extra-vertebrae replied to your post: hi there! do you have any recommendations as to…

Holy that folder collection. I don’t recognise nearly as many names here as I should. Time to re-read my one actually good art history text

Let’s just say they’re nicely named and categorized … because of reasons… I only wish I could be that good with names myself XD But that’s why they’re organized…so I don’t have to remember too much right? Right… 

onepioneer asked: hi there! do you have any recommendations as to what art books/anatomy/shape i should get as a young artist? :D i adore your work.

Gosh golly thanks!

When it comes to recommendations, there are a few books I’ve collected that I’m pretty fond of. First off, Animal Anatomy for artists, is a really great one; full skeletal and musculature diagrams for many, many animals and I find it to be a great refresher on anatomy whenever I pick it up. 

I also have a little book of George Bridgeman’s drawing from life methods that I studiously copied from throughout high school, but a lot of his instructional stuff can be found online for free (that link is an incomplete preview but still a fair amount of stuff there for reading and drawing from- a complete pdf of one of his other books can be found here).

While I never knew of his books until my first year at college, all of Andrew Loomis’ books can be found online for free.

Another book I have yet to get through (or own, heh) is Drawn to Life- but from what I have read and skimmed through, there’s a lot of really good stuff to understand and keep in mind while drawing characters.

Now, for the less structured not so instructional method- just draw. I don’t care if you think you suck at drawing hands or faces (as far as I can see, I still do). You have to start somewhere, and more often than not it isn’t pretty when you do start out (to those of you who have seen my conceptart.org sketchbook from high school, I’m sorry. If you haven’t seen it, good luck digging that sucker up. It is atrocious.) But the point is you can read all you want and you can observe all you want (which will help some, I can’t deny it) but you’re not going to really improve until you do something. 

Nowadays I tend to dig up and collect lots of paintings and drawings so I can do master copies.  My current ‘artists that do cool things’ folder looks like this:

After the folders there are 171 yet to be sorted pieces. My advice thus follows in the track of keep tabs on what inspires you. Everyones’ inspiration is different and the more you understand what inspires you the better you’ll be able to figure out how you want to work (and let that come into it’s own, rushing style can end very poorly). And while I clearly have plenty of digital files of my inspirations, my book collection keeps growing. Because if I enjoy someone’s art I want to support them, and if that means I get a nifty physical copy of their work, awesome. As such, some of my favorites in that collection are Ashley Wood’s World War Robot, Syd Mead’s Sentury II, Sparth’s Structura, The Alien Life of Wayne Barlowe, and several editions of Spectrum. 

Hope that answered some stuff though, and apologies for rambling so much!

Shit naw girl, you cool!  And yah….no didn’t take the photos- my ceramics teacher was nice enough to take photos of everyones’ work the last week of school.

You welcome yes you.

And extra-vertebrae, not sure where your reply disappeared to, but thanks (and interesting to know that’s the first Floyd album you heard!)  The glaze on it (I *think*) is Tenmoku, with Tan glaze layered on top of that on the top and bottom ring areas. Then wiped off a lot of the Tenmoku on the profiles so they wouldn’t get lost in a melty mass of crazy glaze goop. Surprised he turned out so well seeing how it was an experiment at the time >.>