Empathy

One upon a time - four years ago or so - I wasn't bothered by the thing, empathy, while drawing my crazies.

Back then, what I draw was simply an image - ink on paper. I couldn't care less - it was not a person, just a set of lines. Depicting something - who cares if it was architecture or a car or a busty girl.

OK, I didn't draw anything busty back then - to date, I do not see the point of big tits, beyond a couple of games one can do with them.... but guys love those things, so I concede to their taste every now and then.

Of course, finished the drawing I could switch the damn thing on, and see a girl in the pattern of black and whites.

It came handy, when it was time to fap

Then I realized that the anatomy of my humans was, as they say, all over the place.

It was a time when I also switched from traditional media to a digitizer and a computer, only a bit before a friend of mines bought a Cintiq 12wx (for a whopping 700 euros - an offer... I spent the same, in the end, building a 15.4", a 10", a 22" and a 17"... ) and introduced me to the possibilities of digitizer-monitors, which changed things for me.

I never had used much photos, before, because of a combination of pride - "I do not need them" ... WROOOONG! - and laziness - drawing is hard but fun, organizing photo reference is hard and boring.

Also, in a moment the reference material you may have assembled becomes a confuse cloud of sheets of paper, clogging the visual space of your drawing board.   

Working with a computer and a digitizer, things change - you do not need to collect and sort reference material, everything is at a Google Images search away.

Even if you do collect more images than needed, these are files in a tree of folders ... they do not occupy physical space on your desk, when you do not need them.

On the other hand, unless you have two screens, using reference material just as reference is a bother -  switch back and forth  from the Windows Image Viewer to your drawing program? Meh. It is simpler to import the image as a layer inside the drawing that you are doing. Unfortunately, once it is there, it becomes all too simple to just trace what I need and change the rest...

So, over a period of some months, I spent a  bit of time tracing - ahem - photos, adding - replacing elements as needed.

Every now and then, the photos came from friends that wanted a "portrait"... which meant, women I had talked to (usually, written to and read from, really, but you got me).

Human beings - real human beings, not celebrity icons (which I tend to see as no more real than my bedtime sketches) - that I came to know, in some way.

Unfortunately, this menaced to set me off my game - I started seeing the things I draw as representations of actual persons, rather than somewhat abstract collections of lines. Even while I was drawing.

I finally understood what irks some people so much, in some of my drawings... if you enter "inside" the drawing and consider it as a representation of a possible reality, mine is usually a terrible one.

And yet... my drawings are not even fantasies.

They are representations of fantasies, and some of them aren't even that - a lot of them begins before I visualize anything at all, in an "automatic creation" process .

Collect image, open up camera field so that the protagonist's face goes near the centre (for me, the image of a human being is a face, its expressions and the body attached to it - for most it is a body and, for some, it is a vulva with some flesh around it) , add elements to balance the composition, add elements to justify my reader looking at it (without upsetting the composition balance in the process) , ink  everything as well as I can - and a drawing is done, without me ever imagining it before its completion.

When I fall in that "mood", the drawing is still remarkably an empathy-free affair.

Unfortunately, I am not always in that mind-space, nor do I know that the drawn model gets off from seeing herself in my works. 

Which means, finally, that sometime I have to beat down my stupid empathy to get the job done.

Luckily, empathy sounds like a female name...