For my "sit in public and draw your environment" assignment, the lovely people running Apex Ki Do Kwan let me draw a picture of the warehouse we all come to beat each other up in. I remember it feeling strange, sitting behind the counter and hearing Master Ron - a cool guy whose name nevertheless strikes fear into the hearts of every student in the Kwan - gleefully conduct one of his infamous warm-ups, but feeling no pain. In that moment I understood the grin he often has during the whole exercise, as I saw all the people struggling, and noticed I was not one of them. Master Ron often talks about silencing your inner voice for the purposes of pushing yourself to do difficult things - my inner voice was telling me to stop maniacally laughing at the pain of my fellow students, and for a while, I silenced it. "One last push-up" said Ron, and I laughed knowing that 'one push-up' meant at least ten miniature push-ups contained within a single push-up, and that the warm-up was far from over. Unfortunately, my morals came flooding back into my head as I remembered that I had an art project to do, and began drawing the Kwan. I drew during two classes; the first time for the environment, the second for the people in that environment. I did the separate sittings because A) I was not fast enough to even draw the whole environment during the span of a class, hence the reference pictures, and B) The week in which I was drawing the environment was "ground fighting week" which is a martial arts term for "wrestling". I like to think I'm good at drawing people, but I know my limits. If I tried to draw wrestling people, it would end up looking like some monstrous Lovecraftian blob of arms and legs. So I waited. I returned the following week to find a much more drawable focus: "arm joint manipulation", which is a martial arts term for "pretending your opponent's arm is a pipe cleaner and fashioning it into butterfly". For this session, I knew I would have to get good at drawing poses within ~30 seconds, as these people would be constantly moving through techniques. So, I practiced gesture drawing over the weekend, and by the end I was filling a sketchbook page with poses in approximately seven minutes. I also practiced drawing folds in fabrics, as our martial arts uniforms are baggier then regular clothes and getting them right would add a sense of motion to the fighting. It would also add a sense of confusion to myself, because the rules of fabric folds might as well be a branch of quantum mechanics; their behaviors are so unpredictable. | Once I started drawing, I learned quickly drawing a whole person, let alone a pair of people, in ~10 second is no easy feat: I could only draw skeletal-looking constructions of the pose, which is an art term for "fancy stick figures". Furthermore, I could only see a pose long enough to draw it in between movements of a technique. You will notice none of the people in the picture are mid-throw or mid-punch, because I could not capture it fast enough. I assure you, however, people are usually flying through the air and smashing into walls and punching bags and the ceiling and through windows and support beams (which is why the beams have giant blue bandages on them), threatening the structural stability of the building and whatnot. Once I got home, I fleshed out the poses and inked everything, which essentially made the whole piece into a coloring book page. This was very good news: in third grade I was known throughout my elementary school as THE KILLER COLORER, which is a wrestling persona equivalent of "child who is admired by his peers for his vast collection of crayons." My catch phrase was "STAY IN LINE, PUNK," referencing my uncanny ability to stay within the lines of a coloring book page. My theme song was Beethoven's 5th symphony. Needless to say, I finished my project without a hitch. |
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April 2016
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