drawing

I found a pen & ink masterclass in an old antique mall!

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Last week, I took a road trip down the Mississippi Blues Trail out of Memphis. It was incredible, and I might write that one up as well. Seriously, we ate at the Hollywood beside the piano where Mark Cohn was inspired to write “Walking In Memphis”, saw BB King’s famous Lucille guitar, and walked Dockery Farms where the Delta Blues were born. Amazing trip.

The only reason I mention it now though is we were headed back on a route through Little Rock and back to Kansas City when we stopped at an old antique mall. If you’ve hung around here at Grailrunner before, you well know how much we’re into old bookstores and the forgotten but mind-expanding wonders you can find on dusty old shelves. And man, have I got one for you today!

This guy here. Smash the image below for a short video showing what I mean.

It’s a hardback compilation of Harper’s Magazines from 1891 through 1892. Harper’s is a monthly magazine covering culture, finance, literature and the arts that was launched in 1850 and is still continuously published today. I didn’t have any particular fondness or interest in that magazine so much as just seeing what people read about in the 1890’s. I’m also a little obsessed with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, also known as the Columbian Exposition, and I was hoping there would be a mention or two in here, and there was.

That’s why I first picked it up.

As I flipped through the pages, I was stunned by the quality and craftmanship of the pen & ink and engraved illustrations inside. I use the word carefully…stunned! Some of the artists were familiar to me, but for many of the pieces inside, I couldn’t even tell who the artist was. Credits weren’t always given, and signatures were too stylized to read.

I used ChatGPT to analyze some of the more interesting works to research the artist when it wasn’t obvious, and it was surprisingly useful for that. Often wrong, but with some caution and follow-up research, you can usually zero in on a likely name.

Thought I’d share some of these beauties with you today, and maybe introduce you to some wonder-workers of the past who could summon sparkling magic with a simple fountain pen. I’m offering 20 vintage illustrations here for admiration and craftmanship study.

Care to join me?

By Felician Myrbach

Myrbach was an Austrian-born artist and leading illustrator of the 19th century. Also acting as director of the Vienna Academy of the Fine Arts, he was known for detailed illustrations of military scenes and historical costumes. This image struck me with its sense of depth, balance of light and shadow, and elegant washes. Looks like it’s coming out of the page.

By John Reinhard Weguelin

I loved the subject here, and the haunting feel of it. The artist was J.R. Weguelin, who was primarily known for his dreamy watercolors and oil paintings, though he supplemented his income by slumming to draw masterpieces like this one for magazines.

When I came across a simple article about Native Americans, I couldn’t believe I was seeing an original Frederic Remington illustration there just as a picture for a magazine. Then another. And another. These seven images are all by Remington, and they’re all beautiful. He was known for paintings and drawings mainly depicting the American west.

These three were all by Charles Stanley Reinhart, an American painter and illustrator who was also responsible for artwork on certain silver certificates commissioned by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing said by many to be the most beautiful monetary designs ever produced by the United States. That last image, of the two guys sitting and smoking is an absolute master class in pen & ink linework. I struggle in my own drawings to avoid outlines, to use contrasting light and dark for the silhouettes, and to choose the right directions for hatching that don’t distract from the shapes and mood. Reinhart entirely nailed it with that one.

These two were by Edwin Austin Abbey, an American muralist, painter and illustrator known most for Victorian and Shakespearean subjects. Perhaps most dear to our hearts at Grailrunner, Abbey was the artist behind the famous “Quest and achievement of the Holy Grail” murals at the Boston Central Library.

I really loved these two, as they independently stuck out for me on their own merits before I realized they were by the same artist and in fact, an artist whose work I thought I knew. Charles Dana Gibson was an American artist typically cited as being the creator of the “Gibson girl”, the iconic representation of the independent American woman at the turn of the 20th century. I think that puts the poor guy in a box that is unfair, as his composition, linework and hatching are among the finest of his age. He did a little more than ads with girls in them. Seriously, these two images are firecrackers!

These two architectural pieces just made me stare in awe. I can’t draw buildings, no matter how careful I am. They always turn into heavily lined, overly simplified, often leaning, caricatures of buildings. Not my thing, unfortunately. But these two by John Tavenor-Perry (at least I think so) are masterworks. ChatGPT couldn’t do anything with that weird signature (looking like a stylized rune but supposedly initials). After some heavy back-and-forth, I think we landed on a likely artist though I’m open to correction.

By Albert Sterner, this piece is a treasure-trove of hatching. I love it. Somehow, he’s managed to keep all these disparate elements in the composition cleanly segregated: the ladies and the cushion, his legs and vest, the flowers, the chair, shadows…all of it clearly silhouetted and easily read despite being a jumble of things. No way could I have figured out how to get all that detail into a drawing without feeling I needed to strip it way down so you could tell what it was.

And now finally, the mystery piece.

This one.

I was mesmerized. It accompanies a poem by James Russell Lowell titled “His Ship”, appearing in the December 1891 issue of Harper’s Magazine. No credit given anywhere, including the “Editor’s Drawer” where many other attributions for illustrations are provided.

The signature is maddeningly concealed in the drawing. I think. Hard to say if that’s a signature or not. Here’s what I mean:

Anyway, I contacted Harper’s in case somebody’s maintaining an archive of some kind to help identify the genius who did this. It’s gorgeous. If I get any kind of response or make headway on the identification, I’ll come back and update you.

*

But that’s what I wanted to bring you today. Masters of their craft in the golden age of illustration, doing what they did and generating timeless works of art. For whatever reason, and not just as an aspiring artist myself, these drawings are unearthly and hypnotizing to me.

What do you think?

Art critiques from a resurrected master of pen & ink

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A year ago, I wrote here about the worst art advice I’d ever gotten, and I posted pages from my sketchbook at the time to stay accountable in some way for improving. It turned out kind of popular, maybe out of the general public’s desire to see car wrecks in motion. Those pages were fairly early in getting back to traditional art versus digital and were mostly pencil work with some light-table ink drawings. And by light-table, I mean tracing things and so…cheating.

I updated you guys in November with some more pages and then again a couple of months ago (bottom of the same post). Those include watercolors, some digital stuff in Procreate, and also ink drawings. Somewhere in all of that, traditional pen & ink drawing kind of caught fire with me.

It’s kind of all I can think about these past couple of weeks. Those delicious hatching lines and stipples, deep, gorgeous washes of black, and intricate patterns of black and white condensing beautifully into a striking, eye catching work of art! It’s all very satisfying, if I’m honest. And the feel of a Pentel pocket brush pen swishing on toothed paper feels a little like watching somebody make a chocolate cake, almost mesmerizing.

I found this amazing resource free on the Internet Archive (smash the cover image to take a look for yourself):

Written by Arthur Guptill, this is a classic instructional book on pen and ink drawing, widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive and authoritative resources on the subject. His writing style was patient, articulate, and he was clearly a master of clean, simple line work and exhibited craftsmanship in how he approached both drawing itself but also how he framed his instruction materials. The guy was a natural teacher.

I was approaching my learning by a combination of master studies and daily practice, at first using a Copic alcohol marker for shading and eventually moving to just the brush pen and Pigma liners to focus on learning hatching and cross-hatching.

Here’s an example, a dazzling piece called “The Cobbler”, by John R. Neill:

I learned quite about overlapping structures for depth, clean linework, effective use of contrast, and detailed volumes just by copying this thing.

Here’s another study, by Franklin Booth – a real beauty he titled “Hunting The Tigers”:

Loads of things to absorb by this one regarding overlapping structures, use of negative space, balance of value, simulating water in black and white, and fur textures with ink. Honestly, I’m not happy at all with my copy, but I was being ambitious.

Anyway, we’re four articles in to a new series titled “Conversations from the abyss” where we use advanced AI tools like ChatGPT and also Suno music generation to bring back creators from the past for interesting debates, dialogues, or other entertaining diversions. Nothing for sale – all available free here on the site. It struck me this past week that it would be amazing if I could receive art critiques directly from Arthur Guptill as I’m practicing various bits and bobs I’m learning from the master studies and other practice drawings.

I’ve got a soft spot for Frank Baum’s OZ books and thought an image of a young Baum coming across a scarecrow in a field and pondering it with his wild imagination might be an interesting image for ink practice. I gave it a shot, then uploaded it to ChatGPT and tested this prompt: “Acting as Arthur Guptil, critique this image and provide guidance on how to improve it.”

Here’s what happened, and it honestly blew my mind:

“You have achieved a fine effort in line drawing, and there is evident care in your composition and subject choice. The nostalgic theme—a young boy in thoughtful contemplation before a scarecrow—is charming and well-suited to ink. Now, let us refine your rendering through a few key observations and recommendations:

1. Line Quality and Variation

Your line work shows promise, but greater variety in line weight will enhance dimensionality and focus. At present, the lines are largely uniform, which causes elements to flatten together.

  • Suggestion: Use thicker lines for foreground elements (such as the boy’s arm or the hat’s brim) and finer, lighter lines for background elements like grass or sky hatching.
  • Vary the stroke pressure as a tool of emphasis and mood. For instance, a light cross-hatching for distant tones vs. a bolder hatching for areas of core shadow (beneath the scarecrow’s hat or the boy’s jaw).

2. Compositional Framing

The rectangular frame is sound, but the internal balance feels slightly off-kilter. The scarecrow dominates the space while the boy feels pinched in the lower right.

  • Suggestion: Consider either enlarging the figure of the boy or repositioning him slightly more centrally. Alternatively, allow the scarecrow’s arm to lead the eye toward the boy in a more deliberate diagonal.

3. Rendering Form and Volume

The scarecrow reads clearly as a simple form, but the boy’s anatomy, particularly the arm and face, could benefit from more structural understanding.

  • Suggestion: Study the planes of the face and arm. The boy’s head could use slightly more cross-contour shading to indicate roundness. The hand, though expressive, lacks clear articulation—gesture drawing practice would help here.

4. Textures and Detail

Your use of short, broken strokes to indicate vegetation is appropriate, but the grass and shirt material begin to blend. The shirt on both the boy and scarecrow could use more definitive folds to suggest fabric tension and weight.

  • Suggestion: Use parallel or directional hatching that follows the form of the fabric. Avoid over-randomized strokes, and let texture be a deliberate compositional voice.

5. Background and Spatial Depth

The background is composed primarily of evenly spaced hatching. While this is functional, it does little to suggest depth or atmosphere.

  • Suggestion: Introduce a subtle gradient to the background by controlling your stroke density—more hatching at the top or corners to create a vignette or atmospheric recession.

Final Encouragement:
The spirit of your work is admirable and speaks to a narrative sensibility. With improved control of line, deeper understanding of structure, and refined use of contrast, this drawing could serve as an excellent illustrative plate.Keep your pen in motion and your eyes ever studying!”

*

I mean. A dead guy just gave me really precise feedback on my drawing, recognizably in his voice and noticing very specific things in the drawing! I got compliments that were specific and not vague exhortations. I got clear, explicit guidance on what exactly I could improve. Not generalities. It was, and I mean this, very helpful.

Now, you might be thinking – “Dude, you’re a chicken letting the wolf teach you how to protect the hen house. AI is going to replace artists entirely; why use it for art instruction if you’re encouraging people to use it at all, they’ll just generate the images directly. Why even learn to draw?”

All of that is, of course, nonsense though, isn’t it?

If we get fat and lazy and stop creating, then the images that AI tools use will become instead of crisp white and deep blacks, just an increasingly bland mush of grays…monotonous and uninspired. AI outputs will become AI training datasets, leading to a downward death spiral of junk art. I don’t want to add to that. I want to make new things, man. New things! I see critiques from long-dead art instructors as yet another powerful tool for me to do just that.

I asked for a new chapter to Guptill’s book for digital inking, by the way, which is available free below (and entirely and recognizably in Guptill’s voice):

And yeah, okay, it’s time for an accountability upload of the latest sketchbook entries here (be kind!):

That’s what I wanted to share with you today. Pages 19, 20, and 21 especially benefited from pseudo-Guptill’s instruction, and I gave it all I had to incorporate to the developing pieces what it was telling me.

All this has me wondering – just who else can I get to critique some of this and help me learn quicker? Maybe Leonardo Da Vinci is up next!

Till next time,

Art Advice: An Epiphany In Three Steps

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Back in May, I posted some musings on this site about what I called bad art advice that I’d gotten when I was in Middle School.

“The real world doesn’t have outlines – draw what you see.”

Weird, I know, but I struggled so much with that I gave up drawing altogether. I get that it should be straightforward advice that every burgeoning artist SHOULD in fact receive and, indeed, follow. I get that it’s true and obvious and OUGHT to have been helpful. Just wasn’t how I reacted, unfortunately.

I’ve come to realize that is just a first step.

I recounted how back in October 2023, I’d come across a lifechanging book series called Sketching From The Imagination and an art magazine called ImagineFX that had me rejuvenated to start it all over again, on fire with cool pictures in my head and a spirit to truly give it a go this time. I shared my sketchbook at the time (shudder!) a little over a half-year in, to be accountable to folks here for improving.

Another phase of things had opened up with an enlightening quote from the genius artist, Kim Jung Gi that said:

“Don’t draw what you see. Draw what you HAVE seen.”

I liked his emphasis on practicing reproducing reference images, only from different angles and perspectives so you can learn their forms in three dimensional space. Over time, your visual library carries enough shape and texture language to work directly without reference. Very nice. You see, I have a complicated relationship with the use of reference images in creating art. The dream has always been to sit down with a piece of paper or a blank screen and summon fantasy and science fiction imagery from nothing – not to robotically reproduce an image in front of me. Over and over, every artist I was seeing on Youtube or reading in interviews, they were all using reference images. I had this inner voice saying “if I wanted to reproduce an image, I’d take a picture of it”. Kim Jung Gi’s advice offered a different relationship with reference imagery.

So it’s been over a year now. Keeping up the practice frequency to at least a half-hour each night if at all possible. Even when I’m bone tired after work and would rather stare at history documentaries or old spy movies (or train movies -those are awesome).

Anyway, somewhere along the way, this happened:

Don’t ask, my friend. I just thought I’d try watercolor painting and this guy showed up. I call him Barney. My first attempt. I hadn’t planned on getting obsessed with watercolors – it was Peter Han‘s fault. Was watching Peter draw something amazing, and he pulled out a little travel palette set. The smooth and striking combination of ink and colored wash fascinated me. Strangely, as I submerged into the very deep and mesmerizing well of watercolor painting in magazines, books, interviews, and tutorials, a new, possibly ultimate and final step has started to take shape.

Watercolor pigment does what it feels like doing on the paper. It moves around. Crashes. Blossoms. Ignores your feeble mortal attempts to control it. But it makes incredible gradients and blooms and textures like nothing else. And its mightiest trick, almost its entire reason for being, is to capture light. I’m talking about the translucency of a green leaf in summer with sunlight bleeding through, the broken sunbeam dancing on a marble floor, the ghostly and serene reflections of clouds and seafoam on the beach once the wave goes out. Google “Steve Hanks” and Thomas Schaller to see what I mean.

Reflecting on Indian Beach (Steve Hanks)
Foggy Morning – Maine (Thomas Schaller)

The more this got in my head, the more I began to realize there even WAS a third step to this process. I’m not there yet, but I think I can see it taking shape. If I hadn’t started paying so much closer attention to light filtering through trees or bathing morning fog in an orange glow because of all this focus on watercolors, I’d have missed it, I think. This final quote that crystalizes what I’m seeing has popped up a number of times now, so I’m not sure who started it all. It’s a boneshaker though, that I’m still trying to coax into being my buddy:

“Don’t draw what you see, draw what you feel.”

Now that’s an entirely different way to interact with reference imagery, isn’t it! Snapping a picture in the moment during a hike or on the train freezes one of those haiku moments for you, sure. Cobbling together some stock images and a DAZ3d render or a photobash of some AI-generated elements can put together a good and unique composition, of course. And in that first step, you can practice your technique, reproducing it as faithfully as you can.

At some point though, Gi’s second step suggests you vary the angle, maybe reproduce it from above or from a different side…maybe with an armored zebra beside it, or a screaming werewolf. Mess around and don’t stress about perfection, right? It’s a sketchbook; what do you care if every other one turns out trash? Forms start repeating for you: the fact that eyes aren’t really ovals, that lips and noses and hair cast shadows, and that people almost never stand vertically straight on both feet. That sort of thing.

But then, when you’ve maybe gotten to a point where you can somewhat faithfully reproduce an image with variations and additions, with subractions, and perhaps even can summon something to the page entirely from memory and imagination, another step opens up for you.

Those are pictures I’ve taken in various spots this summer in Kansas City, Cades Cove in Tennessee, and at Destin, FL. You’ve probably got ones like it on your own phone, those images that caught your eye and made you feel something. A foggy morning, a quiet library with the sunlight streaming off a high window, a busy subway station or airport with interesting faces, or maybe a funny face your dog made. It made you feel something, so you snatched it to stick in your pocket.

That’s the third and ultimate step in art journeys, I think: to capture what you feel on the page. The reference becomes almost beside the point. I’m still working this out for myself. Maybe these musings prod something for you if visual arts are at all of interest to you.

Since some folks appreciated the first uploaded sketchbook, here is an update (paper sketches 1-3, watercolors from 4-13, Procreate digital art from 14-17):

Crazy busy year. I hope yours has gone well. For my part, I’m glad Christmas is on its way. That particular crazy freight train is more than welcome this year.

(Update Mar 2025)

And, in the spirit of accountability to improve, here’s an updated sketchbook of what I’ve been up to since this post went up (watercolors on pages 1-8, Procreate sketches pages 9-18, and physical sketchbook pages 19-24):

Till next time,

The Worst Art Advice I Ever Got

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I lost over thirty years in my art journey because I (stupidly) took a wrong turn based on what should have been great advice. Let me tell you about that, how exactly I went off the rails, and what a ridiculously talented Korean artist said that got me back on the journey.

If you care about the process of visual creation, whether it’s you doing the creating or just a spectator’s interest in how all that works, then this one’s for you.

Why does this matter?

Crap, man, I’d like to be thirty years better in drawing and painting! I hate that I stepped away for that long. I’m the chief illustrator for Grailrunner, and its lead writer, and its game designer. I need to get a lot done myself to control costs, but somehow keep a high standard on quality of art to convey the unique (we think) property we’re trying to build with the Salt Mystic line.

The images below represent the style of work I’m building these days, relying heavily on photobashing and concept art techniques (with folks like Imad Awan as my virtual gurus). The Grailrunner house design standard is semi-realistic digital painting with grungy overlay, western themed adventurers almost always carrying the signature weapon (a gauntlet-based plasma weapon that doubles as a shield in duels), exploring statue-riddled, software-haunted ruins with shimmering dimensional portals. We aim for vibrant or earthy colors, lots of smoke and grit, with implied stories (often illustrating flash fiction on Salt Mystic lore cards).

See the lot of them (and trace my hopefully improving style) at the Artstation account. Yes, I use AI-generated bits to composite exactly like I do with stock images but generally composite everything into something new and paint over them such that the transformation is meaningful and my own.

It gets the job done, at least I think. Still, I wish they were grittier. I wish they broke more new ground than they do. I envy the striking shapes and designs of a lot of concept art out there for cinema and gaming – the kind of images that stick with you even if you don’t know the context. Artstation is great for inspiration, but it can also crush your dreams if you compare yourself to anybody.

Mitchell Stuart, for example. Or Ricardo Lima. Or Raphael LaCoste. Or Greg Rutkowski. Or Ash Thorp. People like this are just on another level.

What’s prompted this reminiscence about bad art advice?

Well, I came across this book called Sketching From The Imagination: Sci Fi by 3DTotal Publishing. I wrote about it here. That was October, which seems like an eternity ago. I posed for myself the challenge of returning to traditional pencil and ink drawing in a sketchbook to push my imagination harder than ever before. The dream is to explore a blank page with loose shapes and vague ideas to summon phantoms into form and create groundbreaking designs and concepts. Then these wild new beasties and tech and colorful characters would then find homes in the fiction or game settings.

How’s that going?

Meh. I was so much rustier than I thought I was. I’ll share some pages here to embarrass myself and stay accountable to you for improving. We’ll get to that. But let’s talk about that advice.

When I was a kid, I filled scores of sketchbooks and countless backs of trashed dot-matrix printer paper my dad had brought home from work. Drawings of super heroes and sci fi vehicles and cities were my jam. Comic books were my main source of imagery, so everything I was drawing had bold outlines and underwhelming composition. The stories weren’t being told by the images in a self-explanatory way – I didn’t think about that sort of thing. I was alone a lot, so I didn’t share these with anybody, nor did I get any feedback.

Flash forward to one day in art class, Middle School I guess, the teacher strolled by to see whatever I was working on and stopped to say something about my approach that resonated with me. He pointed at the paper and said something profound:

“Real world things don’t have outlines. Draw what you see.”

It shook me. Hadn’t thought about that. Good point. So I gave it everything I had to incorporate his advice into how I drew. Back home, hovering the pencil over the paper, for the life of me I couldn’t figure out where or how to make a mark to start the drawing if you couldn’t outline it.

For this post, I looked through some old crates to find a particular drawing that would be humiliating to show but really staked the ground for when I began to turn away from drawing entirely. The picture in my head was a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure party with a lady wizard, a swordsman, and an elf planning their next move on a morning beach with foamy, ripply water lapping at their feet. Maybe a dying campfire in the foreground with smoke rising in front of them. I couldn’t find it, unfortunately.

Anyway, it was horrid. Everything on the page was so light, you couldn’t even make it out. I was petrified to start drawing outlines again, and I couldn’t see how to force shadows and contrast to draw out the shapes. It threw my perspective. It threw my focus on their faces. It ruined everything. It was the last sketchbook I really did anything with until decades later, at least in any serious way.

Sounds bad. What’s different now then?

I get it now. Youtube changes everything, doesn’t it? Contrasting light and dark, the subtle use of textures, faking details, focusing and directing the viewer’s eyes across the image, and strategic use of busy and rest areas…I never went to art school. That all may be common sense to you, but it’s a glorious rainmaker for me to see all that in action artist after artist, listening to these marvelous and generous people draw magnificent things and explain their thought process as they go. Great time to be alive, isn’t it?

I travel a lot, so I keep an art pack and sketchbook. Pigma FB, MB, and BB brush pens, Staedtler pigment liners, a mechanical pencil, and some Graphix watercolor felt pens. Since October, I’ve put the practice time in almost every night at least for a half hour. It wasn’t a pleasant return.

The dream is to draw from imagination though: new things. What I’ve learned from artist after artist in their podcasts, Youtube or ImagineFX interviews is that drawing from reference is far more common. A lot of the guys you see on video drawing or painting have their reference images off screen.

Reference images! That wasn’t why I got into this gig. If I wanted a copy of an image, I’d take a picture. It was disheartening to me to hear professionals talk about light table tracing for their outlines…to see fantasy illustrators mash up references to form fantasy beasts – all of it copying what they saw. That was my problem back in the first place, right?

Then I came across this genius: Kim Jung Gi. Rest in peace.

Please google him if this flame of wonder is unfamilar to you. He drew from his imagination like a magical fountain spews sparkly fairies. He just walked up to paper and went nuts, drawing fish-eyed perspective, highly intricate intertwined figures, scores of objects and novel, distinct, and interesting characters at a high rate of speed and without slowing. How’d he do that?

That guy didn’t have any reference images. That’s what I wanted. I had to go deep to understand what he did right that I was doing wrong that could unlock this magic. Exploration on the blank page…finding ideas haphazardly that were uniquely my own…I wanted to bottle this magic for myself. How in the world did he get to the point he could do it so wonderfully. Then I heard him say it (through a translator):

“Don’t draw what you see. Draw what you HAVE seen.”

His point was you have to do the reference images and understand forms and shapes in three dimensional space before you can do what he did. He explained the lifetime of sitting in public places filling thousands of pages drawing what he saw and forcing himself to draw it from another angle. That was the key – he drew what he saw with a lifetime of practice, but still practiced summoning those images from his memory to try them from different angles.

He drew what he HAD seen. It was a big realization for me, this idea of examining the reference image – not just to get better at copying it, but to run your mind’s eye all over it in three dimensions to understand it better and to file that away to fuel your imagination.

Now THAT’s what artists actually do. They don’t copy. They understand.

I wish that guy was still alive. He was amazing.

Agreed. Now how about sharing your progress?

Ugh. Here you go. Don’t be judgey. Wish me luck that things improve. Go ahead. Click the book.

Ouch. I hope you don’t lose all trust in me, should you have had any. Photobashing is an entirely different beast than battling blank pages with a mechanical pencil. I’ll keep at it. The beast-shaped robotic vehicle in the header image was a minor victory in this experiment: called a “sporecutter”, it’s the first concept that’s come from the new approach that might actually make it to the fiction. Page 15 in the sketchbook file here is the front runner for the design of an important vehicle in the Mazewater: Master of Airships novel I’m working on. That’s another possible win.

That’s what I wanted to talk to you about today. I hope it was enlightening or helpful, should this be a journey you find compelling for yourself. Otherwise, I hope I still brightened your day a bit and made you think.

Till next time,

Interesting Shapes: Altered Perceptions Through The Arts

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“Interesting shapes” What in the world does that mean? (I’ll come back to that)

Our passion at Grailrunner is the imaginative process, any and every thing that can unlock new ways of creating mind-melting concepts and experiences with a bent towards speculative and fantasy fiction and images. We experiment with immersive storytelling in wargames, in roleplaying games, through a fusion of art and flash fiction, in novels, and in art prints.

On a personal level, as the guy generating practically all of that, I have to spend a ridiculous amount of time developing new skills. Recently, I’ve broken out the old sketchbook and Faber Castell pencils, bought a Pigma brush pen, and started going deep on Youtube with some modern day masters of the arts to get to a point where I’m not just painting in Photoshop over photobashed composites or renders from Daz Studio or Blender.

What’s the dream?

Because I love the awe and surprise of exploration, of not knowing what lies beyond a turn in the road, I’m hoping to get to a point where I can crack open a sketchbook and not just draw what I see, but generate something in simulated three-dimensional glory dredged from my imagination without knowing what I was going to draw when I sat down. Ideas from there would feed the hopper of more purposeful art images and concepts in the fiction and games. (I did this as a child and filled countless sketchbooks, but it was all 2-dimensional super heroes, heavy outlines, terrible shading, and nothing I’d be excited to show anybody).

Is that dream possible?

This little gem is called Sketching from the Imagination: Sci-Fi, by 3dTotal Publishing, and though it’s a few years old by this point, it will melt your face off if you’re at all into what I’m talking about here. There is some incredible talent in here. They’re doing it.

Also, these guys at ImagineFX (which is free on Kindle Unlimited now, if that works for you). One thing I especially appreciate about this magazine is the artists explain their desk setups, their materials and software, and their thought processes as they create.

What does all this have to do with “altered perceptions”?

It started with Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks, actually. I bought a compilation of them in a used book store in Florida and perusing them, noticing he spent a lot of time talking about the importance of an artist developing their “mental library”. I forget what he called it, but the idea was to look at the world differently and actually notice things like how light falls on an object, how light reflects off the table, where exactly shadows fall. File all that away so you can draw on it in different contexts when you need it.

And there in one of the most influential art instruction books ever written, Creative Illustration by Andrew Loomis, he made the same sort of point. One of the first exercises he suggests is to simplify multiple scenes at random and find the “flow” in them. He saw things in terms of basic curves, ovals, and swirls and something like a person just standing there, to Loomis, was a flowing curved line. It made it easier for him to represent it simply and beautifully on the page. Yet, it’s an entirely different way to see the world, which is my point today.

I’ve written here before about the visual power and intellectual punch of haiku. My hero in that world is an astounding 17th century genius named Matsuo Basho. This guy:

I’m reading (again) his poetry, this time in some translations by Andrew Fitzsimons, finding all kinds of new and striking illuminations there. One particular comment by Andrew caught my eye: he referred to Basho as one of the greatest “noticers” of literature.

“Noticers”

That struck me. Basho noticed things. Here:

The old pond

A frog leaps in

The sound of water

That’s his most famous one. For me, it’s not something I would pay a lot of attention to on my own, but just having him point this out – a little frog plopping in to a murky little pond, making that pleasant BLOP noise on a quiet morning – that’s just a relaxing and pretty thing now that I think about it. Basho points things like that out. He notices them and files them away for future contexts, including how it made him feel to see or experience it.

This past weekend, I was in the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee with my wife and stared longer than I should have at a little mossy tree root that had made its way out into the brook, just thinking about this sort of thing. Today, I noticed the way the sunrise light filtered through a bright orange autumn leaf, making it almost glow. Crazy.

And then I found this guy, Kim Jung Gi. Please google him and watch and listen to a freakishly talented and wonderful human being! There are countless Youtube videos. Enjoy yourself watching him go nuts with a brush pen. Sadly, he passed away last year (and the world has lost something truly amazing).

He talked at length about how he looked at the world, things he noticed and filed away about how they look, how shapes curve, what geometries caught his eye, and the textures. Again, not things I’d pay attention to otherwise without someone pointing at it. We make mental shortcuts all day long – in fact, it’s how our minds work – and artists just focus their attention on things you and I might not because they know they’ll need those things later.

In my day job as a consultant focused on management behaviors and people interactions, that sort of thing plays into our daily lives practically every waking moment. One thing I do to explain that is ask an audience the color of the walls behind them or the pattern of the carpet. Nobody knows, and that’s my point. We’re shortcutting and letting information pass by us that doesn’t matter. We have to.

But what that means is there is untapped capacity to see things differently, to alter our perceptions.

And that leads us to Peter Han. This fellow, you need to meet.

Here’s his Instagram. Here’s his website. Here’s a demonstration of him just riffing on the paper. That’s him, grinning at you in the header image for this article, surrounded by some of his work.

He sees the world like this:

Peter has an inspiring story. He’s been drawing since he was 5, and had an extremely influential teacher when he was studying art (Norm Schureman). Norm apparently impacted him so much that, even with Norm gone now (shot in a senseless and tragic act), Peter has based his life’s work on some of the approaches he learned back then. He’s built a little empire of teaching people like you and me to model any scene at all in terms of basic shapes to get the structure and proportions and silhouettes correct. After that, it’s just shading and texturing, if not also color.

Here’s a sample of a wildly interesting book he’s written and illustrated he calls The Dynamic Bible. But you should really buy yourself the full copy available here.

What are we supposed to take away from all this?

Watch and listen enough to people like those guys highlighted in ImagineFX and Kim Jung Gi and Peter Han, and you’ll hear them talk about “interesting shapes” they encounter in their daily lives. They don’t just see a cricket, they see some fascinating geometry in its belly or legs that has something they appreciate about it. They don’t just see a sunbeam trickling through a dusty window onto a stairway landing, they see its fabric-like ripples and where it fades to one side but gets brighter on the other.

They may not just hear the frog jumping, but experience it more deeply and with more meaning than others.

My point is that’s the sort of untapped perception capacity we can all unleash, with a little focus and determination to do so.

A whole new way to experience the world! That’s what I’m getting at here. Something different and exciting to adventure with.

Cool, huh?

Till next time,