Just been practicing Sheldon's process: gesture, structure, anatomy, and then blurring the lines in between. Actually, he says to them at the same time. These were either just 10 or 2 minute poses. My current goal is to achieve the volume while still retaining the gesture and the "Cal State Cools" are helping tremendously.
Here is an interesting insight I read about James Jean's process.
I'm also interested in what you've referred to as a "matrix of rules" pertaining to how your creative ideas come about. Can you explain what you mean by this?
Once you put anything within the boundaries of a picture, you start to create relationships. Scale, color, perspective, texture—your mind starts making connections between these qualifications. Once you have characters in a space, they intensity of the relationships becomes very literal. I try to orchestrate these relationships so that they are ambigious yet believable. A good way to pull that off is to understand "the rules" that I've created in the picture. Once you create an action—say if a character is in repose or if that particular part of the composition is in darkness—then there must be an opposing force to have put that character in that position or to have cast that park of the picture in shadow. I draw this world until it reaches a kind of balance, until each action is accounted for in some way.
Also, some interviews of my favorite artists of all time...
