All right. Hey everyone, my name is Antonio Stappaerts and I’m a concept artist in the entertainment industry, primarily focusing on pre-production concept arts or even light blue, sky and Sandbox stages. Next to that, I run my own online art program called Art-Wod and what I wanted to discuss with you guys today is the importance of structure in your artistic learning.
Primarily about structure in your drawing and painting, but also a little bit about structure in the mental aspect of being an artist. Primarily what I wanted to discuss is what I call a 6-Ation Principle and don't quote me on that, I just made it up to sound a little bit smarter and make this a little bit more clear for you guys, but I want to discuss six principles that can help you understand better how you can come up with more complex drawings where I feel that a lot of beginners, intermediate artists, they tend to fall into the trap of learning the very basics and then quickly moving on to very complex shapes. You see this a lot when people just - they learn the basics of perspective and then quickly move on to complicated scenes or figure drawing or whatever.
And now that is important, of course. You know, challenging yourself but I feel like there's a really nice setup that you can use which I use in my program as well that can help you better understand how you can come to these nice and complex results that you see from a lot of professionals especially people drawing from imagination because my focus is in that world of concept art and you know, coming up with new ideas, interesting things and you know, design is a big part of it. If you can internalize a lot of complex ideas, things that you see, into more rudimentary yet complex shapes or mannequins, it gives you a nice tool to create your own things.
So, the 6-Ation Process that I want to talk about today, the first one is structuralization, the second one is manipulation and then observation, education, imitation and lastly imagination. So, without further ado, let's just get started. So, when it comes to structuralization, this is the most straightforward for anyone.
It is that very basic rudimentary aspect of just learning to draw the simple shapes (cones, spheres, cylinders boxes) and kind of creating that spatial awareness. Not only being able to draw a box in one point or two point or three point perspective, but also learning how to intuitively draw a box in space and draw multiple boxes grouped together, draw a cluster of primitive shapes together and just learn how to do that intuitively. Now, of course, you do need to learn the rules of perspective, maybe even camera angles and how they relate to perspective to be able to do that, but I feel like that's a really good starting point just to draw simple shapes on paper and get a good sense of spatial awareness because that's what it's all about.
In order to create anything believable, especially when you want to communicate something to you know, further down the pipeline especially in the concept art industry, it's all about communicating properly and a lot of the times that means communicating your designs to the 3D modelers or the animators, or environment artists, or just the art directors in general that sometimes or often requires that you create a good sense of believability in your designs and that everything feels readable as it should be. Now, that's the first step. It's pretty straightforward.
Then moving on is one of the steps that I feel is very often overlooked, and this is what I call manipulation and in broader terms it's shape manipulation. And so, there's a high number of ways that you can manipulate a shape and a lot of you have probably seen excerpts of how it's done, but I feel like it's very often overlooked in people's artistic training. There's hundreds of ways to manipulate a shape, but I’m just gonna go over a few of them.
So, one of the ways that you can manipulate a shape is by taking the primitives and then learning how to bend or twist them, you know? This is a very basic one. It's one that you can also see, for instance, in the Proko videos when it comes to simplifying the torso is just use the beanie, right?
The beanie is basically a bent sphere and things like that or a box that is twisted. If you can already learn to manipulate simple shapes, you'll have a much easier time to then come up with more complex shapes. So, I feel that you can really take a step-by-step approach in this process.
Another manipulation, for instance, is learning how to squish and stretch shapes. You often hear about this in animation where it can really help you create a gestural feeling in your drawing or it will just create a better sense of movement. So, learning how to just take cylinders, boxes, cones, whatever and learning how to stretch them and squish them will give you a lot more freedom when you're looking at more complex shapes on how to interpret those shapes as well.
Another manipulation, for instance, is learning how to manipulate the contours. Now, this is something that I haven't seen too many times or people you know, put it in a different jacket or whatever, but learning to manipulate a contour will really help you when you're looking at more organic shapes. So, for instance, if you take a cylinder that's being manipulated you know, by bending it, for instance, the contour of the cylinder is just a circle, right?
So, it's a circle going round and round. Now, if you can learn to manipulate those cylinders, for instance, by changing that circle, which is the contour of the cylinder, changing that to a triangular shape or changing that to something even more organic and then trying to draw that shape again, you can come up with you know, very interesting shapes but also shapes that are much more representative of real life things. Think of the horns of a ram or a goat, for instance.
This shape can look very intimidating at first, but if you think about it as a cylinder first that is just being bent and twisted and then thinking about how that twisted cylinder is being manipulated, the contours are being manipulated, then it makes a lot more sense and it's also easier for you to either stylize, exaggerate or just replicate what you're seeing. So, contour manipulation is a really big one I feel. Also when it comes to you know, drawing dragons, for instance.
Drgons are an amalgamation of different animals but if you look at, for instance, the neck of a dragon, you can interpret it as just a cylinder which is the very standard structural approach, but then if you think about how you can manipulate the contours of that cylinder by giving it you know, a cooler contour, cooler silhouette, cooler you know, section, so to speak, you can come up with a lot more interesting shapes and basically you're still working with a very mannequinized shape, but you're just manipulating its contour to already have a much more organic feeling. So, again, contour manipulation is a very big one and that's why I advocate so much of learning how to manipulate shapes in its simplest form before you do it on more complex shapes. That's what I was talking about earlier as well.
A lot of people will learn the basics and then they will immediately jump to a very complex subject, whereas if you first jump from the simple shapes to making those simple shapes more complex, that will help you understand the more complex subjects that you'll be looking at later a lot better. And then lastly I think another really cool shape manipulation is the manipulation of edges and that's primarily when it comes to boxes and cylinders. So, you know, rounding off edges or beveling edges - things that you also see in 3D, for instance.
If you can start to learn this on a basic or simple basic shapes, it will be a lot easier for you to understand more complex shapes especially in hard surface subjects. For instance, if you can learn how to round off the corners of a box, you will have a better or an easier time understanding how hard surface things like mech designs are being created because basically, it is the same principle, it's just a little bit more advanced when it comes to the way they round off those boxes and the degree in which they do it or you know, the asymmetry in which they do it to create more interesting shapes. But again, the principles are exactly the same.
It's just taking a primitive shape and then rounding out the corners or subtracting and adding new shapes that are still you know, half rounded edges or whatever, or feel a little bit more organic to create that interesting shape. And I think that if you can look at a complex shape like that, which I teach a lot of my students is, look at something and try to analyze what you're actually looking at, like what's being manipulated. Not just blindly copy what you see, try to understand what you see.
I think that's a really crucial part because when it comes to anatomy or the human figure, it's almost a given like everyone understands that - if I want to be able to draw figures better, I need to understand the mannequin and even the complex mannequin or the Bridgman mannequin, but when it comes to other subjects, I feel like it often gets overlooked in terms of understanding what you're actually looking at. And you know, with these manipulated shapes or just learning to manipulate simple shapes, you'll have a lot more in your tool bag to then look at other shapes random in life or designs from your favorite artist and understand like okay, "this is what it's being manipulated, what they're trying to do with the shape, how they come up with that shape and what makes that shape look interesting". So yeah, shape manipulation is a very big one and I highly recommend that you try it on simple forms first before you move on to complex shape.
And then, thirdly is observation. So, the way I put up this six step process is that everything builds on to the last step, or its previous step. So, that means that you know, we have the structuralization and then you can manipulate the structure and then in the observational part, we can use those manipulated shapes and see how we can mannequiniz what we're looking at - what we're basically observing.
So, for instance, that means if we're looking at anything like an animal, whether that's a squid or you know, an alligator or even a human being, we don't necessarily already need to understand everything about what we're looking at. So, that means that we don't need to first educate ourselves about the anatomy or what makes up that subject, we can just simply observe what we see and through our spatial awareness that we got from the structuralization, from you know, our knowledge of perspective and organic forms and for manipulation, we can sort of already come up with something that resembles what we're looking at. And I think the crucial thing about this is that it gives you so much more power when it comes to making things from imagination, because it's virtually impossible to remember everything when it comes to technical detail.
What I mean by "technical detail" is understanding all the anatomy of every animal or even human anatomy, you know? Human anatomy is very complex and you need to be very interested in it in order to remember everything. But if you can mannequiniz the things that you see and even not just make a very simple mannequin but also make complex mannequins with manipulated shapes, that's still a lot easier to understand.
And I think a great example of this is an artist like Kim Jung Gi where I don't believe that all he does is know - intrinsically know the anatomy of every subject, but he does very much understand the complex manipulated mannequin of the subjects that he studies. And so, that gives him the power to then just you know, draw every subject in different angles from any you know, - in any perspective because he has that power over the simple shapes which he can manipulate in space. And so, when it comes to observation, a really good exercise is to just look at you know, a multitude of reference, especially things you want to specialize in but also things that are outside of your comfort zone because you know, learning to draw things outside of your comfort zone will very much help you with things that interest you as well.
Again, looking at a lot of reference and then trying to mannequiniz that reference using more complex shapes and you can start off with a very basic shape, but then you know, try to learn how to make a more complicated mannequin on those simple forms, right? So again, that's step one and step two. You look at the reference, you kind of try to figure out what simple shapes that reference is made up of and then you try to figure out where those simple shapes are being manipulated; is there some form of contour manipulation going on, is there some addition or subtraction, are some of the simple shapes being twisted or bent?
You know, all these things - or is it a combination of those, of course. All these things can help you understand that subject better. You know, if you have a good understanding of what you're looking at, then you can go into the next step which is education.
So, with education, this is exactly - what the word implies is that now we're trying to educate ourselves about the things we really want to know more about. And that's also a thing with these six steps is that we kind of go from a broad sense to a more narrow sense. Meaning that from step one to step two, step three, this can be very general.
This doesn't have to be your subject of interest per se, it's just something that will help you understand form and spatial awareness and drawing in volumes a lot better - basically drawing with structure, right? However, with education, we usually tend to want to learn more about the things that interest us, you know. For me, for instance, that means studying more figures or studying more animals, creatures, insects, vehicles - things like that.
The things that really interest me are the things I’m going to want to learn more about. The cool thing is though, that because I’ve been you know, learning from observation with simple manipulated shapes, now the things that I’m learning about, for instance, the anatomy of the human figure or the anatomy of a certain animal can better inform those manipulated shapes that I was constructing earlier. So, that doesn't mean that you know, we're completely reinventing the way that we draw a certain thing just because we're now looking at its anatomy, no, it's actually - we can even better fine-tune the shapes that we were constructing before, now we can have those shapes being formed by the anatomy that we're learning about.
And that's why it's you know, it's usually topics that are close to heart or things that really interest us because now we're really going to fine-tune the things that we want to learn more about just to become much better at designing them. So, you know, when it comes to education, we of course pick the subjects that really interest us, learn about them intensively - the anatomy or the packaging of a vehicle, what makes up a vehicle, make a comparison between human anatomy and animal anatomy, especially if I like to draw horses, you know, if I’m a fantasy artist and I want to learn more about horses, I want to learn to draw dragons, you know. If you want to learn to draw dragons, you need to learn about bats, lizards, horses - again, it's an amalgamation of a lot of animals, but these are still specific subjects that you can learn intensively in order to help that better inform the complex shapes that you've already created just to fine-tune your ideas and to become a better designer.
Moving on into you know, step five, which is imitation, this is where we actually learn from our peers or the people that we look up to, to see how they're actually using all the principles that I’ve talked about to their advantage, right? So, I’m not saying that everyone that you look up to or every artist is using this sort of principle that I’m talking about, but you can definitely use these principles to analyze the artists that you look up to in order to use some of their shape language, some of their ideations, some of you know, just their structuralization into your own designs because that will you know, make you a better artist. I think we sometimes tend to try and cultivate a style too fast, whereas there's nothing wrong with learning from the people you look up to.
I would even say that you know, in order to cultivate our own style, we need to have an accumulation of people we look up to and we need to have imitated those artists. Of course, we're not going to imitate one artist because then we're just going to be a copycat of that artist, but if we can analyze all the artists that we look up to and we can you know, pick a little bit of his or her design or you know, the way they draw anatomy or the way they design certain vehicles, or dragons or whatever - you can still analyze those you know, the structure and the shape manipulation that they're using and use that to your own advantage and use that into your own designs. And then finally, we arrive at the last step which is of course imagination.
So, as I said before once we've gone through all the steps and we also imitated or you know, analyzed and studied our favorite artists we can. Now try and come up with our own designs. Now, that doesn't mean that you cannot come up with your own designs without looking at other artists or you know, even going through this process but it will definitely help you or inform you to create better designs.
So, when you've cultivated a vast library of mannequins with more complex shapes, manipulated shapes and you've studied the artist, you've observed things from life, from reference, you've educated yourself about you know, anything that interests you, this can all come together and you can create your own designs using all the knowledge that you've cultivated. So, I think the most important part here is to just see where you are because of course, there's a big difference between coming up with simple shapes, studying things that you can physically see and even studying other artists than it is to create something from scratch, right? It's that old saying of you know "the fear of the blank canvas" which is of course it's very true, but now that you have all of these things in your tool bag, you can still start constructing ideas just from what you already know and then see how far you can take this.
The other thing that I also want to you know, mention when it comes to drawing things from imagination or at least from things that we know or from memory, it's not that straightforward process of going through structure then observation, education and you know, imitation. It's very much a intuitive process, so it also needs to be treated as one. And I think what you need to be aware of when it comes to drawing things from imagination is that we kind of reverse engineer all the things that I’ve just been talking about.
Meaning that you know, you've heard of the thumbnailing process when it comes to being a concept artist - which is a very necessary process sometimes because that's actually what we do as concept artists is we try to solidify the abstract. Meaning that we create interesting shapes to the interesting silhouettes you know, that you know, have a certain rhythm flow a certain cool design and then we try to structuralize these silhouettes or abstractions to create something that is usable and tangible in a game or a movie or whatever. So, what we tend to do is we tend to make something that is abstractly appealing but then we reverse engineer a lot of the steps that I’ve been talking about to solidify that abstraction - to make it you know actually tangible and usable and believable.
So, drawing from imagination does require a whole lot of different set of skills that you know, I haven't covered in this video, but I just wanted to kind of emphasize the importance of structure when it comes to drawing and painting. It's something that doesn't or shouldn't be overlooked. Especially the second step when it comes to shape manipulation, I feel is a very important one which is often overlooked, even when it comes to design.
I did a workshop once on product design and I asked the woman in question that was giving the workshop, which is a very famous product designer, "how can I become a better designer? " and she told me "have you ever tried to make simple shapes like cylinders and boxes look interesting? " which completely caught me off guard because I never thought of it that way, but she told me like "if you cannot even make a simple shape look interesting, why bother making complex designs?
" right? And there's a lot of truth to that, and I think if you try to first learn to draw the simple shapes, the structure, learn to you know, create spatial awareness, learn about the different perspectives you know, and things like that, but then try to manipulate those simple shapes with the things that I’ve been talking about and a lot of other things that other artists have already mentioned in the past just to be able to focus on the task at hand, and if you can create that convincingly, then you'll have a lot more confidence moving into more complex subjects like humans, character designs, creature designs, you know, drawing animals, even drawing from life if you want to be a fine artist that wants to learn how to paint horses, right? It's still very much pays off to know the more complex mannequins and be able to do things from imagination even if you're using reference.
Sometimes when you're using reference, you're still looking at a 2D image. So, if you can analyze a reference and understand its more complex shapes and maybe you know, mannequinize it in your head, it will become easier to then paint that or you know, alter certain things that you don't want to see in your final painting. I think Jeffrey Watts famously said once "try to manipulate your reference and not be manipulated by your reference" and I think that's a great quote because it actually means that you need to understand the subjects that you're drawing or painting instead of being manipulated by what you see.
And then lastly, what I what I still want to you know, briefly say is that, structure isn't only you know, putting things on paper or on canvas, it's also about having structure in your artistic training. So, the only way to get better is to have discipline and a sense of structure in your training - whether that's a consistency with what you do or just having a regular template of the things that you want to learn to draw because art is a very challenging endeavor. So, a sense of structure in your artistic training is definitely necessary when it comes to becoming more proficient at what you do.
I hope this video was at least a little bit useful. I hope it gave you some insight into you know, how I think about studying art, especially when it comes to drawing from imagination and just how you can maybe elevate your drawing or painting education a little bit, all right? And if you're interested in you know, this type of template or structure in your artistic training, be sure to go to my online program called Art-Wod on ArtWod.
com where we have a great community of like-minded artists that you know, we all do these assignments simultaneously. I give a weekly new assignment badge for you to study that very much applies this principle of structure but not only just structuring shapes, but also painting value and things like that. We have a new website right now so be sure to check it out.
And lastly, I really want to thank Stan and the Proko team for giving me the opportunity to be on this channel and share a little bit of my knowledge. I hope it was a little bit useful and you know, I’m looking forward to doing it again in the future, all right? Thanks everyone for watching and see you later.
Bye-bye.
