Gesture, Composition, and Design

Ryan Benjamin has incredible enthusiasm and passion for what he does, and for art in general, especially comic art. I love listening to him talk about it, and even more so watching him create it spontaneously. 

This is a much longer video, but it goes into great depth about what design is in composition and in the figure. Both videos deal strongly with gesture, one of the important principles in making good pictures. 

And this guy (Sorry, I didn't catch his name) goes so far as to say that the principles of design and composition apply as much to individual figures as they do to an entire image. That's something you don't normally hear. He seems to fall into the common belief though that a figure means only the human body, and possibly animal bodies as well, but from thinking about the word and its various meanings I've worked out that a figure is any individual object once it's been drawn or painted. A building, a car or a tree in an image is a figure. I might go into that in more detail later, this isn't the place for it. 

But all this stuff these guys are talking about and demonstrating is exactly what my work needs in order to break free from all this very literal and detailed drawing I've been doing. I used to draw much more gesturally and subordinate detail in places strategically. In fact to some extent I used to use just about all of the principles discussed in the second video, but since in recent years I'm concentrating on bringing up my anatomy and (human)* figure drawing skills, it's been necessary to draw everything with equal emphasis and great clarity, and all of it entirely literally. No abstraction or blurring of shape. 

This probably accounts for why I don't get excited about drawing like I used to--when you approach it like I've been recently it isn't dramatic or powerful or evocative. An image made using these principles of design grabs your attention, it has mystery and power. I think I need to start alternating between the crisp and clean learning drawings (with no caffeine) and the evocative drawings, where you let things go in and out of focus and let the light move sporadically and fitfully over the entire image. 

All of this falls into the purview of this statement, that I've posted several times and has been one of my guiding principles ever since I encountered it:

"Learn as much about composition as you can, and put it all into practice as much as possible."

* And here we see exactly why the term has come to denote only the human figure. It's awkward to have to specify when you mean the human figure as opposed to the figure of a horse or a refrigerator.