The vocabulary of art
Thank you for all the online and offline compliments on my previous posting. It is my hope that I can shed some light on the realist tradition that so many artistic hopefuls lack… to give an appreciation for the vocabulary of art.
I receive dozens of portfolios a month from recent grads and honestly, most of them stink. It is very sad to realize that these students go through four year programs and many even get advanced two year degrees and somehow they never learn basic art technique. At the end of all that study a large percentage of students still can’t paint, either in pigment or with pixels, a faithful representation of reality.
The residual effects of modernism is still alive and well in many art programs and that trend is doing a great disservice to many art students and visualizers alike. I recognize that there are many excellent schools that produce extremely talented artists, but there are far too many programs that ignore basic art training. This is particularly harmful In the world of 3d animation where students need to have a strong foundation in realism. Understanding the vocabulary of art…light, shadow, value, chroma, edge, line, shape, composition, etc is essential to excel in their career. But all too often, students today only learn to paint what they feel and thus technique becomes irrelevant.
This “paint what you feel” teaching method might inspire the latest modern art trend…but it will never properly develop a realist artist.
So if you want to be a 3d artist, and your teacher is asking you to paint what you feel…run as fast as you can to a real art school.
Art vocabulary can be learned. Through training and practice, students can develop an artist’s eye.
This artist’s eye is similar to a musicians ear. Where a musician has the ability to hear a chord and know the notes, major or minor, diminished and so on…The artist’s eye can discern hue, value, chroma, form, plane, edge, etc. Understanding and putting into practice this vocabulary of art is the necessary first step to becoming a competent artist.
-mike
Couldn’t agree more, I actually did an “illustration” degree rather than fine art or 3D and as a result encountered assignments that covered a little more of those visual foundations than I believe is typical. Still, my development was built on an early tendency towards realism – it was what I had a “feel” for and abstracting from that into different styles came along later. Those students without that intitial inclination were pretty much left to their own devices.
So as someone who is looking into pursuing a career in 3d animation, and more specifically, in biological/medical animation, I find this post intriguing, encouraging, and helpful. I’m an undergrad at the University of Southern California majoring in biology and minoring in 3d animation. In my drawing class last semester, my professor’s favorite phrase that he continually drilled into our minds was “draw what you see.” It’s encouraging to know that was good training for my future career. So thank you for that. However, your post also brings up some questions. Are art fundamentals essential to every aspect of 3d animation? I understand how they would be important for some parts of the animation process, but not all. For example, with things like texturing, lighting, and rendering, it makes perfects sense that one would need to be well acquainted with light, shadow, value, etc. But what about things like modeling, rigging, and animating? In my class yesterday, we learned how to build skeletons for out characters and then bind the polygon mesh to it and then “paint” skin weights so that the model moves correctly with respect to the skeleton. How, in your opinion, does “art vocabulary” fit into these components of the animation process?
Hi Michael, The best modelers have a strong foundation in sculpture, so if you have a desire to model i think it only helps to study…to have an understanding of the human form…through the study you become aware of important questions to ask yourself as you develop a model…should this be form dominant or plane dominant…How are the forms interrelated? These are all important visual concepts that come from a lot of observation and experience.
You have good point about rigging, and programming. Sure you could be a successful rigger without formal art knowledge, but you should at least have some anatomy under your belt so that the figure moves and deforms as it should.
michael