34 The Seriousness of Head Sketching/A New Phrase: “Body Syntax”

Try to keep from getting too serious while head sketching. After all, you are in the cartoon business and most of the Disney characters are somewhat comical, and if not comical, then at least they are caricatures of serious beings. Usually when a person takes himself too seriously he is in our eyes a “comedian.” He is ripe for caricature. So if cartoons are not somewhat caricatures of reality they may be taken too seriously and lose that special spark of humor. Very few, if any, of the animators I’ve known found drawing easy. One of Ollie Johnston’s sayings, “It ain’t easy,” became a studio quip. Drawing funny cartoons was and is a serious business. It seems like the funniest scenes were the ones that were “sweat over” most. They were serious matters that required the animator to never forget (in all his groping and mental anguish) that the result he was after was to make the audience smile.

Yes, try to keep from getting too serious while head sketching. Museums and living rooms are full of serious portraits that are just dying to be retouched with a little humor. But, of course, portraits were not invented to make people smile — cartoons were. If you think the world is all so serious, you should be a historian or a philosopher, but if you desire to bring a little humor into the lives of those humor-hungry people “out there,” then be a cartoonist and be serious about losing some of that seriousness.

There is an insistent tendency to look at the model in a serious, even detached way almost as if it were a still life devoid of feeling and personality. We look at the model to pick a starting point; we draw it. We look back to see if we did it right and make a few more dabs at it to reassure ourselves. We look up for another line to add — perhaps connected to the first one, perhaps somewhere else in some unrelated area. We look down, sketch in the new line tentatively, reinforce it, after another look at the model, with several swipes of the pen. The gesture goes unrecognized. The more unrelated lines that get pat down, the farther from our grasp goes the gesture.

Imagine yourself drawing a simple shape like a circle or a square. Do you see yourself sketching a bit here or there, going over what you have done, then on to another section, seeing only those small sections of line you are putting down. No! Of course not. You see a circle and the size you want to make it and in as few lines as possible — wham! Down it goes. A human body is more complicated, granted, but the act of drawing its gesture is much the same. You must see the whole, and wham! (over a longer period of time, of course), down it goes. You have hardly looked at the details. They influence and enhance the pose (gesture) but are somewhat incidental to it. The model could strike the same pose while wearing any number of different outfits. If it is outfits you are interested in, invest in a Sears catalog. If it is gesture you are interested in, then look beyond those extraneous, sometimes gesture-destroying details.

I love to read. I love the way authors put their words together. I love syntax. I love the way the words reveal the plot and the personalities of the protagonists that carry me along in the plot. But if I’m not careful, I get caught up in admiring the details and how the story is told, getting behind in what the story is about. We have been having some terrific models whose “details” (body syntax) are fascinating to the point of distraction. It seems like the more interesting the details, the more difficult it is to see the simplicity of the gesture. So, as it takes a special effort on my part to read for the story, so it is with most of us — we have to make a special effort to draw for the gesture.

Imagine yourself as a pilot landing a plane. Some weird phenomenon has blotted out all but a tiny detail of the field. MAYDAY! MAYDAY! You need the whole field so you can make a good judgment of the situation. If you try to put down on that little detail it might be a section way at the end of the runway, two feet from the fence. Okay, the same with drawing — you need the whole body (the field) to keep your judgment of the gesture true.

Earlier I mentioned body syntax. That’s a phrase worth coining. The non-grammatical meaning of syntax is “connected system or order; orderly arrangement.” What is a pose or gesture but an orderly arrangement of body parts to display a mood, demeanor, attitude, mannerism, expression, or emotion. The phrase “orderly arrangement” (body syntax) is worth ruminating over. An orderly arrangement or body parts — — I love it. Even the sentence places arrangement before parts.

I apologize for the over-abundance of text from here on. Because drawing is largely mental I am trying to reason along these lines. Once the physical faculties of manipulating a pen or pencil to one’s satisfaction is conquered, that side of drawing is taken care of and from there on it is mental. It is then the ability to analyze, imagine; to caricature, to assemble, and organize all the separate elements of storytelling into one drawing or into a series of drawings (animation). As we have come to realize since Dr. Betty Edwards, drawing is a right brain activity. The left brain is a serious namer of things, while the right brain uses all that seriousness for some creative purpose. The left and right sides of the brain are the “odd couple” of the cerebral community — the right side is the slightly less serious of the two.

“He can’t draw but he likes to size people up.”