My art needs help. How to make this not ugly?

I was looking at the Inktober challenge this year,  although,  I'm not up to 30 drawings,  I would like to do four.  My theme, Art Nouveau. It's a style I enjoy and would be a good way to practise ink and wash.  

The problem is, I really suck at art.  Especially composition from imagination.

This is as far as I got





Here's the thumbnail I started with.




These are just sketches an I can see a lot that can be improved like the sheep's head.   I want to replace the snowdrop border with night stocks to fit better with the dream theme.

But that still doesn't get this looking like Art Nouveau.  It looks too much like a colouring book - my biggest problem with my line and wash work.  

At this stage,  I usually give up and paint another chicken.

But on the way to the recycling bin to vanquish my monstrosity,  I wished there was somewhere I could get feedback and help improve the composition....

What do you think?  Can it be made into an Art Nouveau style painting?  

The idea is from a dream I had.

There was this sheep (only it was an infinite sheep - it was one sheep and all sheep) and it was in the sky jumping over a fence that was also the Milky Way.

As it jumped, spirals of wool fell off and made piles of fluffy clouds.

I don't know how to show this in an image.  I think part of the problem is I don't have a strong internal image system.  I dream in feelings instead of images and I have to translate that into words so it can be made into pictures.  

Basically, it didn't look anything like what I drew.  And what I drew doesn't capture the feeling of the dream at all.  

I asked AI for help by sharing my picture with it (gotta love training AI with poor quality Art) and asking for "art nouveau sheep jumping over fence with moon behind it and wool becoming clouds".

It gave me this

and when I ask google for an Art Nouveau sheep, it finds me this.

back when I had a corporate job I used to watch my boss create the art for jimmy buffet tee shirts on his easel in his spare time. then I remember he was commissioned to do the tee shirt art for the back to the future movie. it was quite amazing to me. he is a remarkably  creative and talented individual and a really nice person too. I took some art classes in school and came to realize that some people have "it" and some people dont. I have a very close friend who is world class fine art expert who works for one of the worlds largest collectors of fine art and having know some very famous artists, some people have "it" and some people dont.
beauty is in they eye of the beholder and what you might think is ugly might be beautiful to others. if you keep drawing your work will most likely develop and improve. so just keep at it and do what you think is good.

The conversation between Talent ("it") and Skill (acquired through practice and feedback) would fill a library.  (or another one as it's a conversation that's been going on for millennia)

Do you have any suggestions on how to improve the composition for the next draft?  

Draft 3

I don't know how well pencil shows in a photo.

But I think a gibbous moon fits better

I’m not an artist but I think what you have is cute and you should just keep sketching and it will evolve as you do it more.

Maybe it would help to find examples of each element you want to incorporate, to help you visualize it better, and figure out your placement, perspective, and dimensions? For example, finding individual images of the milkyway, the moon, and the sheep, that are all similar in angle (whether or not their placement is where you'd want it, in your work). Then you can play with everything, but with a fresher more stable eye toward what you're looking for.

If I'm aiming for a specific style like art nouveau, I'd start by looking at a bunch of existing samples that I like and think about what they tend to have in common. Borders, lots of borders, usually mirrored left and right. Along with that, windows. A large central element, usually a person or animal. Flowers and vines in the frames and as the frames and wrapped around the frames. Big curved geometric shapes, especially a big circle around the subject's head. If there's a person, they're usually wearing loose flowing cloth. Lots of bold swirls and spirals, often as hair or vines. Repeats of shapes, especially in borders. And so on. ( I'm leaning into Mucha here, but there's other options.)

You've got sheep, wool fluff, a fence with the night sky, a moon, and a world of plants that sheep eat or are used to dye wool... I'd say yes! Draw small versions half a dozen different ways, see what gets you excited enough to make a bigger version.

Art Nouveau isn't a style I'm terribly familiar/skilled with, so I'm going to go stare at some samples of it for a second

*spends not nearly enough time staring at the images to form a truly informed opinion, but it's 1:30am, so we're going to wing it*

Art Nouveau seems to be a beautiful mix of stylistic and realistic elements. The boarders have graphic elements (circles, swirls, even some naturalistic elements that remind me of medieval illuminated manuscripts). These frame the main art work, much like the frames around letters or the descriptive text in a medieval text. Inside this framework is a simplified realistic drawing. It's stylized, but still to proportion. You can tell the artist is aiming for realistic proportion--it's no Picasso--but it has simplified colors and shading and details to make it have a stronger visual impact. In many ways, it continues to remind me of medieval manuscripts.

see how the graphical patterns frame the text and art?

see the strong visual boarder with the largely realistic drawing inside.

Another thing I see common between them is how the interior art breaks the boarder and often merges into it.

See the strong boarder, but it's broken by the swirling hair?

apparently hair breaks the boarder a lot in these images!

Another thing to look at is where the focal point in in this style of images. It seems like (from the few I've seen) it's at the top-center or top-right. You want your sheep to be the focal point, right? So you'll probably want to scooch it up? I wonder if you can use the moon it's jumping over as part of the "boarder" part of your design.

I've also noticed you've stumbled across one of the main struggles of design--paper shape! You started off sketching a design that looked pretty good design wise on a more square piece of paper. Then you tried to translate this to a paper that was proportionally taller. This stretched your design, and made things not flow the same visually, nor be in the same proportions. Your sheep went from being in the center, to being at the bottom-middle. This also made your top curve not as curvy, which made the eye not flow around the picture as easily. I have had this happen to me a multitude of times!

So, I'd first make sure you know what dimensions you want your final image to be. If you want it to be the same as a piece of printer paper, then you'll want to sketch at those dimensions as well. If you want it to be the same dimensions as your sketch, then you'll want to chop off or tape off or fold down some of the height on your final paper.

Honestly, I think the design layout is more important than making the sheep look perfect. If the layout is good, it'll forgive a wide amount of "inaccuracies" in the technical drawing of the sheep and fence, etc.

You are wonderful at arranging good photographs. You can tell when something is aesthetically "off" in a picture--it doesn't matter if the items in the picture/video shot look good if the arrangement of them is off. You want apply that knowledge to your drawing. You could draw the best sheep in the world, but if it didn't look good with the boarder and arrangement and layout, the art would not be good.  

It is more than okay to keep sketching out designs until something looks visually appealing in basic shape/layout. I hate drawing in ink for this reason, because I really need to draw something, look at it, realize how it stinks, erase parts of it, re draw it, see more things that stink, then redraw them, etc. Sometimes I just have to scratch my initial layout and try again.

I really like your idea for a composition. Try moving he sheep up and using the crecent moon as part of the cirular boarder, and see if that helps...

Okay, so after I made that post, I figured I'd try and show what I was sort of thinking of. And so I started sketching. The first moon was so bad I flipped the paper over. I erased the second, and then just kept fiddling from there.  Sketching lightly and then darker really helps me. I kept searching until I found a pencil, because I hate sketching with pen--so irreversible!

I realized as I was sketching that maybe the fence could wrap up and around the moon, kind of echoing the concentric graphic circles that many of these Art Nouveau paintings have. And it kind of adds to the dreamlke state of it. You could bring the clouds up to connect to the curving fence, and use those clouds as part of the frame. On the right side, I had the clouds go up a bit, and then the planty-swirly thing come up. And then, I thought, "why not have the planty-swirly thing connect to the moon? That might help draw the eye up and back around."

I have no idea if this is at all useful. I feel like this design needs a slightly taller, skinnier paper. And it might be more surrealist that Art Nouveau? And it's totally not anywhere near refined enough, even as a sketch. I scribbled it out in 15 minutes when I should be asleep (which is generally a good time for my art brain, because the reasonable section of my brain is asleep...which is partly why I'm still posting, even when I should be asleep, hahaha!)

To add a tiny tidbit to Nicole's idea (and based in her thoughts above), the swirling hair that overlaps the borders could be the swirls of fleece that become the clouds you were thinking of.

Cut your detail on the sheep.  You are trying too hard.  Work on easy outlines for the sheep and skip the detail a bit.

I don't do animals well but here is some of my other.  Haven't done any in many years.

ink drawings

Yes, there is a lot of medieval influence in Art Nouveau.  It's a really interesting time.  

In much of Europe, it's the first generation that has no first-hand experience with pre-industrialization.  They are coming of age at a time when the Romantic Movement (literature, art, etc) was harking back for an idealized pastoral way of life.  The old guard whinging that photography is destroying art and an entire cultural value set and in reaction to this, the old guard tries to double down on firm rules and one true path to do art.  

With that in the background, the Art Nouveau movement looks to idealized pasts where life was beautiful, slow, and calm (medieval Europe, Japanese wood prints are big inspiration here).  A time when there weren't so many stuipd rules about "high art". But it's more than that.

It's an attempt to reconsider and improve the technical advancements that society is struggling with with the perfection of history.  To nudge industrialization and commercialism (it's one of the first modern "high" art movements that goes out of its way to be commercially viable - posters, advertisement, packaging.  I can see some of the remains of this movement on my golden syrup tin as the packaging design hasn't changed much in 100 years).  The attempt to make the best of both worlds a simultaneous reality.

(only to be crushed by WW1, but that's another story)


I found this definition of Art Nouveau in a library book:

Organic subjects flattened and abstracted into sophisticated, sinuous, and flowing motifs.

I often suspect art is one of those things where we have to know what it means to know what it means when they talk about art.  



Thanks for the feedback.  I'll see what I can play with for the next draft.  

The thumbnail you started with is the best one!

I think some of the idiosyncrasies of the thumbnail (the shape of the moon, the sheeps' legs not attaching to their bodies) simply make it more attractive. The composition also has depth and feels more balanced. That being said, the art nouveau style didn't really come through in the thumbnail-- but I am a cartoonist and I recognize a good cartoon.

It is very common, among both amateur artists and professionals, that the early sketches with less effort often look better. There is a quality of "good" drawings where they look "effortless." In the process of adjusting the composition and cleaning up the lines, the confidence and flow of the original can be lost.

Devon Viola wrote:The thumbnail you started with is the best one!

Definitely.

I worried it was too busy as I was sketching in pen and instead of crossing things out, I just added new ideas on top.  
For example, it was just one sheep, I just kept putting it in different spots so now it looks like many sheeps.  


I'm punishing myself right now for not doing a very important time sensitive task and I'm not allowed to draw or paint again until I finish it.  
Once that's done, I'll play with some more ideas and see if I'm getting better or further away from the goal.



thinking about this some more, I am starting to understand why I'm struggling with composition so much.  

In photography and filming, it's about exclusion.  I remove all the unwanted pieces of reality and keep only the perfect reality inside the frame.

With art, it's about adding.  Creating stuff to go inside the frame.  That's a lot harder for my brain to understand.  

When I did logo worka dn other art we would start very small.  Keep it simple and not invest in a big sheet of paper. Many little sketches on one sheet and then take the best parts of each. From patterns to details like David Holmgren. Shapes, composition, and spaces first. No detail until later.  On the other hand the joy of drawing is your own path.

Nicole Alderman
Thats an ace arts lesson.
Youve not made any attempt to divert the poster from her original aspirations/hopes, but examined workable possibilities that fit her ideas and dreams.
Well done you, sez I.

r ranson wrote:I asked AI for help by sharing my picture with it (gotta love training AI with poor quality Art) and asking for "art nouveau sheep jumping over fence with moon behind it and wool becoming clouds".

It gave me this

I don't have any skill at creating art, but refining AI prompts feels fairly natural to me. I tinkered with the AI at craiyon.com for a few minutes to see what I could come up with. It generates nine small images at a time. (You can upscale them.) The attached images come from different iterations. Between iterations, I'd come back to this thread for keywords and ideas to refine my design prompt. I finally settled on

art Nouveau sheep jumping a fence that is the milky way, backlit by a large moon on a starry background, with bilaterally symmetrical borders, flowers and vines. lost wool becomes clouds

If I were trying to generate the finished image, I'd say it needs more refinement. I think I've added so many parameters that some are getting lost in the shuffle. I think, though, that it'll do as a demo of what you can do with the tool. Hope you find it useful.

yeah 2D art is hard. when i first started off some decades ago now i used to paint and draw all the time, i can say i got better and better at it, and many drawing and painting classes and hundreds of hours of practice later...but i realized after a while that i wasnt ever going to be like super great like the greats. idk. i did eventually get somewhere where most often i was happy with what i was doing and improved. i have been doing some graphic digtal art these days again, but thats a whole different thing, and a whole new set of frustrations and difficulties and learning curves.

part of what i think is tripping you up is the idea of being bad at it, its really a jedi mind trick here. you have to have a certain amount of detachment to whats good and bad especially as you start - so you can keep going. doing the same drawing over and over and over again...well you fine tune it as you go, so think of those early sketches as just quick drafts, dont get too invested in whether its good or what. youve got to free up your hand...and get into a flow state, and all that good and bad and evaluating takes you out of it.
so yeah i suppose i dont have a lot of specific advice, other than get it out of your mind whats good and whats bad and try to get into the flow state....and practce again and again and again, keep drawing the same thing...drafts at first and then refine it after many attempts.

I'm tempted to attempt a masters study of cycles perfecta to get a better feel for the style.



There's a lot going on that I missed before like how the line work isn't black.   I have coloured ink, but they are water-soluble.   So the wash would have to come first.

r ranson wrote:

Devon Viola wrote:The thumbnail you started with is the best one!

Definitely.

I worried it was too busy as I was sketching in pen and instead of crossing things out, I just added new ideas on top.  
For example, it was just one sheep, I just kept putting it in different spots so now it looks like many sheeps.  


I'm punishing myself right now for not doing a very important time sensitive task and I'm not allowed to draw or paint again until I finish it.  
Once that's done, I'll play with some more ideas and see if I'm getting better or further away from the goal.



thinking about this some more, I am starting to understand why I'm struggling with composition so much.  

In photography and filming, it's about exclusion.  I remove all the unwanted pieces of reality and keep only the perfect reality inside the frame.

With art, it's about adding.  Creating stuff to go inside the frame.  That's a lot harder for my brain to understand.  

Sketching in Pen helps teach additive as you have to start in your very foreground and work back.  Unlike painting where you start with the background and work to the front.

r ranson wrote:I'm tempted to attempt a masters study of cycles perfecta to get a better feel for the style.



There's a lot going on that I missed before like how the line work isn't black.   I have coloured ink, but they are water-soluble.   So the wash would have to come first.

Yeah, the sepia ink looks really nice in this picture. I've always liked sepia more than black, because it just feels a bit more natural. It makes sense that it would be put to use in a lot of art nouveau. I think you could use black lines, but the colors would all need to be tweaked toward the blue end of the spectrum to make the whole thing "cooler" and match the cool blue-black of the lines.

If you want to ink first and then paint for your study, you could potentially ink it in black, paint in water colors, and then go over your black lines with a high-quality brown colored pencil (like prismacolor). It won't give you the same clean-ness of lines, but would give you the same color results at the end, and might help with your process if you want to ink first.

I haven't done much watercolor. But, if you paint first in water color and then try to do brown lines with water-based ink, will it bleed? I'd hate for your art piece to be ruined thusly! Maybe try a test sheet if you're not sure how the water-based ink and water color paints will work together.

After tracing the lines for the study, I remembered that this sketchbook hates my dip pen ink.  So, I'm going to do the line work first in permanent carbon black ink.  It also gives me an opertunity to practice with my fude pen.

All the art nouveau books the library owns are visiting my house.   Almost all have a copy of this cycling poster.

The colours are dramatically different between the books.   Some have black lines and dramatic colours,  others light sepia lines and sun bleached muted tones.

I suspect,  it's because this was a poster,  plastered in windows or other places where the sun shone.

Also there were a lot of experiments with new inks at that time and since this is ephemera,  light fastness wasn't a big concern.

But, if you paint first in water color and then try to do brown lines with water-based ink, will it bleed? 

It depends on the paper and the quality of the paint.   Can it layer or glaze, or is the binder so weak the small amount of moisture in the paint would reactivate it?   Is the sizing on the paper good enough to keep the ink from flowing in the fibres of the paper?  

Normally not a problem, but occasionally yes, it's a mess.

Sample, sample, sample to be sure.

I haven't gotten very far in the line work yet.  It's interesting to see how the quality of the lines varies depending on the subject.  Clothing lines tend to be fairly short and muddled with big dark areas.  Hair lines are overlapping and long.  The lines for the girl, however, are hesitant and short, almost like sketching.  Even the line framing the shape of the chin is in three parts.  

I fround this thread in my e-mail as "interesting permies threads you might have missed". Interesting indeed!

Good question and so many good answers. And then you started to do the right thing: study the work of a master. You start to see some details you did not notice before. You know Art Nouveau, you have an image in your mind of the style, but now you start understanding it better ...

Your starting point was the dream-image of (a) jumping sheep, moon, stars and clouds. In your small sketch you nailed that image. But the time to make the final art work with that subject has not yet come. You want it to be in Art Nouveau style.

It will take time and a lot of practice before you can make something in Art Nouveau style. Do you know how many 'ugly' sketches Mucha made? How many try-outs of drawings he threw in the waste bin? No, I don't know. Probably nobody know, because that story was never told .... I am sure this beautiful poster was not his first attempt!

That's enough line work for this first study.

The fude (or bent calligraphy nib) worked well enough, but I think he used a dip pen or brush judging by how the line width changes,  especially in the hair.

Each element has such a different personality of line that I didn't expect.   Very interesting and much harder than expected.

I  want to explore this style more, and it would be fun to do a permaculture 4 seasons series.

But for now, I want to try the colours.

I see a light blue,  orange-red, and a orange-yellow.  Everything seems to be blended or perhaps layered from that.   Glazing watercolor technique might work.

If memory serves,  these were printed in four or five layers,  each with a different colour.  

Oooooh, a permaculture 4 seasons series sounds amazing!

I find the process of studying a master painting facinating. We never really did that in my high school art classes (and I was never able to take art in college). I had not noticed how many lines were in the hair. Because the ink is brown, it blends well with the blond paint, and the lines aren't that apparent. The density of lines in the hair and dress also make those portions a bit darker and make the light--largely lineless--portions of her skin really draw the eye. Fascinating! I don't think I ever would have really noticed the roll the lines play in the art.

(My pen & ink and watercolors were always my worst pieces in high school. I'm starting to see why...)

Nicole Alderman wrote:Oooooh, a permaculture 4 seasons series sounds amazing!

I find the process of studying a master painting facinating. We never really did that in my high school art classes (and I was never able to take art in college). I had not noticed how many lines were in the hair. Because the ink is brown, it blends well with the blond paint, and the lines aren't that apparent. The density of lines in the hair and dress also make those portions a bit darker and make the light--largely lineless--portions of her skin really draw the eye. Fascinating! I don't think I ever would have really noticed the roll the lines play in the art.

(My pen & ink and watercolors were always my worst pieces in high school. I'm starting to see why...)

I would need to get a lot better at designing from imagination.

Either that or find out how to art nouveau chickens and we have the four seasons according to chickens.  (maybe divide by the equinox/solstice).

Or someone else helps design it and it becomes a group project.


I often wonder if there is a fear of teaching master studies in this day and age because it's easy to get on the wrong side of copyright law.  I love doing these master's studies, but I want to make sure it's very clear that I'm not doing my own work.  I'm practising and learning.  With the rise of the internet, there have been issues with people not disclosing that it's a Master Study and if the artist is still alive, there can be a lot of hurt feelings and drama.  

I'm not fond of the drama side of things, so I'm making sure the painting is in the public domain before doing a master study.  

I think the line work is something that takes practice for it to become more muscle-memory than hand-eye-coordination. It is both, but like calligraphy you have to have a foundation of penmanship to understand the letter forms before you apply line weights and flourishes.
To get lines that are fluid, not choppy, you need to draw LOTS of lines. Do some exercise work on drawing some different sorts of lines, s-curves, spirals, lines that diverge and meet again -- like a narrow leaf, maybe add a center vein, practice parallel lines with an even offset like Mucha's hair. Practice doing these at different angles, vertical, horizontal, clockwise, counter-clockwise (lots of mirroring in decorative art!). Do this as an exercise to build skills, and as a warm-up to get into the flow as you start a work session. When you get something you like, repeat it. When you get the sheep head figured out, you can add that to the other elements to make a whole sheep, just how you want it.
Do some or all of your layout in light pencil, which will be inked over later, this will help you get the main compositional elements just how you want, erasing and redrawing as needed. You can still leave some details for later. You could for instance, draw the moon with a compass to not have a weird looking egg-moon or a cookie-bite (not what a gibbous moon is either), and you could draw some of the important scrolls on the sheep, that ones maybe describe the legs (similar to animals in the book of Kells) and leave filling in with other scrolls for the coat free-hand. You can do all of your washes/watercolors over the pencil without it bleeding, once dry you can ink all the lines. Also, don't forget that in your final work you can rotate the page to a comfortable angle to do some things.

To remind me to watch tonight



First few minutes look promising

r ranson wrote:To remind me to watch tonight

First few minutes look promising

I watched it, but was a little disappointed. What he calls 'tips' are only the steps you need to follow when making a watercolour painting with pen-lines. When he shows what he did it's too fast and too short. And his linework is not like Mucha's.

Yeah, I didn't get a chance to watch his video, but the mermaid in the cover photo is styled quite differently from Mucha's work. The video's shading is more extreme/dramatic. And, Alphonse Mucha seems to outline nearly everything in ink-- This is not the case with the video's art.

My eye is also drawn first to the starfish in the boarder, and then to the mermaid. The boarder is very busy and bright, and draws the eye. It's also a lot more geometric and square than Mucha's. Mucha's work uses the boarder to draw the eye to the woman. The boarder almost always seems a lot more subtle in color and design, and is rarely a square/rectangle boarder around the featured lady.

You guys are right, it is disappointing.  

But, I learned a lot watching that video - although probably not the things I was supposed to.

The introduction was the best part for me.

The design of the paintings in the video are both too complex and too simple to match well with Mucha's posters.  To me, Mucha seems to have a lot less going on (no background fish or seaweed) to put more focus on the subject and the framing devices.  He also seems to use no more than four colours - and then blends them.  Usually two or three.  This is probably related to the printing process as the fewer colours, the more affordable it is to print.

This underpainting technique is one I've seen around and I'm eager to try it.  But again, it doesn't match well with what I've seen of Art Nouveau and Mucha's posters.  It seems more related to "proper" art at the end of the 19th C.  We also see a lot of people using charcoal as the underdrawing and applying watercolour over top to spread the charcoal to create this underpainting effect.

Practising the lines in that bicycle poster, I can get a feel for how complicated and flat the picture is.  The lines seem to be doing more of the work than the colour - maybe these lines are doing the work of the underpainting?  

r ranson wrote:
The design of the paintings in the video are both too complex and too simple to match well with Mucha's posters.  To me, Mucha seems to have a lot less going on (no background fish or seaweed) to put more focus on the subject and the framing devices.  He also seems to use no more than four colours - and then blends them.  Usually two or three.  This is probably related to the printing process as the fewer colours, the more affordable it is to print.

Using fewer colors is also better for design. I think you mentioned somewhere that Art Nouveau was used largely for posters and graphic art and book illustrations. My brother went to school for graphic arts, and the main thing he learned was that you really want to limit yourself to 3, maybe 4, colors. This applies to webpages, too. Too many colors can quickly become disharmonious, and at the very least distract from the content of the site.

For fun, here some mermaid paintings by Henry Justice Ford, a different art nouveau used as a book illustrations



These weren't aiming to be posters or anything like that, and so probably did not need such a limited color pallet. But, even still, it sticks to a more subtle and limited color scheme than the one in the video.

Even doing a quick search for "Art Nouveau mermaid," I'm finding lots of mermaid paintings with subdued colors and limited color schemes.

It's fun how much we can learn by comparing what looks like Art Nouveau, and what does not. It helps us isolate what makes something look like art nouveau. Sometimes we really don't pick up on these aspects until we compare them to other styles. Really valuable!

I decided to see what craiyon could do if I added "in the style of Alphonse Mucha". I'll post a few examples here, but I think the AI's understanding of the style is less nuanced than what I've read in the conversation above. My prompt:

sheep in the style of alphonse mucha, jumping a fence that is the milky way, backlit by a large moon on a starry background.

This yielded mostly images with a woman. Sometimes she took the place of the sheep. Sometimes she was with the sheep. Sometimes she was combined with the sheep, like some kind of sequel to The Fly. There was a space to enter "negative words". I typed woman there, which helped.