Work Smarter, Not Harder: Design vs. Exploration

Greetings Patreon Members and public friends!

In my series about creating better work more easily, I wanted to talk about how to get more done with less effort.

One of my mentees has the goal of optimizing his time. He’s nearing the end of his art program, and could feel something lacking but wasn’t exactly sure what to change in his process. Whether it comes to creating something self-sustaining, or just pushing a hobby you’re passionate about, keep in mind that the time you spend on this earth is limited. Let’s spend it the best we can.

If you’re reading this post, it’s statistically likely that you’re living in a space that doesn’t value you as a human being. Most of your time is probably not yours to spend of your own volition. Perhaps, like eight years of my life, you must work your service industry job selling food that is bad for people and working significantly harder than the people profiting off your labor. Perhaps this is to pay towards a degree in art, in a school that will not help you secure any of the art jobs you’d want. The bad news is that your degree alone isn’t going to help you get that job you want. The good news is that you aren’t alone. And while I plan on breaking down, in detail, how to get from this confusion to a sustainable art career, that’s for a later post.

This post is on spending your limited time for your passion as constructively as possible. I’ll be including the start of one of my images, and later the process I walked my mentee through in one of our video calls.

Each of my mentees have different needs. Some assignments involve technical drawing exercises, while some involve initiating difficult conversations with family or friends. No matter what the assignment, we emphasize having an exact aim in our explorations. 

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I. The Two Modes: Designing and Exploring

If you’re trying to get a thing done, there will always be a time to intuit in messy processes, and there will be a time to don your thinking cap and choose succinct logic. We cannot do both of these at the same time. And without choosing one explicitly, we risk spending our time in unfocused ways. 

Designing. This is concise problem solving. This is measuring, drafting, and precision. It is knowing what your aim is and executing in one direction. You know you want to make a chair, and so you are plotting where pieces fit into place, and considering which materials and tools are the most appropriate medium. Your blueprint is on its way.

Exploring. This is a journey without an exact end. It’s figuring out what you want, not meeting a goal. It’s organic, it’s feeling. It’s knowing you want to sit, but do you even want that sitting to be in a chair? Draw all the furniture ideas you have and see which ones you like the best. Check preexisting designs with your eyes and butt, determining which ones just feel right. Soon you’ll know what to design. You are narrowing your wedge from many options to fewer ons.

These steps may not be a linear process, yet acknowledging these modes exist will already place you above the average. Amateur artists often aim at nothing, yet are disappointed when they hit their mark, falling endlessly into this trap while never understanding how to improve their situation. Meanwhile, effective creators are comfortable stepping back from either mode and switching tracks when it serves their situation. 

II. Make Your Plan, Work Your Plan

This common dad-ism isn’t just for doing home construction—it’s for seeing your creative dreams to fruition. You must have a conversation with yourself. What vibes are you going for? Where are your motivations coming from? Stream of conscious notes and doodles get your thoughts where you can read them. Your ideation becomes actionable once you can circle and cross-out your messy thoughts.  

My sketches are often so messy that they're only decipherable to me. And that's okay. As long as i can read the energy I have in mind, that's the most important part of this step.

After putting in time deciding which keywords or doodles feel closest to my goals, I can either continue Exploring or I can move to Designing. If exploring, I’ll continue to my doodles and my notes, narrowing my wedge of options until I get as specific as possible to one article or one image that I can develop. Sometimes this can be a single sentence explaining, in order of importance, what my next piece will be.

Potential example: “I’m creating an image of Resin (1), in a yoga pose showing his entire body (2), in an abstract environment implying external stressors (3).”

Let’s reword this statement as a design plot for this piece.

“The first thing (1) you should notice about this image is that it’s of my Character, Resin. The white palms, soles, and facial features are high-contrast, and will jut out at the viewer before anything else. 

Secondly (2), his dark limbs will eventually be read as being in a yoga position, creating a strong silhouette and composition throughout the canvas. It will be context behind the white features.

Finally (3), abstract marks in the background will seem to have an effect on the character, even if we don’t notice them until a few seconds of looking. Some of the marks will keep movement in the anatomy going, and others will lightly imply weighing down the character.”

The foundation of our design stage has now been established!

III. Please Use References, I’m Begging You.

I offer constructive criticisms for artwork on almost a daily basis. And the single greatest problem with artists is that they don’t use references. When I ask why they don’t use references, I always hear one of two answers:

“I wanted to see if I could do it without references.”

or

“It honestly didn’t cross my mind to use references.”

I can forgive the latter, but the former is only acceptable if you choose to use references afterwards. If you are trying to be a good visual communicator, and are resolved to work from pure intuition for the sake of rendering impossible or exaggerated things, you can only draw or paint what you understand. Artists working on armor need to know how armor works, how it behaves. By drawing that without research, the only thing you can gain is seeing your blindspots, but that only comes from cross-referencing your failed doodles with armor research.

The "mood/reference board" (above) and my finished study from 2019, Bedouins. Not only do I have applicable photos, but examples of brushwork or design elements that I'm trying to keep in mind. Without that moodboard the image would have been weaker and more painful to produce.

Say this is armor you’re drawing, take your best doodles from the exploratory stage and start applying reference in the Design stage. Your job is no longer to do new poses. Your job is to make sense of the pose you doodled by injecting visual intelligence into it via reference images.

You now have a drawing with actual pieces of armor, right? The pieces fit, the anatomy passes, and you’re ready for the next step. That’s when you should consider your values and lighting next. This could be when you exit Design and return to Exploring within design boundaries.

IV.  The Back & Forth

You explored, you designed, and now you’ll explore again. You already have your composition and pose, but you don’t necessarily know what lighting will be the best, or what secondary or tertiary details you can introduce to make the composition its strongest. Take any of your finely constructed poses and change up the crop, the lighting, the value distribution. Exploring.

Once you find your desired lighting and values, start shooting your references, or find photos lit as closely to your needs as possible. Frankenstein your references together to get an exact idea of the space between your previous reference and your goals. Designing.

Take it digitally and enjoy cycling through many gradient maps and filters and colour schemes. Exploring.

Apply all your resources together so your lighting and coloring are believable, even if it’s fantastical. Designing. 

Go back to your earliest sketches. Is there a dynamic and refreshing quality to the sketch that you accidentally diluted by overworking? Take a sledgehammer to your drawing (also called in the industry as “killing your babies”) and bring back those dynamic marks into the image. Make sense of the marks later. Exploring.

The left portion of this image included shot photos and found animal refs. The right portion included a study of the mask I have of my character. The strong geometry was brought into the rest of the anatomy.

This back-and-forth goes on for as long as you want it to, until you run out of ways to make the image feel good to you. 

V. Think About What You’ve Done

With luck and previous attempts, getting that end-product in a somewhat reliable way becomes doable. You always get to decide how much you’ll move out of your comfort zone when trying to bridge that gap between fleeting idea and tangible result. If you are commoditizing this labor, you should be timing your creative process, playing close attention to the moments you were frustrated or less comfortable in birthing your art. Will you lean into the discomfort of certain stages, or will you avoid certain roadblocks in the process altogether?

You don’t normally hear this from artists, but this whole art creating thing is just as much about what you do as what you don’t do. The jobs you turn down, the sketches you choose not to post, or the visual problems you avoid altogether, these are all deeply significant parts of not only your creative process, but your relationship as a creative to the public. The only way to learn what you don’t like or what you shouldn’t be trying at all is through trial and error.

You will have many friendships, eat many foods, and go many places before you can get the best view of who you really are. Being an artist is no different. You will paint many paintings and sketch many sketches before learning who you are, what you enjoy the most, and what you owe your clients and the general public versus what you owe for yourself.

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I’ll end this post with some screenshots shared, with permission, from my mentee.The initial idea was to have a small illustration to be used in a D&D campaign.

At this point, he was finished up with the first exploratory stage. So far the understanding is that this is a dog, they are flexing confidently, and they are bulky-enough to be a bodybuilder.

Despite a basic understanding of the desired image, he didn’t dedicate to exploring nor to more designing. This is visible in the cartoony eyes not matching the rest of the image, the lack of uniform lighting, and an ambiguous pose below the waist.

This image existed just as a way to burn time. This is valid as a pleasurable and meditative process, but not so much as an assignment to create an image with a specific goal. The pose and species lacks dedication, turning this into an exercise of memory.

Here was a few minutes of my paint-over critique after applying references. The changes went quickly because I didn’t noodle around with things I didn’t understand. With a specific canine species in mind, and a couple bodybuilder photos composited together, I worked conscientiously to get closer to the end-goal of the image in a fraction of its previous work time.

And I added a little reminder on the bottom corner.

My time as a professional art educator has taught me that drawing issues are rarely ever just about drawing. They’re about focus, about seeing the truth behind things, about dealing with your fears. This mentee had an goal in mind, but in the middle of it the goal was abandoned in favor of doing something on autopilot. This happened because in this moment, his life was stressful and he needed to have fun and relax more than focusing his mind on the constructive building of a portfolio piece. And now that we had that conversation, he has a shot at viewing his situation from the outside. A more focused attempt at his future art goals is waiting for him. 

Maybe now that you’ve read this post, you’ll have an easier time on your next assignment. If this helped you in your artistic journey, please pass this article along to those who would need it. 

And with that, I send you my love and wish you luck in your creating!

-J

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Jonathan is an artist, educator, and public speaker. His work normally covers themes of spirituality, psychology, and sexuality, often through anthropomorphic subjects.

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