Stay in the loop with our monthly newsletters, new courses, discounts, and more!
Share
Planning: Do you really need to?
Published 6 months ago • 3 min read
Art Tips
My next YouTube video (stay tuned!) demonstrates a kind of process I’ve been playing with lately. Simply put, it involves not doing any planning, and just jumping right into the final.
This sounds counterproductive - and for many it probably would be, so please don’t take this as objective art advice.
But there’s something to consider here. If you have the basic initial direction figured out - and you have a good grasp over the fundamentals - and you trust your own instincts - then why not simply dive in and start creating the final? No underdrawing, no thumbnailing. Sure, it’s uncomfortable not having a plan (which is what thumbnails and under-drawings and value studies help establish), and you’ll almost certainly make some wrong turns or odd decisions along the way without any of those guideposts in place … but the trade-off is that you’re much more likely to surprise yourself as you make improvised decisions. Hand-drawn animators often talk about there being two ‘philosophies’ around doing the drawings for a shot. Pose-to-pose is the more planned method, where you work out the most important poses through the entire shot, creating a kind of block-in, which you’ll smooth out later with in-between drawings. Straight-ahead is when you simply draw frame 1, then draw frame 2, then draw frame 3, etc., - without a plan on how you’re getting to the end. They both have their benefits. But animators often try to find a place for working straight-ahead, as that’s usually where the most fresh ideas are discovered, because the unknown path is full of surprises!
The notion of ‘surprising yourself’ has become one of the primary things I seek in my own process, because it’s so easy to be creatively repetitive. People often liken creativity to a muscle, which I agree with. But if that’s true, then creativity is also prone to muscle-memory - where it kind of starts doing the same thing over time without you being aware.
Improvising throughout the process helps keep things fresh, and also keeps you on your toes. And I’m willing to bet you’re more apt to like your final result! Again, this advice may not be for everyone, but it is certainly worth thinking about!
What I’m Working On
I am trying to get more into a routine of doing critiques for my Community members. When I started the community, I thought two live-critique sessions per month would be plenty. And it’s going well, but I still find myself falling behind on submissions! So, with the help of The Intern, we’re going to start organizing a system where, in the weeks between live sessions, we’ll get a bunch of Community submissions together and I’ll hit record and go through them.
The Art Industry
After three consecutive years, I sadly won’t be attending Lightbox 2025! I’m super sad to have to miss it, and fully plan to be back for next year. But the good news: I was invited to speak at the GiC (Game-Industry-Conference) in Poland - which also happens to conveniently coincide with some European travel plans my family and I already had during October.
My talk will be about learning from life studies, and how to best apply that to your creative work. It’ll touch on composition, drawing, and color. Maybe I’ll even bring my kids on stage to share the experience. Hope maybe some of you will be there!
Worth Checking Out: My Latest Picks
I’m a big fan of fiction novels, across all genres. Lately I’ve been reflecting on some of my favorite recent books, and wanted to recommend this one: Champion Of The World, by Chad Dundas. It’s a period-piece about a wrestler who’s part of a traveling carnival, and the adventures he encounters on the way. It’s full of interesting world-building, compelling characters, some fun genre-mashing, and a fully unpredictable plot. It’s one of those books where it’s almost sad that you’ve finished reading it, because you wish it could keep going on. The audiobook recording is great too. Highly recommended!
Champion of the World Chad Dundas
PS. I have new video lessons on Total Guide to Figure Drawing! Have you seen them? Feel free to comment on the newsletter website or reply to this email!
Art Tips: Quantity Over Quality One of the most pivotal moments in my artistic development was when I took a 10-day painting workshop/retreat with artist Scott Christensen (in 2008). I traveled to his home in Idaho, where a group of us would meet at his studio every morning to take in lectures, demos, and of course, paint the beautiful Teton valley scenery together. I chose to study with Scott because of his awesome ability to capture the grandness of nature - his paintings are both natural...
Art Tips: Studying From Life Disclaimer: I promise to try not to turn this into a “the old days were better” reminisce, and hope to make a solid, relevant point by the end! Having gotten into this whole art thing around 1995, I’m old enough to have witnessed the critical years of art’s transformation from a predominantly analog activity, to the now-ubiquitous digital nature of mostly everything. Yes, making art digitally was a thing in ‘95 (Myst and Toy Story were both huge early inspirations...
Art Tips: Anatomy & Figure Drawing I’ve done a great deal of life drawing in my nearly 25 years of art-journeying. I firmly believe that life drawing (or figure drawing) plays a big role - consciously or not - in setting your art ‘ceiling.’ There is so much to the figure drawing process: gesture drawing, capturing a sense of life and movement, building simple forms, building more complex forms, fitting things together, lighting all those forms, etc., all of which come together to represent...
