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Draw 160

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Mike Lynch shares some real gems from his cartooning classes in a recent blog post:

How do you get to be a better cartoonist?

There is the old piece of advice: take a stack of paper the same height that you are. Draw on every one. When you get to the bottom, you’ve gotten a lot of the bad drawings out of your system and you’re a better artist.

Mike had his class of ten students draw 160 images in about 5 minutes. He prepared ten sheets of paper, each comprising a pre-labelled 4×4 grid. The students took turns passing the paper around and filling in a square of their choice.

A brilliant exercise. The results are fun and, though obviously childlike, say a lot about visual thinking and how little detail is truly needed to get an idea across.

In Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, a fifteen-week classroom in a book, his first week assignments include just such activities:

…Spend 3-4 minutes drawing a car. Then, start over and draw it in 2 minutes. Then 1 minute. Then 30 seconds. Then 15 seconds. And then 5 seconds. Draw faster at each step, that is, draw the entire car within the time limit. Repeat this same process for four other subjects: a cat, a castle, a telephone, and a self-portrait.

  • http://www.stephenbobbett.com/ Stephen

    An interesting exercise. I like how it boils a subject down to its essence, but it also runs the risk of teaching budding artists to reduce everything to symbols instead of detailed, nuanced representations of objects. I might try it, nonetheless. :-)

  • marghe

    this is really inspiring! thanks for sharing!

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    The last exercise sounds really interesting. For those of us with very little artistic talent, it would, at the very least, probably improve our skills in games like “Cranium” and “Pictionary.” :o)

  • http://justtheplaceforasnark.blogspot.com/ Mahendra Singh

    Brunetti & Lynch's advice is useful … taken to its logical extreme though, there's really no need for an instructor … nor a class … nor even bothering to learn how to “draw”.

    This really does lay bare an underlying assumption: drawing & cartooning are not the same thing. Perhaps even illustration & drawing are no longer the same thing?

    A fruitful topic for discussion?

  • http://www.dragoart.com/ learn how to draw

    This exercise could've been better but actually works when it comes with drawing shapes.

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