How do I take my art to the 'next-level'?
TODAY’S TOPIC:
In this episode, Annie and Emily discuss basic art fundamental skills and the reasons why we need to continually develop these skills to bring our work to the next level. They cover what art fundamentals are and the importance to continuing to learn after leaving school and university. We are never really 'done' learning art - we should always be challenging ourselves to step out of the 'box'.
“ESSENTIALLY ART FUNDAMENTALS ARE THE BUILDING BLOCKS OR FOUNDATION OF ANY PIECE OF ARTWORK. IT INCLUDES MANY ASPECTS OF CREATIVITY LIKE COLOR THEORY, COMPOSITION, LIGHTING AND VALUE, PERSPECTIVE, FORM, AND ANATOMY.
ART FUNDAMENTALS CAN MAKE OR BREAK YOUR ILLUSTRATIONS.”
Introduction
Emily: Hello and welcome to the Learn Medical Art podcast we share our tips, tricks and advice on the medical illustration and animation industry. Welcome to episode 1! Our very first podcast episode! I’m Emily Holden, a medical illustrator and animator.
Annie: And I’m Annie Campbell, also a medical illustrator and animator. You can find our show notes and resources from this episode and more educational content (such as industry interviews and tutorials and more) at www.LearnMedical.art.
Emily: So...what are we discussing today Annie?
What we want to discuss
Annie: Well Emily, today we are going to have a discussion about basic art fundamental skills and ways that you can hone those skills to bring your work to the next level.
Art fundamental training is so so important to learn and maintain throughout your creative career.
Coming from a science background, I didn’t quite realise how important art fundamental training was. I’d do an assignment of drawing and shading primitive shapes but I never quite connected these shapes with the more complex illustrations I created. I think this lead to really flat, lifeless illustrations. And I kind of forgot about keeping up with my art fundamental training when I got my first job. Over the years I’ve realised that I struggled and took more time with more challenging assignments that required concepts that were a bit out of the box.
Emily: So lets take a moment to go through Why we want to discuss this. It's definitely common to hear that that most art schools don't teach you everything you need to know about art fundamentals. And even though there is some truth to that, I feel like they give you the right push and stepping stones towards learning more on your own. As an art student I definitely feel like I spent a lot of time waiting around for someone to teach me everything I needed to know to become an awesome artist...Buuut unfortunately it is just not that simple.
We want to go over this topic today as we want to encourage people to push the boundaries of what they have been taught and find their own recognizable voice in their work. Often we heavily focus on all of the software we know and have this as a list of good core skills on our CVs but what really matters is how we use these basic skills whilst considering all the other important art fundamentals. There is no use in having a list of software on your CV and no evidence that you are better than the next person who also learned that same software!
Annie: Totally and we see a lot of CVs that say they know a lot about a program, like Photoshop for instance, but the real evidence on whether they know how to use the programs effectively is there in their portfolio work. So, rather than focusing on how many functions you know in a software, what we really should be focusing on is how can this software help me create great work—and that comes from knowing your art fundamentals.
What are art fundamentals?
Annie: Art Fundamentals, what are they Emily?
Emily: Essentially art fundamentals are the building blocks or foundation of any piece of artwork. It includes many aspects of creativity like color theory, composition, lighting and value, perspective, form, and anatomy.
Art fundamentals can make or break your illustrations.
If you look at a piece of artwork and something seems a bit off or not quite right, a bad execution of art fundamentals is usually the culprit of an unsuccessful drawing. Art is one of those things that people judge very quickly and some people won’t quite know why but they just don’t like it! You may ask why and they may not be able to pinpoint the exact reason... there is just something that is throwing them off.
Annie: Which Sometimes is the case when you work with certain clients right?
Emily: Yes, absolutely! On the other hand, a professional artist would be able to say if it's the form, or proportion, colors or lighting that is the root cause of this and they can provide constructive feedback, or if it is their own work - they can go fix it.
So let's talk about portfolios.
Emily: What separates average from extraordinary when viewing portfolios?
Annie: Well, when we look at people's work, their portfolios, there are a couple of things that really stand out to us. Number 1 is a good grasp of art fundamental basics. An understanding of light and form, observational drawing skills, composition, and color theory. The most beautifully rendered sphere is much more appealing to us than a badly constructed, complex illustration. Number 2 is good figure drawing skills as it gives us an idea on whether you have good observational skills and are able to judge form and proportions correctly. There's a reason why many Disney and Pixar animators do a lot of figure drawing training and practice, it's so that they can correctly translate anatomy into the characters they create and animate—don't believe me? Check out the training they do at CalArts (one of the most prestigious art schools for animators). Being medical illustrators, we need to have good figures as that serves as our canvas for many of the visuals we create. Number 3: The third thing we look for are unique pieces of work that require a heck of a lot of visual problem solving. It's really easy to do frontal and side anatomical poses in portfolios, there's so many references out there to help you visualize this. What's challenging is doing difficult orientations and figure poses AND STILL maintain enough clarity in your medical illustration to teach people something. This is spatial problem solving and takes a lot of time and dedication to learn this incredibly important skill for medical illustration.
Emily: Absolutely! I completely agree with that. I think that anything that had somehow pushed the 'boundaries' of what we typically see from medical illustrations will stick in your mind far more than a flat illustration on a white background. It could be a super detailed cross section of a heart that the artist has spent HOURS on... but it can just fall flat or look samey. Another thing to try and avoid using and set course assignments in your portfolio that doesn’t show anything new or exciting. If you are competing with other graduates from the Medical Illustration course you graduated from for a job position then it is very likely the employer will have seen all of the course work before and won’t necessarily be bowled over by the artwork unless you have done that little bit extra to do something different with it and present it in a unique way.
In general, I would just encourage people to be experimental... that is what art is meant to be. If you are well informed in the fundamentals that Annie was talking about then it is likely that your experimentations will be more successful that you may imagine. Stepping out of the box and really considering lighting, colour, layout design, exciting poses or angles will just set your work aside from the rest.
What are some of the other reasons people should you focus on the fundamentals?
Annie: I love what just said there, Emily, about stepping out of the box as that's where the real challenges come in. When we see evidence that a person as some form of understanding of the fundamentals of art, we can tell that they would be able to problem solve any difficult creative challenges that might arise. Usually in medical illustration, we need to draw the unseen or draw something from a different viewpoint. Putting this into a cohesive and informative graphic as well, is a challenge, and that's why we're specialists.
But if you're just starting out, trying to create highly complex medical illustrations is going to be incredibly difficult without building good foundations in your art fundamental understanding.
So our advice here is to take those baby steps and time in learning these fundamentals. Do lots of studies and practice on primitive shapes, practice how to draw cross sections, change the orientation of shapes and implement perspective. Do lots of these exercises until you're sick of doing them.
What can you do?
Emily: That takes us nicely into our next section - What can you do?
Annie: I think firstly is knowing what art fundamentals there are will be helpful. Emily you mentioned them at the very start of this chat. What were they again?
Emily: That's right, the basic art fundamentals fall into the following categories: color theory, composition, lighting and value, perspective, form, and anatomy. There are loads of articles, books and tutorials that cover these in great detail.
Annie: Right, and the schools that we go to, to learn medical illustration, they give us the basic training of the fundamentals that we need for our work. It's up to us, the individual, to continue learning and building on those fundamentals, even after we graduate. And I think when people graduate, that's where they sometimes stop learning and they find it a struggle to get back on the learning bandwagon and you can kind of see the quality of their work plateauing. I know I did that when I left school.
Emily: You can just buckle up, suck it up and do the work. There is unfortunately no magic plug-in that can make your work wonderful. What makes someone's work outstanding is their use of composition, colour, lighting.. considering the fundamentals. It’s going to take work... a lot of work.
It's going to be really hard and you're going to get frustrated that your skills are not progressing as quickly as your knowledge intake is. But remember that it's all progress, you're slowly adding to your skill sets throughout the years.
Annie: Also another thing to consider that this type of training, it's constant, there will always be another level to read up on. Color and lighting for example. First you learn about color theory (complimentary colors etc), once you've mastered that you step it up and learn about how light affects color: how warm or cold lights affect shadow color, AAAAND once you've done that you step up another level and learn about how light and colors affect translucent materials, what subsurface scattering is and so on and so forth.
I used to scour the internet for quick fix tutorials and get really frustrated that tutorials couldn't tell me what I needed to know within the first 20 seconds. But I've came to realize that I learn more when I actually sit down, listen and try to understand why certain steps were taken. It's saved me a lot more development time further down the line.
Emily: Haha I was the same with tutorials! I think the shift happened for me when I realised I had to do some out of the box thinking because there just weren’t any tutorials out there for what I wanted to create. You may not find the EXACT how-to video you need... you are probably going to watch or read multiple tutorials until you can achieve the thing you have in your mind. Don’t settle on easy, don’t settle in your first option.
What not to do.
Emily: Thanks for catching me before I went on my what not to do rant! Haha. Firstly, do not use a tutorial and produce an exact copy. Most people use video tutorials to learn new skills. Which is great! The internet has made it so easy to learn new skills... but it would be dreadful if everyone had the SAME portfolio piece because of this. You need to use these skills to adapt it into your own style.
Annie: Yes! So often I'll look at a person's portfolio and I don't like it when I can tell which tutorials they've used to create that piece of work—it's even worse when it's one of our tutorials. That's not a good thing. Pieces like this are not a good indicator that they are good at visual problem solving or have an understanding of why, it just shows they can copy. Also if the final piece doesn't even look like the tutorial example, then it's a bit of a worry there's of a lack of skill there.
Emily: Absolutely, Don’t look for an easy way out... because there isn’t one! It is easy to get frustrated and get into a “that will do” or “good enough” mindset. If you feel like that, it’s time to get inspired... go and look at some artists you really admire and find that spark that made you want to enter the creative field in the first place! It is the same if you get disheartened and instead of “that will do” you start feeling you will never be good enough. To be honest I don’t think anyone ever thinks they are ever good enough at art. But that is actually the great thing about it. If you are feeling lost or unmotivated, go back and delve into the fundamentals. You are never ‘done’ learning these and I always find inspiration by going back and trying to improve these skills.
Get the most out of tutorials
Emily: So let’s have a think back on using tutorials - Annie, what's the point of tutorials and how can you get the most out of them?
Annie: You're never going to find a tutorial that tells you exactly how to create something that your client wants. If there is such a tutorial that exists, then why are they paying you to do the work when they could do it themselves? Use tutorials for their theory behind things, and rejig it for your work. For example I wanted to learn more about better lighting in my digital painting, I searched for a tutorial that talks about lighting in 3D rendering. Even though it's two different software, the theory still applies.
Emily: When you work in a more niche field such as Medical and scientific Illustration and animation you will very rarely find what you are looking for by searching YouTube. When I started 3D animation there was hardly anything on YouTube for how to create some standard Medical animations. That’s really what spurred me on to try and make tutorials and share the techniques when I finally worked out! You really need to just think in general terms when searching for tutorials. I did an animation on reproduction and I knew that I wasn’t going to get much for “how to animate 3D sperm swimming” on YouTube! So you need to break it down into WHAT the movement looks like... and what would be another instance movement like that would be animated. So I ended up looking at how to animate flocks of birds, scols of fish, tentacles... anything I could think of that people definitely animate in the more general field! It is fine to have all the tools at your finger stops within a program but it is another level to be able to search for inspiration in other places not particularly related to what you are creating.
Annie: and this goes back to what we were saying about having skills you have been taught but the taking them to the next level by focusing on the fundamentals. This works in animation as much as illustration as you said Emily. Further to what you said, there are so many fundamental skills that can be missed out on in animation by being to software-focussed. There are so many resources out there. You can look at things like Disney’s twelve basic principles of animation, you can look at cinematography techniques... all these little extra things can elevate your work and bring greater realism and creativity to your work!
What you can do
Emily: on that note I think this would be a great time to wrap it up and do a quick summary! So what have we covered and what are the main take-always for our listeners.
Annie: Ok let's summary some actionable steps
Get to know what the art fundamentals are, read up about them, scour the internet, books and videos about them
If it applies to you, get to know specific fundamentals for certain creative sectors such as the 12 principles of animation or typography fundamentals.
Put words into practice and do small training exercises. Do them regularly.
Self critique and try and identify the reasons why when your image or animation looks off
Use tutorials as a learning tool, ask yourself why they chose that color or added that key frame, don't just mindlessly copy
Challenge yourself to step out of the box and create something different
And I think that's enough to for people to get started Emily.
Emily: Great thanks Annie and thanks everyone for tuning in to the Learn Medical Art podcast. You can find show notes and resources from this episode on our website www.learnmedical.art. Give us a follow on social media @learnmedicalart and if you want to get in touch you can reach us via our website or send us a DM.
