Open To Interpretaion
Dog Leg
comment to youtube
Watch "The Reference Sandwich - A Better Way to Use Reference Photos" on YouTube
https://youtu.be/dfk9BlggPkITwisted Cat
Too, I was working up a post to my blog about "reference"...I can draw from reference, amateur I am, but find it very hard from imagination...now, thinking on this just this morning waiting in traffic, I was "air drawing" the car grill fronts across the intersection waiting like me...I can remember just so much of a reference...like map directions...good for a snippet, but not the whole map!...so, soh, here I happen on a take that begins with a motorcycle "grill"...lol...go figure!...from photos I took, my reference, I have five frames of a cartoon/comic...1. Squirrel in tree, in the "Y" crotch, espying two cats...2. Squirrel half way down tree trunk still looking...3. Two cats at the edge corner of a brick planter seeing a sudden the squirrel...left one is twisted looking back and up...right, straight on full length same look..4. Squirrell from behind tail up running away across street...5. one cat sitting a tree's base, looking at the runaway squirrel...that's it!...illustration from imagination is something I'd like to learn, or adapt from my writing, where I can...oh, I want to illustrate my stories...anyway, I set aside my photo references, and focused just on the twisted cat...head upward looking in profile...one front leg planted...one back leg stretched way back...and cat's tail end on the ground in front...now and then for days now I do little sketches, just from memory...the little bit of the map I have is just the two ears...the angle of one in front of the other...the rest a blur!...my sketches all off...with six cats running around how can this be?...well, I dont have enough "cat" committed to map memory...the task is on going, I havent revisited the photos, but I am watching the cats, and filling in the blurred cat map...like the straightness and length of the lower back leg...I didn't have that...but, just for fun, I thought to google search "twisted cat" images...hmmph...a common deformity in cats is crippled twisted legs- the tendons cinch up...too many sad cat pics!...such the hazard of images references!...a curio is the name for a fishing gear maker, Twisted Cat, their ad image a Catfish making a twisted turn for a baited hook!...lol...the same conceit of my little cartoon...I'm at moment binge watching on youtube The Unsung Heroes Of Illustration...and too how to vlogs...much to learn, and find amusement in...that 3D-drawing, and then the figurine, I'd never seen that done before...props!...I live in a cave...😃😃😃
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Notes: As with many things, something simple can become complicated in a hurry...such was, is, my effort to draw Twisted Cat...TC is one frame of a five frame comic strip...explained in the sketches and comment...I did a google image search Twisted Cat, and quickly found the poor crippled cats...well, as it happens, one of our six, seven, not sure anymore, cats has a crippled back leg, but Autumn hobbles about just fine...that an aside....aside too is there is a fishing gear product that has for a logo a catfish twisting around to grab a hook...the self same Little, or Tucker, was doing to look at the Brown Squirrel in the Jacaranda...it's in the sketch notes...these messy notes are no less than what cartoonists and animators and video game designers do to come up with stuff...concept art...there are concept artists that all they do is this...come up with sketches that prompt the staff...famously Disney did this for his staff...they were stuck, not knowing where to go with the story of Snow White...so Disney got them together, and acted out in person all the characters and the story...and off they went...being 'stuck' is a common plight...one has a notion but not a clue how to go about it...there are talented geniuses who can get over such obstacles, and have dragged humanity along since the beginning!...Wot!, DavidDavid???...patience, I'll get there, somehow...this is going to be long...so, soh, I took photos of the cats, and it would be simple to draw out the five scenes from the photos...I began to do that, but the camera battery died, so I couldn't upload them...thought is to draw from my big screen lcd tv...so I put things off to next day, but then while listening to the radio and snacking on the driveway in Silver, my Jeep, I thought to sketch out the scenes from memory...and thought long on drawing from memory, from imagination...I know a little bit of human and animal anatomy, bones and muscles...but my grasp isn't photographic...I gather it can be if I practice-the ten thousand thing...but then what?...I can do photo realism, and lost, left behind, would be naivete...hard to explain naive art...stuff children do...stuff people do with no art training...art has an adulthood...nowadays a professionalism...anyway, I set myself the task of drawing the scenes from memory, hoping for a kind of blend of my naivenss and knowledge...most folk read cartoons in a moment and a glance...amongst illustrators though, they study one another's works obsessively...see Beard, The Unsung Heroes of Illustration on youtube...so, soh, this long take is of that obsession!...I couldn't get the stretched out back leg right...and with that problem in the forefront of my thoughts, for days, those sketch pages above just a few of many, I began taking note of back legs...now, I've drawn back legs before...at Lunch in the Valley, I would copy from Loomis' Animal Illustration book...but one doesn't know what one has, until swimming about without a reference!...I'd totally lost what animal back legs look like, and kinda sunk in gloom that I could be so stupid...but browsing, I happened on a story, an illustrated story, in the New Yorker, about the difficulty of drawing horses...brb...
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May 30, 2019 — To learn to draw horses, you can't just want to draw them; you must NEED to draw them.
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it's behind their paywall, but before the "curtain" closed, I noted how the back leg of a horse looks...the back of it is a graceful semicircle, that curls back, then ends in a sharp point, and from there the narrow foreleg angles forward to the hoof...looking about, I found that this is how all four legged animal back legs look...aha!...a motif!!!!...a sudden, all my studies of ancient motifs transferred, adapted, to learning to draw...I can just sift things out by seeing individual motifs, and as I draw, just sort of put them together...looking long at the horse's back leg, now my Twisted Cat's back leg too, I realized it not only can be thought of as a motif, it IS an ancient motif...the Bull's back leg, the Big Dipper/North Star/Polaris...it's in the center of the Egyptian Zodiac of Dendera...the Pre-Columbian Americans noted the Big Dipper, it's said, as the Twisted Gourd...the Step Fret...every culture saw different things in the Stars, and made their constellations...the Egyptians saw the Dipper as a Bull's Leg...we see it as a Dipper!...with it's companion Little Dipper...Ursula Major, Ursula Minor, Big Bear, Little Bear...I hesitate to learn the Constellations, least my Stars become "their' Stars...astronomers are a menace...anyway...brb...
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https://www.livescience.com/ancient-egyptian-star-constellations.html
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they just found that image...the leg sometimes combines with the bull's head/horns....so, I have this little transition, from drawing the leg from memory, which was near right, to having seen the curves and straight lines...a bit like learning a letter of the alphabet...all along, I'm keeping in mind the old rock artists...they were doing what I am doing...seeing the everyday, then trying, on a cave wall or such, no less than to draw what they were familiar with...I've been going back through history trying to find where the 'dog leg' first appears!...it's really old...the clay 13,000 year old Bisons in the the cave in France...I've been going around to caves and ruins with the Dog Leg motif in mind...the artists who make it had to bridge like I did from just drawing a kind of stick figure, to the more animated and correct Dog Leg...been meaning to look at Andean Pre-Columbian art...do they 'see' it?...brb...
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https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-americas/south-america-early/inca-art/a/inka-an-introduction
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I cant say that artist didn't know the 'dog leg'...but those straight legs are what I would expect, the naivenss before learning the dog leg shape...from Loomis, I remember the 'tip' that in animals, concave curves have opposite convex curves...sorta...the top of my finger is flat, straight...the underside like three soft concave curves...here I'm thinking 'motifs' for drawing are like 'tips'...the bouncy look of Disney cartoons is a collection of such 'tips'...in sketches above one can see me puzzling over where there's fat skin, or just skin and bone!...the soft skin areas of our face, the muscles, make our expressions...one can just use one's self as a drawing manneken/model, and curious the ancient cave artists were very close to doing just that with their handprints!...I dunno!...
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This a post-Columbian artist, not long after the Conquest in Peru...the artist knew the dog leg...and likely influenced by the European art they saw...I think...brb...
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https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Moche-Representation-of-a-Camelid-Drawing-by-Donna-McClelland-2007_fig17_320387359
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I'm guessing this modern rendering is true to the vase painting...the Moche had the dog leg...very apparent in their Deer drawings....and they pre-dated the Inca...I dont know what that drawing is a part of, but I took note of the Strombus shells...spiral shells like this, the cut in half profile, said to be the origin of the step fret, twisted gourd...too much to recap!...see previous posts...thinking on this similarity of the dog leg to the gourd, I did a step fret search...hadn't done one in awhile...search twisted gourd...brb..
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In that sense the cosmology of a new social order worked much like a morphological change in a population that moved it from stasis to cladogenesis.
https://thetinkuy.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/twisted-gourd-xicalcoliuhqui-the-symbolic-language-of-the-pre-columbian-rainmakers-a-cosmovision-of-divine-rule-of-a-triadic-universe-2/
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well, I first read that on my tablet, it's a new entry, I think, to that blog, which I have referenced before...this a few days back, and I wanted to copy paste a bit, but the tablet memory was full, and I thought, I'll get back to it...what the author was on about, is that legendary figures like Kulkukan, who brought gifts to mankind like agriculture, irrigation, reading, writing, and such, have a modern counterpart in geniuses like Tesla and Edison...these individuals have an almost, or maybe it is, supernatural ability to bridge from one thing, a stasis, to another, a cladogenesis...now, hereabout I have to go look up cladogenesis...lol!...brb...well, it's a biological evolutionary term...a species changing into another...which has obviously happened, but no one certain how...well, a kid nowadays with a cell phone connected to the web is a far cry from some ancient child of Greece, Egypt, Mesoamerica...there's been some changes...a succession of inventions...and in a blink of time...the article connects the step fret with the American Southwest all the way down to Peru...and my own browsing of the web, affirms this...my latest annotation is a bit of textile they found on one of the child sacrifice mummies atop an Andean peak...it has the step fret and chacana motifs...the blog author refers to what connected the Cointinents as like a Silk Road...oh, maybe I can word search the article-silk...that would locate what I wanted to quote...brb...
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And why did it start with a mercantile cult? I can think of nothing else but a pan-Amerindian version of Asia’s Silk Road along which merchants traveled and a river of ideas flowed that could account for the facts of a multilingual Puebloan culture with a touch of the Huichol’s rainbow deer here, a bit of Puuc-style core-and-veneer masonry there, a Veracruz-type cranial modification associated with traders, and a pinch of Palenque’s interest in polydactly as a sign of a snake-jaguar, “all directions” Centerplace ruler. All all of these ideas were reflected in the Anasazi culture that developed at the periphery of Mesoamerican influence in the northern Southwest. The thread that ran from South America to North America and shaped a new world religion that embraced these ideas was Twisted Gourd symbolism.
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lol...and I'll leave off with that...
:)
DavidDavid
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