Greetings Artisan!
Ok let’s go down the rabbit hole!
What do Akira Toriyama, AI Hype, and Drawing Consistent Character’s have to do with each other?
Not much really. Except I talk about all of them in my latest Art Ritual video! You can check it out here:
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One of the things I touch on in the video is the concept of the Process Paradox—and I think it's worth unpacking a bit, so let's dive in.
Have you ever had a great idea in your mind for a piece of art, only to be disappointed by the result? Has your attempt at manifesting that amazing mind-image onto the page ever gone astray?
Many people who are keen on AI seem to imagine... that they can imagine... truly amazing things. I think this is somewhat universal for creative souls; often our heads are full of fantastical stories and ideas.
Early on in my artistic development I would read fantasy books. I would imagine the scenes and come up with my own stories.
I had a head full of living, breathing things.
But whenever I went to draw those living, breathing things, it all went wrong. The results were often disastrous!
The frustration of having a great idea and not being able to really communicate it is intense.
Here's the thing though: this frustration is often aimed in the wrong direction.
When I would imagine some amazing battle scene or a tender moment—and end up two hours later with a hacked up piece of paper that had been through a storm of smudged graphite and frantic eraser action—I blamed it on my skills.
I thought (and fair enough) that I just wasn't good at drawing. Yet.
And I was right! But there's more to this story.
It took me a long time to really understand what happens when we transition from the idea to the finished image. Once I could actually do a decent job of taking my ideas and illustrating them, I realized a few things were happening. And I started to see these happening for students too.
- The first is that often our ideas are actually pretty vague.
- The second is that we're not good at coming up with ideas that actually fit our chosen medium.
- And the third is the Process Paradox.
Firstly, even though our ideas can feel very solid and real, they're often laced with emotion and imagination.
From talking people through the image creation process, it seems that while everyone has a different way of experiencing what's going on in their mind, ideas are often a mix of things we've seen before. Feelings we've had, different images we've seen, different art we've seen. We can imagine new things, but frequently they're actually linked to other feelings or moods we've stored in memory.
Basically, it's a bit of a mess. Only we can really know what that original idea feels like in our mind!
Our job as an artist—our calling—is to try and communicate that feeling to someone else through the medium of "art" or whatever we choose.
This brings us to the second issue: the medium.
The easiest way I normally explain this is to point out that because we watch movies and our world is moving, our imagination often moves too.
Makes sense!
Often you can have an idea that's moving, in three dimensions, and is actually a sequence of multiple actions—but your medium is a single 2D illustration.
This is normally where a lot of the frustration occurs early on. We have this awesome idea for an illustration, but we don't even realize that it's not actually an idea for an illustration at all. It's an idea for a movie.
But even if it was an idea for a movie, it still wouldn't fit the medium that well, because early on people don't imagine different shots in sequence. It's all kind of just one big idea of what's happening.
The trick is to figure out how to get that idea into the medium we're working with. And with each medium, it's different.
Often, getting better is not just about drawing better or learning composition better.
Instead getting better is imagining ideas that are actually static 2D images, or imagining exactly how you would break a film into different shots.
I think we end up actually tailoring our imagination to our chosen medium. The more we create, the more we realize what works—the more we come up with ideas that work better.
And this brings us to the Process Paradox. This is where it gets a bit metaphysical...
For every one image that we take from our mind and manifest into reality, there are actually three distinct versions that we experience as artists:
- The first is the Mind Image.
- The second is the Work-in-Process image.
- And the third is the "Finished" image.
The first idea we have is a mind image. It's sometimes clear, sometimes not, but it's mixed with emotions and sensory data and feelings that only we will really ever understand or be able to experience.
The mind image stays with us—it can never be shared. Ever.
When we go to make this into something we begin the work-in-process image.
Our process can have many forms, but ultimately we strive to create something that embodies the idea we had in the beginning. Or, we abandon it and find something new! Something even better.
This is a transitional, ever-morphing image. We can break it down into sketches to begin with; we can have a rational, logical step-by-step process. But the actual nuts and bolts of what's happening are still a bit magical.
We tweak, we adjust, we fix, we reconsider, we move further away from, and then closer to, that original idea—or the feeling of it.
We move closer to the end of our process and finally, at some point, we call it done. We slap a signature on it. We put a frame around it. We send it out into the world.
We stop. And then it's finished.
We kind of agree that this is it—that we're not going to work on it anymore. (Although some artists have been known to just keep picking at things, or scrape it back and start again years later.)
Lastly, there is the finished image! The thing that we started out trying to accomplish.
This is what other people see! This is our idea viewed by the world.
But what do we see?
And what do they actually see?
Do they see what we saw in our mind?
Probably not...
In fact, the Paradox is that we often cannot really see our own work. Not as others do.
When I see my finished illustration, or a printed comic book, I see both the finish and the work in progress, and how it deviates from my original intention—from my original idea. I see all of these things, and they combine into one judgment.
In fact, something you might have experienced is that you often see mistakes in your finished work.
We spend so much time fixing and looking for mistakes through the work in progress—why should it stop all of a sudden? It can take years to really "see" our work with fresh eyes.
Often a lot of our experience of a piece is in the process. The steps in the middle, that no one sees.
We put most of our focus in the middle. This is where we spend most of our time.
This is often what we actually do day to day as artists. We look at unfinished art and think about what's wrong with it. How to make it better. That's half the fun!
But at the end of the day, despite working tirelessly on something really important to us, we will perhaps never really see the final thing.
We will never really be able to judge it properly, because our experience of it is so enmeshed with its creation.
And this is why skipping the process with algorithmically generated art seems so strange to artists.
Because once you start creating, the fun is actually in the middle. And part of developing is learning when to hold an idea tightly, and when to let go. When a happy accident should be followed.
When to go down a rabbit hole to see where it goes!
If you understand the Process Paradox it helps to manage expectations. Often the fun is in in the middle, in actually making stuff.
Phew... ok, that's enough psychobabble.
Check out the Art Ritual 23 video if you want to hear me talk about Mythical "AI Directors" for about 50 minutes while sketching robots and aliens.
Next week I will dive into some more practical drawing tips!
Cheers
Tim
If you haven't lately:
Check out The Line and Color Academy:
A big part of understanding how to get your ideas onto the page is developing a simple, reliable process. Which we go into detail on throughout the course!
