Good morning and welcome back to another flip through. This is Todd from toddYoungONLINE. Today I’ve got another mid-nineties Canson spiral sketchbook that I used so much and carried around that the cover fell off. Looks like maybe there are some drawings, when I went back through it in the early 2000’s to do some updates on some of the character designs. Just looking through these sketchbooks, I keep mentally trying to tell my previous self doing these to focus more.
Something I keep kind of going back to, just some advice for my old self and my current self is, just focus your intention on what you’re doing first. Make sure you understand what you’re doing. I say that because, a lot of these pages are just large thumbnails. I use the whole page just throwing it down without working it all out first.
Some of them are smaller, but work out the idea first and understand what you’re going to work on or what you want to do first. Nothing wrong with doodles, but there are mor efficient way. Though to be fair I was working through my processes still.
Start with your composition, work with some thumbnails and gestures, then build your foundational forms to help you understand where forms fall. Be a little bit more deliberate in your actions and a little bit more efficient when you draw. So you’re not just using up the whole page needlessly.
I have a I’ve developed a peeve about wasting space and especially when I look back on these and it’s like, you could have, you should have been better. But, the truth is, I couldn’t have been. I was as good as I was at that point in time.
A lot of these themes and characters as I was trying to come up with characters for comic book ideas that I wanted to do, and, it’s one of those things where I was trying to do everything myself, and a lot of times have really gotten myself kind of pigeonholed into trying to do everything myself, when working with people didn’t work out.
I have dome drawing my daughter did when she was around three years old in here, too. So cute,
but my low brow unrefined style. The nakedness of these characters and how rough they were. Yeah. I get a little bit better sometimes working with cloth and folds, still working at that, reference and intentional studying helps.
References really help.
Sometimes reference is the best way to learn and develop your vocabulary. I envy the people that can really do this from memory. Who have done it so much that they now have that vocabulary. I don’t have that yet. but I’m still working towards being able to do that. Developing my vocabulary for anatomy and composition. To make things look the way I want.
And if they don’t, then how to lean into that and make it look, coherent.
Which is an exploration in and of itself.
I get lost watching these pages. A lot of these used references from comic books and poses that I saw. Some were trying to pull it out of my head, trying at one point, I felt like, if I didn’t do it myself, then it wasn’t original and but at some point we’re really derivative anyway.
So it’s just putting your spin on your work. Some of it’s not too bad, some of it’s not too great, but some of it’s well, all of it’s a starting point. That’s one thing that I’ve taken into my professional life, to try not to sound corny or anything, but it’s not going to be perfect, but if you get it down then people can use it as a starting point and build on it.
It’s rarely going to be perfect, but if you just at least get a rough draft, you can go back to it as a starting point.
Some of these are just really big detailed thumbnails.
I’ve been trying to consolidate my work into more persistent places that won’t disappear if I stop paying for them.
I’ve got a few of these sketchbooks. I was using Canson for a while and then started liking the hardcover sketchbooks. You can get them in value packs from Dick Blick and wherever, and it felt like those gave a little bit more credibility and level of coolness when you’ve got a hardcover book full of your artwork on the shelf.
Finding a place more persistent to collect my work. Whereas my website toddYoungONLINE.com collects everything, but goes away if I don’t pay the bill. But, platforms like YouTube, I hope, will be around in whatever form, longer than I am.
I think we’re at a point where, these platforms like Facebook and are going to be around a while, hopefully they’ve they’ve learned their longevity lessons. So, it’s kind of cool to be able to put yourself out there and have it outlast you in a world where only a small percentage of things are deemed special enough to be conserved. Now the internet has given us all an accessible place, but still feels like it needs more free spaces, and it there should be more of allocated of spaces for us to, if we want to, put leave our legacy. Beyond an overgrown tombstone in the ground somewhere.
Here’s my work. Here’s what I did here, or my pictures here, my videos. Basically my life’s work. Sometimes I got things right and sometimes I got things wrong.
I really enjoy Instagram and YouTube all of the artists sharing their work and contributing to the greater knowledge you can learn from them.
I’ve watched RODGON the Artist and a bunch of other artists. He pops in my mind because I always see him live and teaching, I think Instagram or TikTok, breaking things down and demystifying the process. I love how he fills up a page with thumbnails and examples.
As someone who, compositionally, likes whitespace, but if I’m sitting down and drawing and composing a page I want it full of just stuff. I like to force the composition like a Where’s Waldo page. Everywhere you look there’s something…lol.
All of these experiments, reminding myself that I was getting better, you just have to keep pushing forward and learning. One thing that I’ve kind of come to remind myself lately is that, creativity and imagination are muscles that you need to keep exercising, you need to keep working out in whatever medium.
Sometimes, having time to sit down and draw is a luxury that you just don’t have because other parts of your day suck up your energy and attention. But being able to exercise your creativity and imagination at whatever job you find yourself in, finding ways to to improve and, problem solve that’s what’s important.
Like the challenge of creating a comic book or visual storytelling.
Coming up with, then writing your story, doing the visual contrast, making it compelling or as compelling as you can, and then moving on to the next thing. But, if you don’t do it and keep doing it. It’s hard to get back into it.
You see it all over the internet, a community of people that are trying to get back into their creative side because, for whatever reason, they lost the time and or the energy to work on their stuff.
So sometimes it just comes to reminding yourself what you’ve done, that you have done something and that it all matters. It’s all cumulative. Even if it’s just for yourself, everything you do has some value to your expansion and growth as an artist and as a person. For me, it’s just sitting down and making some marks. And if it doesn’t necessarily look like I wanted it to, why not?
I lean into ‘the wrongness’ of it and keep pushing it until it’s right.
Because, and I’ve said this in other videos, I think it was Eric Larson who said, your style is everything you do wrong. If it wasn’t him, then I’m crediting it to him in my mind. But, I think it was.
Develop your way of doing things, visualize the human anatomy, develop your storytelling. It will become recognizable after a while as you keep doing it and building on it, and you keep evolving. Just keep doing it.
Like anything else, that’s what I keep telling myself. Each project I do is like, all right, you got that one done. Now how can you make it better next time?
I’m working on the podcast, YoungTales.fun I like spoken work and hearing stories being told. If you’re interested, I also posted on both YouTube channels, one for Young Tales and the other for toddYoungONLINE.net, as well as I try and link everything back to here. The podcast gave me the voiceover and starting point to develop the ‘theatrical’ versions utilizing AI voices, music, and sound fx, with the intent to animate them at some point. I’ve been working on character designs and gathering assets to put them together with.
I’ve been trying to do more streaming with gaming. I’ve got so many games to play and so little time to do it. But, at least finding the time to do ‘something’ is more important. Prioritization based on what you’re enjoying the most.
We are coming to the end of another sketchbook.
All my little derivative characters, photocopies of old paintings from 2003. It looked like I was kind of on to something a little bit better. I think I can, I think I’m still. I mean, right now, I, I usually use more reference to do my stuff, but I have, there was some, you know, I was doing some figure studies.
Another piece by my daughter.
And then a piece that shows up in another sketchbook.
Then I made a copy of and that’s another one. I really appreciate all your support watching these. I hope you get something out of them and enjoy them, the good, bad, and ugly…there will be more.
Thank you and have a great day.
See you soon.