Artists emulate nature. We also emulate other artists.
Hopefully, we emulate the best things about them.
One thing an artist can do is try to capture the perfect design of nature and exaggerate what is interesting or pleasing about it. This is a very ancient philosophy.
The Greeks reasoned that although man can never be perfect, setting up a goal of ideal perfection and constantly reaching towards it is the best way to improve yourself and what you do.
The beauty of nature occurs casually and almost accidentally. The Best we can do is work to emulate it, hiding our efforts and making it look like it was easy to do.
A tree doesn’t go back and forth making revisions and focus grouping its leaves, they simply come out. Check out the European tradition of Sprezzatura and the Japanese tradition of Shibui:
Why is contrast pleasing to the eye? Why is one thing being different from another more pleasing than similarity?
Humans are sexually dimorphic. Dimorphic means the men and women are different. If you look at Frank Miller comics, or Bruce Timm characters, the men are manly and the women are feminine. I think this is a statement, consciously or not, about the artist’s appreciation for the dimorphic aesthetic quality of God’s ultimate creation.
You take what is beautiful about nature, and exaggerate it.
Make the women look more feminine and slender and graceful, which is why women are beautiful.
Make the men more tough and powerful, which is why men are beautiful.
Men have wider jaws and necks to make them more difficult to knock unconscious. A few years ago I discovered a cheat for making any character more feminine is to make the neck really slender. It gives a very beautiful and feminine look.
Women have wide hips, to make birth possible. Men have wide shoulders, for killing animals and defending themselves and their family.
These drawings are a sort of love letter to the fundamentally incredible design of the human body, which gives women the power to create life, and men the power to build things and defend what we hold dear. It’s very aesthetically pleasing.
Graphic simplicty, and this exaggeration of dimorphism are informing what I’m doing right now. What I love in art and what I love in nature is this contrast of big and small, thin and wide, sharp and round.
I want my drawings to be sophisticated, visually and ideologically. I think one of my intentional statements should be of respect for the beauty of nature’s design.
