Drawing From Life

I'm fond of saying that drawing skills aren't particularly necessary for making comics. It's a narrative medium, not an illustrative one the traditional sense. Some of its best practitioners draw simply, even crudely, but are so skilled at organizing and conveying information that it hardly matters. That's the job. I myself occasionally give a lecture titled "WHAT to Draw, Not HOW to Draw."

That said, drawing skills are certainly a nice bonus if you draw in a way that's even a little bit representational, as most of us do. It might start with childhood tracing of art you've seen and liked. Then you move on to trying to imitate your favourite artists. Eventually -- hopefully -- you absorb those influences, gaining the trained eye and the muscle memory required to develop a style of your own. An essential part that process is drawing from life.

A one-minute gesture drawing

I was lucky to have a high school art teacher (shout out to Linda Maskell-Pereira, formerly of Central Elgin Collegiate Institute in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada) who really emphasised drawing skills. We didn't do nudes at that age, of course, but she would routinely pick a student from the class to sit or stand on a table and pose for the rest of us to draw. We learned about gesture drawings -- quick, expressive sketches that capture the lines and basic forms of a pose in a simple, efficient way -- and "blind" drawing, where you don't look at your paper at all, forcing you to really look at the model in detail. Both teach you that drawing is about seeing. It's something you do with your eyes and brain, not your hand. It's hard to imagine anyone learning to draw well without at least some experience at this.

30-second gesture drawings

Later, I did a year of Fine Arts at university (before switching my major to Film Studies because I knew visual storytelling was where my heart really was.) The program included a lot of nude figure drawing, of course. But once I left school and eventually embarked on a career -- first in illustration, then in comics -- I stopped doing it. As much as you may enjoy it, when you draw all day (and I do mean all day -- I'm typically at the desk around ten or twelve hours on weekdays) sometimes the last thing you want to do at the end of it is even more drawing. Eventually my two kids came along and life got even busier. Plus, I figured I'd done the life drawing thing and learned everything I needed from it.

However.

The thing about drawing professionally is that you're working quickly. Especially in comics, which require an astonishing amount of drawing. There's rarely time to reference things outside of shooting some awkward photos of yourself on your phone. So you end up drawing out of your head a lot, and developing shortcuts that inevitably become the things people recognize as your "style." Which is perfectly natural, and part of the game. But drawing effectively, even in a simplified, stylized way, requires you to understand what you're leaving out. And drawing from memory requires your memory banks to be full of gestures, forms, surfaces. Poses. See where I'm going with this?

By 2017, about twenty years into my art career, my memory banks were feeling empty. My drawing style was starting to reference itself more than it was referencing the people and objects it was meant to represent. And the more experienced I got, the more I wanted my "style" to just be good drawing. The solution was obvious: I needed to start drawing from life again. Fill those memory banks. Remember what I was leaving out.

Luckily, I still lived close to my old university, where the Fine Art department still held life drawing sessions, which were free for alumni. So I started going to that every week or so to get back on my game. Other sessions began popping up all over town; like axe throwing or brewing your own beer, life drawing was briefly hip in the late 2010s. I tried out many of them. It was nice to draw for fun again, with no deadlines or fan expectations, in a social setting. When the Covid lockdowns in 2020 eventually shut those sessions all down, I fell off the wagon again. But I've recently gone back, and for the same reasons: to prevent my professional work from becoming too reflexive, and to give me an excuse to get out of the house on Wednesday nights.

This model's day job was as a house painter. She brought some of her tools of the trade to the session, which resulted in some refreshing (and practical!) poses.

Gesture drawings of a model who was six months pregnant.

Is it weird being room in a room with a nude stranger? Sure, for about two minutes. But once you start drawing -- start seeing -- you might as well be sketching a bowl of fruit. It's lines and forms, textures and lighting, proportion and weight. In that respect, it's good to draw as many types of bodies as you can. It keeps things interesting, and also makes sure your memory banks are as diverse as possible so that you don't end up drawing the same two or three "ideal" bodies over and over again. A good life drawing session will vary their models week to week for this reason. Over the years I've drawn people who were tall, short, fit, unfit, male, female, trans, pregnant. I've drawn amputees. I once drew a woman with a colostomy bag. Depending on the venue, there's also been any number of costumes and props. Everyone has different proportions, carries their weight in a different place, and poses themselves in a way that's them. You learn very quickly that bodies are unique, and uniquely interesting.

It's valuable to see that, even just on a person level. But if you draw human beings in your work, even in a "cartoon" style, it's vital.