Greetings Artisan!
Getting the right mix of gesture and life in your drawings is a challenge!
But it's even trickier when we have to combine life and fluidity with structure and form.
Often when we start our art journey, our art is messy. It lacks detail, it lacks… pretty much everything!
The art we aspire to often has a level of polish and refinement that seems unattainable.
So it's easy to think that any form of mess or sketchiness is to be avoided… that it's just something we need to move past.
We need to 'get better' so our art stops being messy and sketchy.
But is this actually true?
A recent cover I did for Star Atlas: CORE - Rough sketch along side the final illustration.
Certainly, my early attempts at drawing and creating finished illustrations were sketchy and messy.
I remember tentatively showing people in school my work. Hoping that this time, finally someone would send me a tender morsel of faint praise!
An early sketchpage of messy designs and failed attempts. (Done well after highschool, but still lacking a lot of the polish I needed)
Everyone would say "Yeah, cool… I can't wait to see what it looks like when you finish it."
But it was finished!
That was the best I could do…
It took quite a journey to build my skills to the point where my art looked 'finished'.
One my of rough construction drawings vs the final panel. from Pinocchio.
There are many foundational principles that are key here. Like understanding form and structure. Learning perspective (properly). Building visual library. Learning to render. Mastering the tools…
And what I have found is that for most students… if they really stick with these concepts and apply themselves to the foundation, to learning fundamentals. They do get better. Things start to look more finished, it becomes possible to get that higher level of polish!
But I also saw something else happen at the same time. Their art would get stiff. It would often lose a lot of the style and emotion and life that it had early on.
Which made me think… perhaps this is one of those times where we throw the baby out with the bathwater.
We spend so much time running from the sketchy mess... that we forget how important the act of scribbling is.
You see… the thing is that great artists often scribble. They sketch. They can be messy. Great artists can create magical things with a few seemingly casual loose lines.
I was often enamored by the great John Buscema. One of the best Marvel artists (in my humble opinion), Buscema had a way with sketching that totally blew me away.
John Buscema - How to Draw Comics The Marvel Way, alongside a spread from Buscema A Life in Sketches.
He had amazing energy to his preliminary drawings. They were functional, yet full of life. It seemed effortless!
When Buscema created the art for 'How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way' he dropped quite a few memorable pieces of advice.
I talk about his tips on building the figure in my latest video on YouTube - 'What Does Professional Scribbling Look Like?'
You can check it out here:
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In this video I discuss how we can often focus so much on foundation, and structure, and form, that we forget how important it is to let our hand go. To get back to sketching.
And not just sketching in a beautiful flowy artistic way. But sketchy in a messy way.
A sketchy John Buscema stage in the step by step figure breakdown from How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way. Along with sage advice.
Having a place in your process where you can be free to really let go and experiment will help immensely.
Sometimes in the beginning we wish to be identified as a particular type of artist. Someone who can create polished work. Someone who is a professional. Someone who has 'good drawing skills'.
But the reality is that art is created in stages. And each stage requires something different from us.
The early stages of planning and building a drawing or illustration are about exploring different options.
Another great spread from Buscema A Life In Sketches
The more we can let go in the early stages and explore, the better. This is where the figures get their life and emotion. Where we think about the bigger picture.
These early stages are also where students can tighten up. Focusing so much on 'drawing well' that they forget to have fun. They forget to think about intent, and story, and why someone would care to look at this nicely rendered 'thing' they are making.
The answer here is to stay connected with sketching, with scribbling. With being messy.
As we progress on our artistic journey and build skills and foundation, we need to keep having fun. We should not throw out the sketchiness or the messiness with the 'bad drawing'.
Now… that's all well and good to say. But it's harder to do.
Rough panel sketch from Pinocchio
I remember not really understanding why my sketchy mess of nothing was so much worse than Buscema's few deft lines of loose masterful figure indication.
And for sure, it is really challenging to figure out how to separate mess that is good from mess that is bad! Especially early on.
The trick is to understand that art is created through a process. A series of steps.
And each step is a place where we focus on different things.
There are stages in your process where you should focus on gesture and emotion and story and feeling.
And there are stages where you need to focus on structure, and form and perspective and where exactly the damn light is coming from.
There are also stages where you focus on the minutia. The texture, the pixel level details.
A page Breakdown from Star Atlas: CORE
Getting a high level of polish is less about always drawing perfectly. And more about learning where and when to figure out the details. You need a place in your process to focus on building the drawing up so you can actually add all of those final touches in the end.
Being sketchy and messy always has a place. And if we lose touch with it, our art often suffers.
Plus it's just kind of fun to scribble around.
-Tim
If you haven't lately:
Check out The Line and Color Academy:
Sketching is one of the best ways to stay creative and build an artistic ritual. Stage 1 of the Line and Color Academy focuses on getting back to basics with your sketchbook. There is an entire step by step 7 day mini course that helps you get inspired, stay motivated, and figure out what you should draw!
