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Skip down halfway or so if you want to get to the 'point'.

I have limited experience in drawing human beings. In the past I tended to instead represent human attributes with alien physical identities in an attempt to make up for this. It's still a perspective I enjoy; it allows the viewer to look at themselves from an outsider's viewpoint. The sad little cloaked men you see running around in my gallery are a good example of this. I thought, "we're all really cloaked like this. No one likes to tell the truth, especially about themselves." This is still true, I think, for the most part. But lately, I have become disinterested in symbolism and have instead endeavored to take up drawing actual, realistic depictions of people, for a number of reasons.

The first, being that people, regardless of all of their flaws, and quirks, still make fantastically interesting subjects for art. They are very dynamic and easily adapted to different poses and situations. Their bodies are complex and beautiful.

The second, and latter reason being that I still have a nagging feeling in the back of my head that I've been ignoring the challenge of drawing people for too long now, and that finally facing that will help me to expand greatly as an artist, although I doubt there will be any visible differences to anyone besides myself. I tend to become very bored of artists who focus on portraiture almost exclusively, unless those portraits in some way give you a deeper insight into that person, and this is something few artists outside of the great masters can achieve.

So I have started drawing people. You will see very few examples in my gallery of them for awhile; I have set a standard for quality regarding them. The few humanoids I do put out are probably just caricatures, or approximations, and are not serious attempts. I have decided to start with women first, simply because I do not know them as well as I do men - obviously. I am a man myself. I have already come across a few roadblocks. If anyone has any advice... do not hesitate to share it, please!

When I draw someone (In most cases, a representation of them) or something, I like to try to put myself into their heads and see through their eyes. You will see a lot of people who are ugly simply because they think they are ugly. I think this will afford a more personal touch towards any portraiture I do, instead of merely copying what I see. This is tougher when it comes to women, as I am not one of them. It's definitely not impossible, as I have a vivid imagination in those regards (Some of it probably being highly unpleasant, but I won't get into that.) Also, this method can quickly become complex when context comes into play. Should I illustrate what I think they'd want to see themselves as, or what they really know they are? And if they don't know that... what facade have they put up? People usually don't like my drawings of them, for a number of reasons: Visually speaking, they often can't recognize themselves, and visually speaking, I probably did a terrible job of drawing them. The latter I can fix, and the former I do not believe is a huge problem considering my intended methods.

These methods are what kept me from drawing people for so long. I kept becoming wound up in their psychology as opposed to their physical appearance, and I made no attempts to study general human anatomy. (Something I am actively doing now, and it has helped a lot.) Like I said earlier, I am still approaching the subject with said methods, but this time around I am definitely taking a more balanced route.

Some mind wonder why I am making such a big deal out of drawing people. It is true that you, I, and that pigeon outside my window see all of us as reflected waves of light, just like we see everything else, and what an artist does is take those waves and illustrate them. But the answer is simple: People are important to me. My life would be nothing without the people around me. It is funny for me to admit this now. I can fondly remember my early teenage years and dreams of building mountainside hermitages and sitting in a sickly brown stew of my own misanthropy. It has taken awhile for me to come to this conclusion, and it is not an entirely easy one to make: as incredible people can be, they can also be horrifically savage and destructive and vile and totally not the kind of subject material I'd like to portray in a positive light. But now, I am willing to put up with that, and help other individuals overcome that sort of thing. They're worth it.

So you can see why I am so careful about this now. It would be almost a crime for me to visually misrepresent someone who is important to me, not just in terms of aesthetics, but the mood generated by the piece. I have the bad habit of often putting very little planning into my work, and a lot of my lengthy text descriptions are whipped up very hastily with little thought to the source material. Some of you have caught on to this - you know who you are. It's not right. It feels like I am wasting my potential, and instead of putting more work into the drawing itself, I am forced to explain away inaccuracies with loads of text. I love my writing, too, though - that's not the issue, but the place it's being used, and how. I feel I have misrepresented myself as some sort of wordy fool too wrapped up in a dictionary to understand the proper proportions of a human pelvic bone!

So - drawing women. I started my research by purchasing an anatomy book and it proved to be an excellent investment. The book is "Human Anatomy For the Artist" by Stephen Rogers Peck. I bought it at Borders for fourteen dollars. I highly recommend it to anyone in need of a good reference of the sort, as the illustrations and photographs included are invaluable, as well as the text that accompanies them. After awhile, though, I realized that flipping through a book and going through the exercises within wasn't enough. It was helpful, to be sure, and important, but it felt too technical, like I was getting away from the whole reason I wanted to draw people in the first place, and that my drawings of people were starting to become too based around a step-by-step system of my own creation, and thus, were not dynamic or distinctive, and many of the facial features seemingly randomly branching out of my lines, completely out of my control.

So instead I decided to directly study the subject. This proved to be somewhat of a dangerous idea. I quickly found myself distracted, again, by outside variables, like the subject's voice or her gait. And no, just to specify, I was not stalking people, but rather, just attempting to observe female passerby of all sorts in more detail as I went around my daily routine - the typical artist attitude. But not only was I easily distracted, some of them would stare back rather disapprovingly. So I tried to be a little more invisible and a little more careful. It worked. I have the good fortune of having excellent hearing and eyesight, and most little details don't get past me. (Unless I let them - and I often do!) In the end I saw a lot of good and a lot of bad. Elderly women parading themselves around in gaudy and ungraceful makeup looking like some sort of dying clown. Little girls prancing around in miniskirts and haltertops emblazoned with pink sequins, and a pair of stick-thin American teenagers wearing what looked like painfully tight jeans sadly commenting on how "skinny" one of their friends was.

And I thought - this isn't beautiful. I don't think this is what most men really want to see - at least, most certainly not me. I found it to be deeply disturbing. I've heard the lamentations of my female relatives regarding the impossible standards for beauty they hold to themselves, but this took it to almost another level. Again - this is not beautiful. I closely relate beauty to honesty - to self-love, not the hopeless pursuit of getting outside attraction that is probably unwanted anyway. Inner beauty is, in some ways, almost easier to spot than external beauty. At least, the lack of it is. It's not very unlike my own little cloaked men, is it? Except modern women are hiding behind something entirely different, and from something different.

There seem to be a lot of cliches in the art world to portray "real" women, stripped of all makeup, (or in excess of it for sarcastic effect - I rather prefer this.) with paunchy little stomachs and a little flab here and there. I don't particularly admire this approach; it feels contrived to me, like someone is trying to bring one's suffering to attention instead of the way they actually appear. There's a fine line between this and a real person. That's something I definitely want to avoid. Another popular approach is the extremist punk one which spews messages of rebellion and anticomformism, which I certainly think looks plenty cool, but after all of that flashiness lacks real depth. In the end, how many of us are really going to rebel? Was it all about getting attention to begin with? For me it was, although I still want to help change the world for the better in whatever way I can. This is not the best approach towards that, though, I believe, and it's certainly a vapid one.

So there needs to be a middle ground between the fantastic and the so-banal-it's-fantastic-anyway. Maybe middle ground is the wrong term, then - there needs to be something different. And that's what I've been working on. Formulating my style to fit the subject, not the subject to fit the style. That is dishonesty. And that's why it's taking so long. Your thoughts?

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