A Bastardly Guide to How to Draw Good!

Theme: Art Decade - David Bowie

As the debut of Thinking Barbarian followup series Last of the Amazons draws nigh, I figured I might share my TOP TIPS for How to Draw Good when, like your humble blogìste, you don't actually have any talent, but still want to draw cool things like mastodon riders fighting Aztec cavemen, Voodoo bike gangs with tommy guns chasing our heroes through neon-lit streets, and goth girls fighting Baywatch babes in gladiatorial combat, because you're an arrested 12-y/o.

1. Get Some Perspective!

You're supposed to do this every time you draw a simple building.

Perspective is HARD and BORING. Swerve it by setting most of your action in forests and caves, so you can draw irregular shapes instead of buildings. Drawing trees and shit is EASY, but is also BORING, so you can cheat by using photographs for your backgrounds. This leads us nicely to...

2. My Sketchy Background!

If your background is too detailed, noone knows where the fuck to look! Blurring your backgrounds helps direct the reader's eye toward the main event occurring in the foreground, which is where you put your characters.

Then again, like me, you might prefer to use distraction to conceal your comical ineptitude at anatomy.

3. Go Figure!

Most of what you will draw will be the human figure. Like perspective, anatomy is HARD, but unlike perspective, it's also NOT BORING, so I suggest you study anatomy. One way to do this is by dissecting cadavers; these can be found at your local morgue or cemetery. Should this prove too difficult, copy your poses from better artists, which should at least get you in the ballpark, and when hall monitors CATCH you in the ACT, don a beret and call it an "homage". On the other hand:

4. Colour Me Shocked!

Learning basic colour theory takes five seconds: red goes with green, blue goes with orange, purple goes with yellow (but this last one is used pretty seldom). This is because these are opposites on the colour wheel.

In "The Fell Civil War" I had the red and green wizards fight each other and the orange and blue ones fight each other for this very reason. IDK who invented the colour wheel OK but it just works, just trust me on this.

ALSO: don't give one character too much colours; give them two main ones and a third one that's more of a highlight on details of their costume such as belts and straps. Let me expostulate...

5. My Dark Designs!

Besides incorporating colour theory, another rule of thumb I learned for character designs is that you take some visual motif and repeat it in a bunch of places on the character. One character can have two or three of these motifs but they have to be spaced out somewhat intelligently.

Helga has a black widow hourglass motif on her lips and kneepads, sometimes over her eyes, and a square "face" motif on her shoulderpad and shield. She also has the same type of feathers on her shoulderpad and trident. This simple approach creates unity and balance in the character design. Later I switched that random semicircle on her belt for another square face, which works better.

Now you've mastered character design, make like an embalmer and start...

6. Managing de composition!

Advanced composition is HARD, but simple composition that works is as EASY as the rule of thirds and shapes. Place a strong line on each third. You can just do this with the vertical or horizontal thirds or you can do it with both. Having characters with spears, or interiors with pillars, gives you easy things to use for these strong lines. The rule of thirds is such an easy hack for composition that it should be BANNED in competitive drawfaggotry, but is INVALUABLE for bastards like you and me!

Yeah, I eyeballed all my thirds, but it's an art, not a science. The thirds police aren't going to come knocking at your door.

Shapes are another good simple way to do composition good: arrange the components of your mise-en-scène into a triangle, a square or a circle. When you GIT GUD at art, you can combine several shapes more smartly, or so I am told.

Circle.

Square.

Triangle AND circle. Illuminati confirmed!!!

7. Most importantly, have fun!

Because one day you'll die and be forgotten.

8. Outsource to AI!

If you get stuck, remember that learning to draw is a complete waste of time and I only do it because it brings me joy, and if you just want to skip straight to the end point, you can just ask one of many AI programmes to create your picture for you. The Art Community might throw a bitchfit, but who cares what insane people think? For myself, I'm content to draw the old-fashioned way, but more out of quaint Amishness than any pretense toward punkish Luddism. If you want to cheat on your homework by having the smart kid do it for you, knock yourself out. For my full thoughts on the implications of AI technology for mankind, see: it's way too early to tell.

Now you know everything I do and more! Tune in next week for IDK, you decide.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Legend of the Surami Fortress!

Theme: Stein um Stein - Rammstein

Let me tell you a tale...

Everyone knows Sergei Paradjanov for his seminal 60s classic Sayat Nova (aka The Colour of Pomegranates), an ostensible biopic of Armenia's most celebrated poet. It was obvious to everyone that Paradjanov had the most singular talent and vision among filmmakists since Ozu, but the Soviet regime did not approve of his flagrant flouting of socialist realism formula and penchant for stirring up nationalist sentiment in the benighted SSRs, so he spent four years in a prison camp on what nearly everyone agrees were bogus charges of rayping a Party functionary before being released, only to reprise his controversy-courting schtick in the mid-80s because, in his words, "lmfao yolo nigga idgaf".

Paradjanov surveying all the territories occupied by his balls (1985, colourised).

While this absolute madladdery merits celebration in itself, the fact that Legend of the Surami Fortress adapts so effortlessly Paradjanov's patented succession of album-cover-worthy compositions and bizarre vignettes to a more traditionally narrative folkloric template makes one wonder why no indie hipster fast-tracked by H*llywood has tried to make a franchise flick this way, until one remembers that indie hipsters don't actually watch arthouse films or have integrity, audacity or character. Yes, Legend, set in a bizarrely stylised medieval Georgia, has a plot, albeit one the great filmmakists often seem indifferent to conveying with any great clarity or urgency, in favour of complete non-sequiturs like this:

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The plot concerns a fortress which repeatedly collapses, to the great consternation of the Czar, and the intertwining fates of various slaves, merchants, warriors and clairvoyants that culminate in a solution: a young man must sacrifice his life to be entombed within the foundation of the building, ensuring its stability for the ages. This might seem like an odd idea, but similar legends are found as far off as Japan, so many cultures shared it. I myself have immured several victims in my foetid crawlspace, but less to consecrate the building and more because they wouldn't stop wearing her face.

Neighbours know better than to bother me or ask too many questions. You heard nothing; you smelled nothing.

But Legend's impact lies in its striking visual style over the vicissitudes of plot anyway. Closeups are few, lending the objectivity of detachment that makes the stagey imagery stand out in its naked strangeness. Compare Kurosawa's Dreams and Terayama's Pastoral: To Die in the Country for examples of similar atmospheric derealisation. Off-symmetrical framing is another motif, introducing subtle dissonance into an ordered world:

I'm showing these compositions to Stanley Kubrick to watch his eye twitch later this evening, but you're not invited.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Miraculous Virgin!

Me reading my own blôgge posts.

I first saw Czechoslovak kino Panna zázracnica, or The Miraculous Virgin, on YouTube without subtitles. Given that the subject matter orbits the now-obscure nadrealist scene - a Slavic cousin of surrealism - this was an entirely appropriate way to experience it and one I recommend unironically. The Dalí himself was fond of saying that confusion was the best and purest form of communication, to which end he would speak in four different languages, switching abruptly mid-sentence like a Mr Bungle song. Dalí's erstwhile dickriders tried to kick him out of the surrealist mOvEmEnT for the thoughtcrime of preferring Franco over the inarguably far more murderous alternative, to which he replied thus:

Posers eternally, irrevocably stumped, schlonged, rekt, shrekt, BTFO the fuck out and on suicide watch.

Nadrealism likewise did away with much of the prosaic safe-edgy hipster commie baggage that weighed down the less notable pretenders to the surrealist throne in severing the perceived umbilical cord between surreal art and the discredited theories of Marx and Freud, allowing it to easily outshine the more western-based iterations of surrealist schtick, and The Miraculous Virgin is withering in its contempt for the red orthodoxy that had overseen and crassly micromanaged artistic expression in the eastern bloc cinéma prior to the Czechoslovak New Wave. In one scene a pompous party hack lectures a hapless sculptor that his statue of the red tyrant du jour looks too much like a priest and not enough like a secular bureaucrat BUT TOTES AWESOMESAUCE.

The kino is loosely based on a novel but is as close to pure cinéma as it gets in its flights of celluloid fantasy through the world of an art scene neither you nor I (be honest) had remotely heard of prior. The plot, not that it matters, concerns Anabella (Jolanta Umecka), a dream waifu clad in mourning black who becomes archetypal muse to the nadrealist clique as they agonise over their art and the absolute state of society and so forth.

>tfw gf nevermore

In the end the crowd of horny artistes chase Umecka away, to the consternation of Michael Ironside doppelgänger Raven, who peevishly sulks at their behaviour as ungracious. While it's clear that he's supposed to give voice to the auteur's pretentions of sensitivity, this angle has aged poorly and plays into the modish prudism of the soyjak/chudjak Yin-Yang that makes up the currentyear+9 zeitgeist. Better to see the artists' lamentation of their irrepressible libido in the bittersweet terms of myth - for, after all, what makes it sad that they chase her away is precisely that she's a hot goth girl to begin with.

Sure, the right woman brings out the animal in man, but animals are noble and cool.

In this context, they're like Orpheus, doomed to lose his Eurydice by the very love that compelled him to seek her rescue. This isn't even really a stretch, since one of the protagonists is named Tristan, after another famous avatar of tragic male infatuation. Still another clue might lie in the kino's repurposing of Jean Cocteau's famous mirror gag from The Blood of a Poet - the first part of, you guessed it, the Orpheus Trilogy.

This sort of intertextual wiki-walking is what "media literacy" might mean if it hadn't been co-opted to mean licking the boots of didactic H*llywood scolds.

Unsurprisingly, Virgin was banned following the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and remains little-known in the west and the English-speaking world. If you're a fan of Dalí and Cocteau (and if you're not, why are you here?), you owe it to yourself to Czech it out.

Parade

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