All Hail Sir Reginald Snobbington the Third

Okay, I’ve got a sure-fire formula that’s guaranteed to make you the most annoying guy (or gal) this weekend: after watching whatever movie you and your friends, your wife or your family wants to see, talk about why you hated it afterward. And don’t be general, make sure you go into all of the specific errors that the director made, and how you would have done it better. Be prepared for accusations of ruining the movie by over-analyzing it, and not enjoying it “for what it is”, be prepared to be labeled a snob.  You’ll be guaranteed to be hated by your loved ones, but you’ll also be guaranteed to be a bit better of an artist (that is, if you actually go out and try and create art afterward).

Hating other people’s art is an essential part of becoming a better artist. Sure, it’s a great idea to analyze art that you love, but honestly, you will learn the lessons much more saliently if you see what’s lacking.

Why is this so important?

Well, one way of looking at art is as a discussion. One artist creates a piece of work, and says, “Here, here is my understanding of what life, truth and beauty is all about.” And another artist comes along and says, “That’s a good start, but you’ve missed this little bit of life, truth and beauty over here.” And so it goes, on and on, for thousands of years.

Greeks look at sculpture, and say, “Hey this could look more like a real thing.’” and start making stuff that looks more real. The next group of Greeks say, “Wow, that looks real, but wouldn’t it be more exciting if they we’re putting their weight on one leg?” and then the next Greeks come along and say, “Wow, that contrapaso stuff is swell, but how about some more flowing drapery and dynamic poses?” and before you know it, three artistic movements just happened.

Hmmm, not bad.

Now, that's more like it!

That’s the thing about movements: they never happen in a vacuum. They’re always a response to the one that came before. You can only engage in the conversation if you know the language, and the language of art is critical analysis (aka talking like a snob).

What does analysis mean? It means, yes, picking things apart. Nitpicking, if you will. It means, first paying attention to how you feel, and second coming up with a good explanation for why you feel that way. Look at the details. Figure out how they work together. Break apart those details, and try and understand the finer details inside. Question the assumptions. Challenge the stuff that’s phoney.

“Wait,” you ask, “won’t it ruin the experience for me?” It might, but what is more important to you? Do you want to say something significant with your art? Do you want to illuminate a bit of truth or beauty, or do you want to be transported to the magical realm of Middle Earth?

Umm...Middle Earth.

And to be quite honest, analysis does not ruin art for me. It empowers me. Rather than having an artistic experience dictated to me, I have a say in what the experience will be. Rather than being told that explosions and Megan Fox are awesome, I can say, “Hmmm, I don’t think so.” And when a piece of art is really well made, I can decide to let myself really enjoy it.

Okay, I want to finish with one more little secret:  you don’t always have to open your mouth. If you’re always analyzing things, and ruining the party in the process, then you should probably just shut up. The job will get done just as well if you wait to do it with other snobs,  write it down in your hoity-toity theory blog, or scream it into a pillow. As long as you have a chance to figure it all out, and as long as you actually go out and make something in response, being an art snob can only make you a better artist.

I can’t say that I’m the best artist out there, but I’m certainly a better artist than I was when I started this blog. I’ve read a lot of advice about getting better at drawing over the years. Some advice has been very helpful and some advice just hasn’t worked for me. I want to share just a couple of things that have helped me improve, particularly over the last four or five years.

1. Draw a lot. How much is a lot? Malcom Gladwell says its takes about 10,000 hours of doing something to become an expert at it. (I recently did a back-of-the-napkin calculation with my father and we figured he had done over 80,000 hours of surgery!) So the more you do every day, the faster you’ll get good. In 2004, I attended my first San Diego Comic Con, where I nervously showed around my sketchbook to artists I admired. One of these artists was Paul Davies, who recommended that I fill up one sketchbook a month, at minimum. I did just that, several months over, and was amazed at how quickly I progressed over that time. I also recommend that if you have the means, to get a job where you draw. It’s much easier to get in a lot of hours of practice when 8 or more of them are guaranteed everyday.

This is your best friend

2. Slow and Steady. Especially when learning to do cleanup, whether it be with pencil, brush or crow quill, go slowly. It’s just like practicing a musical instrument. You start as slowly as you can without making mistakes, then you speed up. Go as slowly as necessary to have control over what you’re doing on the page. This is particularly important when trying to ink ellipses and other curves freehand. While it’s best to sketch an ellipse in a single quick stroke, I’ve never seen an artist I admire ink an ellipse that way. Most will carefully and deliberately chunk out the ellipse with smaller controlled ink strokes.

Watch how Jake Parker does it:

Inking Missile Mouse from jakeparker on Vimeo.

3. Learn from the best. Another musical analogy. I met a guy once who played the violin in high school. His music teacher gave him this piece of advice: If you want to be first chair, don’t set your sights on first chair, set your sights on the best violinists in the world. Particularly with the ubiquity of information on artists available on the internet, there’s no reason you can’t learn from the best. Find the artists you admire through google or twitter. Start a correspondence with them. Ask them questions. You’ll find many are generous and willing to help. Read what they have to say on their blogs, and watch their video tutorials. The recently launched ArtCast Network is a great place to do this. If you can’t get in touch with an artist you like, then copy their work. Download, or buy high resolution images of their art and practice making exact replicas. When I started learning how to ink, I would download hi-res images of Frank Cho’s art, convert it to blue-line, print it out on Bristol and ink over it trying to copy his line quality. The same can apply to any artist you want to replicate. Look at their art, study it closely and figure out how to replicate it. Just one caution: make sure and give the original artist credit if you show your studies to anyone else.

One of the Frank Cho images I would practice my inking on.

4. Fix it until it’s right. When working on a difficult piece, redraw it until you get it right. Especially if you’re starting out, I recommend using mechanical pencils with a good eraser. They erase easily, and you can re-work and readjust a drawing until you get it right. Set a high standard f0r yourself and work to achieve that with every piece. Look at your drawing in front of a mirror, or flip it around and hold it up to the light. Seeing it in reverse will reveal problems in the drawing. Don’t take this suggestion too far. If you’re really hitting a wall, abandon the drawing, or start over. It’s more important to draw a lot than get stuck on one drawing.

5. Study the Fundamentals. Study the best books and videos on perspective, construction, anatomy, rendering and color theory. I highly recommend the resources found at Gnomon Workshops (Some of the best stuff I found on Gnomon were tutorials by Feng Zhu and Scott Robertson on how to draw a straight line freehand.) Go to live figure drawing classes, weekly, if possible. Go to the zoo every week, or more, if you want to learn to draw animals. Ernest Norling’s Perspective Made Easy will teach you everything you need to know about perspective. Preston Blair’s Cartoon Animation is the best place to get started with construction.  I’m still really searching for is a good book on anatomy. I own several books on anatomy, but none that really satisfies me. If anyone has any recommendations, please contact me.

Buy this book.

6. Repeat until you die. This is probably the most important step. There’s always something new to learn. Thank God! One of the greatest joys of drawing is having those break-through moments that come from constantly challenging yourself. Keep at it. The fun is in the process, not in the prize.

Pablo Picasso: “I paint objects as I think them not as I see them.”

The greatest challenge of anyone trying to tell a story visually is to try and figure how to tell the story. For a comic artist, it’s a question of what do I put in the frame, what is its relationship to other things around it, and how close am I going to be to my subject? For the writer, it’s a question of what do I describe, and which and how many words should I use to do so. For film makers and animators, the questions include motion, sound, and the manipulation of time.

So how do you make your choices? There are an infinite amount of possibilities at any moment of your story, and the human brain is physically incapable of analyzing all of those possibilities and selecting a candidate for the best idea. But the human brain is also very good at generalizing and finding simplified heuristic models to understand how any system works. For artists, this is called a theory.

The thing is, every artist operates on their own theory, whether they know it or not, and depending on their theory, their art will be shallow and unoriginal or deeply profound and unique.  Michael Bay’s theory of film making can be summed up in one question: “Is It Awesome?” It’s a theory based entirely on spectacle and resonance with pop-culture and is a common guide of the novice. The other two novice theories are the “make it different” and “do it like them” theories. Either, you are trying to come up with something that hasn’t been done before, or you are copying something cool you saw someone else do. None of these theories are bad theories, in fact I think the best storytellers follow them to a certain extent, but I also think the very best storytellers have a much more important underlying theory guiding what they do.

And here’s what it is: Empathy.

The best artists know, that at its root, storytelling is about understanding the experiences of someone else.

And the tool that the greats use to create empathy is point-of-view.

In 2002, I had the opportunity of participating in Orson Scott Card’s Writer’s Bootcamp. Previous to the Bootcamp, I was assigned to read Characters & Viewpoint by Mr. Card which discusses the importance of point-of-view and particularly the superiority of the 3rd-person-limited-omniscient-narrator in writing. Like most people I understood point-of-view at a surface level-1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person ect. It just means who is telling the story, right?  But it wasn’t until I was in the workshop that I really understood the importance of point-of-view to telling a story.

He gave us some writing samples to read. They were very descriptive passages of landscapes and sunsets and details of clothing, but they were boring as hell. Why? Because the descriptions were too objective. It was like a robot describing a photograph-there was no humanity to the words. Then we read some other passages that were vibrant, gritty and funny. The difference was point-of-view. The writing communicated an attitude, not just a description. That’s why the 3rd-person-limited-omniscient-narrator is such a powerful tool, because it communicates attitude so well. (For a masterful example of 3PLON, look no further than George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.)

So, point-of-view is not so much about who is telling the story, but how he sees the world. You don’t even have to limit the narrative to just the things a character thinks and sees, as long as the world you are showing is colored by his attitudes.

The textbook example of using point-of-view is Kurosawa’s Rashomon. You see the same event three different times, from three different perspectives. The details and the feeling of the story are widely different with each telling, depending on the attitudes of who is telling the story at the time.

When the Thief tells his version of the story, it’s all bravado and adventure. When the victim tells the story, it’s nightmarish thuggery, and when the guy hiding in the bush tells the story, we see a pathetic struggle for survival. (By the way, the third act of Rashomon includes the truest fight scene in the history of cinema.)

So, point-of-view is not only an important tool, it’s the most important thing to consider when telling a story, and can better help you decide what artistic decisions to make than any other rubric. If you want to do something awesome, unique or traditional go right ahead, but it’ll be a thousand times more powerful if you can also make it support a specific point-of-view.

Lastly, I want to point you to this clip by Improv Everywhere. If you have the means or the desire, contrast it with the subway scene in Borat. We are seeing the same thing through two very different attitudes. Neither one is “true”, they are simply choices. Ultimately you have the power to choose a point-of-view that will show others how you see the world.

Perhaps that’s the most important choice of all.

I was reading some interesting thoughts on motivation the other day on Regarding Design. These two snippets were particularly interesting:

For any who call themselves “creatives,” a need for inspiration would signal a very bad thing…

What the real issue is “motivation.” The very word by definition means “to move.”

I think this is a really important distinction. Particularly for folks out there who want desperately to get off their butts and do something meaningful, but who lack the “motivation”.

There’s this concept of the “tortured artist” that we love to romanticize in popular culture– the self destructive, other-worldly artist that’s so full of genius they can’t lick a postage stamp, but in fits of god-inspired passion, create beauty beyond the comprehension of mortals.

While Vincent VanGogh and Daniel Johnston make great stories, they are not great role models. They are, for the most part, tragic figures that were able to create something beautiful despite immense challenges.

Was cutting off your ear really necessary?

But still, we glamorize this vision of the artist and spend our days watching Dr. Phil and playing Team Fortress while we wait upon the finger of God to touch us with “inspiration”.

The truth is, we have it backwards. Work always precedes inspiration (we can go into a  definition of “work” later).

And I’m not the only one saying this. Veteran creators like Steven Pressfield , Stephen King , and Twyla Tharp, all write about the “muses” in mythical, almost religious tones, but they all affirm that the inspiration comes only after you’ve laid your sacrifice on the altar. And what is your sacrifice? It’s doing your work, whatever it is, every day. Cory Doctorow does it, So does Michael Chabon:

In 2000, Chabon told The New York Times that he kept a strict schedule, writing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day, Sunday through Thursday.^[13] He tries to write 1,000 words a day. Commenting on the rigidity of his routine, Chabon said, “There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they’re big, and they have a lot of words in them….[T]he best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life.”^[9]

So, now the question is how do they do it. That’s where motivation comes in, but that’s the topic for another post…

Action directors take note:
Jackie Chan knows how to make an awesome fight scene better than anyone else in the world.

Better than Michael Bay, better than the Wachowski Brothers, and even better than Christopher Nolan. Yes, even with everything brilliant that Mr. Nolan did with Batman, his ability to direct a fight scene pales in comparison to Jackie Chan.

I recently had an excuse to revisit Police Force and Drunken Master II. And let me tell you, if the only Jackie Chan movies you’ve ever seen had Chris Tucker or Jennifer Love Hewitt in them, you have no idea how amazing Jackie Chan can be.

It may have something to with Hollywood insurance and that he’s no young buck anymore, but all of Jackie Chan’s masterpieces were made long before he became the Asian Nick Nolte.

Take a look at the fight scenes in films like Police Force, The Legend of Drunken Master, and Super Cop. They’re amazing. And there’s still nothing out there that compares.

There are a couple of tricks that JC has figured out that make his fight scenes so awesome:

1. The Nice Guy. Jackie Chan’s characters are never stoic bad-ass kung-fu masters. They are basically Asian Jimmy Stewarts — nice guys that end up in a mess and try their darnedest to get out of it. This is immensely important, but action directors always miss this. A bad-ass kung-fu master eats ninjas for breakfast. He might as well just be playing croquet. A nice guy hates to fight, isn’t that great at it, and gets beat up a lot. He has to struggle to win. And watching a struggle is much more interesting than watching a croquet game.

This is exactly why Jackie Chan likes to make fun of himself. Bad-asses never look stupid, because then they stop being bad-ass. Jackie Chan makes fun of himself so we know he’s vulnerable, and fallible just like us. That way, when he does win a fight, it’s way more amazing.

3. No Cables Needed. The Forbidden Kingdom may be the exception, but for the most part JC eschews the Hong Kong action practice of choreographing scenes with cables. It’s another one those things that helps to raise the stakes. Cables soften gravity. They make a fight scene feel like it’s happening on a trampoline. Take away the cables, and it feels like a world where gravity can introduce your face to a concrete floor. For the same reason JC likes to the play the nice guy he likes to leave out the cables. When your hero is vulnerable you care a lot more about him when he’s in danger.4. Clever tricks. This is one of the biggest innovations that JC has brought to action directing. A fight scene doesn’t just involve fists and kicks, but every movable and immovable object within the vicinity of the fight. Not only has revitalized the fight scene with this, but also covertly resurrected the brilliance of Gene Kelly. Check out Signing in the Rain and imagine all of the dance scenes were fight scenes. It’s basically just a Jackie Chan film (albeit at half speed).

5. The Cornered Animal aka Beet Face. This is the book-end to The Nice Guy. While JC always likes to play the nice guy, he’s always a nice guy that by the climax of the film is pushed to the boiling point. JC knows that if you start with an awesome fight scene you have to finish with an awesomer fight scene. The first fight scene will be the nice guy scrambling for survival, and final fight scene will be the nice guy transformed into cornered animal who destroys everything in his path. You can always tell when a JC movie reaches this point because his face turns bright red ( or purple in the case of Drunken Master 2) and he gets really, really pissed.

The final fight scene in Drunken Master 2 is a great example of all of thee above, and probably the greatest fight scene of all time. Please partake:

Drunken Master 2