In last week’s handout, there was a reproduction of a drawing by Brad Kuha. Next to it was a sketch I did to suggest a way for him to draw a little more loosely. Here again is his drawing and my suggestion.
When I do this, I encourage the artist to hold the pen looser and farther away from the nib and let the pen do the drawing. If the drawing turns out good, take the credit for it, if it turns out bad, blame it on the pen. But don’t “draw” — let the pen do it. It gets you out of the frame of mind of “What is this part I am drawing and how do I draw it?” into the frame of mind of “Ah, these lines are going down so easily, I feel I can push the top part of the figure over a little farther, and stretch the arm a little more, and etc. Wow, this helps me to forget the anatomy charts and to go for the gesture.” Here are a few more of those somewhat stiff, structural drawings. Anatomically and proportionate-wise they are good, but they have a slightly mechanical look.
Now let me show you some of the beautiful, loose, life-filled sketches Brad made after that one drawing suggestion. These, if you’ll excuse the expression, are damned nice drawings.
And while we’re on the subject of damned nice drawings, Mike Swofford, who studies drawing seriously, did some too. Mike takes the drawings he makes in the class and reworks them later to perfect them (and himself). These don’t need any working over.
A newcomer in our midst is Ash Brannon. He attended the class on the night of four-year-old Kyle Brown’s explosive modeling performance, got caught up in the excitement, and “drew up a storm” of his own. Here are some of his sketches.
Realize, I am not trying to sell these artists to anyone, I am trying to sell sketching — the quick and intensive kind where there is no time to atrophy either in the mind or on the paper. When you slave over a drawing for hours it should still have the appearance of spontaneity, as do these quick sketches. Having to rev up the engine, to floor the adrenaline pedal while sketching a moving subject, makes one fall back on one’s sixth sense where reactions are instinctive rather than intellectual.
In a book called Inner Tennis the author says your body knows what to do — just get out of the way and let your body take care of the strokes. Sometimes we try to force the drawing into being. We intel-lectualize. We name parts and attempt to draw them, when all we need to do is “get out of the way” and sketch (tell) the story which is unfolding before us. If we were verbalizing something we wouldn’t proceed by analyzing our sentence structure, syntax, and spelling. We’d be tongue-tied in a minute. In drawing something, all we’re really doing is verbalizing with marker and paper. So, “get out of the way” and let it be told the way it really is.