And then it all made sense: Breaking things down to their fundamental Elements.

Hey guys, Virgil here. I have a confession to make and it's kind of hard to admit this much but, I'm turning 30 in September. Now, this whole post isn't going to be about how 'I've only got so much life left to live' or 'wow, what have I got to show for 30 years of life' or any of the other crap dudes my age are supposed to be saying. In fact, I feel pretty positive about the next decades because; long before it's over, I got it.

See, I graduated from the Art Institute of Portland in 2007 and have been post-college-flopping ever since. I have a regular job any schmo can do and I am lucky to have it. Additionally, I carve out just enough free-time from it to keep working on my skills, most of which have matured here, right before your eyes. Since I never was able to make the cut, I might as well keep honing my skills such that I can at least feel confident I could do the job if the opportunity is ever mine. And work I have these last 5 years, to teach myself the skills my college wasn't interested in giving me. Humbling as it is to say, I only recently got it.

My drawings here on the site, the art I create, is only as good as it is because I lucked into two good sources of drawing skills. One is Burne Hogarth, a master illustrator who's drawings are iconic as they are solid. This mans work, which you can buy in illustration manuals for very little money, diagram the ins and outs of human anatomy without expensive studio memberships and live-nude drawing. In addition to that I encountered the Blog of one John Kricfalusi. While his opinions and art style -LACK- his knowledge of drawing fundamentals is extensive and available for anyone to learn! Whatever speed you're at, these guys can help and only now do I understand why.

Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." As far as art is concerned, the statement holds true. When I work on art, when I decide, 'A pony doing "X" at "Y" while "Z" is "A," I start with the same simple steps: Create the mass shapes, establish their relationships to each other, decide the narrative, refine. It starts as simply as that. Only when the complexity of the image increases are there additional concerns. Knowing the simple steps, I repeat them for the eyes, the ears, the manes, etc. Everything done in the final steps of an image are permutations of the simple steps in the beginning. And because I focus on these simple steps, the end result comes together effortlessly!

Of course, I can't say that the images are always 100% successful or done well, but they are always done correctly. It's unfortunate that it's taken this long but the notion didn't cement for me until recently with painting and now architecture. For your consideration, I present the following video:

[video=youtube;FPz8Xyt3z-w]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPz8Xyt3z-w][/video]

Now, it may not make sense at the moment, but what he's telling you to do here is precisely what I do when I start an image. In painting, as opposed to drawing, you concern yourself with color shapes. These localized color-masses (for our benefit) have borders with their neighbors in terms of their edges. After you seat every color at the table, you can manipulate the strength and presence of each color to reflect your narrative in terms of what to do with your warms and cools. Should you be sufficiently able to discover and reproduce these fundamentals, your painting is going to turn out properly.

It doesn't stop there, either. Being that I have a strange bent for the stuff, Architecture ends up being an important consideration in my drawings. Especially when I need the background to assist the image, I want to nail the buildings down correctly. Funny then, that I've discovered the process is already mine, just being executed in a different manner:

[video=youtube;vmHoGicPQQQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmHoGicPQQQ[/video]

So, it's not color shapes and it's not mass shapes, instead its even more symbolic. He talks about where 'parts' of the house are in terms of where the others are. Here the kitchen, here the master bedroom; so forth. In the act of designing enclosed spaces, you utilize these function-shapes and distribute them over the site. In architecture it's where you put these shapes in relation to the others that defines the home. Stairs, supports, electrical, kitchen counters; these are the details that go in last. If you start just by getting your function shapes into their proper places and then refine down; you bypass all the frayed nerves and anxiety you might have if you just started designing the master bathroom first.

It may not seem very clear by the way I've presented this, but I hope what I say here helps at least one person. Knowing your fundamentals, figuring out what they are for the given skill you want to develop is your first step. Once you understand these parts to the whole, you are free to experiment, knowing full well when you get it wrong and, most importantly, how to make it right from there. You won't be a sure success with this, goodness no! But successfully discovering and working with the fundamentals is the difference between trying and giving up and trying, failing and trying again.