The Fundamentals of Drawing

Once upon a time, in a classroom nestled amongst the cornfields of Iowa, a young woman learned about the fundamentals of scene design by putting pencil to paper. As this young woman continued her education in the art of design, she was directed to put her mad photoshopping skillz to use in her representations of her imaginative designs. But this young woman was sad. She didn't want to spend hours on the computer wrestling with the right brush size or calibrating the screen to the printer output. She felt angry and betrayed to be told that the wave of the future was in computer generated artistic output. So she decided to stop being a scene designer and work an office job inputting numbers, since she'd have to stare at a computer screen for hours on end either way.

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Okay, stupid story above aside, this is a dilemma that I face. I liken it to the philosophy about photography skills I learned in high school:

You have to learn the basics of dark room developing and manual camera adjustments before you can successfully navigate the digital tools that are becoming available in the photographic industry. Of course, one might argue that my teacher was just trying to explain away demands of the high school students to learn with the most cutting edge equipment, but I do believe that this philosophy is true because, having grown up with Photoshop on our home computers because my parents are graphic designers, it was not until I was in the dark room that I started to understand what burning and dodging was and how it could be applied digitally.

As I come into contact with undergraduates here at my illustrious institution who are being called upon to use Photoshop and turn to me with simple questions, it becomes difficult for me to teach them the program without trying to draw their attention to the real-life processes to which the Photoshop tools correspond. How can they understand that there are about fifteen ways that you can change highlight and shadow in Photoshop, if they do not understand how, in real-life, you might try to adjust those things in a photo dark room, with a pen, pencil, paper, collage, etc? If you can't walk, how do you propose you can run (or, more accurate an analogy, use a treadmill)?

It frustrates me to no end the emphasis that is being placed on digital output in theatrical design without spending time to make sure that the manual output is up to industry standards. Take drafting, for instance: many undergraduates do not know how to produced easily readable, accurate hand-drafting, so how can we expect them to create a good drafting packet in AutoCAD? Sure, they can tell you where all of the drawing buttons are and probably give you accurate information, but because they don't really understand what the purpose of line-weight is, or how best to visually indicate the sectioning of architectural and scenic elements, their computer output is going to be sloppy and difficult to process.

I think that knowing the fundamentals of the craft--being able to draw figures, accurate (or at least believable) perspective designs, evoking mood with chiaroscuro--is the only way that generating digital output moves beyond just basically relaying information and becomes an art itself. I don't know how many times I look at digital renderings and think they look flat and two-dimensional, like old-school digital animation. And digital animators start with the basics, gauranteed! Why, then, are we not spending more time teaching young designers how to get their great, imaginative images on paper rather than fussing with computer programs? The great thing about my generation and those after me is that our learning curve with computers is off the charts. Many of the people coming behind me were practically born with a mouse in their hand. We should shift our focus away from the how-to's of digital imaging software (Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc) and make sure that the how-to's of manual artistic expression are strong. Then tell the students the same thing can be done on the computer and sit back. Trust me, they'll figure it faster than you can say "create a new layer."