On Writer's Block

What's more cliche' than a writer writing about writer's block?

I'll just say this up front: I don't believe in writer's block. At least not in the way that most people describe it. I'd rather call it apprehension or better yet writer's doubt.

When an artist first starts out creating things they have a simple goal in mind: they want to express something intangible. They have a need to see an idea in their head materialized in reality. This need is often driven by feelings that the artist has about their view of the world. Something that seems off to them, something that needs to be said, something that people aren't paying attention to. Any of those inclinations can plant a seed of a project and, once those seeds are planted, only time and energy are required to bring them to fruition.

Those types of projects are usually the best.

Unfortunately, to live as an artist, you have to consistently produce new work. (The great censorship of capitalism is that we must sell what we create.) However, once you have tapped out the initial expressive ideas you are left with an empty well of interesting concepts and novel ideas. There is nothing demanding your attention, at least if you had sufficiently expressed your distress in the first place.

So you languish.

Nothing seems right. Nothing has the same flavor as what you made before and you search for ways to reinvigorate your work. You question what it was that made your work popular in the first place. You wonder if what you created was a fluke. You wonder if you are actually contributing anything to the world at all, and when that happens you lose the drive to finish what you were working on. You have created your writers block because you have robbed yourself of the very reasons you created your art in the first place.

By forcing expression we are in fact gagging our voice.

So what do you do? Well, for starters, you re-explore the ideas and feelings that led you to create in the first place. No amount of art in the world can sufficiently answer the issues of society, so there's a good chance that the issues you have with it are still out there. And if, by chance of societal evolution, those problems have gone away, then there are certainly new issues to arouse your creativity. Art doesn't answer societies ills, not in the same way that government and religion can, but it does serve to illuminate and illustrate the realities of our existence while providing a beautiful emotional ideal for us to weigh ourselves against. Once you have re-connected with those observations that planted the seeds in the first place, you will find your resources rejuvenated.

You cannot allow doubt to get in the way of what you create. You may make something awful, you may make something wonderful, but by simply creating you are contributing to a vast and evolving puzzle of creation that contributes to the human experience. To art, the value of a blockbuster and that of a single seller are the same: something has been shared, something has been exchanged, and something has been expressed.

Do not worry how the world will receive your work, the remarkable thing is that you gave it in the first place.

Painting the Invisible

My previous article focused on the idea that accurate lighting entices viewers into pieces of art, but how do you paint light when your subject only exists in the imagination?

Here's that cover again:

Poor Slips has really been under the microscope lately, hasn't he? Anywho, I wanted to revise this cover and add a better sense of lighting and depth to the piece. Anytime you feel stuck or in need of improvement you should seek out the advice of the old masters. So who better than Caravaggio to teach us a bit about light?

The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1600 A.D.

Notice the intense single light source coming from the right hand side? That was the style of the day. Painting at the time favored a single light source because the light in the painting was a symbol for God and there could only be one god. Caravaggio also knew that a single light source lends a sense of drama to the piece as well as a clear way to move the viewers eye's through the work. It also firmly plants the painting in reality. 

So how do we apply this to a giant imaginary chameleon? Well, we start by deciding where the light source should come from.

 That little purple thing is supposed to represent a spotlight. In reality it would be a little bit off of the surface of the canvas to the upper left of the picture, but I put it there for the purpose of illustrating the point. The shape of the cone indicates the spread of the light while the arrow indicates the direction. Everything outside of those two extended cone lines will fall in shadow while things closer to the center line arrow will show the brightest highlights.

Light is a funny thing. We tend to think of highlights as bright and vibrant but the closer to "bright" a color becomes the more it loses its saturation. Conversely, the more shadowed a color, the more it tends to saturate. Shadows tend to be "cool" colors, they have more blue in them. While mid-tones and highlights are "warm" tending to have more red or yellow in them. The combination of all of these different values is what creates depth in an illustration and gives it a sense of realism.

Once you have decided on your lighting, molding the form of something that doesn't exist comes from your knowledge of painting things that do exist. I know that Slips' eyes are big and round, so shading them like you would shade an orange works. His nose is bulbous and his cheeks rise up over his mouth, so those points get highlights. Notice how deep this image is compared to the earlier version. I'm a little sad to lose some of the bright bubbliness of the first image, but I think that the movement  drama, and clarity that the new version has outweighs that loss. 

Art is never finished and an artist is never done learning. Thank you for joining me along the way!

People Are Like Moths

How important is light to painting?

Yesterday I had dinner with a friend of mine from college whom I hadn't seen in nine years. We used to talk a lot about painting, going so far as to geek out about how warm cerulean blue is and why it makes your skin itch when you use it (tiny crystals get under your skin, seriously.) I showed him my body of work and suddenly found myself in the middle of an art critique.

He commented that "The Monster That Ate My Socks" had better lighting, color, composition, movement, and rendering than "The Imagibles: Slips' Slip Up" did. Interestingly these two titles are separated by about a year of work and around fifteen books. That's something like a hundred and fifty illustrations between the two pieces. I was baffled. "Am I actually getting WORSE at art?"

"People are like moths, they're drawn to light."

The major differences between these two pieces are the application of lighting. The sock monster has a high level of lush light and shadow and a background that provides nice contrast to the form. This gives  the piece depth, even when it's a tiny thumbnail on your kindle. The Imagibles, by contrast, has the flatness of a playing card and doesn't feel "alive" in the same sense. The color is also flat. There are no cold values weighted against the hot values so the eye isn't as enticed to explore the image. Pretty heavy stuff for a book cover, no?

What's interesting is that as we looked at my body of work, the titles that had this luscious sense of lighting were invariably more popular than the covers that did not. It didn't matter what the illustrations on the inside of the book looked like either, it was the cover, and only the cover, that communicated the quality of the work inside.

My friend quoted his favorite teacher who said that "people are like moths, they're attracted to light." I have to agree. Good art has a sense of light built into it and I think that this is one of the phenomenons you can point to when people say things such as "I don't know why I like it, I just do." Everyone intrinsically has a sense for good art regardless of their training or ability to illustrate because our sense of art comes from observing the world around us. We are conditioned by living life to know instinctually when something seems out of place and thus we are naturally attracted to those images and forms that fit more closely into what we expect out of the world.

I would also take the quote one step deeper. People are not only literally drawn to light but also figuratively. The stories, places, and personalities that put out a "luminous" quality also attract the most attention. 

What exactly is luminosity? I'll leave that up to you to decide.

Pulling Narrative Thread

How can you take a small idea and turn it into an entire story? 

When I was in college, I had a writing instructor that said "you can write anything if you know how to pull the proper thread." It took me years of writing bad stories to understand what she meant.

We are constantly inundated with narrative in our culture, actually every culture, and because of that most of us have access to an intuitive sense of story. For example, if I tell you that I'm working on a love story about a man and a woman who reunite after five years you will immediately assume that in the end of the story those two will wind up together. Did you also assume that they would be separated at some point in the story? What about difficulties between them, do you think they had them or did they get along splendid from the get go?

These assumptions are the "thread" that you as a writer can pull to reveal more about your story and how it wants to be constructed. Yes, stories have a life of their own and I am a believer that the concept behind the story has a way that it naturally wants to be expressed. (Michelangelo talked of how he never actually sculpted anything, he simply revealed the sculpture that was within the stone to begin with.)

By pulling threads, or rather asking questions about your concept, you can quickly and easily work through the entire structure of the piece. Questions lead to other questions and eventually you will have followed enough thread to find the entire yarn (hyuck hyuck hyuck.)

Going back to the example of the love story, lets ask ourselves why the couple was separated in the first place. Remember that there's no wrong answers, only decisions that feel more right than others. Lets say it was because of a sailing accident and the woman thought that her love had been lost at sea. Ok, kind of cheesy, but lets run with it. If a sailing accident happened, then we know that the man sails. Does the woman also sail? Yes. Okay! Is that how they met? Yes! Okay, then we know that we can have a scene early in the story where the two love birds meet over sailing. Perhaps the man teaches the woman how to sail. She was a sheltered upper class woman after all and he was a ruffian from the docks. 

See where I'm going? I'm having too much fun so let's take this all the way. If he taught her how to sail then that becomes her "superpower." Most protagonists have something about them that makes them special so that they can overcome their challenges. Luke had his light-saber while captain Kirk had his infallible gambling skill/decision making. So this woman learned how to sail. Her friends and family all told her that her love had died at sea. The coast guard had given up the search. No one thought that he had survived. No one, except our heroine. Her connection to this man told her that he was still alive. So she uses the skills that he taught her to sail out to sea and find her lost love. And, after years of searching, the man never giving up hope, who is it that sails to his rescue? The love of his life of course!

And save, print, submit. All we need is a title . . . How about Love Tide . . . Maybe we'll save title creation for another post . . .

What kind of stories can you come up with?

What kind of stories will you create?

How about asking your children for ideas? They tend to find the best threads . . .

All my love,

A. J. Cosmo

Duckfish Cork Floaters (Craft Project)

With summer here, I got to thinking about water and that reminded me of one of my favorite childhood crafts: cork floaters!

Materials you will need:

• a large cork topper (ask your parents)
• safety scissors (parents)
• a thumbtack (maybe you should do this with your parents)
• crayons
• cardboard

Have a parent or a guardian cut the cork topper in half (you could make two separate floaters out of one cork.)

Place the cork half flat on a surface and use your scissors to carve out a slot on the top of the cork. (You can also have an adult carve out the slot by using a knife.) The slot should be thin enough to hold paper snug.

Take your cardboard and draw the outline of the creature that you want to create. Here I made my good friend Duckfish. Make sure that at the bottom of the creature you create a bit that sticks out.

Use the crayons to color the entire surface.  Make sure to be thorough, the wax in the crayons will waterproof your creature!

Insert that bit of cardboard into the slit you cut in the cork.

Take your thumbtack and attach it to the underside of the cork. This will weigh the floater down in the water so that it doesn't roll.

Wait . . . something is wrong . . .

Sometimes whenever you try something new it doesn't work out the way that you planned. That's ok! We learn from our mistakes and try again until we figure it out. In this case, the duckfish was too large for what the cork could support. So I made another, smaller, Duckfish.

Aww, he's still cute! Time to go for a swim little guy . . .

Awesome! Here he is enjoying my bird bath. And then getting blown into the corner by the wind . . .

What is a Duckfish anyway? Who cares! 

What kind of things will you create with your children? Share them @ajcosmokids!

Sculpting a Monster (Craft Project)

Hello everyone!

Sculpture can be a great way to spark the imagination, engage thinking, and relax after a stressful day. Every child loves Play-Doh, but if you'd like something a little more permanent, I'd recommend Sculpey.

Sculpey is a plastic modeling clay that you can bake in the oven to harden. It's extremely soft and maleable and also relatively cheap. It normally comes in white but you can also purchase color blocks like the ones above. (Use a mat or work on an old table, the colors can stain!)

What am I making? An Aarghmouth of course! This little guy is from one of my favorite books Monsters A to Z. He lives behind things and likes to jump out and scare people.

So how do you go about sculpting something like this? Well you start with a base, or in this case the feet . . .

When sculpting you always go from simple shapes to complex ones. Don't get frustrated if it doesn't look like what it should be immediately, you can always go back and mold it later! Work from bottom to top, that way the sculpture will be balanced when you're done.

I placed the chin and then cut in to the feet to carve them out. They look so cute!

I used the red clay to create the back of the mouth and then covered it with a thin layer of orange (I was running out of orange already!) Not only do you want to work bottom to top, you also want to work inside to out, so we have to create the mouth cavity first. Now on to the teeth!

I inserted the teeth and then covered it with a wedge of orange to create the top of the jaw. Now it gets tricky. One of the hardest things to do in sculpture is free floating appendages. The trick is to make the base sturdy and the extension delicate.

I made the hand separately just by using a ball and three rolls. I attached the arm by spreading the Sculpy over itself. As long as you mush together all of the sides, the piece should bond together.

You can press in to the center of your sculpture to get it to balance, but this one was being tricky. So I had to improvise . . .

I added a tail. Sometimes you have to take liberties in order to make a project work. Be fearless! Now for the eyes . . .

Make sure the base is secure and remember your process. Everything takes little steps and as long as you think things through, you will have success!

I mixed yellow with red to get the pink and then inserted the uvula and tongues after molding them. All it took to attach them was pressing them in.

Use a small round or flat object to smooth out fingerprints and places where you bonded the Sculpy. (I used a cuticle pusher!) Other household tools include toothpicks and spoons.

Voila! Now it's time to bake :)

(Definitely need parental supervision for this!)

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit. Then bake the Sculpey for 15 minutes per 1/4 inch thickness. This little guy is about one inch thick, so I set the timer for 60 minutes.

Poor fella. He looks terrified! Sculpy can burn so it's importnat to watch the time. It also has a distinct smell when it's done, sort of a woody plastic smell. When the smell turns bad, like a burned pizza, remove it quickly!

What kind of things will your children create? Send me pictures of your creations @ajcosmokids and I'll post them!

Painting in Photoshop

Hello again! I'm working on a new book. I'm not going to say what, but it might have something to do with this one. . .

I use many different techniques to illustrate my books, but for today I wanted to demonstrate one that has its heritage in the great procedural painters of the early renaissance, such as those used by Jan Van Eyck. Now this is photoshop and children's books so the technique is a bit simplified, but if you wanted to you could completely re-create any of the old techniques. So here goes:

You start with a simple black and white drawing of the illustration using varying opacities for your brush. I use a pressure tablet, but you could also just select different opacities by hitting any of the numbers at the top of the keyboard (3 gives you %30, 5 gives you %50, etc.) Use a simple round brush with or without feathering for this.

Make sure that you refine the outline to the best of your ability. Any sort of extra strokes, escpecially white strokes, will show up in the next step. If you are publishing to black and white devices this technique ensures that your illustrations will still be legible on those readers!

Once you have the tone right, create a new layer and set it to Multiply in the Layer Styles pulldown tab. Multiply takes the color you paint and multiplies it by the tone of the color below it. If you use color on color you'll get really vivid dark colors. However, if you use it on black and white you get a flat color with smooth tone. Like this:

There are only four colors used above: red, blue, yellow, and brown. (Also realized that I misspelled Shakespeare here, no matter though, I can go to the previous layer and fix that!) You can mix up the colors and blend them to create more interesting values such as the brown-red in the lower left corner of the book. But this isn't finished, it still needs some tweaking to "feel" like a finished picture.

Add another layer but leave the style normal. This will be your color layer and you will paint directly on top of the other two to polish the image that you've created. Use high opacity color with small brush sizes. This will help create sharp edges and spaces where it feels like more detail then there actually is. When you're done, you should have something like this:

Van Eyck and others used two additional steps to achieve their look. After the black and white layer they would glaze the canvas with raw umber and then apply straight black and white to the "cold" areas of the color. Then they would apply the final color using glazes of oil paint and thinner. The result would be a gorgeous and deep color that would give off the warmth and depth of life. You can read more about this technique here. Interestingly enough, part of the reason the painters developed this technique was to conserve paint, colors such as purple, red, and blue were expensive!

I hope this has been informative. As always if you have any questions about this or anything else relating to your work please say hello on twitter @ajcosmokids

Happy painting!