I want to talk about something that changed a lot for me when it comes to drawing. For many years, drawing has been this monster of sorts for me. I defined myself by my art, and struggled with perfectionism. I used to be afraid of making a bad drawing, and being shown in very clear terms that I’m a shitty artist, thus making me shitty due to being defined as an artist. The anticipated drawing was bad, so I avoided it, and didn’t draw it. This went on for about a decade. I stagnated, while also hating myself for not drawing. I thought about it all the time, yet never did it.
A few years ago, I went to a life drawing session with someone to do gesture drawings. I remembered all the admirable voices in the past who told me that gesture drawing was super important for capturing life. I’ve studied animation all of my life, and pretty much every animation educational resource says to do gesture drawings. I hadn’t drawn in a while, so I agreed to go to this session to give it a go.
This is what came about:
I felt awful that I couldn’t find whatever it was that I was supposed to find in these poses. My lines were super scratchy and light, two big signs of lacking confidence and conviction. There was nothing clear that I was saying with any of it. I left feeling bad, and being more afraid to draw. I can copy what I see fairly well, and thought I knew what I was getting into, but that is a deeply different process from gesture drawing, which I didn’t recognize at first.
Recently, after attempting to animate for the first time in 3D, I decided that I needed to practice gesture drawing. I needed to understand how to capture the life of someone/something. So I watched a great video series on gesture drawings from Proko, loaded up my phone with pictures of gesture models that I bought from his site, and went outside every day at lunch to do gesture drawings for about 20-30 minutes a day.
I wanted to use pen to help build my line confidence, and not give me an “out” with light lines. I wanted to showcase my scratchiness as an unnecessary thing. I wanted to be able to break the feeling that these drawings needed to be accurate, and just capture the feeling of the pose. I knew that if I was going to get better at all, I needed to destroy the feeling that every drawing was/should be precious/permanent. So I decided to draw these gestures in a shitty ruled notebook that I grabbed from work. The goal would be specifically not to make beautiful drawings, but to fill it up with garbage experiments. The only way I could break free from perfectionism, is to draw garbage as a gift for a garbage heap, and not to please myself aesthetically. Whatever I was building was not going to be on the page, but inside of me. So that’s what I did.
I tried not to care about accuracy, and just exaggerate. Draw the feeling of it, even if it looks weird/bad. Have really long limbs, or bigger tilts. Do whatever it takes to break my focus away from accuracy. Between drawing for the garbage heap, and changing the focus toward exaggeration, I started to fill this notebook up fast. The image above is where I first started to see progress in this mindset.
Sometimes I’d lose my way, and forget to focus on the pose above all else, but those were still helpful days because I was drawing. I felt frustrated sometimes at the fact that Proko seemed like he was drawing slowly, making perfect lines to get a solid gesture in 2 minutes, but I was struggling and racing just to get something recognizable down. Then I’d regroup and remind myself that I’m SUPPOSED to be creating garbage. Piles and piles of garbage. The intimidation and frustration would then subside, and I’d get back to enjoying myself more.
I think the pen helped me gain confidence in my lines. I tried to lead the pose with the spine, but I couldn’t quite get it all the time. Sometimes it worked okay.
I tried to use the lines to aim the body into the action, straightening even when I saw it wasn’t straight in the model, so I could get the essence of what was happening.
I also tried to capture the main part of the pose first, then do the rest of the body, so that if I was short on time in my 60-120 second time limit, I’d still get the feeling down. Sometimes, I’d miss half the body, but I’d still get the gist of the feeling.
I became more comfortable with missing parts. Sometimes I felt it added to a pose by cutting out parts that didn’t contribute to the pose as much. Because I was prioritizing from the beginning, this culling happened automatically, which was a cool feeling.
These drawings went on for a couple of months. I liked when I could feel the weight of something. I think the hard flat lines on the arms on the left pose contributed a lot to that. Eventually, my drawings were something I actually felt some pride about. Ignore the Dora face above. I was trying to explain something to a friend. Or don’t.
This next one was from my last life drawing session, 1-5 minute poses (see the full resolution image here). I had some better captures of the gestures in some of my past drawings, but these are really pleasant to me. Plus when practicing art (or any skill maybe), it’s not about hitting the pinnacle of your abilities every time you sit down to do it, but about raising the average. Understanding that helped kill my perfectionism further, freeing me more and more.
Drawing most days, I didn’t really feel the improvement in the moment, but having those notebooks filled with garbage helped me to lay out my journey, and I see that I’ve actually traveled somewhere. It’s something I have to keep in mind with other long-term skill building exercises. I am going somewhere with these things. In fact, this blog was made to help me see that with a variety of skills that don’t fit into sketchbooks.
I’m so relieved to kill the majority of my fear of drawing. It was such a terrible burden. I hope these gesture drawings do in fact help me with my animation, but that’s not nearly as important to me as finding the freedom to draw again. I used to think my perfectionism was a great asset (which I would use to judge others... another false asset), but now I see that it had more negatives than positives. I will continue devoting effort to killing it in me. It will never die, but I need to show it that I’m the boss, that it can’t bully me anymore, and that I will call upon it only when it’s most useful to me.











