The Drawing Trap

I consider my drawing abilities to be decent. I'm pretty good at drawing what I see. But it's a trap. A dirty, stinkin' trap. The trap had been sprung. And I fell for it. Like dominoes. A single domino. Me. Into this trap.

I started taking a class on force drawing during lunch at work. Not The Force, but the force in human movement. It was in the first session that the instructor talked about this trap, which I thought characterized my own struggles. When you learn proportions and become good at measuring and drawing things to scale by eye, you can draw things pretty well. But it's a trap. It becomes easy to think you know everything there is to know about drawing and that there's nothing left to learn. You see someone else's drawing and you think, "I could do that." You probably could make a pretty good copy of it, but could you create it from nothing? Maybe not.

This was the reason why I wanted to take this class. Internally I felt unsatisfied with my drawing abilities and I wanted to work on being more expressive. The fundamental idea of the class is to draw verbs rather than nouns. Obviously a single drawing is static, but from a single drawing you can convey a sense of motion as opposed to creating something that looks like a drawing of a statue. So it was nice to hear the problem of the trap elucidated in words, and how to push past it.

What is this "force" drawing class? Well, the instructor is Mike Mattesi, a former Disney animator. Each session has a live model. If you've ever taken a drawing class, at some point you've probably had a live model who poses in intervals as short as 30 seconds to intervals as long as 20 minutes. That is, the model changes poses every 30 seconds and you quickly try to capture each pose on paper. Professional models are adept at creating difficult, lively poses, and being able to hold them. The focus of the course is to make these poses alive on paper. As an artist you have to ask yourself: How does the model support herself? Is there stretch in her body? Where is there strain? What direction is she moving? How do the contours of her body connect fluidly? It may even help to construct a story or an action behind the pose. And then the goal is to use lines to convey and emphasize the force, the strain, the stretch in her body to make the drawing alive. Don't worry so much about proportions. Experiment. Push the boundaries. You might be skeptical, but when you look at the drawings of someone who can do this well, you'll understand the distinction between force drawing and a literal drawing.

There's only four sessions to this mini course, but hopefully I'll get a better sense of what to look for in the figure and how to interpret it. There's only been one session so far, but the instructor ensures us there's a method, a science to doing this. It's not just a bunch of crazy artist mumbo jumbo. And he wrote this book.