Welcome back for another flip through this Todd from toddYoungONLINE. This is one of my older sketchbooks, if not one of my oldest, is doing a lot of comic book work again, trying to find characters to use for some stories.
I had, you know, a had a thought, you know, a bad paraphrasing of Picasso saying, you know, we’re all born artists. It’s just kind of life that milks that out of us. And it’s true. I’m trying to go through that now, trying to get back into this consistently and draw consistently. But with all my other, you know, responsibilities and things going on in my life right now, practicing character work, relearning, figure drawing, just trying to figure out what I want to do with my art.
It really is a struggle to make it happen daily. And the irony being that I’ve hoarded art supplies to use and I keep kind of finding things and I’m like, Ooh, that’s cheap. I’m going to buy that. So I now have a lot of, yeah, there’s something naughty. I have a lot of like sharp eyes and stuff because I’ll see them on sale and I’ll grab them.
So it’s crazy. Just going back through this, you know, this was one that not recently, but at some, some point I had gone back through when I had gotten a little stronger with some style that I was kind of working on or working with and redoing some of these characters again in that style, using Sharpies and my work.
And so I remember I forget where I was when I did that. Anyway, working from, you know, life trying to work with ink and make it what am I saying, making deliberate marks. It may not have turned out, you know, realistically, but here we are.
Makes you think before you, you know, make the mark and what you’re going to do. So this is one of the shorter ones. But yeah, working with something like Sharpie will definitely make you think, okay, this is what I want to do. You know, it’s it’s not forgiving at all. But then you work with what you do and build from there.
It I was watching someone do some critiques, have been watching a lot of YouTube videos and Instagram stuff and people teaching, and I saw somebody do a critique on of his work and I thought it was interesting because it reminded me of a teacher I had, and I may have told this story already, who he was critiquing our work.
And you can only critique from from in through your lens of experience. But if you don’t ask the intention of the person and what they were going for, your critique can be flat, I guess because you look at it like, This is what I would have done, this is what I would have done. But if you’re if you don’t know what their intention was in drawing or doing what they were doing, then you can be completely off.
I mean, it’s not off for what your skill and experience would have been, that you would have drawn it a little differently or whatever. Sure. But with so many different styles and people experimenting in so many different ways and developing their own vocabulary, that sometimes your your lens isn’t accurate to what their intention was. So I just found that interesting.
I had that experience and in class with one of my teachers one time that he was trying to critique something and I was looking at it in a completely different way. And we didn’t know or we didn’t ask what the intention behind the work was. So we kind of had a difference of opinion in, I guess, some of the best ways because, you know, it’s like that’s the only way you can look at things a little bit differently sometimes is to step back and and think about how somebody is really working on something.
And what they’re really trying to do elsewhere is, you know, abstract expressionism is completely useless because, you know, it doesn’t look like anything. And so I just things that make you think and make you, you know, relive things. More anatomy work for me, older stuff, trying to find the lines and find the definition of the form that I wanted to to do.
Probably using things like bridge Women’s book and some other, you know, ways to find it. You know, I honestly I mean, I wasn’t I mean, some of these, you know, back in 94 and that’s kind of when this was 93, 94, you know, being able to look back and see, you know, the blue lines were a lot more confident practice playing with different this like I said, this idea kind of popped up and came through a lot of sketchbooks.
But anyway, I really am flattered at the response I get from these and the encouragement. And I really do think everybody for their watching these and, and their and, you know, the feedback you give me. So thank you very much.
This has been tired from Todd Young online and I will see you soon.
Take care. Bye.
