Some sketches & some thoughts

Like everyone in the world, I get fed up with myself for lots of reasons all the time. Last Wednesday, this resulted in me declaring that I would wake up earlier and start each morning with a quick little drawing from memory or imagination.

I may have mentioned this before, but if I had to pick my number one weakness as an artist, it would probably be my inability to draw from my head. I can be an absolute slave to photo reference. And while many years and thousands of dollars of illustration education have taught me that photo reference is a very important thing, being shackled to it is not. It's limiting and incredibly frustrating, especially when you don't have the resources to shoot your own all the time.

Compounding this problem is my job. While I enjoy it and so appreciate having it, it definitely only exercises certain parts of my brain and leaves others to rot. It's taught me a lot about graphic design and working with type, but after a stretch of a couple of months of doing only that kind of work, that first illustration is tough to churn out.

This isn't the easiest thing for me to do, but since having a constant stream of blog material is one of my best motivators, I'm sharing selections of my morning warmups that don't totally embarrass me.

A group of kangaroos is called a mob...

You can tell that toward the end I figured out how to change the settings on my scanner. Adobe seems to have removed the scan-to-Photoshop ability from CS5, which is super annoying, mostly because I had to learn the crappy software that came with my scanner, which is supposedly the same software that Photoshop used anyway but doesn't have nearly the same number of scanning options for some reason...

ANYWAY, another reason I wanted to do this was to help with the styling of my work. I felt like I was headed in a more simplified/stylized direction two years ago, but my art director at my current job prefers my older more realistic work. With or without her influence, I'm definitely pulled in opposite directions by the things I admire. On one hand, work like this (by Steve Hanks) makes me want to pursue gorgeously rendered watercolor perfection (I mean come on, that's freaking watercolor):

...and yet "Rupert visiting family in Bavaria" (by Matte Stephens) literally made me squeal with delight this morning. Look how happy Rupert is to be visiting his family in Bavaria!

That's a big difference, to put it mildly. How do you reconcile that gap? Where is the middle ground? Is there even a middle ground? Can I end up with something personal that is neither of these but equally satisfying? Thus far I've found myself more often than not caught in limbo, far enough from realism that it's not classically impressive, but not stylized enough to have real personality. That's what I'd like to get out of, in one direction or the other. If only I could decide which...