It felt so good to use physical media for doing these studies. Big ups to the model Shadia. Every semester we have a different topic we cover, in the past we have done high fantasy, cyberpunk…currently we are on pirates. So partly this means looking at historical examples, eg the golden age of piracy or Zheng Yi Sao. Or the late 1990’s early 2000’s file sharing internet pirates/hackers. Or contemporary issues of pirates like Somalis. And then still farther what about fantasy or cartoon versions like One Piece. I have no problem talking about anime or manga in my classes as was my elders bias against that culture. I still hear of art teachers that bash anime or manga. But doing so from a place of ignorace of the beauty of those art forms.

Anyways, I think while I will be very on brand NEMOS content for most of my posting. I will use this channel to blog about art or life or whatever I want to. Keep making art kids. - Papa Sweets