Misconceptions I had about “art”

For most of my life, I wasn’t an artist. I was a programmer. After discovering the value in learning art, I came to art school expecting to learn a totally new skill set as I started animating characters. Normally I’m self-taught, but since art was so different I didn’t even know what direction to go in.

But instead I realized that I had some severe misconceptions about the process, the kind that you hear non-artists talk about. Once those got cleared, I was like “Oh, this is what it is!” And even though I wasn’t learning much from art school anymore, I found enough of a direction to confidently explore my own ideas on animation.

So part of this article is basically addressed to my former self, but if you’re someone who has historically never been an “artist” (really I’m talking about cartoon character illustration or animation), you may potentially get something out of this.

No one is good at drawing everything.

In hindsight this is obvious. But a lot of things are obvious in hindsight, aren’t they? My thinking was that if “artists” are people who make “art”, “art” is basically anything, and only people who are good enough at it are called “artists”, then they are good at anything.

But if you look harder, those who are called “artists” only specialize in drawing specific things. All “artists” are specialists. Everyone’s definition of “art” is different. If you walk to different groups of people and talk to them about “art”, what do they think of? Some groups might think about the abstract paintings they see in cultural museums. Some may think about landscape paintings. And generations of Internet users think about cartoon character illustrations, which I specifically was after.

My expectation going into art school was that I’d learn to draw everything, and then draw my characters last. That way I’d really hone in my “artistic competence” so I could do the ideas in my head the most justice. But after I was cleared of the misconception that “artists” are good at everything, I actually felt freedom. If you want to learn how to draw cartoon characters, you start by learning how to draw cartoon characters! I was lucky in that I didn’t want to be good at drawing everything anyway. I just wanted to get some specific ideas out of my head.

Being an “artist” is like being a “musician”. A musician can’t play all instruments, they know how to read sheet music and can play a couple instruments. An “artist” may understand the basics of geometry, perspective, etc. but beyond that they have their own specialties.

There is more than one way to draw in a painting program.

The typical way to illustrate a character is to basically do it in “layers”. You start with a rough sketch of the character. You lay as many strokes down as possible with minimal erasing and minimal adjustments. Then you put a layer over that to put in cleaner lines and potentially make some further adjustments. And then you’re done!

In fact this approach to illustration is further reinforced by those who advocate for practicing life drawing with a pen, in order to force illustrators to draw things right the first time.

But I can’t work this way. Instead I lay down the absolute roughest strokes just to get the pose of a character down and have some vague resemblance to their silhouette. Then I keep adding new strokes and erasing old ones to inch the drawing closer to the one in my head, and use generous amounts of the transform tool. It isn’t so much drawing in the typical sense as it is sculpting my outlines using identical tools to those in a painting program.

It turns out this approach works really well for me and gives me the results I need, much closer than if I’d gone the typical approach. I don’t want to say that the typical approach is a bad approach. It’s not, at all. I can see it being a very efficient way if you’ve already drawn a subject or character so many times. But it’s important to show that there are plenty of other ways to wield a painting program to get good character sketches down. And this is my way.

“Art” and “Technology” are artificial divides

“Art” is strongly technical. You have to translate a subjective idea in your head into a medium that is objective. Which is also what programming and every other form of engineering basically is.

It consists of both understanding the desired aesthetics of a character from a technical and anatomical standpoint, as well as learning to wield technology to manifest the character. It’s all tech and analysis. And yet “art” gets branded as its own thing because people only think about the look of the end result, not the knowledge and processes that led to that result.

This revelation has driven a lot of my explorations in the process of animation. As both a programmer and a character animator, I want to attack the task of character animation from a more analytical standpoint. This doesn’t mean that the visual appeal of characters have to be sacrificed. In fact I’d argue it can make them more appealing, because advancements in animation can bring more life to them.