Listen & Draw - Erasing Your Art To Improve it?

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Transcript

There are stories of art professors instructing students to erase their drawings they worked so hard on for hours. I think that was cruel.

In this podcast, I will talk about the benefits of destroying your art, but not in this way. These teachers asked students to destroy art they had worked on so hard and for so long. There was a hard lesson there: are you willing to start from scratch to make something even better if the result isn’t perfect?

This podcast will present a better approach to that.

Welcome to the Practice Drawing This Podcast, designed to listen to while drawing.

On to today’s topic.

Designing a chair is a classic assignment for design students. They have to create a chair that looks good in certain environments, and that is comfortable to sit in for anyone, and it has to be designed so that it can easily be mass-produced.

You can see why this is a useful exercise for people who will specialize in designing tangible products.

The designer will come up with a design after doing many quick study sketches meant to be thrown away later.

It is important at this stage to not fall in love with the first design! If the designer likes the chair, great! The designer should try to draw it again, but pushing the idea further! If they don’t like the design, that is fine too. they should try to come up with another design. But they should not fall in love with their first design and draw many options.

After that, they have a workplace create a prototype of the chair. They then place the chair in an environment it was designed for to see if it fits, if it looks good there. Then they invite people with different body types to sit in the chair, to feel if it is pleasant to sit in.

The designer makes notes on what they want to change to the chair.

Then, the prototype is thrown away.

The designer goes back to the drawing board, and makes more design sketches and arrives at a new slightly altered, slightly improved design.

And the workplace makes another prototype!

The designer will use this iterative approach, repeatedly making a slightly better chair every time, to arrive at the ideal chair, making throwaway sketches, making throwaway prototypes of the chair.

The companies who create game consoles do the same thing for their game controllers. The controllers have to be easy to use for lots of different hand sizes and be pleasant to operate for hours and hours. To that end, they will, again, make lots of preparatory throw-away design sketches, and they will have a workplace create prototypes. Then, they have actual people try to use the prototype controllers. They get feedback on how the controller feels, and they throw the controllers away and make small alterations to the design, and commission another controller prototype, and they test it again.

Gamers with hands all sorts of sizes and shapes will hold these controllers for hundreds of hours. The game console companies really have to get it right.

If you follow the world of digital cameras, you can see that the camera manufacturers come with a new, slightly improved design for their camera each year. The specs usually also improve; the images captured will have higher resolution, the auto-focus will be faster, et cetera. But also, they will make the camera hold more pleasantly, they will make the feel of pressing the buttons more pleasing, the texture of the body hold more pleasantly. Note that the cameras in their current form have existed for around one hundred years, and still they iterate, still they come out with slightly improved versions of cameras each year.

The same can be said for cars. Even though cars have existed for a long time, car manufacturers manage to come out with new, slightly improved cars every year. Technology advances, but they also pay attention to how it feels to operate the car, and they make slight improvements from year to year, from model to model.

You see the pattern, here: design something, create a prototype, test the prototype and make notes on where it can be improved, redesign, and then make another prototype.

So why is this relevant to artists?

Well, to begin with, animation companies use this process, too. They will start with a script, which is written and rewritten and rewritten. The script versions are like a preparatory preliminary sketches, easy to change quickly. This is the stage where it is the easiest and cheapest to change things.

Then, artists take the script and they make storyboards: very quick sketches of single shots, potential frames in the film. They try to design the storyboards so that they help support the telling of the story.

These storyboards are also like preliminary sketches. They have to be done quickly. You have to not be emotionally attached to each drawing. Not fall in love with your first design! Make many iterations of the design of each storyboard. If you like one storyboard, great! Draw another one, and try to push the idea further. Don’t like it? Then try out another idea. But don’t go with the first thing you drew. Maybe there are better ideas.

The storyboards are, again, throwaway prototypes.

The storyboards can now be put into sequence and presented to a team of creatives, storytellers, animators. But what they can also do is create an “animatic”.

An animatic is when they take the storyboards and use those to make a film that approximates what the film might look like in the end.

A prototype! They can now all go sit in a theater and watch that animatic, watch that film, and get a feel for whether that sequence would work, whether the shots would work, whether the pacing works, whether the dialogue works, whether it evokes the right emotions at the right moments, Et cetera.

And then they trow the animatic away.

And the writer goes back to their keyboard and makes changes to the script; a new prototype.

And the artists go read that changed and hopefully improved script, and they create new storyboards, new prototypes for the single shots in the film.

And another animatic is made, another prototype. And the crew go sit in the theater and try to figure out what does and doesn’t work in this prototype.

And then they throw away the prototypes and they go back to their desks, and do it again...

In the end, when they are happy with it, they start the expensive production of the final movie. It would be extremely expensive to fix story mistakes in that stage, which is why they went through the scripting, story-boarding, and animatic stages, because mistakes were still relatively cheap to fix. In the final stage, the rendering of the animation is expensive, rendering one frame can take a computer a day, for example. Imagine having rendered tens of minutes and having to throw all of that away. It’s cheaper to just discover it in the prototyping stage where it costs very little to regenerate.

As mentioned in the beginning, in the past, teachers would ask students to erase their drawings. I think that was a cruel thing to do, to be honest, at least without explaining why.

You, the student feel like you invested so much time in the drawing, and now you are forced to erase it! You are asked to destroy a piece of art you just made, that you just poured your heart in, your everything in, for the past tens of hours!

And now you’re asked to erase?

But these teachers were (presumably, if they weren’t just trying to be cruel) testing to see if you were willing to start afresh if that could yield better results. To treat something you made as a prototype, to study and analyze and figure out what you could do better in a next attempt at it. To learn from it, to grow. To get better results in your next attempt.

They were testing to see if you were willing to treat the drawing like a prototype.

That is how many fine art artists work. They create painting after painting, searching for something. Each painting is effectively a very expensive prototype. They look at it, figure out what they don’t like about it, and then go make another painting using what they just learned.

That is a perfectly valid approach. You get to hang a finished piece on a wall, live with it for a few days to figure out how you feel about it.

But there are often less painful ways. You can make prototypes, or even thumbnails in your sketchbook.

Thumbnails are the ultimate prototypes for artists. If you want to make a painting, or a character design, you can start by making tiny, small sketches in your sketchbook. Keeping them small means you can draw them quickly so that you don’t feel as emotionally attached to them and are more willing to throw them away. They also say “Draw Small To Think Big”, meaning that if you draw small, you can not fret the details, lose yourself in the details, and you are forced to consider the bigger picture first instead. Plus, as the thumbnails are small, you can draw many on a sketchbook page and compare them and see which one pops out.

If you get a chance, watch how Glen Keane develops a drawing. He’s an animator. He has a board with semi-transparent sheets of paper used for onion skinning a 2D animation which is when you flip through consecutive frames to see if the animation works. But he also uses it to refine character designs! He’ll make a quick sketch of a character, and then he’ll lay a new sheet of paper over it and do a new design, a new iteration, on that fresh sheet of paper, seeing the previous design shine through the page so he can follow it, or change things like proportions and details and such and refine the design. He’s in effect prototyping the design, improving it iteratively, one prototype after the other.

There is this concept of sunk cost fallacy: when we already spent a lot of time on a drawing, we don’t want to throw it away as we already invested so much time in it. But we’re not throwing it away! We got something from it! We learned that some aspects of it don’t work, and so we get to do better in the next iteration!

We came away with knowledge.

It’s not so much about erasing your drawing as it is about redoing it, improving it with each iteration, really.

But you can make it easier for yourself to really consider these drawings as prototypes, and to only make a finished piece when you are absolutely sure about the design. That way, you only throw away cheap sketches that you made off the cuff, and don’t have to throw away that final piece you worked so hard on.

A fun thing I like to do is fill sketchbook pages with lots of attempts to draw something. I will fail heroically; there are mistakes in each of them, but the page as a whole still often looks nice!

And I don’t really throw away those sketches. I keep them. I even post them online sometimes.

You don’t actually have to erase or throw away your drawings!

Just be willing to try and try, to analyze your work, figure out where you can improve, make notes, and to try again, to treat each drawing as a prototype for the next one.

Thank you for listening.

Yours sincerely,