Working on Paper vs. Working in your Head

In his video What does Your Imagination Look Like?, filmmaker Solar Sands says that our ability to picture things clearly in our minds is a bell curve. At the upper end are artists like Karl Kopinski and the late Kim Jung Gi, who can do most of their drafting in their heads. Kim, in particular, is the most astonishing draftsman I have ever seen, doing huge forced-perspective pieces without any reference or construction. On the other end are people who are unable to picture anything in their minds at all, and must work everything out on paper. Believe it or not, one man so afflicted was nevertheless a professional animator at Disney. This suggests that Kim's aptitude, while impressive, is not necessary to produce a good result.

I myself am likely somewhere in the middle. I can picture what I want in my head, but it's a grainy, poor-quality image, and I often need to see some reference to get my imagination going. From there, it's an iterative process of refining and sharpening. I use a light pad for this, not to trace, but to work in layers the way digital artists do. I also like to ink using the light pad, so I can ink on a clean board, and not have to bother erasing the pencil lines.

I suppose the moral of the story is, it's not about having aptitude, it's about developing skills. There are artists who do their construction on the page, and others who do it in their heads, and both are capable of good results. So stay on that grind.





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