hey i made this small dumb comic about my gay OCs! it was my first time doing one, so i think i learned a lot. i hope you like it! i’ll try to make more comics in the future, especially with these characters.
(I know some people hate Zak S, but the dude has a fine arts degree and knows his shit on this topic.)
Yes! This thread made me think of this essay when I first read it, but I couldn’t think of any identifiers from it to google so I didn’t bother running it down to include. Thanks to the-real-seebs for unknowingly providing a link to an essay I had lost track of, but was secretly thinking about for the last week :p
i saw a post encouraging new artists to practice and then other people discussing how it’s intimidating, and kind of condescending, to be told to practice without being told how or why. and i thought i would chime in to say that what works for me is to think of it as studying.
it’s like this: if you are in class, you take notes, right? drawing from life, practicing, studying, it’s just like that. your notes aren’t an essay. they’re not a finished work. they’re definitely not an authoritative document. they’re just your observations on the subject. you’re talking to yourself about what you’re learning: summarizing here, elaborating here, jotting down reminders there, trying to get a handle on new material.
take some paper and a pen, and approach virtually anything, from a cat to a flower to a trash can, as if you were making notes on it. but now your notes are visual.
draw the leaves of the flower, observe the veins, the stem, the petals, the shadows. cross out what seems wrong, try a couple times to get some detail right, focus on different parts, try different angles of approach. you’re not trying to Draw A Beautiful Flower, you’re just talking to yourself about what makes that flower a flower. you’re free of the terrible pressure of Making An Art: instead, you’re just studying. it’s okay to take your time, throw away the notes that don’t work, fill up a whole journal on leaves that don’t look good.
the best way to get good at anything is to embrace the process of learning, and to do that you have to recontextualize ‘failing’ as part of the process of discovery.
so when people tell you to practice, don’t get frustrated, and don’t give up. you’re not making one bad drawing after another. you’re just taking notes on the way to whatever comes next.
Ok guys, we need to talk about J.C.Leyedecker, and how its a fucking travesty that no one has made a film about him yet.
So Leyendecker was an illustrator during the 1910′s-1940′s. His work was absolutely gorgeous and highly ubiquitous at the time, and his llustrations for the Arrow shirt company created one of the most iconic images of male beauty of the early 20th century. But this icon came with a delicously romantic twist.
So this image of The Arrow Man was both incredibly macho and well built, but also ethereally pretty and dapper. But the model who the drawing was based on cropped up in A LOT of Leyendeckers work. In many he was engaged in casual social scenes with other men, in others he was shaving in the bathroom or getting dressed, broad shouldered, skin glistening, dark blond hair perfectly in place, jaw sharp as a fucking shovel, but with a slightly rounded chin. In one ad for war bonds he even appeared as the statue of liberty. This same man appeared in hundrereds of drawings, each with the same sharp care and attention to detail which makes looking at him almost feel voyeristic.
So this mans image is EVERYWHERE during the early 20th century, and he is a fashion/lifestyle icon for men on par with the female gibson girl. He was the celebrated symbol of male strength, virility, and power.
And man who modeled for Leyendecker’s iconic univerally adored macho man? That would be his lover, Charles Beach.
so all this gorgeously homoerotic artwork defined the image of hyper macho masculinity during the interwar period. Leyendecker painted Beach onto the face of the world, that was his love letter. He basically immortalised the love of his life by making the whole world adore him as much as he did.
Leyendecker’s work would go on to influence the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Rockwell. After his death in 1951, when people figured out that the unmarried man he’d been drawing and living with for decades, right up until the time of his death, was actually his lover, Leyendecker’s name has sadly been pushed out of the history books in favour of more wholesome characters.
And that fucking sucks
I would like to request a full length movie, with all the jazz era glamour and steamy romance that this genius deserved. During a time when homosexual men where thought of as weak deviants, this man not only had the nerve to use his lover as the model for all his great works, but he made him into the STANDARD of what it was to be a man.
J.C. Leyendecker and Charles Beach deserve your rememberance.
just moving along like everyone else 