The Awesome Power of a Crappy Sketch
Starting your projects with a pencil and paper will set your mind freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
This article was originally published on LinkedIn in March of 2017. I’m reposting it here as part of moving my writing to my own platform…
Anyone who’s taken one of my classes has heard me say
"A crappy sketch is better than no sketch at all!”
I’ve always been a bit embarrassed at my drawing skills. I started drawing like all kids do… crayons and those big fat pencils that kids always end up with. I loved drawing Star Wars X-wing fighters and Mach 5 race cars. But, my drawings always lacked “polish”. They never felt like something I wanted to hang on the wall. I think the problem was that drawing was never the end goal for me. It was a way for me to focus my energies for a bit. To clear my head. To that end, I suppose the real goal was just that… To get the idea out of my head and onto paper. Once the idea was out of my head, I tended to lose interest and move onto something else. I had gotten my point across with the drawing and that was that.
I've never been to art school, but through a series of twists and turns of fate, I discovered I had a real talent for creating on the computer. In my late 20’s I started working at an entertainment advertising firm. The pace was intense. We had to create logos for TV shows to present to clients in ridiculously short time scales. It was not uncommon for us to have only a couple days to turn out 20 or 30 solid ideas that could be presented to the client. Luckily for me we never ever showed the client our sketches. All that stuff stayed in house. We had to show finished logos that looked exactly as they would in a magazine ad, or on the television. This meant that I didn’t need to draw well. I just needed to get my point across. Then I could dive into Illustrator and/or Photoshop with a clear goal of what I needed to create. This was when I really started to understand why sketching (no matter how bad the sketches are) is such an important tool for creativity.
Years later through yet another series of twists and turns of fate, I found myself teaching at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Remember how I said that I’d never been to art school? But, I discovered that I had a real talent for teaching. (Not at first though, I was pretty rough… but that’s for another article.) I taught motion graphics courses using After Effects and Cinema 4D, and at first the courses were really just about the software. But after a few semesters I decided to change things up and really focus on getting the kids to communicate a story. It might be a commercial for a product or an infographic piece about an environmental cause, but regardless, it was a story. Turns out the best way to get the point of your story across is with words and sketches… Imagine that. This practice of storyboarding, of sketching the sequence of events in your story, had long long been a practice of the advertising and cartoon animation industries. But, motion graphics artists, not so much.
I think the problem is that motion graphics as an art form, as an industry, began to flourish with advent of desktop computing. Programs like After Effects made it possible for an artist to create design and animation “on the cheap”. All you needed was a relatively inexpensive computer and buttloads of labor and time. The advent of digital photography has made us extremely lazy about taking pictures, and I think the same thing has happened with motion graphics. It’s so easy to just open After Effects or C4D and start animating. But, technology doesn’t free your mind. Technology clutters it up. Software is complicated, and it doesn’t always work right, and it doesn’t come up with the ideas. It’s just a tool for achieving ideas.
I’m currently working on a music video project for an artist named Dammien Alexander. It’s an abstract piece that will use particles and lines to communicate a feel of space, gravity, and time. It’s challenging. I’ve never been good at abstraction. I’ve always made animations about things. Carefully defined sequences of events that kind of write themselves. But, this project needs artistic abstraction. So, I’m approaching it in a way that gives me a structure to work within. I’ve brainstormed a bunch of scenarios based on the lyrics in the song, and now I’m systematically animating each one. Every shot starts with a crappy sketch of the sequence, and that is used to focus my work. The video below shows the progression from sketch thru each of the refining renders. My Sketch book stays open right next to my keyboard, and I can look at it while I’m working.
Every time I get stuck on a project, it’s because I haven’t taken the time to work my ideas out on paper ahead of time. I just dove in and started making cubes, and guess what… I got nowhere. It isn’t until I’ve sat down with my sketchbook and done a few thumbnails that I begin to see my goal clearly. A pencil and paper WILL free your mind.
The only thing you have to think about is your idea (and how sharp your pencil is).
