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tealinI was lucky enough to work with James Baxter for a few months, a few years ago, with a group of other young animators. If you are not familiar with his work ... well, you probably are, you just don't know it. Here's a short YouTube compilation of some of his rough animation. (Yes, that is rough animation.) He has a distinctive way of drawing (besides 'perfect,' I mean) in which the lines don't look like big swoops but like someone breaking a trail through snow, as the pencil scrubs its way along its intended path. You have to get in pretty close to see it, and the only high-enough-res example I've been able to find online is a drawing of Belle and the Beast, which doesn't show it quite as strongly as some of his work in The Art of Hunchback, for example. One of my fellow acolytes asked him why he drew with that distinctive 'hairy' line, and he answered that it was because he didn't have the fine motor control to make quick gestural strokes go where he wanted them to.
It struck me as odd that this amazingly talented man who did such perfect drawings claimed he lacked 'fine motor control' – what is a beautifully crisp piece like that but a testament to the most precise hand-eye coordination possible? But I think I came to understand his point: he could only get his pencil to go where he wanted it to go in very short strokes, so he had to make even the most swooshy of gestural lines bit-by-bit. His brain knows exactly where the line needs to go, but instead of throwing a line down on the page, he picks it out a centimetre at a time.
This led me to make a distinction between draughtsmanship and fine motor control, things which I had previously considered to be more or less synonymous. I have landed on the two following definitions:
fine motor control - the calibration of the small muscles that control minute detailed movements of the hand and fingers
draughtsmanship - awareness of dimensionality and realism in one's drawing; accurate portrayal of volumes, perspective, space, size, detail placement, etc.
It is possible to achieve draughtsmanship without a natural gift of fine motor control, but you have to really study how not to make your drawings look stiff and noodley, when you can't loosen up your pencil. Mr Baxter does do really rough drawings to start his animation, just to get the movement down. When you look at them on their own, they are not as graceful or beautiful as those of Glen Keane, but watch them in motion and the animation is all there. It's really amazing. All he has to do after that is fill in the final lines, which he can do because he knows where they need to go, and just has to make the pencil trace them off the image in his head. Because he knows what makes a gorgeous flowy drawing, he can get such gorgeous flowy animation as Po's kung fu moves in the intro to Kung Fu Panda, even if the motion of his pencil is not as gorgeous and flowy as the lines would suggest. Looking at those forceful, dynamic lines, you'd never think they were etched out bit by bit, but that just goes to show it's all in the brain.
Fine motor control without draughtsmanship, now, that'll give your drawing that amateurish look, where the nice pretty clean lines don't really illustrate the volumes and the drawing just doesn't 'add up,' no matter how careful the linework may be.
I have no medical research to back me up, but I believe that fine motor control has a much stronger genetic component than draughtsmanship. There have been studies that have shown that women tend to have better fine motor control than men, which is borne out by the gender divisions between the animation and cleanup departments, not to mention millennia of feminine handiwork.* A lack of fine motor control is what gives people bad handwriting, which I've noticed tends to run in families and is difficult to improve. Draughtsmanship, on the other hand,** is more in how you think about your drawing than how you execute it, and that is much easier to teach. So, if you find yourself apparently unable to draw pretty lines, do not despair! You can still do good drawings. And if you're one of those lucky people who is blessed with a good eye, a keen brain, and supreme mastery of your hands, maybe – just maybe – you can be the next Jin Kim.
*As always, gender divisions (especially neurological ones) are far from being absolute, and there are sizeable exceptions, but as far as trends go, my own observations have borne out the science on this one.
** so to speak
Didn't get this up on Saturday, I apologise ... it's been a busy weekend.
It struck me as odd that this amazingly talented man who did such perfect drawings claimed he lacked 'fine motor control' – what is a beautifully crisp piece like that but a testament to the most precise hand-eye coordination possible? But I think I came to understand his point: he could only get his pencil to go where he wanted it to go in very short strokes, so he had to make even the most swooshy of gestural lines bit-by-bit. His brain knows exactly where the line needs to go, but instead of throwing a line down on the page, he picks it out a centimetre at a time.
This led me to make a distinction between draughtsmanship and fine motor control, things which I had previously considered to be more or less synonymous. I have landed on the two following definitions:
fine motor control - the calibration of the small muscles that control minute detailed movements of the hand and fingers
draughtsmanship - awareness of dimensionality and realism in one's drawing; accurate portrayal of volumes, perspective, space, size, detail placement, etc.
It is possible to achieve draughtsmanship without a natural gift of fine motor control, but you have to really study how not to make your drawings look stiff and noodley, when you can't loosen up your pencil. Mr Baxter does do really rough drawings to start his animation, just to get the movement down. When you look at them on their own, they are not as graceful or beautiful as those of Glen Keane, but watch them in motion and the animation is all there. It's really amazing. All he has to do after that is fill in the final lines, which he can do because he knows where they need to go, and just has to make the pencil trace them off the image in his head. Because he knows what makes a gorgeous flowy drawing, he can get such gorgeous flowy animation as Po's kung fu moves in the intro to Kung Fu Panda, even if the motion of his pencil is not as gorgeous and flowy as the lines would suggest. Looking at those forceful, dynamic lines, you'd never think they were etched out bit by bit, but that just goes to show it's all in the brain.
Fine motor control without draughtsmanship, now, that'll give your drawing that amateurish look, where the nice pretty clean lines don't really illustrate the volumes and the drawing just doesn't 'add up,' no matter how careful the linework may be.
I have no medical research to back me up, but I believe that fine motor control has a much stronger genetic component than draughtsmanship. There have been studies that have shown that women tend to have better fine motor control than men, which is borne out by the gender divisions between the animation and cleanup departments, not to mention millennia of feminine handiwork.* A lack of fine motor control is what gives people bad handwriting, which I've noticed tends to run in families and is difficult to improve. Draughtsmanship, on the other hand,** is more in how you think about your drawing than how you execute it, and that is much easier to teach. So, if you find yourself apparently unable to draw pretty lines, do not despair! You can still do good drawings. And if you're one of those lucky people who is blessed with a good eye, a keen brain, and supreme mastery of your hands, maybe – just maybe – you can be the next Jin Kim.
*As always, gender divisions (especially neurological ones) are far from being absolute, and there are sizeable exceptions, but as far as trends go, my own observations have borne out the science on this one.
** so to speak
Didn't get this up on Saturday, I apologise ... it's been a busy weekend.
