Every last detail: how I found my artistic path
Though they could imitate pencil, vector graphics always left me feeling cold — but gradually, I learned to breathe life into them.
Foreword: The Birth of the Artist
When I was little I used to draw on anything I could get my hands on — and if all that came to hand was my leg, I’d get down to business without a moment’s hesitation, transforming inch after inch of skin with the contents of my imagination.
But technology was on the march, and those days weren’t to last long: by the time I was a teenager my family had its first computer, and with this came a new canvas for my creative endeavours.
From the first it was my darling Maman who stood at the vanguard of our digital train: she was a web designer at the time, and taught me the basics of digital art. Perhaps the greatest gift she gave me early on was to get me on the fast track to learning about raster graphic editors. Back then it was all about Painter 7 — and from there I began, one small step at a time, to climb the mountain that is Photoshop.
But the means of producing the image were only the half of it, of course: alongside all this, I had become bewitched with the idea of writing my own fairytale. Creatively, that’s where things really began to take off. (I still don’t quite believe that I will ever finish a story of my own, though I have had the pleasure of illustrating one for a book, Little Trailblazers, that was published earlier this year and is being sold in aid of UNICEF. It’s a project I’m incredibly proud of.)
Always aware that art cannot do without its corresponding science, Mama soon informed me that I would be more successful if I were to perform upon my pencil drawings some mysterious manipulations. The word that hung always from her lips was ‘vector’ — but for now, for me, its meaning was obscure.
It turned out there was no problem with the word itself: I could see through it quite clearly to the concept behind — but that concept baffled me. Bafflement was not a state that I took kindly to.
There seemed to be no end in sight for my puzzlement at vector graphics, until one day I started work at a gaming company, and it stopped mattering — my tasks were now wall-to-wall raster. Soon, though, the repetitive daily slog of photoshop and stupid advertisement banners began to feel as though it were killing off my brain cells. Hemmed in by boredom, I began once again to pray for a new challenge.
Angels come in the strangest guises, and mine arrived dressed as my friend Turischev Sasha, a talented designer who had not long before begun setting up his own studio. Soon, bit by bit, the darkness seeped out of my creative soul, and a year later I joined Zajno — as the studio had been named — as a digital artist and illustrator.
How not to lose your sound
My biggest obstacle had long been my lack of understanding of how to transfer all the sincerity and naturalness of my pencil sketches into what seemed like the chokingly narrow confines of vector graphics. Later, I would learn that the problem was mainly down to my inexperience — but for now, they seemed to render everything pretty much lifeless. Soon, though, with the guidance of my new colleagues, I had learned that like any technique, vectors are only containers for your ideas. All I had to do was learn how to shape those containers around the ideas I wished them to carry.
This did, however, all require a few mental and psychological gymnastics. As one part of my brain had contorted itself through the process of discovering how to move curves, another part had fallen asleep. Now it was time to reawaken it — and to teach it how this new language of curves and points might be used to stir hearts.
The secret was to lie in a relentless study of the world around me — and the singling out of particular details. It is the details that make your story interesting; make it different from all the others. Only an unstinting analysis of everything around you can lead to an appreciation of the simple logic that underlies all phenomena. Once such observations have been achieved, they only need to be transferred — with great care, so as to retain their clarity — to the necessary plane.
Children are confronted with a world about which they know they know nothing, and so, without thinking too much, they accept it. As designers, we must in some part return to this childlike gaze, but combine it with what we’ve learned — our designers’ superpower. We must notice things, consciously taking in geometry, pattern, texture, which are God’s hidden blueprints, only revealing themselves to those who seek them out. Having beheld this hidden lore, all the riches of the world open themselves to you. You’ll observe the golden ratio in the unfurling frond of a young fern — then, casting your vision a little further up and away, you’ll notice the same magical spiral twisting its way through the Milky Way, binding micro to macro, proving that genius and simplicity are inseparable.
History
Though he became the greatest scientific mind of the Renaissance, Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t learn physics or anatomy on purpose. Though he was informally taught those two subjects (along with Latin and mathematics) at the start of his career, that wasn’t what made him a genius. It was rather his refusal to let a single detail of the world pass him by that led to his colossal contribution to human knowledge.
The lesson from Leonardo and from history is that the pursuit of understanding requires the largest possible library of samples: the acquisition, in other words, of experience. Then, once the raw stuff has been accumulated, one must become an experienced contemplator — drawing all the materials, the clay, the pixels together, to become one.
In ancient times, ‘creativity’ was a way of looking at the world, and did not have to involve producing anything new. Plato, for example, believed that the work of artists lay precisely in their ability to imitate — to enact a formula for harmony already written in the world around us, for those with eyes to look.
Towards detail
The personality of an artwork emerges from an accumulation of interconnected details. For the artist who must bring those details into being — by definition, before that final personality has yet emerged — this presents a difficult conundrum.
In my view, the key is never to try too hard to see the final result, but just to be sure that at each stage you’re always moving away from the general and towards the specific.
This game of association applies to both the technological and creative parts of the puzzle: at each stage, every block of meaning that you have already put in place must be unpacked, and its sub-blocks rearranged in an order that will only then have become apparent. This is the way in which an idea is gradually refined, its story teased out and made comprehensible.
Then, finally, the ultimate stage of this process that has been unfolding is to understand when it is fully unfurled, and at that moment to stop. To recognize the moment of completion. Mama sometimes tells me that “too much of a good thing is worse than nothing”. Call me a perfectionist if you like — but I think, with a bit of practice, it’s possible to get just the right amount.
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