Advice - Bad Clients

Stemming from the previous post:

I have the privilege of getting some pretty fantastic professional advice on a regular basis. This saves me from stumbling along, into and only barely around the pitfalls of the industry; I'm grateful to these friends I have (that often double as teachers), and I feel the need to pass advice on to anyone who might read these posts.

I recently had someone pitch a large project to me at 1/3rd of a reasonable price. Now, when I pointed out exactly how much work would be involved in the project (an undertaking that would span the better part of a year), I was given tales of other artists who were content to work for very little, if anything at all. I know that they intended those stories to cast a pitiable light on them and their financial situation, but it only made me angry. As an artist, those stories told me that since other artists were fine with the exploitation, I should be okay with it too.

Not budging, I was then offered exposure as a form of payment. However, a promise of exposure and a client's appreciation does not pay the bills. I spent far too long with dollar signs in my eyes, trying to see if the deal was salvagable, when I should have just walked away.

You can always decline offers, even if they are big offers. Hell, if you're getting big offers, be confident that more will come in time. If you don't like how the client treats you, if you don't like the offer, and even if you're not feeling the creative pitch, you can decline and that's okay.

You can also fire bad clients. I was surprised to learn that it's not a one-way street! It is perfectly okay for you to develop the self-respect to not take shit from people before you make a big name for yourself. This will save you a lot of time and frustration in the long run. Respect needs to go both ways in relationships, and business relationships are no exception.

Most importantly, pay attention to your gut feeling. This is the greatest piece of advice that is being (lovingly) hammered into me right now. I am fortunate enough to have savvy industry art friends that see the potential in me to get fucked over - by both others and my naivety to be distracted by dollar signs, because I'm just starting out and want to make this my living.

In the realm of freelance commission/contract work, you are your own boss. Bad clients come and go in any business - I used to work in retail, and the difficult customers still stand out in my mind. The only difference is, back then I had to take their bullshit.

Advice - "Exposure"

I have some advice that was given to me, which I must now pass onward, which has to do with the subject of art as a profession - and this is to all the artists like me just starting out in their field;

"Exposure" is bullshit.

If someone offers you "exposure" as payment, walk away immediately. I've been having a lot of trouble with this concept, but in the end, my gut tells me not to do these projects. This is a GOOD thing.

Yes, people go "but it'll get your name out there!" but I want you all to know that they're buttering you up to ensnare you in either working for free or working for slave wages. You will be surprised at how many people out there want to get your work, for free, and will say almost anything to get it without having to shell out for it.

Never work for these people. They are exploiting you. 

They see young artists with no confidence in their work, and they prey on that. Exposure becomes a nice carrot on the end of a stick, but just like a carrot on the end of a stick, working hard and doing your best to chase it won't get you any closer to it with projects like that.

I have had large companies try to hose me out of hundreds of dollars worth of hard work. You might not believe it with the quality of my work, but if they hear - even from word of mouth - that there's an artist out there with even some skill, they'll take free from an amateur over having to pay a professional almost every single time.

Set your prices. Don't budge. Before you ever, EVER open yourself up to paid work, figure out what your work is worth - not only to other people, but to yourself. Have confidence that, when people pay for your skill in the profession, that you are, indeed, skilled. Every artist works hard to get where they're at; people mistake it for natural talent, which is why they don't want to pay for something you make look so easy. 

Let me tell you: ballerinas make dancing and looking graceful look so easy, but they spend half their day every day training to have that skill and keep that skill up.

If the buyer walks away from the offer, good riddance. There will be other job offers.

You work honestly for your art, there's absolutely no reason a patron can't pay honestly for it.

I refer you now to Fuck You, Pay Me.

The Importance of Reference

If there's one thing I have to emphasise, and emphasise again, it's the importance of using visual reference when you're designing.

Lose the ego, you're not as creative as you think you are, you're not going to be able to pull an entire world out of your head (or ass). Sure, you have a blurry general idea of what your world looks like and what its aesthetic is, but that's all it is; a suggestion of a design.

You've got to nail this shit to the floor, bro.

Exhibit A: The dog.

It's not a bad design of a dog, per se; it's just... unremarkable. It's the idea of a dog, jotted down on paper. You think dog, you think of that particular shape. There is nothing about it that really defines it as one particular breed or another. It's good for laying out the kind of design you want sort-of, but not much else.

And here it is, improved. Using reference of the Xolotl dog, the lines are more confident, and it's been given more of a defined shape; it's a far more solid design, because it has anchors in reality. What I was going for in the previous design is now realised; a mangy, malnourished, thick-necked fighting dog. This is my final design for the dog.

Exhibit B: The camel.

Again, the general outline of what I want is here; a bachrian camel. All of what will make the final camel design stand out is here; hair over the eyes, big curvy neck, puffy front shoulders, high hips...

With referece, the whole thing still works, except now it is exponentially better looking!

If you are going to design without reference, let that never be your final design for that character/item/layout/whathaveyou. Caricaturing from a general idea is good for figuring out what will make that character/item/layout/whathaveyou special and stand out, but it must never be the definitive.

Grande Finale - part 2 - Master Layout Process

Hello my darlings, today I present to you the work in progress of my Master Layout. And with it, the method I'm going about it. Depending on your Method Of Choice, this could be a help to you or not your thing. No biggie.

The first step, as always, is the draft - and here's where this diverges from my usual way of going about layouts. Almost always, I draw them with pencil and paper, pen, whathaveyou - blocking everything out that way. But, that's because I know pretty much where everything goes (and it's obvious when I don't!).

So, it begins with the incomprehensible sketch.

...Which is then fleshed out. At this stage everything is a representation of an object that can be moved around and placed wherever, with absolutely minimal detail.

And after that, so begins the actual detailing.

Method

The really big advantage of doing a master layout digitally is mainly in layers; each object you can rough out, place on its own layer, and be able to adjust and move everything around with ease. It's an aid in tweaking the composition in the early stages, and for something you're still just throwing together, that's pretty rad.

For ease of detailing, step one: select the object you want to flesh out.

Step two: pull that object into its own file, and colour it.

Aaand after collapsing the layers, drag and drop it back onto your main image.

This is only a basic rendering of the objects - lighting sources have yet to be added to the image, and that's a step that's further down the production line for me. 

Grande Finale - part 1 - Mockups

Because I am totally On The Ball here, I've got some mockup sheets for my final layouts.

Images found through Google Images.

Images found through Google Images.

Images found through Google Images.

Excellent image resources for housing and furniture:
http://www.karakalpak.com/yurtanatomy.html
http://www.tfairloveyurts.co.uk/small-yurt-hire.htm
http://www.yourte.ca/yurt/index.htm
http://ghengisyurts.com/
http://www.rajasthanart.com/wooden-furniture/indian-victorian-furniture/
http://www.rajasthans.com/indian_wooden/bed/sleeping_beds.html

Hit The Streets

Here, my darlings, we have the layout done up first in greyscale (rather sloppily, I might add!):

And the final, fully-rendered piece:

Full writeup on this to come.

Hit The Streets

This week's assignment is to go out on the town and take photographs of a location you could actually visit - take detail shots, mood shots, whathaveyou - and compile a mockup sheet. After that, the name of the game is choosing a style to emulate.

And, since I was away from the city on the weekend, I present to you my location:

My grandparents' place on Salt Spring Island.

The layout style I've chosen is that of Disney's Enchanted, which is only partially animated:

(The concept art for this is currently eluding me, so until a style sheet is compiled, please enjoy the YouTube snippet that will - in all likelihood - be taken down quite soon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ovlr3cypTY )

And has, in itself, taken stylistic cues from the works of Alphonse Mucha:

Beat Boards, Attempted

In my previous blog, I explored the purposes of beat boards and what they could accomplish. The key is in the composition, framing the shot to bring attention to what is most important in the scene - good storytelling being essential above all else when you are... well, trying to tell a story.

Least Intense:

1 ) Our protagonist, a young girl, witnesses a fight break out between her mother and her brother - her mother's friend intervening. The girl stops in her tracks. Front and center of the frame, the girl's reaction is more important than the scuffle.

2 ) Words between the three are shared as the girl stands still in the background, away from it all. Despite being furthest away from the camera, the situation frames her.

Build Up:

3 ) The conversation continues and the girl's legs fidget and shake, she herself shaken. Again, we are paying attention to her reaction over the words. She is the center of the audience's attention, because the shot brings her to attention.

4 ) The girl is called for by the friend, leading the mother away as she does so.

Most Intense:

5 ) The girl's reaction to everything is with devastation and - with the time it takes to move to the next shot - reluctance. Again centered.

6 ) Focus is on her feet now, taking their time to move.

Less Intense:

6b ) Once she finally takes that step, the tension breaks.

Beat Boards, Explained

Today, I'll be explaining a beat board. 

The function that a beat board serves isn't quite the same as that of a storyboard, but they are incredibly similar; they aren't for the actions that the actors take in the scene, they're only somewhat for blocking - beat boards serve the purpose of figuring out whether the shots you choose to describe the intensity or banality of a scene will work in the final sequence.

Essentially, beat boards make sure that you - the audience - will get emotionally manipulated on an almost subliminal level! Isn't that fun?

I'll be using a scene from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang as an example, because that movie is rad as hell, and if you haven't seen it you are bad and should feel bad. Moving on:

ROLL THE CLIP, DUDES:

Aaaaand the sequence I'm going over in this here blog entry pretty much ends after Gay Perry's car pulls into traffic and Harry Lockhart is spurred into action.

Least Intense:

1 ) The first shot. It is split very evenly down the middle of the screen, with the blacked out wall adding some sort of visual interest besides the figure - our protagonist, Harry - in the centre. Other than that? Pretty boring, very sterile.

• WHY IT WORKS: It's a perfectly blank canvas. With just this, what are you expecting to happen next? If you say "corpse in the shower" without watching the full sequence, you are some sort of insane person.

2 ) The second shot, it's just Harry saying some mundane things to an off-screen love interest as he goes pee.

• WHY IT WORKS: He's the most interesting thing in the shot, the darkest figure in an otherwise pretty monochromatic bathroom, until the camera pans slightly down and to the right...

Build Me Up, Buttercup:

3 ) ...revealing and bringing into focus the corpse in the shower. He's still peeing, by the way.

• WHY IT WORKS: As a continuation of the last shot, the interest is now shifted from Harry over and onto the fact that there is a fucking corpse in the room.

4 ) Startled by SUDDENLY: CORPSE, Harry is urinating all over it! It's the same shot as the first one, but slightly zoomed in.

• WHY IT WORKS: Since it's a repeat of a previous shot, we only really notice the changes. The dark comedy here breaks up the seriousness of the situation, and takes it out of Drama territory.

5 ) Good job, Harry Lockhart. This pretty much par for the course with your life. This is a grossed out reaction shot, where he is clearly the focus of the scene...

• WHY IT WORKS: Reaction shots work, period, if you want the audience to pretty much know what a character is thinking.

6 ) Yep, it's a corpse. It's the most tilted, the most angled, and the corpse's body language is abnormal. Also, to top it all off, there's a spotlight on the dead body.

• WHY IT WORKS: This shot is the most unique, in that it's the most off-kilter and askew in the sequence. Make no mistake, folks: THIS IS WHAT WE SHOULD BE TAKING NOTE OF.

Most Intense:

7 ) Back to Harry's reaction; the horror of the situation starts to set in.

• WHY IT WORKS: In this shot, the tension builds because as he is reacting to it, he has to keep calm - otherwise Harmony, his love interest, might stumble upon this as well, causing all sorts of trouble for him.

Less Intense:

8 ) The tension breaks once Harmony leaves the hotel room. Harry's sudden fears of having to explain the bullshit of a dead person just cropping up in his hotel room have vanished.

• WHY IT WORKS: As Harry collapses and is free from restraining his surprise, he breaks the stiff equality of the shot my moving away from the centre - and the audience can let out that breath they were holding in with the main character.

9 ) We can start to relax, knowing that Harry's got Gay Perry on the line.

• WHY IT WORKS: Since this shot is so different - very dark, not as sterile as Harry's - it's a believable back and forth without having to give Perry some elaborate location.

10 ) Harry has crawled under some shelves and is staring his situation in the face. Literally!

• WHY IT WORKS: The shot is framed by the corpse, the shower curtain, the shelves - he's in a dark corner, visually boxed in by his situation.

11 ) PERRY HAS THE BEST LINES.

• WHY IT WORKS: I explained this in number 9!

12 ) A close up of Robert Downey Jr's beautiful doe-like eyes Harry's face,

• WHY IT WORKS: He is the focus, here. Right smack dab in the middle, evenly spaced, the most evident thing in the shot: everything that's happening is all on him, so the shot itself is all him.

Perry and Harry continue to go back and forth, and then the movie continues on - and continues working to be darkly hilarious.

3 Point Perspective

Can you take a guess at what we'll be discussing this week? If you cheat and look at the title, we can't be friends anymore. I'm joking, we're totally friends.

Please don't leave me.

Know your memes.

Here we have the rules again, slightly altered from the previous incarnations to apply to three point:

1. Objects closer to the viewer appear larger.
2. All parallel lines intersect at a vanishing point.
3. There is more than one vanishing point.
4. The point of view is no longer facing the horizon.

Since the viewer doesn't face the horizon line, three point perspective is largely for extreme up and extreme down shots, but it can also add a subtle dynamic to indoor scenes. However, since three point is more work than two point, you might as well get the most bang for your buck and do an X-TREME angle.

Image found through Google Images (then drawn on)

Here's a good example of an up angle. You look UP at the third vanishing point. The horizon line and the horizon line's vanishing points need not even appear in the image.

Image found through Google Images (then drawn on)

And now a down angle. You look DOWN at the third vanishing point; the horizon line and its vanishing points aren't in the image, and here we can see that the horizon line doesn't even need to be in line with the image's edges. Really, this image is just a series of vanishing points.

Image found through Google Images (then drawn on)

As you can see here, a more subtle three point perspective can be a little... well, like a ballet. Far more complex than it looks at first glance, but the technical skill required to make it look like a piece of cake?

How about I attempt all three in my thumbnails?

Perspective 3: The Re-perspectivening

Are you intimidated? Good. That means I can simplify this in a way that will blow your mind wide open and make me seem knowledgeable and cool despite my shortcomings in the subject matter.

If you can't tell, I really like cheating to make it look like I know what I'm doing.

Here, I really fudged it; even the hole should be in perspective. There is a lot wrong with this thumbnail. The perspective here is entirely... well, wrong, for the composition, because there is a horizon line here where it's not supposed to be. Whose fault is this? Entirely my own.

This is what we call a counter-example, my friends.

And again, a good counter-example. Reference your shit. Seriously. It can be really obvious if you don't know what you're doing, and can't stick plants or other things in the way.

Now, go forth. Draw, young grasshopper, using these perspective tips.

2 Point Perspective

I've gone over singular point perspective, that's just in my last post - so it's time to level up. On to two point perspective, where the rules change a little:

1. Objects closer to the viewer appear larger.
2. All parallel lines intersect at a vanishing point on the horizon line.
3. There is more than one vanishing point.

Can you handle that one extra rule? No? Well, crank up your techno and let's break it the hell down then, because this is--

Perspective 2: Electric Boogaloo

Have you got your techno? I've got mine. Go on, I can wait. Okay, are you ready? Let's dive right in. 

Here we have an example - a few examples, actually, because as it turns out my last post was really lacking in terms of following the assignment parameters - of two point perspective, with some guidelines drawn for you. Do you want to know why I draw on the guidelines? Because you are my everything.

Image found through Google Images (then drawn on)

Again, this is really... rather boring; you've got your two vanishing points on the horizon line there, and it all comes together neatly and nicely. Let's shake this up, ladies and gents!


Here, we move on to my thumbnail examples and personal notes:

Foreground elements are cool because they can even out the image. Here, I have a building right in the forefront. Notice that it doesn't grab your attention as much as the background, because it serves as visual relief, and takes down the amount of detail/pencil mileage you need to fill up the image. 



...They are great in a time crunch, by the way.

In the same vein as foreground elements, you don't need to have ALL THE THINGS. You can leave it largely to organic shapes, with some architectural accents. How many or how little is up to you, but you don't have to crank the detail up to 11 to get a nice image.

Seriously. This is a lesson. A valuable one.

They can't all be winners. I'm telling you that right now, because this is one thumbnail that would just not do what I wanted. I attempted an extreme angle with really close vanishing points, but that didn't work out. I moved the horizon line way up, that didn't work out for me so well either. So I tried something fairly average, which was turning out rather well until I Bob Rossed¹ all over it.

The lesson? Sometimes, you will draw crap. Don't get discouraged by it. Learn from the crap.

I learned that putting the vanishing points really close together looks really fucking bizarre, no matter how many times I attempted to pull it off (there were several, actually).


And now, for the not-thumbnail-but-still-very-much-a-draft image:

Here's an attempt to apply the first two principles. Applying the third one would have been counterproductive, so I skipped it (haaa). I've got a big tree to the side to balance out the large wall/gate, and a large grassy area I resisted putting fountains and things on. Shabang. Done.

¹ Bob Ross [bɑb rɑs] -verb

To make something nice and then take the artistic equivalent of a shit all over it by doing a big blotch in the middle.

1 Point Perspective

Let's discuss one point perspective for a moment.

Simple perspective is one of the first actual lessons you learn in an art class. You probably have memory of it still, from elementary school, where you drew an isosceles triangle of a road that quickly came to a vanishing point - as with the power lines you might have drawn, or the row of perfect trees at the side of the road. It looked bizarre and unnatural despite following all the rules.

That's right. All two of them:

1. Objects closer to the viewer appear larger.
2. All parallel lines intersect at the vanishing point on the horizon line.

However, every once and a while there is an instance where these rules actually apply in a really obvious way and that triangle world happens - but it happens pretty much always in architecture.

Image found through Google Images

You can even draw all the lines, you'll see that it follows the rules. Hell, I'll do it for you:

All of the parallels taper into the singular vanishing point, obscured nicely by the light at the end of the hallway and salvaging this image from the depths of some sort of architectural Uncanny Valley. The pillars are larger closer to the viewer, so are the boxes, as are the doorways...

All the rules apply!

...But this is really blah.

Like, really blah.

Because this is so damn blah, I came up with a couple tips to shake things up! Make it more visually interesting. Just keep these things in mind when you do your thumbnails, and one point perspective can look pretty decent.

It gets pretty triangular if you don't. And I hate that. It makes it unrealistic to me, because when I look off into the distance, there is so much more detail by that vanishing point than I can cram in to a thumbnail. Hiding it or blocking it from view with something fairly mid-ground is a quick fix for that problem.

If it's just architecture, there is absolutely nothing to contrast the straight lines. Trees, shrubs, plants, statues... nice organic shapes are cool too - don't be hatin'. Throw in some nature!

Like in the previous examples, you can move the horizon line to extremes on your image. Play around with it! If you're not having fun, you're wasting your time.

Not only that, don't worry about using parallel horizontal lines on the image. I know it's fun to fiddle with all those angles, but if it's just those angles, you're going to get that triangle world with no effort at all. A lack of perspective can balance out all the angles in an image. Try it out!

5 Inspiring Images

Am being encouraged to blog regularly on blogger specifically for a design class, despite my many, other outlets for posting my work and socially networking (and also asinine thoughts as they occur, in approximately 120 characters or less) but I digress.

Runaways 30 - by Jo Chen

I'll start off by sharing an image that I found - and still find - so inspiring. It's an image that I want it to get a portion of tattooed on myself sometime in the near future (1-2 years), due to concepts I could elaborate on for pages and pages. In an attempt to be concise, here's one (sort of):

It isn't the figure in the front holding the staff that catches my eye, it's always the character facing away from the viewer. My eye is directed straight to his arm, the electric charge being the most bright, saturated, and distracting part of the largely sepia-toned piece. While the woman in the front is probably the focus of the image, she lacks the vibrancy to properly and equally offset the electricity to guide the eye.

Now, you might wonder, "Well, if you see this as improperly focused, then why does it inspire you so much?"

But that is precisely why. To me it's due focus despite place, because that turned away character has always been, in my eyes, the shining star in the ensemble cast of Runaways. So, in this image - just as in the series - he stands somewhat in the background, not the main focus but eye-catching nonetheless. 

Catwoman 64 - by Adam Hughes

Here we have another comic book cover, but inspiring for altogether different reasons. While the former image represents to me a larger concept, this cover - as I have not read the series or even the issue that this cover represents - is something I admire purely on (what I perceive as) technical excellence. 

The darker elements are what your eye is drawn to instead of the light ones, with the woman in the centre with the walls that frame her on each side. Though the negative space is bright and detailed, it fades to obscurity in the background.

The mood of this cover is nothing short of sublime, invoking the feelings of coldness and solitude associated with both the dead of winter and the middle of the night.

In the same vein, I also find Catwoman 65 a remarkable sample of Adam Hughes' work.


I can dig up endless comic book covers that inspire me (a bunch of Jock covers immediately come to mind, oh boy), but for diversity's sake, I'll start branching out and into other subjects:


The Rococo Period

Ostentatious is the word that immediately comes to mind when I look at furniture, rooms, and architecture from the rococo period - decadent, intricate in design, elegant in execution, and always unique.

Everything about these rooms and their detailing screams custom made; nothing about it seems cookie-cutter or factory produced, despite the constantly repeated motifs of gold leaf flourishes and pastel-coloured damask. There is care and richness put into everything about these places, a regal warmth about them that I can't see replicated in any other architecture.

Admittedly, I find a lot of architecture lifeless and boring, but this is the exception because this isn't architecture - this is art.


Familiar Wilderness

Dirt trails with roots raised to playfully trip the unattentive; large, mossy rocks like icebergs in the earth - mostly unseen beneath the surface; leaves scattered haphazardly by wind; peeling, sunburnt arbutus trees; windy, rocky, sandless shores... these are the sorts of trails I wandered as a kid, so these are places that my mind wanders to for comfort.

And, last but not least:


Rock Stars

... Rock stars are my fashion idols.

Do I want massive quantities of pseudo-goth bling and ridiculous anime hair? Absolutely.