High Focus Drawing

Over the weekend, I met up with a coworker, his roommate, and brother. The conversations we had meandered from topic to topic, thanks to my ability to ramble. The coworker and his associates knew I was an artist and eventually I was asked, “How do I draw better.” The simple and clean answer was, start. The complete and dirty answer was to find a teacher.

He gave the stock response of, not liking what he was on paper, the topic of conversation changed again. After a few hours we parted ways, and when I got home I found this wonderful book, High-Focus Drawing by Jame McMullan. This, revolutionary approach to drawing the figure, later influence one of my favorite creators, Rebecca Sugar. Their sketches are amazing and you can see the influence of McMullan in their work. Sugar has said in a short form video that, “I aim to draw like every line will be part of the final piece.” As a fan of her work I fell confident in saying, “They draw like, they are writing prose.”

In his blog post, The Answer to Student AI Slop is Authorial Voice. Aaron Ross Powell sums up how I feel every time someone asks me for creativity advice. In school teachers are required to give their students structure, so they may eventually improvise out of class. But the expectation of composition scares some students into using AI for well formatted essays. Powell sites professor that have undergraduate who turn in essays that fit the bill, but are generic and lack the nuance he has come to expect over the years. The solution Powell suggest: “The way to stand out in the classroom, or the way to indicate to the teacher or professor that you wrote the paper and not Chat GPT, is to have a voice.” (Aaron Ross Powell)

High-Focus Drawing, takes what people know about the figure and than asks the artist interpret the things that draw their attention. In a world where AI slop feels overwhelming asking students to utilizes the fundamentals to amplify their personal rendition of the world, is what we need for the future of creativity.