CONTORTED PASTA

Back in the day, when I was an animation nipper just learning the ropes, if I wanted to learn how to draw an animated character, I had to deconstruct what I could from pictures printed in art books, the occasional colouring book if it was drawn well, and low-res jpgs from Altavista image search. We didn't have a VCR that would do frame-by-frame very clearly, and if you left it on pause for more than a minute it would turn off. You kids are so spoiled these days with yer DVDs and yer Quicktimes and yer 1000x1200 online images! Why back in my day –

Wait, I had a point here. Oh yes! ( Drawing from the screen. )

When you are drawing your character, be it from your imagination, off an existing image, or from life, try building up the figure 'naked' (for lack of a better term) to begin with, then adding clothes on top of that. This forces you not only to think about the construction and anatomy of your subject (rather than handwaving it away under drapery) but also to consider how the body affects the clothes it is interacting with, and how the creases and contours of the fabric indicate what is going on underneath. And, of course, your drawing will be that much more believable if it has a solid foundation.

Obviously it's best to figure out how this is done by starting with some drawing from life. Try to deconstruct what you're seeing, using the clues that are apparent to the eye; then when you build it up again from your own mind you can use those same clues to convey the information in your original underlying drawing.

I've written a lot about drawing people, but today I have to touch upon our animal friends. Chances are at some point you will need to draw an animal so it's a good idea to be fairly familiar with them in general. Once again, there's really no way to get there other than just to draw them. People think this means going to a zoo, and it is certain that zoos are a great place to see a lot of different interesting animals in one location, but saying you can only learn to draw animals at a zoo is like saying you can only learn to cook in a fancy restaurant. Good old homestyle animals can teach you a lot, too! Chances are you or someone you know has a cat or dog – those will teach you about how quadrupeds work. You might know someone with a pet bird, or live close to a park in which there are ducks or geese, or live near the sea and have gulls and crows readily at hand, and everywhere has pigeons. You might have to travel a bit to find an ungulate, but if there's a petting zoo, stable, pony ride, or living history farm nearby, you've got a good resource for hoofed mammals. Reptiles, fish, amphibians, and arthropods are a bit harder to find, but also tend not to be so in-demand for drawings, so you can wait until you find yourself with access to a zoo to add those to your repertoire, or try to learn as much as you can from videos and books.

The key to successful animal drawing is to understand how the animal is built and how that comes into play in the pose you are drawing. Animals very rarely are so courteous as to stand still long enough for you to draw them, so you have to jot down a rough sketch of the pose as quickly as possible (the Bradbury Snapshot comes in handy here), then build information and details on that as you collect them from that animal as it goes about its business. The muscles and surface features will stay in the same place no matter what the animal is doing, all you have to do is take what you see in whatever position they're in now and apply it to the pose you drew before. In order to do this, you have to know some basics of their anatomy, so before you go drawing, do a bit of research. You can probably find some decent animal anatomy books at the library – I know DK puts out some useful stuff so check the J section too – or you can take the plunge and look up Muybridge's Animals in Motion, which is still one of the most exhaustive studies of animal anatomy in practise.

While the zoo is fun, your everyday sources of animal interaction can give you a good grounding in the different 'makes' of animal. If you know how to draw a bird, a quadruped carnivore, an ungulate, or even better, a couple from each group, you can use research and observation to learn how different species use the same basic structure in slightly different ways.

Also, don't limit yourself to doing anatomical drawings. See if you can also capture some of their body language; try to capture what they might be thinking or feeling. That really makes them come alive, rather than being furry/feathery/scaly robots of different shapes and sizes.

So you've gotten into an animation school ... now what?

THE PAIN!

I mean, um, learning. A lot. All in one go. You ready?

Luckily I came to the realisation fairly early in my college education that the more I put into school, the more I got out of it. It was possible to complete my assignments to an acceptable standard with a minimum of effort, but I learned more when I went the extra mile, even if what I learned was 'you have bit off more than you can chew.' That is a valuable lesson too! And of course it applies to any creative discipline, not just animation.

I think the assignment I learned this on was a toddler walk. I had roughed in some animation that was perfectly adequate, but I had a bit of spare time, so I decided I was going to give the toddler some ponytails and a little skirt, and tie down all the drawings. I still got it done on time without too much lost sleep, but I learned so much more about secondary action and draughtsmanship (and what I was capable of) than I would have if I'd left it at the bald generic toddler I'd had originally. Humans are inherently lazy – most of our greatest inventions come from our fundamental desire not to do things the hard way – so it's very easy to fall into the trap of 'good enough.' After realising how much I learned from that walking toddler, I put a little sign on my desk that read '"Good enough" is not good enough!' As it was only for internal consumption I knew I didn't mean it in that damaging, overbearing perfectionist kind of way, but rather simply that if I settled for the least I could do, I would get much less out of my precious little time spent in this institution. 'Good enough' should be your fallback position! Shoot for the stars! You can always come back to 'good enough,' but you'll be bringing with you the wisdom you've gained from the cosmos.

I was prepared to write up a whole thing on the idea of a clear rough drawing being better than a clean unclear one, but darn it if Mark Kennedy hasn't covered that already:

Temple of the Seven Golden Camels: Clear, not Clean

I think we all know what a clear drawing looks like, rough or clean, because it reads instantly. If you have to pick apart a drawing for a while to figure out what's going on in it, it is not clear. I see this a lot in rookie portfolios. Probably the best way to check if you're falling into this trap is to show a drawing to someone and look at them looking at it – if they are confused at all in the first couple of seconds, it might not be clear. Because the moment of truth is in the first impression, if you don't have anyone nearby to look over your art, try surprising yourself with it. You are probably familiar with how it looks on the page because you've been staring at it for the last hour or so, so you have to make it new somehow. You could take it to the bathroom, hold it below the level of the mirror for a few minutes, and then raise it up quickly so you get the mirror image flashed to you. Or scan it, flop it, save it and close the program immediately, do something else for a bit, then open the program and your image back up. Basically what you're trying to do is forget as much as you can of your intentions for the drawing and look at it in a new way, to see what it carries only at face value. If, when it comes into your vision again, it looks like a mess of spaghetti, it is not clear!

This is sort of cheating, because I've sort of written about it in the past, but I thought it deserved a revisit, especially as there are people following this art thread now who weren't reading my blog when I posted it originally. (Hi people!)

If you take this drawing-from-life thing seriously, you should carry a sketchbook around with you everywhere. You can learn something from everything around you, whether it's people waiting at a bus stop or the glass of water at the restaurant while you're waiting for the waiter to bring the meal you ordered. Sometimes what you're learning has a practical application; sometimes you're just learning how to draw what you see. It's all important! There's an interesting side effect, though: Being in the habit of drawing from life, and looking at everything as if you were going to sketch it, awakens you to the world around you. Even if you are in a position where you can't reach for your sketchbook, you will notice things, and pay attention to them in ways that you hadn't before. It might not make your world more beautiful, but it will be more interesting. Around every corner may lie some new source of wonder that you would have completely passed over before.

It's been a long time since merely drawing opened my mind up like this so I've come to take it for granted, but whenever I get out of the habit for a while and come back to it, it happens again. I also notice it happening afresh every time I try to take up painting – the world does not necessarily get more colourful, but I notice the colours, the way they interact, the values and hues and textures. Things as mundane as a leaf of ivy against a stone wall, which I've passed every afternoon for the last month and a half, inspire me to crack open the paints.

This wonder and fascination with the world takes you out of yourself and engages you in the moment; in doing so I firmly believe it is a route to happiness. Plenty of self-help gurus talk about 'living in the now' – what better way to let go of everything troubling you than to empty your mind to everything but capturing the sweep of a hillside against the clouds, or your cat lying in the sun, or the way that one tree in the boulevard grew crooked? For ten minutes at a time, nothing else matters; you are absorbed in the beauty of something outside yourself. I know my mood improves when I do a lot of drawing from life and I think this is why; awareness of the wonders of the world overrides the petty concerns gnawing away at me. It's like drugs, only you're improving your brain instead of frying it! And it costs nothing!

An interesting outgrowth of this preoccupation with drawing from life is the Sketchcrawl. Click the link – Enrico Casarosa explains it much better than I would (he invented it, after all) – but take it from me that after the first half hour or so of getting into it, a day spent Sketchcrawling is a fantastic day! You can do it with friends or on your own; you can do it on the official sketchcrawl days if a sense of community and sharing your day on the forum is appealing to you, or you could set a day aside and do it by yourself. (Going with a group of people makes it much harder to drop out, though!) It's a way to dive in the deep end and see what drawing from life can do for you.

I am one of nature's noodlers – I am naturally inclined to be very hesitant about my lines, very careful, detail-oriented, reluctant to do anything bold or expressive. My artistic career has been (and will undoubtedly continue to be) one long education in how to loosen up and get some life in my work. I will share with you today some of the techniques I've learned for doing so, but I want to clarify before I get started that I am far from being an expert on these things and more often than not could do with a good dose of my own advice.

First off: why should you loosen up? Well, primarily, because the human brain tends to smooth things out, make them simpler, or more constrained. Possibly this is a way to compress them for easier processing, I don't know, but the fact is that even if you want to draw something accurately, you have to do what feels to some degree like caricature. Going beyond accuracy, getting a gestural drawing of what your subject feels like, can bring out its inner truth, and depict the idea of it more purely than its mere appearance can. And on a practical level, getting a loose base sketch down quickly can vastly improve the speed at which you draw, something you will come to value immensely if you're drawing a moving subject, or while travelling, or (heaven forbid!) to a deadline.

Also, by jotting down a quick, loose sketch of what you want, if you have to change something, you only have to erase a few lines and a few seconds' work, rather than a whole lot of laborious detail. It makes it much easier, both emotionally and physically, to correct yourself until you get it right – and it's through these self-corrections that you learn.

Most of these tricks involve lessening your control over your line. The more you can finely control your line, the more cerebral it is, and the less you get that raw expression of energy straight from the heart or gut or wherever it comes from.

( Draw from the Arm )

( Pencil Grip )

( Change Media )

( Time Restrictions )

Loosen up, man! Just let it floooow... remember, you can always go back in and tie it down later.

You never know when you're going to come across something that will expand your artistic toolkit. I never thought, when I picked up a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes in my senior year of high school, that it would teach me anything about drawing from life, but that was before I read this passage:

Mr Cooger, somewhere behind the eye-slits, went blink-click with his insect-Kodak pupils. The lenses exploded like suns, then burnt chilly and serene again.

He swivelled his glance to Jim. Blink-click. He had Jim flexed, focused, shot, developed, dried, filed away in dark. Blink-click.

... When their faces turned, Mr Cooger inside the nephew went silently blink-click, blink-click ...

Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Chap. 19

The idea of taking a mental snapshot stuck with me, and I tried doing it while doing observational sketches. When you're out in the real world, no one is going to pause for you to draw them, so you have to be pretty good at jotting down a quick impression. I found that it was much easier to get this impression down accurately if I pretended I was a camera (or Mr Cooger) and, when they reached a pose I wanted to capture, blinked – then held that image in my mind, with my eyes closed, transferring it from a passing impression to an image held in my short term memory, and tried to draw it immediately off this mental slide, without looking back up.

It's really hard at first, but I guarantee you the permanence of your mental snapshots will improve with practise. Back when this was the only sort of life drawing I could do, I got to the point where I could hold onto the image long enough to get a pretty decent rough sketch out of it, then would add details using logic and impression as the memory decayed. I'm not nearly so good at it now as I've been spoiled by years of formal life drawing, but I know that if I got in practise again it would come back.

The key is to know what to focus on – the curve of the spine, the relative positions of the limbs, the tilt of the head, rather than details of clothing, facial expression, hairstyle, and so on. What makes the pose that pose? What makes the person that person? Often you're capturing a flavour more than an actual likeness, so what are the most basic things that give that image that particular flavour? These sketches should take no more than one minute to do – thirty seconds is better; less if you can. They are not supposed to be pretty! As long as they capture a gesture, a moment, a personality, or a feeling, they're doing their job.

Aside from being a useful skill in general, this is great for drawing animals, which really don't hold still unless they're sleeping, and also for passing undetected in crowds – if you're constantly looking up and back from your sketchbook, checking your drawing, you might attract attention. As most beginning artists I know are mortified by the idea of drawing in public, this is a good thing to avoid and still get your sketchbook time in!

The TRINITY of LIFE DRAWING LITERATURE
According to Tealin

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
This book will probably teach you more than any other single book how to think about drawing on a fundamental level. Basically, it teaches you how to see. It trains your brain. And as I hope I've demonstrated in at least a few posts, it's all in your brain! The author takes the stance that anyone who can write letters can draw, which includes nearly everyone. There are exercises. They are dull, as exercises are wont to be. DO THEM. You can thank me later.

Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist by Stephen Peck
Pretty much everything you need to know about what's going on under the skin, so you can understand what all those bumps mean. Mostly bones and muscle – the digestive system doesn't come into play much when you're life drawing – but super clear, useful diagrams and the like.

Force: Life Drawing for Animators by Mike Mattesi
Once you've learned from Ms Edwards how to put on paper what you see, Mr Mattesi will teach you how to think about what you are drawing and take it to the max. By which I mean make it more dynamic, really get to the core of what's going on in the figure, how to express the rhythms and motion in your lines, capture not just what a pose looks like but how it feels, etc. This book changed not only how I approached life drawing but pretty much all drawing I do, reprogramming the way I draw right down to how I put a line on the page. Cannot recommend highly enough. In fact, I should probably give it another read-through myself ...

I'd been putting this section off because I wanted to devote a whole week to it, but now the time is here. Brace yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, for the hour is at hand:

LIFE DRAWING WEEK!

I'm going to start out with a little bit of semantics, because I'd like to make the distinction between 'life drawing' and 'drawing from life.' I will be using both phrases this week and I don't want people getting confused.

Life drawing I use to refer to drawing a live model, nude or clothed. Drawing from life is a much broader term which refers to drawing something you see in front of you; translating a three-dimensional object in real life into a drawing on your paper. Life drawing is drawing from life, in that you are making a drawing of the real live person modelling for you, but drawing from life also includes drawing your cat, your car, a vase of flowers, the view out your window, an interesting silicaeous sponge, anything that exists before you.

( Why Drawing from Life is Important, and My Secret Wisdom Thereon )