Construction

I am doing this daily excercise on construction since the 1st of January this year.
Why?
Well, because I want to make a conscious change in my process of drawing.

I noticed a while ago, that when I'm drawing I tend to get lazy, fall into habits and drawing tricks I conditioned myself in the past years and lose focus because I'm not fully conscious of what I'm doing while drawing. Resulting in skipping between all kinds of steps that are essential in creating a succesfull one-story-drawing. It's so hard to stay focussed on what's most important in the many steps of making a drawing, that I find myself to be distracted and focus more often on achieving an endresult then on what I should focus on, telling the story you want your drawing to tell your audience.
It is not there for you to feel all good about yourself that you finished another drawing. No, the drawing is there for your audience, to entertain them. Don't forget your audience. You allready know the story you wanted to tell. Now it's time to tell it to your audience.

So to ask myself a simple question, what is a drawing for me?
A drawing for me is a way to tell a story visually.
A succesfull one-story-drawing for me is one that tells your audience exactly the story you want it to tell. That is always the main goal. There are many ways to achieve this. Here is where I think it starts.

I belief that a succesfull one-story-drawing starts with knowing the story you want to tell. Second is a good understanding of your subjects construction. If you know your story,then you also know your subject(s). When you have a good understanding of your subjects construction, then you can focus on achieving the strongest pose and emotion for your subject that will tell your story the best.

So by doing this excersise I hope to influence my thought process while drawing, making construction a conscious step in my process of telling a story with visuals on paper, aka a drawing.

First step: Know the story you want to tell.
Second step: Understand your subject's construction.

There are many more steps in the proces, to name a few: emotion, line of action and dimension, but for me now, construction is my main focus. When I notice that it is part of my process, then I will turn the next step into a new excercise for myself and this way build on a more consciuos drawing proces.

Here's two pages from my sketchbook, focussing on construction. Simply copying stuff,it's about construction, not about designing new characters. This is from Preston Blair's book Cartoon Animation.

One A3 page a day, keeps becoming lazy away?




Listening to: Quarteto Em Cy