Static Sketching to Dynamic Drawing

So I just wanted to take a moment to talk about how confidence affects one's creative abilities and how important it is to just.... relax. My own personal artistic weakness is getting my work to be dynamic. I worked hard in school so all the technical skills and understanding of different mediums and how to draw things is there. Give me a photo reference of anything at all in the world and tell me how rendered of a recreation you want and I can do that. Photorealism of a neon sign? I can do. Semi cartooned watercolor of this photo of a running horse in a swamp? Done. I do it quite often actually, grab a photo I have, tweak the composition, photoshop in a thing or two and do a watercolor of it. Its great for stress-relief. Like meditating.... or taking a bubble bath. But the struggle is with my original ideas. With sequential art where looking up a reference for every lamp post in the background is terribly inconvenient and cumbersome. I have plenty of ideas swirling in my head. If the technology existed to take my imagination and download it directly Id have a whole series or two of graphic novels by now.

Project Magpie is the one Im most anxious to get off the development floor. My webcomic. My fully planned, mostly written, half revised.... 100+ pages long.... webcomic. I have all the tools I need. I am officially out of excuses not to have anything drawn. I have like 50 inking pens, entire dresser drawers of paints and brushes, drafting pencils, empty sketchbooks of every size, drawing tablets, a nice drafting desk, photoshop, other painting software, script writing software, comic panel mapping software ETC I have everything I need. And I have just been so frustrated that I havent yet rose my artistic skill enough to match the level of detail and storytelling I have in my head.

See... I know exactly what I want the audience to see, I know what I want every character to look like, down to the freckles on their noses. I know how I want every scene to play out, down to what reflections can be seen on what surfaces. But every time I go to draw one of them I get so caught up in the anatomy and the composition and trying to remember everything I learned in school and hung up on "is this GOOD enough? Would my former professors approve of this? Is this too cartoony?" that I just end up with some real rigid and awkward looking flat characters standing idly in some interior designer's room planning blueprints. Somewhere down the line I forgot that art was .... well.... more art than science.

I forgot that technical skill and correctness werent terribly relevant in the type of storytelling I was trying to achieve. I got so preoccupied with trying to be the best possible artist I could be and trying desperately to "keep up" with my former art school peers as Im watching them post amazing works in progress on their facebooks and instagram that I forgot how much more important the emotion of the work is. Gestures arent about anatomical accuracy, they are about the visual flow of the human body. Evoking emotion with poses. The backgrounds arent meant to be 100% precise representations of the settings youre imagining with correct perspective. They are suppose to lay out a mood, set the tone for the characters, grounding them in their world. Thats all. Like magic, I stopped worrying about whether or not my character drawings were as good as ones Ive seen from former classmates..... I took a step back, took a deep breath, stopped worrying about how rusty Ive gotten or how wonky my sketch process was and suddenly! they improved. Suddenly.... the gestures have flow and emotion. Suddenly they look that much more like what I have in my head. Backgrounds are still a bit of a struggle for me. But I just wanted to share that its ok. Its ok to let loose a little and just.... draw what you want to draw. Stop worrying about how you compare to others. Stop worrying about how your style measures up to what other people say is acceptable. Dont worrying about anatomical correctness if the point of your art is to tell a story and not to inform someone about the human body. Art is truly..... in the eye of the beholder. Theres no wrong way to draw. Just keep at it and let it flow.