Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

Anonymous asked: So... I have something to ask. I'm aspiring to be an artist once I can attend art college, but for now I'm still quite young. Lately, I've been doubtful of my current style, as I was told just the other day that "all (my) characters look the same". I'd like for my style to be a tad more realistic, but... I can't seem to make anything work that way. I know I have time to keep learning and developing, but I'm impatient; I can't help it. What should I do?

Ooooh do I feel you there- unfortunately you’re going to be like that, forever. Yup. Artists, no matter what their age, nearly always feel this way- I certainly do! Right now, as it happens. The funny thing is the when you feel that you’re really in a rut and not improving or going too slowly etc. that is usually the time that you are learning the most. It doesn’t show because your brain is always 5 years ahead of your hands, but the connections are being made, and that sense of self analysis (barring being too overly self critical) is vital to improving.

I’m sorry I can’t help get rid of that impatient feeling, but you really do just have to be… patient! And not with ‘waiting until you’re better at stuff’ I mean just, patient. With yourself and with others and with the world and how you fit into it, or not! Patience is not about doing nothing, it is active; it is about diligence and coping with frustration by observing. So, observe what is frustrating you: if you have a real weakness, like say hands or feet or backgrounds, make it your focus for a while. Just do studies of real hands and feet, or colour studies of nice landscapes, or try imitating a style that you like and then apply it to something new. Give yourself little challenges in the form of games and art lessons, and don’t feel obliged to post the results; the majority of the ‘learning’ work I do is never seen by other people because in itself it is not especially valuable, it is the process of doing it that is.

If you want to push your style in particular, studying the real thing super helps with that. Don’t worry about it looking ‘realistic’, just drive yourself to understand what you are looking at. Be intimate- try to know what you are drawing inside out, because when you are at that level of understanding then you can start pulling it to pieces and exaggerating different parts of it in an effective way (which is basically how you stylize). Try breaking yourself out of your comfort zone, too; try using different media than usual, or even draw with your none dominant hand for a while! Allow yourself to play and get things wrong, because both of those things are how you learn to get better.

FAQ!

Recently a very cool person sent me a bunch of questions as a sort of interview for a school project, and it occurred to me that I get asked these questions a lot so I’m throwing them down under the readmore for you guys in case you wanted to know this stuff/so if someone asks me one of these in the future I can just link here. So yeah lots of talky talk under the whatcjamacallit

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Anonymous asked: Hi mod! I'm an art student myself and recently I've had my confidence and faith in my work completely shattered. I was just wondering if you've ever experienced something similar and if you have how you came back from it, because right now I don't even want to look at my stuff let alone actually make anything.

I have. It is hard, it hurts, and it takes a long time to recover. You don’t think it should but it does, and it always does, and you may think that’s because the big shattered hurt feeling is so big and fills you up entirely, but rather it’s like the big wonderful thing that did fill you up is gone and that is so much worse because it suddenly occurs to you that you are small and fragile, but the truth of it is that the thing which has been taken from you is so big and wonderful that without it you feel vulnerable- and I say is, not was, because it is still there, and that is what you must remember. You will slowly find it again, in little pieces all over the floor or in the middle of a conversation, and it will be unexpected and gradual and unstable as you put it back together. Sometimes little bits will break off it again and it will feel like the whole jigsaw-puzzle will fall apart again- and it might, but you can start again, and indeed if you have the patience to live on then you will find that it does start again despite everything, because the big wonderful thing that has been so broken and flown away wants to fill up the space inside you, because nowhere and nothing else is exactly the shape and size and wonderful that you are- it loves you. So, be patient with yourself, not angry; you are frightened and hurt and that is how it will be for as long as it has to be, because it matters; if it did not matter it would not hurt so much, but you are able to recover. We are always able to recover if we are given the time and love we need, and there are people and pieces of art and music that will help with the love, but it will take time, and for that time you must be very brave and tolerant and not too cross with yourself, or you risk scaring away the big wonderful thing that wants so badly to come back to you. I wish you good luck, and maybe this will be the first thing that will push a little piece of that broken, big and wonderful thing that you are into coming back to you, because it will; you must believe that it will.

Anonymous asked: Hello! I've just recently been introduced to the world of cartooning and I'm struggling to find a personal style. I was wondering how your own drawing skills grew, and what you did to become comfortable with it. Right now I feel like I'm trying to hard to replicate others work because I'm not yet confident enough to sit down with a blank piece of paper. Any advice? Love your art, especially the gravity falls stuff 0:

Well gosh, hard question- sense of style and personal style is something that develops with time and experimentation, and copying to learn is a great way to go about that! The only thing I would warn about that idea is really trying to mimic one and only one particular style; you can box yourself in and make yourself into a professional, forgetable copycat by doing that. What you want to do is copy and learn from a lot of different places and people- and by learning I mean thinking about what you are copying. Look at the artwork, think about what it is that draws you to it and makes it appealing (is it the shapes? the linestyle? the expressions?), and then try smushing one or more of those qualities together with another from a different source! One of my favourite daydreaming pasttimes is to take two totally different ideas and smash them together, it’s how I’ve come up with a lot of my stories but it also works for drawing styles. Try combining two of your favourite artist’s styles into one hybrid version, or replicate a drawing you like in a different style- learn by copying, but don’t just be a photocopier. Most of all don’t feel pressured to match a style that is popular. What is ‘in’ isn’t necessarily what you like, nor is it necessarily good! There is no right or wrong way to draw. Play with your art, and keep playing, because playing is learning; it is taking ideas and shoving them around and messing about and making something new. If you keep doing that you will not only develop your own style in time (and that sneaks up on you, trust me, it was a big surprise when someone first told me that I had one!) - but you will become a much more versatile artist than someone who has only one, if distinctive, style. I am constantly trying to push myself out of my comfort zone and try new things, and not all of them work! But that’s how you learn what doesn’t work, and that is just as valuable as knowing what does.

Anonymous asked: in the process of becoming such an amazing artist, did you ever feel like no one really liked what you did? sorry for such a depressing question i just need some conformation that i might maybe be able to be good someday

I’d debate the being an amazing artist (I have a long long way to go! but thank you very much for the kindness), but to answer your question; absolutely! I have felt that people outright hated my work on various occasions, and not just any people- my teachers! I was very lucky for most of my education, with tough but fair tutors, but at one very critical stage of my education I had a bad run and it was very poisonous for me and my art; my work was called “indulgent” and “commercial” and I was frequently told that I was over ambitious and “trying too hard”. I still have bad reactions to those first two words even now- although I’ve come to learn that sometimes they can be meant positively, I don’t think I’ll get past the negative association with those terms

the worst was probably the ‘trying too hard’ insult- because why is that an insult? trying to do the best you can? that’s a bad thing? apparently it can be seen as that, and by people who are supposed to be extracting the best from you, no less! it took me a long time to get my head around, largely because I had convinced myself that they were right, because teachers always know best (and before then they usually had, so I trusted them by default)

months after graduating by the skin of my teeth I had a short conversation with my mother (former psychiatrist) after a startling revelation that I had been depressed- she agreed. I had no idea at the time, and in hindsight it’s staggering that I didn’t, but that’s what I was, and that will be a part of me forever, and that, as they say, is that

recovering from depression was a struggle, but it was during that stage that I started to notice the work that I had made in that time which I still liked was the stuff which I had made for myself- the stuff I just wanted to draw and drew for the hell of it, and it didn’t just make me happy either! it seemed to be that specific stuff that most other people enjoyed too!

it can be hard to find a balance between accepting critique and holding true to your own vision, but it is possible, and while I’m still learning and hope I will continue to for the rest of my life I know that the best stories I have written have been the ones that I have wanted to read myself; the same with drawings, the same with everything

learning to love yourself and your work is a lifelong task and it’s all too easy to fall off the train even if you’ve found the railroad, but keep at it, and don’t forget to listen to your gut! instincts are an under-rated asset and they haven’t failed me yet- if anything, the times that I have failed have been when I’ve ignored that little voice or the unexplainable twinge that was telling me to do something else

so yeah, TL:DR I absolutely have felt like that, but I have come to terms with the fact that it isn’t as important as being happy with the work myself

Anonymous asked: Hi shy anon here, I'm currently in year 10 of school and taking Media, Graphics and History for GCSE (I know History is unrelated XD) and my parents say I should stay on for A Level. Do you know of any universities that specialise in animation?

Okay well firstly history is never unrelated keep reading that stuff always, taking A levels is a good idea so yup yup do that if you want, but for animation univeristies within the UK I’m afraid I’m not an expert; I had a pretty lousy experience at the place I studied in the UK, not going to lie, but maybe I was just unlucky. There are probably good places here but you’ll have to ask around, and don’t just trust information on university websites- find people who studied at them to get a better perspective. There are a lot of super great places to study in Europe, however, and obviously I recommend places like VFS after you’ve got some more experience, but it all depends on how willing you are to travel and live away from home- it can be rough, and very expensive!

You have a long time to decide, so don’t rush into it or think you must set yourself a path right now and follow it absolutely. People change! You are allowed to change your mind! What I would super recommend is that before you decide on studying animation and/or where, take a foundation art year. I did one at Manchester Metropolitan University and it was very helpful in letting me decide where I wanted my specialties to lie, and dabbling in a lot of different types of art gives you a better, broader perspective on what you can do with animation and your life in general.

Having said that, you still have another year to go before completing GCSE’s and then it’s up to you as to whether you spend another two years doing A levels. Don’t feel pressured! Teachers can make it sound like you’re meant to have the plan for the rest of your life all sorted out before you’re seventeen or else you’ll fail at everything but hell, it isn’t true! Please don’t trap yourself into that system. Give yourself enough time to decide, be patient with your development of interests, and learn as many different things as you can- remember that nothing is irrelevant to art! Certainly not history!

Anonymous asked: how did you learn to draw hands?

okay I’ve had a lot of people asking this one and for hand tutorials and, well, I’m not much good at tutorials and I didn’t learn to draw them from a tutorial so it would feel a bit silly to make one tbh but this is the honest to god truth you can ask my mother she was witness to it and thought I was nuts because I spent two weeks over a summer holiday drawing nothing but hands every day

that’s… it

seriously

two weeks of nothing but hands

my parents are both doctors so we had various anatomy/dissection books scattered about the place and I knew I sucked at drawing hands but I wanted to be able to really badly, so I grabbed a bunch and sat and did studies of the skeletal structure, muscles, nerves, you name it. Really bad ones. Over and over and over, and even after that I wasn’t fab at drawing hands by any stretch but it helped me understand what they’re made of and how they work as mechanical objects- I mean god I know about the blood vessels in hands and I’ve never had to use that information practically but hell is it interesting to me.

The next step was just observing people and their hands (including myself, lots of drawings of my own left hand in my sketchbooks lemme tell u), and getting the body language down. You can’t draw a real thing purely from a dissected thing- take George Stubbs, fantastic horse artist, knew the anatomy literally inside out but some of the paintings he did just look kind of… wrong. Why? Because they look like a puppet of a horse that’s been meticulously arranged, that’s why. It is anatomically perfect, but not alive. You have to look at the living thing and how it moves and behaves to be able to draw it as a living thing. One thing I learned was that body language- especially in the world of hands- can be extremely personal as well as universal, so observe as much as you can in as many places as you can!

so yeah sorry it’s a very boring waffling answer but in summary I just kind of sat down and studied hands for a single ungodly length of time and kept going as a habit ever after. There are probably much better saner ways of doing it and I’m by no means an expert at drawing them- I’m still learning all the time! Try to find the way that’s right for you, there’s lots of cool guides out there, but in all honesty you’re only going to learn how to draw something by looking at the real deal and trying to figure out how it works, so go look!

Anonymous asked: Besides never, when do you sleep?

Actually, I sleep as much as I can! And while I do get my fair share of restless nights and 3am attacks of inspiration that leave my brain spinning like a car careening off the M6 after just being hit by a ten tonne truck, I do get my 8 hours a night as often as I can and I can’t emphasize how important that is and how important it is for people to know that

it is

good

to sleep

in the creative world there’s this sort of glorification of insomnia and the notion of ‘working all the time’, that an artist has to suffer, that every self respecting cartoonist or animator or painter has to be driven to the point of exhaustion every waking hour in order for them to be allowed to call themselves an artist, that if you are not working you are wasting time and being a self indulgent twat (in a nutshell). I am here to tell you that is not true, and it is not healthy to think that it is true.

I often get people asking me where I get my ideas from, or more often how I get so many ideas and so quickly. I can’t answer that very easily but I know for a fact that the times that I have been stressed and sleepless and a nervous wreck I have not been able to come with good ideas. I have certainly not been able to come up with them quickly.

Ideas need time, your brain needs time, and that time can’t be simultaneously occupied with you worrying about your taxes or whether you ate something this morning or why the cat is on fire. Imagination time is a state of rest, it is a sort of meditation; you need to feel at ease in order to be able to play, because that’s what imagining things is when it gets down to it. Children don’t play when they know there’s an axe-wielding maniac in the room, and they don’t play when they’re cross and tired and angry at the world for being unfair and awake and much too loud. That’s when they cry, and the more people I meet and the more I learn about myself and humans as a whole the more I’ve come to realize that there is no bigger fiction than the concept of ‘being an adult’. Your mind and my mind are just as sensitive, creative and special as they were when we were five years old, we just have a lot more information to deal with, and knowledge to manipulate, and that can be used to our benefit! So long as we don’t keep sending ourselves to sit in detention.

It can be very difficult to find this sort of ‘peace’ to think in, which is why people often have their ideas in the dead of night, or in the shower, or on the bus into work; it is those gaps between the frantic thought that the rest of life demands from us that our minds are allowed to drift, make sparks with synapses that they haven’t used for a long time or smash together two thoughts that they never connected before, but which then go on to make something new. I can’t sit here and tell you to ‘make time to think’, but I can tell you that you shouldn’t think that you should be doing something all the time every second of every day.

Yes, draw every day, that’s great, and doodling is amazing oh my goodness yes doodling is like super fab and covered in glitter, but don’t draw all the time. You have to rest, not just your hand and wrist to avoid physical strain, but you have to rest your mind; it will help you to stay sane and happy, and it will help you to create more and better work than ever before. Working to the point of self destruction is counter productive and dangerous, and I hate the modern myth that surrounds it. It promotes nothing but insecurity about yourself and your work and is a guaranteed one-way ticket to carpel tunnel town and the therapist.

(shit this got really long hit J to skip)

Well, firstly, I’m not sure if ‘we British’ are better than anyone else at being scary, or anything else, as a matter of fact. I have, however, come to accept that we have a certain, unique sense of absurdity to our culture, and strange as it sounds I believe that absurdity has a large influence on what humans find 'scary’.

Absurdity is the irrational. The out of place. It is something familiar in a place it shouldn’t be, or something unfamiliar in the place of something that should be there. In comedy absurdity is especially wonderful because it is unexpected. Non-sequitur humour is priceless because it simply never gets old; it cannot. Drop a whale onto a banana in a skit show; it’s funny without having any particular reason to be, but you can make it even better. Thirty minutes later show a close up of a bunch of bananas, then pull out to show a whole pod of whales falling onto them, but cut away before they hit; it’s hysterical. Drop a banana onto a whale at the end of the show and you’ll probably kill a member of the audience.

Fear can be built up in the same way. Hitchcock himself used it by showing a ridiculously large group of birds sitting on a children’s climbing frame, then a larger group of birds, then a larger one, and a larger one. In one sense the situation is absurd, because it is unfeasible; but it is that displacement from the norm, and the gradual increase of it, that makes it dreadful. It is strange, almost impossible, but we become accustomed to it as a sequence of events and begin to wonder if it is so strange after all. At the same time, we are not given any information about the nature of these birds beyond some slightly dissonant singing as a musical backdrop, and despite this sound being clearly unrelated to the birds themselves we suppose the worst because of it and the build. There is no need for violence or a sudden shock tactic to merit their being scary. Without being explicitly told that these birds are a menace we perceive them as a threat, not a joke. We are afraid of them, not 'despite’ knowing nothing about them, but 'because’ we know nothing about them.

Put a matte, black box the size of a house in the middle of a field. It’s odd. It doesn’t respond to the light properly. It is unnatural in shape and size. It doesn’t fit. Not, perhaps, scary, but it is unsettling. If you own a pet dog, you may have experienced it barking at a new piece of furniture in your house; this is because something that is familiar has not only changed, but has been invaded. There is something new, and, as history and society has (cruelly) emphasized time and time again, people are reluctant to accept change, and this reluctance often manifests as fear.

Leave the box there for a week, we accept the situation.

Move the box to another part of the field with no explanation as to how it got there, it begins to become sinister.

Point out that the shadow of the box does not face the same way as any other shadow in the field, we are afraid.

Change can be scary or funny, gradual or sudden, but it is critical that this change is unexplained for it to be either one. It is often only the timing that separates the two; a practical joke that is badly timed can be greatly distressing to someone, which is why learning the balance is very important for either intent to be achieved correctly.

So, we have learned that placing something strange in a a strange place can be 'odd’. Now, imagine something that has always been familiar, and is in a familiar place, doing something strange. A clock that always chimes on the hour doesn’t do so. A doll on the mantlepiece falls off without any sign of having been disturbed. Your mother has someone else’s voice, but nobody else seems to notice.

This last method in particular can be used to begin a line of thought that a great many people find distressing; that of whether the fault in this event lies outside of the person’s mind, or within it. 'Am I the one who is wrong?’ It brings into question the security of the observer. If the world is suddenly strange, or something strange seems to have happened, but nobody acknowledges this 'change’, it brings forth one of the most primeval of fears; that of one’s own madness. Is there a conspiracy, or is it you who is wrong, are you the one who is the danger to others? Doubt is a very frightening thing, and gradually layering insecurity on top of anxiety is a toxic recipe for a person’s state of mind. The absurdity in this case is not a displacement of something tangible, but of one’s own self; and that is what is so terrifying. There is not only no way for you to be sure of the strange event you have perceived, but of any event you perceive. It is reality itself that has been displaced, and so you are the anomaly; you are the absurdity.

Augh wow shit that is enough TL:DR and I have to go out and gosh there is so much more to be said about this subject but yeah short answer= if you want to learn to make something scary, learn how to make something funny.

Nnnnot really? Not a conscious one anyway- I suppose it’s how I draw because it’s how I think?

I’ve always had a taste for the macabre, but I never saw it as separate from things that were cute or childlike. If anything the stories I read seemed to emphasize the fact that the world was always going to be misleading in that respect; that things that seemed sweet and trustworthy more often than not weren’t. You can trust a human to be made of blood and guts and gore, and death is an inevitable feature of life, but promises of immortality? Sing-song fairy rings and houses made of sugar? Those were the things that were scary, not to be trusted.

Morbid Penny Dreadfuls and candy-coated trippy dreamlands will always be a massive part of me, but out of the two the saccharine view of the world has always seemed the more sinister one to me.