Elf Sternberg

Awhile ago, I mentioned figure studying with photomanips and renders (Gah, was that really July 3rd? I'm so behind on my studies...) and one of the things I commented on was how renders and photomanips don't have to correspond to a working notion of a functional skeletal anatomy and how this makes drawing them a bit more of a challenge. Yesterday, as I was doing my gesture exercises. I'm currently trying to do eight two-to-five minute gestures a night, in the hopes of doing 100 and then moving on to the next lesson, working to make my gestures look like those of Hampton and Mattesi, trying to understand what they see when they look at a human figure.

Since I'm explicitly and deliberately looking for a pin-up artists' toolkit as a first skillset, a lot of the examples I've been working with have been pin-ups and nudes, mostly from Tumblr. And looking at those, I realized something similar to the issue with photomanips and renders.

Gravity.

Mattesi, especially, wants you to concentrate on the tension and forces in the picture, and how to capture those with your lines as your working. And one of the issues with pin-up photography is the model, regardless of the dynamism implicit in the pose, usually has to hold very still while the photo is being taken. Which, in turn, means that the dynamism is artifical, and trying to draw him or her reveals the way the figure is neutrally balanced or supported by a tripod of arms and legs. Much like a manip or render can ignore gravity, boudoir photography tries to distort the effect gravity has on the model, implying more or less than the model is experiencing, in order to communicate with the viewer.

If you want photographic poses that show people actually defying gravity, and not in a "hide it from the camera way," Jordan Matter's nude ballet photography is both gorgeous and mind-boggling in the strength being shown.

Drawing is, I believe, an essential life skill, and that I regularly let it go fallow bothers me. But every time I take up the pencil again, I get this weird, hesitant emotional response to the act of illustration.

I realized the other day why learning to draw bothers me. It's because the brain cells that drawing forces to grow and mature don't talk to me.

I've known a few other geeks like me: the kind of people who, when they learn something deeply interesting and profound, can feel the brain re-arranging itself. It might just be the prickles of our scalps responding to the deeply intellectual challenge of understanding something complex, like a new level of set theory or grasping functional programming, but it's a validation that the process is working, it's a sensation I've learned to really enjoy-- even though it hurts the way exercise hurts-- and at the end, I can express myself better.

Programming and mathematics are forms of human expression. They allow us to say things we couldn't say any other way. The constant emergence of new programming languages is part of the process of looking for new and better ways to say the stuff we programmers want to say. The uplift to functional programs-- programs that get away from the muck of how we express things and more clearly express what we want to say-- has been a huge leap.

But all of these skills are verbal skills. We may have symbols like '@' and '>>=', but we use words like 'at' and 'bind' to communicate with each other and ourselves. We can label them. Their meaning may be more subtle than that, may be contextual, but at least they have labels.

Even music starts off with labels, at least the way I come at it: clefs and staffs and notes and bars. I realized, watching a jazz trumpeter do his thing the other night, that he had gone past the labels and was communicating through his instrument what he wanted to say at that moment, but talking to him afterward, even he admitted that it started with symbols, with the clefs and staffs and such.

Drawing has none of that.

Oh, sure, you can start with ball-and-stick, mannequin, perspective lines, but even the most rudimentary drawing requires skills that have absolutely zero verbal components. You can't even let the words get in the way: that's what classes like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain are all about: getting the words out of the way. And since I can't talk to that part of my brain, since it doesn't talk back in the verbal way with which my very noisy brain is familiar, it bothers me.

I think I should explore that further.