January 30, 2024

Getting a feel for the thing

I don’t know about others, but I can’t just sit down and write a story. And I don’t mean that I need to do what most people talk about – plan a story with 3 acts, character biographies, fresh and detailed worlds, conflict, climax, resolution etc etc. No, I mean I need to feel the story before I can write it.

Instead of words, I start with sketches. Characters emerge on the page as I’m sketching lines and contours. It doesn’t take much – a couple of curves, a few marks for eyes and a nose, and my brain is engaged, much like, I imagine, a sculptor may be as they respond to the changing shape of the stone that sits otherwise inanimate in front of them.

As someone who admires writers, this often feels like a failure. Shouldn’t I just be able to use words to imagine and create these worlds? But then, occassionally, I come across others who seem to work like me; people searching for an image that gives them the ‘essence’ of the story (as Hayao Miyazaki says in the documentary 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki).

Searching for the essence of a story through drawing has always felt like a hack – a band-aid solution that masks my inability to write well – but I’m becoming more comfortable, day-by-day, in finding my story through marks of pencil on paper, which, at the end of the day, is what a writer of words is doing anyway.

Other observations
May 20, 2025

Artificial intelligence and art

Are artists under threat from generative artificial intelligence? Or is the ‘competition’ we see just misunderstood?

May 13, 2025

It ain’t gonna draw itself

What happens to an idea if I’m too scared to draw it? If I don’t feel skilled enough? If I’m just not ready?

May 6, 2025

Like a machine

Should artists aspire for robotic-like accurate and consistency like those who are the best in their sport?

April 22, 2025

The craft of digital drawing

The problem with digital art is that there’s always a piece of software between me and the work, but maybe that’s what makes it a craft?

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