As the Aspire Project has been picking up steam, I’ve been taking stock of the skills necessary to succeed as a comics artist and setting time aside each day to brush up on them. Figure drawing is one of the most fundamental and feeds into a lot of other areas, so it’s where I began.
Starting out with figure drawing practice
I’ve been along to a few classes and evening group sessions with live models before, but for a long time I was missing the theory underpinning the whole thing. Then the internet came to my rescue. There’s no shortage of great material out there freely available for self-taught artists. My biggest breakthrough came from learning about the concept of “gesture” in figure drawing from Stan Prokopenko of Proko.com – in short, it’s the simplest expression of the overall fluid motion of any given pose. It’s essential to giving the figure a sense of dynamism and life – simply focussing on contours and fine detail results in stiff, boring drawings.
I started getting up early to practice drawing gesture from photo references first thing in the morning. The best online tool I’ve come across for this sort of practice is Quickposes, which displays a series of photos in a timed slideshow (be warned though – it’s all user-submitted material, so expect some NSFW images if you pay a visit).
After a few weeks I noticed some improvement, but at the same time I felt I lacked a tangible goal that I could work towards. That was when I found another great tutorial video by Matt Kohr of Ctrl+Paint, where he spoke about a homework assignment for a figure drawing class in art school:
Draw one thousand gesture poses within a week.
A thousand! In a week! Now we’re talking! It sounded crazy, but I knew that if I pulled it off, I’d definitely see some real improvement – not just in the quality but also the speed of my drawings. I worked it out: if I spent the recommended 30 seconds on each pose, I could draw 175 poses within a 90-minute block each morning. If I did this consistently for six days, I’d meet my target handily. So I printed off some pages lined with a 7x5 grid, and aimed to have five filled up each morning. They could only be tiny thumbnail drawings, but size wasn’t a major concern – the important thing to practice was identifying the gesture and getting it down within the time limit.
At first, I struggled to complete a drawing on a 30-second timer. So I gave myself a little slack as I got used to things, and bumped the timer up to 60 seconds. Of course, this meant more time to produce the same number of drawings, so I spent a great deal longer than the 90 minutes I had originally intended to hit my daily goal. After a couple of days, I was able to wind back to 45 seconds, and then down to 30.
Even though I got faster, it still felt like a marathon effort to fill five pages each day. I ended up needing to take multiple breaks inside each sitting to avoid cramping up. Once or twice, I needed to make up for a rushed morning session with an extra one in the evening. This was all on top of regular client work and other commitments, mind you. It was a gruelling pace, but…
I did it. And there they all are – exactly one thousand gesture drawings in that pile, done in the space of a week.
I was a bit dazed after the whole thing, and lapsed in my everyday practice for a while. It was a few days before I could bear the thought of drawing another 30-second gesture figure. Which isn't good – the aim here wasn't just to get a bunch of practice in, but to establish a habit of consistency.
So, what have I learned from this challenge?
- Being intentional about when and what you practice is critical for real improvement. Scheduling time for it each day is how you can make sure it gets done.
- Having a tangible goal to work towards will motivate you to push hard. A crazy-sounding but still achievable goal is even better, and provides a satisfying through-line when you hit it.
- However! Not every goal should be the big hairy audacious kind. It’s great for a quick challenge, but you run the risk of burning out if every week is like this.
- A week is a good length of time to study and practice a specific skill. Any shorter isn’t enough to see results, and any longer can become monotonous. It’s best to strike balance between focus and variety.
- True mastery takes a lifetime. More important than short term results or reaching an ambitious target is making a habit of showing up and doing the work.
My next steps
I’m going to continue setting aside a slice of each morning as my deliberate practice time. From now on, I plan to switch between focus areas each week, building up a breadth of skills that will each make me a better comics artist. I'm far from done with figure drawing – it's been useful to practice identifying and capturing gesture quickly, but in the end it's only component of a larger whole. My goal, in the end, is to be able to draw the figure entirely from imagination, in any pose, from any angle. Most of this will come from studying constructive anatomy, but continuing to draw from life is still a valuable exercise.
Maybe I'll return to this concept and do another Draw 1000 challenge at some stage. It was exhausting, but thrilling at the same time. Switching media may prove interesting – perhaps ink and brush next time?
Here's to crazy goals and lifelong learning.
